Abandoned. Thought I could do it, but turns out there's only so much "Sir Bleow-alot unhorsed Sir Palami-wain, Sir Launce-tram unhorsed Sir Perci-had" that a man can take in one lifetime. ( )

The first time I read this I was a college student immersed in literature. I loved the language and imagery, truly felt transported to another time and place. With this second reading I see James Bond. Arthur roams the countryside, bedding/leaving damsels, fighting/killing whatever gets in his way, getting himself wrapped up in conspiracies and evil plots, all without losing his smirk. OK, maybe Malory doesn't mention the smirk, but you know it's there. ( )

One of those very small Penguin 60s classics that slip easily into ones pocket. I have dozens of them and would read them on the train when commuting.
Extract from Le Morte dArthur, Penguin classics, 1969

When I was in high school, I spent the summer reading Le Morte D'Arthur. It is probably still one of the best summers I've had. ( )

Full disclosure, I did not actually make it through reading this book - I only read to page 235 before I gave up and focused on enjoying Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations. Malory may have been the driving force behind expanding the Arthurian mythos to include more adventures about King Arthur’s knights and in romanticising the ideals of medieval chivalry, but unfortunately that doesn’t make up for the fact that his writing style is completely obtuse and unpleasant to read. It’s amazing what punctuation (especially punctuation and formatting that’s tied to dialogue) will do for readability, and how a lack-there-of presents a barriere which modern readers are not going to enjoy. Malory’s language itself isn’t exactly modernized, which is expected in a text coming to us from the 1400s, but in this specific edition which was published in the 1890s (mine is a modern facsimile republication of course) I expected at least a modicum of modernization.

Yet my goal in purchasing this specific edition wasn’t really to read the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, anyways. I’m pretty familiar with the majority of Arthurian lore already, and to a certain extent expected that the readability of this volume wasn’t going to be its shining glory; like most purchasers of this weighty book (I imagine), I got it because it reprinted in its entirety Aubrey Beardsley’s first major collection of literary artwork. Compared to some of Beardsley’s later work, the Arthurian collection does have a few downfalls: its scope is far too large for the young artist, and readers can tell that his creativity was taxed by the sheer number of titling pieces he had to produce. Yet the larger illustrations, even those which don’t depict specific scenes from the tales, are wonderful examples of Beardsley’s mastery of composition, linework, and balance of negative and positive space. Even though the smaller compositions quickly become repetitive and stray from depicting the chapters they’re assigned to that doesn’t stop them from being great examples of Beardsley’s unique style of art and a showcase of his artistic experimentation in book illustration. There’s something intrinsically attractive about books which include titling artwork, so I’m glad that the publisher chose to utilize this method to enhance his publication - even though it wasn’t particularly popular at the time or a guaranteed success when other methods of illustration were undoubtedly more popular. ( )