Last night I finished The Once and Future King. I'd previously read it sometime in september of my first year of graduate school. Unlike the 3 Musketeers it's definitely on my list of books to read aloud to my children. The first book of the four can be read pretty early and then wait a few years before the later ones...

All this thinking about the books on the readaloud cannon has really really made me want to homeschool my kids, how else do you get the time to read all of these books with your children?

I think The Once and Future King is also important as a sort of anti-Tolkein. It's a myth about noble likable larger than life characters trying to do good in the world, but it isn't a tale of good against evil, it isn't a tale of complete success due to the fundamental goodness of its protagonists... Instead the characters that you love spiral down into mythic tragedy, but you wouldn't want any of them to change a single step. My big discovery of the past few years (spurred by the Zobeide in Invisible Cities) is that some mistakes are worth making, and even worth making twice. Sometimes one can learn too much from a mistake.

In Tolkein you don't see Gandalf or Aragorn making serious mistakes (sure Aragorn thinks everything he does is going wrong, but I'm thinking more of actual character flaws) the way you do in this telling of Arther, Lancelot, and Guenevere.

It's important to see that sometimes the world is destroyed by good likable people making the good mistakes they're destined to make.

On the third hand there's Dune where people aren't good like in tolkein, or lovingly faulted like in white, but instead coldly calculating and evil. That may be the proper third post for this stool, but I can't ever see myself reading it to my children.