It’s wonderful to simply see the names of all these books that I loved, still love, so much. I’m always a bit surprised that other people have read these books, I still have the feeling that these were my own private worlds. Nesbit, Corbett, Norton, so many of my favorites are mentioned here already. One book that comes to mind that I haven’t seen mentioned is “The 13th is Magic,” by Joan Howard (1950). It doesn’t completely have the “common magic” feeling of many of the others, it’s a bit dream-like, but it still sits on my shelf right next to all the others. If I think of any others I’ll write.

Is an episodic book simply a string of events? I think the key is to look for a subtler type of arc in these cases. This is one reason it’s such a good idea to separate the episodic issue from the question of good vs. evil and a book’s central conflict. (Thanks, J.L. Bell!)

Of course, not every story arc is highly dramatic. I should say, not every story arc NEEDS to be highly dramatic. I’m thinking of a book by Hilary McKay, The Exiles. It’s not as good as her more recent books about the Casson family (which I adore), but it’s an example of what I’m talking about: four sisters go to spend the summer with their grandmother, and the story is episodic in the sense that it gives us a series of escapades; however, there’s a quieter overall arc having to do with the girls’ relationship with their grandmother.

On a related note, weren’t Charles Dickens’ books written/published episodically? I’m also remembering Richard Peck’s books, A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago, as examples of episodic fiction. Of course, all stories are episodic to some extent, scene following scene following scene, so I guess we’re really talking about whether the scenes/episodes drive (or derive from) one another. There’s a range of possible levels of connectedness, as Bell also indicated!

I wonder how many episodic and Manichean books we could find that are new….

The other is between books that are based on a worldview of Good v. Evil and/or involve the Fate of the World and books that take place on a smaller, often personal or domestic scale. I’d like to call that distinction as between Manichean and mundane, except not enough people know what “Manichean” means (seeing the universe in dualistic terms, good versus evil).

Those two axes create four quadrants: unified and Manichean (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), episodic and Manichean (Divine Comedy), unified and mundane (James and the Giant Peach), episodic and mundane (Half Magic).

The Odyssey *is* both epic and episodic. But many books today to which “epic” gets applied don’t follow the original definition.

Sort of like the way we abuse the term “tragic” today.

So maybe we need a better term to indicate a kind of HUGE arc, a big climax, the universe at stake. “Episodic” versus “???”

Help me out!