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[shadowkat]

I'm insanely addicted to Good Reads, but may have made the mistake of allowing people from Facebook to see my books. Considering my current erotica/romance novel addiction...
mysteries wouldn't be so bad. But people are weird about the romance/erotica genre, for admittedly good reasons.

Finished Rainshadow Road by Lisa Kleypas - which was a sweet romance. Best part was the descriptions of stained glass making and all the information on vineyards. The family drama was rather cliche. I've grown bored of dysfunctional family drama. There's little to no sex in this book, and it is admittedly better written than 50 Shades and Bared to You, yet oddly not quite as entertaining.

May be my mood.

Another problem with Good Reads? I can't remember half the books I've read or the titles, the one's I do remember I can't quite find on the site. Also, is it just me or are there a heck of a lot serial fantasy/paranormal romance novels being published? Ugh. I'm not a fan of serial novels. Unlike tv shows - where you get the next episode fairly quickly, serial novels make you wait forever for the next segment...and by the time you get it? You've pretty much forgotten the last one. I get that everyone wants to be the next Stephanie Meyer, JK Rowling - and clearly publishers love serials, because guaranteed sale. But personally? I found them poorly written and rarely evolving the characters. Often inconsistent. OR filled with plot holes. And getting more outlandish with each chapter. With few exceptions.

So not a serial novel fan. Again, with a few exceptions - Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings,
and The Hunger Games come to mind - but those were short serials with a definite arc.
These paranormal romantic fantasy or plain fantasy/sci-fi serials...just look like cheesy take-offs on Twilight. Although, I'll include mystery novelists in this category as well.
With few exceptions, the paranormal mysteries and the regular mystery serials have similar problems - a lead character who barely changes, romantic entanglements that are either repetitive or drawn out too long, and repetitive mysteries...after about the fifth book, you forget which ones you've read - they all begin to blur together, and you wonder if the writer is just repeating the same set-up with slight variations. (I'm looking at you Janet Evanovich, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Cornwall, Kellerman, Robert B. Parker, Ross D. McDonald, Ian Fleming, David Baldacci, Tom Clancy, Laurelle K. Hamilton and sigh, Charlain Harris (who actually manages to get worse each book she puts out - I gave up after book 5 of the Stackhouse mysteries - making me wonder about the publishing industry).) Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison are the only two exceptions I've found to date.

Comments

[liliaeth]

hmm, I kinda like Terry Pratchett's disc world novels. And I was and still am, a huge fan of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar verse (even if I'll admit that she's more of a guilty pleasure)

And both of those could fit under the serial label.

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

I got really tired of Jim Butcher's books after about the seventh or eighth title. I've got a friend who adores them, but while the world and concept were okay, I just really hated the main character. *shrug* What can you do? (I'm assuming you're talking about Dresden here and not the Codex Alera; haven't read the latter-- it looked too cliche to me and I couldn't get into it.)

Admittedly, serial fantasy/sci-fi is most of what I read. There is good stuff out there, but it does take some finding. I do tend to stick with series that end after about 5-6 books, as any that go on longer (like Butcher's) tend to either start getting stagnant like you describe, or they fall into the Wheel of Time trap where they introduce so many characters and plots it's impossible to keep track of them and impossible for the author to resolve them. That's the primary reason I haven't read Wheel of Time-- I have no interest in a series 13+ books long, with each book over a thousand pages. Trilogies or short series, though, are excellent. I feel like they give me a chance to really explore the world without going and finding fanfiction.

The one person I think who really managed to pull off the long series well was Pratchett-- but with his books, the great thing is that you can find a particular group of characters you like and just follow those, or read the one-off books. They're all in the same world so you have a sense of continuity, and there's lots of little cameos between books, but if you don't like characters... you just don't read the books that focus on them. It would be nice if more authors did this, because as you said, there's only so much plot you can do with the same main character or two before it gets really repetitive.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to read a book or watch a tv series if you don't like the lead character or even the supporting ones, particularly a series that is not ensemble based and from that character's pov.

I get that. It's why I can't stand Breaking Bad. Why I've struggled with several of Neil Gaiman's novels. And various other things. The book Atonement by Ian McEwan...I despised but I hated the main character whose pov I was in.

I admittedly adore Harry Dresden and I'll give Butcher credit for evolving and changing the character, who gets darker and more powerful as the series progresses, and less self-aware. He is in danger of becoming the very thing he's fought against. The books are definitely in the noir category. But if you can't stand the character - no way you will like that series.

(I haven't read the Alexa Codera series either - tried, didn't like it.
Butcher is a clean and neat writer...getting better as he goes, but he doesn't like to play with his world and his stories have...a sameness to them...that gets tiring at times. Plus Butcher's writing is very conventional. While he takes risks with Harry, he doesn't with anything else. I prefer in some respects Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series - which is also noir, but about a female character who gets darker and more powerful as she goes. Harrison blends sci-fi and fantasy, plays with established tropes, steps outside the box and has a bit of femslash in there as well. She's more creative and she has also established character arcs for everyone NOT just the lead (which is the main flaw in Butcher's books - it's all about Harry.) Harrison plays with more characters. She's not as technically accomplished in her writing as Butcher, not as neat and clean. But her story, itself,
is a lot more interesting, as are her characters. Example of how story trumps writing technique.

Can't really comment on Prachett. I've never been able to get into his books. I liked the Amazing Maurice, and Good Omens wasn't bad. But Monsterous Regiment bored and annoyed me. And the whole footnotes bit gets on my nerves - residual effects of undergrad and grad school no doubt. (I have no patience for footnotes in non-fiction, where they belong, let along fiction - I feel like I'm being asked to work. Plus they are bloody distracting to anyone with dyslexia - I have enough problems keeping myself on track, having to skip down to the bottom of the page to read silly footnote about a pun pulls me completely out of the story.)

(Yes, there's three things my flist loves to pieces that I don't understand: 1) X-Files, 2) Terry Prachett, 3)Breaking Bad. LOL!!!)

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the Dresden files in the beginning when they were very case of the week, but once they got into the massive war with the wizards and the vampires... yeah, I just didn't care. And I just couldn't like Harry. Although he eventually got his act together a little bit, he was the kind of character who foolishly rushes in to bad situations with no plan, even after that has proven disastrous multiple times before. I really hate characters who won't learn from their mistakes.

I'll have to check out the Rachel Harrison books. Like I said, I liked the setting, I just really didn't like Harry, so something in that vein might be fun.

Pratchett is hard to get into, you have to find the right character group to follow. It took me several books to really find the one I enjoyed, because I kept trying to read Wizards/Rincewind books and I don't really like those characters. But if you don't like the formatting either, that's definitely a barrier. I like the footnotes, I find them funny-- but I'm not an English major and never had to do any serious analysis of writing that would involve footnotes. And I can see how dyslexia wouldn't help either.

I haven't seen X-Files or Breaking Bad, so I can't comment there. But I wouldn't defend all of Pratchett anyway. I think his earlier work (standard fantasy laughing at itself) is much less enjoyable than the later books (satirizing modern life via a fantasy world) and there are some characters I flat-out don't care about and won't read.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was law school that killed me on foot notes. You haven't seen foot notes until you read case law and legal briefs. Lawyers like to hide things in the foot-notes.

If you like footnotes? The only book or writer I've ever read that does a good job with them is Nabokov - Pale Fire. The footnotes are 90% of the story and a satire on the use of footnotes in academic writing.

Oh...on the Harrison books? It's Kim Harrison, and start with Dead Witch Walking. Also they are serials, not cases of the week. There's a female bisexual living vampire that is in love with the main character, a demon, an elf, a pixie, and the main character is a witch. The novelist is a former biologist/geneticist - with a background in genetic engineering. Rather interesting.

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

Ugh, law school. I cringe just thinking about that kind of stuff.

I don't know if I'd properly be able to appreciate a satire on academic writing, considering I generally avoid academic writing like the plague. Literature too. I like Pratchett's footnotes, but that's mostly just because they're kind of meta. More serious footnotes can definitely be tiresome, like, hm, 'Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.' That book had pages-long footnotes and, while ultimately interesting, the whole story was so try it took me weeks to finish, which is incredibly slow for me.

I'll take a look at the Kim Harrison books. (Woah. There are 10 of these books already? You weren't kidding about it being a serial.)

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

There's 10?? I've admittedly lost track. It does have a decent character arc for one villain, who turns into a romantic love interest by the 10th book.

She has at least five more planned I think...she's doing 15. Each book's title is a creative twist on a different Clint Eastwood movie.
So if you are a big pop culture fan...they are fun from that perspective. Eastwood did noirish Westerns and brutal noirish cop films.

(Dead Man Walking (the film he directed), Every Which Way But Loose,
The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, A Perfect World, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Few Dollars More, A Handful of Dollars, etc.)
I've seen all of Eastwood's films so not only catch the references, but also see why she did the titles.

She's not as neat a writer as Butcher. More emotional and intutitive, less by the numbers - also there's more typos in her books. He clearly has a better editor. But I find her characters and world to be more interesting and less predictable.

I couldn't get into Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel...the footnotes killed me. Pages long is right. She mad Prachett look easy in comparison. Jonathan Strange felt too much like reading a legal or academic journal or casebook. Or consultant's technical proposal for designing a bridge. I read far too much dry material for a living, don't have the patience for it in my free time. But a lot of my friends adore it...bewildering but true. ;-)

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

Apparently. I looked on Amazon to get an idea, I saw 10 listed.

Hm. I have not seen any Clint Eastwood films. Knew he did Westerns, though not cop films. Neither are genres I watch much of. So maybe I won't enjoy them as much from that angle. I... I kind of fail at pop culture outside of a few tiny segments. To the point that I didn't know most of the shows references on Community were real shows. >_>; What can I say, I haven't had working TV in years and when I do watch TV it's either animated shows, Discovery/science/factual stuff or news/humor like Rachel Maddow and the Daily Show.

Still, it seems worth checking out.

I only read Strange & Mr. Norrell the once, many years ago, and... ouch. It was interesting as a stylistic experiment, but a really difficult slog to get through. I don't have any desire to revisit the story again. Ugh. Too much work, and reading should be fun. At least when it's, you know, stuff that you choose to read and not required material.