shadowkat | (no subject)

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.

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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.

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.

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.)

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. ;-)

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.