Occasional musings on a variety of things.

D.Eddings.

David Eddings is dead. He wrote basically pulp crap young-adult fantasy, but I read it and more or less grew up on it. My high-school friend Dennis and I used to stay over at each other’s place, awake all night reading the Belgariad and the Mallorean. He was always further ahead than me and would suddenly start laughing at things he couldn’t tell me about without ruining the story.

There is a friend of mine in Christchurch I still think of as “Javelin” – he named himself after an Eddings character on the BBS we used to use.

Years later, I carried my friend Sean home from a fairly epic episode of drinking. Not a simple feat, as he is the Southern Hemisphere’s mirror image of Jason Segel. In the morning, he stumbled out of bed to explain that he had thrown up in the night, but in an effort to save everything around him had reached for a book and puked into that. It was Belgarath the Sorceror by David Eddings. The first pages had filled up quickly, so in his half-conscious reasoning he had turned the pages to make more room for the continued noxious stream of bourbon and bile. Ruined the book. Or, as James said, could only have been an improvement.

Funny. I was going to say I read the Elenium too, with that main character, Spokane. But the main character was Sparhawk. Spokane is where Eddings was born. I’m not sure I knew that. Weird.