This was my 900th book that I've read. Let me be clear on that, when I say my 900th book. I have not read nine hundred books from page one to the end. Or actually, I might have done. There may be books from my childhood and my pre-GoodReads-and-blog days where I read a book-either 3 pages or 500 pages long-that I've read all the way through that I've since forgotten about. As it stands, these are books that I've picked up, either physically or electronically and thought, "yes, I want to read you

This was my 900th book that I've read. Let me be clear on that, when I say my 900th book. I have not read nine hundred books from page one to the end. Or actually, I might have done. There may be books from my childhood and my pre-GoodReads-and-blog days where I read a book-either 3 pages or 500 pages long-that I've read all the way through that I've since forgotten about. As it stands, these are books that I've picked up, either physically or electronically and thought, "yes, I want to read you". Some of them have disappointed; some I haven't managed to get beyond the first few chapters, but for me I have read them. Please feel free to have your own opinions, but I neither feel like I've cheated myself nor you. It is simply a number.But yes, my 900th book and I was very excited.There are two things I wish to point out, firstly, I am an over-bearing high-fantasy, none of your twee-YA-mild-fantasy-rubbish, fan: a true high-fantasy, heavy-on-the-world-building-high-fantasy fan, and secondly, I have never read a book by Kazuo Ishiguro nor seen any adaptations of his works.It sounded intriguing. His imagination is vast, much like Neil Gaiman's, and the initial storyline was very intriguing. At the beginning I was thinking maybe two stars, half-way through when Sir Gawain turned up it shifted up to a three-star rating but then it slowly sank in to the ground and pretty much died the death of a thousand dead men, who you think are dead but do that last-gasp thing and then really do die.I don't want to go in to a whole load of detail, so I will throw out the main areas that bugged me. Firstly, it felt like a contemporary novel with a fantasy-genre guise, written only to win Big Shiny Awards, because genre fiction, like fantasy, doesn't win Big Shiny Awards That Anyone Cares About. I'm looking at the Man Booker Prize, mostly. Secondly, the characters were 2D and fairly annoying, with exasperating dialogue. I appreciate their memory loss made them rather stale, but otherwise they were uninteresting and I had no sympathy for them, nor did I feel any empathy toward their plight.Thirdly, fantasy is basically The World with everything else coming in second. Fantasy is built on world-building: that's mainly the whole point of it. You don't need a whole planet, and you certainly don't need any thing made-up: Earth serves its purpose well for a fantasy novel. This book had none: "ooh, there's a forest over there" was pretty much it. At the beginning of the book we get a nice description of what England looked like back then, but that's about it. You need to remember this throughout the entire book. It's either desolate, wind-swept planes or trees.Fourthly, and this is a very personal opinion, but I disliked the way Sir Gawain was portrayed. Yes, he's my favourite Arthurian Knight, no, I don't know the Arthurian legends enough to really know if he was correctly portrayed, but I've read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and some of Lord Tennyson's work, and Sir Gawain is not an impetuous whinger, I do know that.A few other things I'll leave out because of spoilers, but the ideas some of the characters had were inane and self-serving, especially toward the end. In fact, the entire ending, aside from the exact end, was just a heap of disappointment. And my Lord, if Axl called Beatrice "Princess" one more time than he did I'm pretty sure I would have stopped reading. The whole thing smacked of "hey I know a secret but I'm not going to tell you 'til the end" and we didn't actually find much out at the end.What did I like? Sir Gawain, of course, and the weird way we sort of dropped in to an Arthurian Legend as if it were a true part of History. That was imaginative and fun, but not done well. The name of the book itself was grand, though very ill-chosen (again, with the "here's a secret I may or may not tell you about later"), and the fact it had dragons and a type of magic. Yeah, the cover.I don't really know. An experiment gone wrong, perhaps? This certainly hasn't stopped me from trying his other works out. I've read a few other reviews from people who have read his other works and they all seem to say the same thing: this is very different and not anywhere near as good. That makes me feel a bit better about not liking it, to be honest. I don't know why I feel bad for that: perhaps one star is too harsh, but the way it made me feel-almost angry toward the end-makes me think I can't give it any more.At least I read my 900th book all the way through. Every single word.