Silverlock - John Myers Myers

Ace, printed 1985, copyright 1949, 516 rather large-print pages, including four separate essays reporting how good the book is.
ISBN:0-441-76674-9
Read June 2015, Age 37

This book was quite a lot of fun, but the sheer density of literary allusions was quite overwhelming.  I read the book, stopping here occasionally see what I missed.  I've read a few books, but much of what I've read was written post-1949.  As such, there was just quite a lot that I missed.  Despite that, it was a pretty good story, with some pretty decent character development, and a lot of fun tacked on top.

A note on the essays.  I tend to dislike these things, as I prefer to know my own mind before reading someone else's take on a subject - then I'm not disappointed by having my expectations raised too high.  I read them last, and that seemed to be a pretty decent way to do it.

Rating: 4

If I'd been better read in some of the older fiction and history, I'd expect that it'd be closer to a 5.  I also expect that it'll improve with re-reading. I'll have to do that in a few years.

A very incomplete list of allusions, just off the top of my head and in no particular order:

Various Norse mythology
The Odyssey
Various Irish history and mythology
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Alice in Wonderland
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Robinson Crusoe
Sumerian Mythology
Beowulf
Don Quixote
Tom Jones
Much Ado About Nothing (I think)
Robin Hood
Doctor Faustus
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Various American history
The Divine Comedy
Various Greek mythology
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Various geography
Crime and Punishment
Anna Karenina
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter

And dammit, there's a quote in here somewhere that I didn't flag that perfectly encapsulates how I felt about the book.   "Something something darned good yarn something something better if I knew the players something".

....half an hour later... here it is!  "It was easy to appreciate, but I would have had more chuckles out of it if I had known, as others did, about the personages involved."