That is not in any way an insult to the Chosen, however, which I am very grateful school forced me to give another try to, and which I’m quite fond of.

well, your mother does. Your big sister suffered her way through the chosen too young to appreciate it only to be disappointed by the crystal cave.

Mumsy: Thanks for the recommendation. I do plan to read them. Just waiting for the right Arthurian moment.

Jenny: The three favorites are–

John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights (An altogether strange book, sort of him reaching back into his childhood psyche. It may help to read it when you’re in the most impressionable part of your teens.)

T.H. White’s Queen of Air and Darkness (I still think of them as the separate books, before they got collected into the one volume of “The Once and Future King”, because that’s how I first read them).

The Sword and the Circle by Rosemary Sutcliff (which ignores most of my qualifications)

And the one in my top-five-all-time-favorites list:
The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein

People are anti-alliteration?! That boggles my mind. It’s so fun! lol

I can’t remember Lancelot from TH White, which makes me think it is time for a reread!

I liked Sir Gawain too. We read it in my medieval civilizations class, and almost nobody liked it because of all the alliteration. But I liked it. I had read Gerald Morris’s version of it first, so I enjoyed seeing what he had taken from the poem, and what he had changed. Adaptations are (well, can be) fun.

I’m woefully unaware of the French side of the stories. I should have had a good, well-illustrated Arthur storybook as a kid, and then I wouldn’t be so ignorant.

Same here!

Maybe you can set a week or a month aside and that will be the time in which you read all your Arthur stories at once. Actually that’s probably not a good idea; you’d probably get sick of them pretty quickly that way.

Yeah, I wished Philip Reeve had gone through a more stringent editing process. I’m not sure it would have made me love the book, but it would have made me less irritated with it, at least.

You didn’t like TH White?