Finally finished this. It took nearly 10 months, and I had to force myself, but I did it. 
 I really wanted to like this more. It's about King Arthur! It has knights! There's magic! Merlyn! Quests! Treachery! The middle ages! This kind of stuff is up my alley, but the book just didn't deliver for several reasons. 
 There was too much whimsy in it, and while I normally enjoy that I didn't want so much of it in this setting. I wanted more serious action and adventure. However, I also want more lightheartedness than is found in the tome Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table which I haven't read but only perused enough to know I don't want to read it. I guess I'm impossible to please. 
 Dialogue: If T.H. White ever had a conversation with another person it certainly doesn't show in this book. All of the characters get distracted and often change the subject as they're talking. Merlyn should've concocted Ritalin for everyone. There's also a problem with the way the dialogue is written, and I never did get used to it. Speakers are never identified as they speak with "he said," or "said so-and-so." Instead we get: 
 "Did you go to the store?" 
 "Yes, I went to the store" 
 "I bought some bread." 
 "Well, that's good, for we're out of bread." 
 "I suppose we were. I bought some." 
 "Where is it?" 
 "Did you put it in the pantry?" 
 "It's in the parlor." 
 "The falcons are restless today. Did you hear the Studebaker start up at Eton? It was very loud." 
 "No, I didn't, but I saw the falcons." 
 "I agree they're restless. I think it's because mekka lekka hi, mekka hiney ho." 
 Did you follow that? If so, you did better than I would've had I not just made up this conversation as an illustration. Let's say the speakers are called "He" and "So-and-so." He spoke lines 1, 4, 6, 7, & 9, whereas So-and-so spoke 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, & 11. When two people are having a conversation in a book and no speaker is identified, usually the quotes alternate from speaker to speaker, but White doesn't stick to this generally accepted practice and puts two quotes back to back for the same speaker leaving the reader guessing who is speaking which line. And when more than two people are involved in the conversation... Just forget about it. There's no way to tell who's speaking. I suppose I got the gist of the conversations anyway, but it was still very distracting. 
 What was also distracting was the anachronisms. White explained in the beginning of the book that he was going to use them so it would be easier for the modern reader to follow, but it had the opposite effect on me. I'm a history person, and things from the future showing up took me out of the story every time. It was OK when Merlyn made these references since he was from the future (more or less), but it didn't work for the rest. Arthur is supposed to be in the fifth century AD, or thereabouts. That's entrenched in my mind. Eton, railroads, cricket, communism, cannons, radio antennas, and any number of other things have no business being in the story. Also, what is Robin Hood, a hero from the 13th century, doing here? I liked him, but he was out of place. And Wart (Arthur's name when he was a child) crept around like a red Indian a couple of times. Wart made the analogy himself, but he can't have known anything about them. Every instance of this took me away from the story, but if that kind of thing doesn't affect you, then you should be fine. 
 White would also go off on tangents about unrelated matters. (I don't know how many times we got a couple of paragraphs about modern cricket players and matches). He seems to be very knowledgeable about a great many things, but constantly throwing them into the narrative threw me out of it. Sometimes we got excessive details about what was going on such as how ink was made starting with the list of ingredients, and the process used to make it into ink. Some guy was just trying to write a letter, and by the time we got back to that letter I had forgotten what the letter was supposed to be about. Then White would skip other parts that should've been important to the story. Things are going along, building up to some action such as a major battle, then all of a sudden it's six months later, the battle is over, and people are having a conversation about the after effects. But we did get several detailed jousts. 
 Nothing really happened in the first two stories. In "The Sword in the Stone," Wart learns lessons for 200 pages, then in the last 10 the sword in the stone comes into play. There's no gradual build-up to it; they get to a town, there it is, and suddenly he's king. The first story is the most lighthearted of the four, and there are several entertaining characters and tales in it, but they don't further the main plot that I can tell. 
 "The Queen of Air and Darkness" is the second story, and we go straight from the levity of the first one to this which finds a woman boiling a cat alive to get certain bone so she can work some magic with it. There's also a rather graphic unicorn butchering scene. Still, not much happens in this one either except Arthur continuing his education via trial and error, and we're introduced to some characters who are important in the last story. Nothing they do in the second story pertains to the last that couldn't have been explained in just a couple of pages, but we're at least introduced to them. I think there was a battle or something at the end of this one, and it followed the same format as the first book in that there was a bunch of stuff going on mostly unrelated to the climax of the story. 
 "The Ill-Made Knight" tells us about Lancelot and Guenever. Basically Lancelot is hella STUPID, and Guenever is a bitch. Stuff happens in this that's related to the last story, so things are being woven together in a format more typical of a novel. Still, this third book feels more like a collection of short stories loosely cobbled together. There isn't much of a climax for this one, but at least it's related to a theme pertinent to the rest of the story. 
 "The Candle in the Wind" was probably the best written of the four. Trouble is introduced at the beginning, it grows, and we get one big story instead of separate tales tacked to each other. However, the ball is dropped at the end. We build up to a last battle with Mordred, and that's it. We don't know what happens. We could find out if we read Malory's book, but we're not told in this one. White actually pulled this trick all the time throughout the entire book, often saying "Since Malory went into such detail, I won't rehash it here." This normally happened at exciting moments. But we can be thankful he was more than happy to tell us how to make ink which I'm guessing Malory didn't do. 
 In the last chapter of the last book White wanes philosophical, and Arthur puts together all he's learned since the beginning of the first tale about humanity and war, and what he's tried to do for the general betterment of society. It's a really good chapter, but it's still just 11 pages in a 639 page book. By that point I already had a two star rating in mind, but I decided to give it an extra one as I read it. Then I took it right back again because that was the last chapter. White's final we-don't-need-to-go-into-that trick was the coup de grace. (view spoiler)[I really would like to have heard how the battle with Mordred went the next day. Did Arthur survive? Did Mordred? Did Lancelot make it to the fray? He had heard about Guenever being besieged in the Tower of London (which wouldn't even be built for another 500 or 600 years, but whatever), and he was on his way. We aren't told. Instead Arthur tells his ideas to his page Tom of wherever, and instructs him to run away to share those ideas with whomever, and we're to assume the page did just that. (Tom is supposedly Thomas Malory, which I thought was pretty clever. Nobody knows when Malory was born exactly, but he died in 1471, so we can assume he spread the good news to a lot of people over the course of 1,000 years). (hide spoiler)] 
 There are parts I liked, and I can see how a lot of people would like this book, but the distractions were too numerous for me to enjoy the whole. Like I said it took 10 months to read, and I had to force myself back into every time. If the first three stories had been written like the last one, I probably would've enjoyed this much more. If you like whimsical fantasy, and don't have the hang-ups I have that are listed above, you'd probably really like this; the community's rating suggests it's quite popular. I would've preferred an abridgement that cut out the frequent asides which I understand are actually part of this book's charm, but I'm not sure if such a thing exists. It would probably be 50-100 pages shorter, and easier to keep up with the story.