Which books don't do it for you?

[Extollager]

[continuing my previous message]

If I seem unfairly sour, let me ask you to do a quick thought experiment. Imagine yourself a current author who gets the ideas for one of Alan Garner's YA novel The Owl Service. As Garner wrote it in the 1960s, it came out, as I recall, around 150 pages when it was reprinted in a Puffin paperback. Now I'm saying that if written today, that book would be spun out to maybe three to five times the length. You'd have the usual trite switching-back-and-forth of scenes between characters. The author would give us much more description of locales -- the town, the valley, etc. There could easily be scenes involving the myth-curse as it worked out in the past -- indeed one could work up a whole bunch of scenes with a whole bunch of additional characters who really do nothing for the main idea except play out the theme of the recurrent love triangle and death. Sexy stuff goes down well in YA novels today, so the author would give us many pages about Huw's mother's affair with the guy who became Huw's father. It would be easy to spin out the story into a typical bloated novel.

Or take Dick's Scanner Darkly. From today's point of view, what opportunities PKD missed to elaborate endlessly this near-future society, to follow endlessly around the characters who, as the book stands, have very small parts. It "should" be 800 pages at least.

Fie! I can't stand it.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But others want that scope? I find older books sometimes don't develop characters as much as I'd like.

 

[Grunkins]

I guess YA-flavored stuff turns me off. I can't read Brandon Sanderson because all his books have that YA flavor to them.

Also Peter F Hamilton just doesn't do it for me. I have one book left in his Night's Dawn series that I'll eventually read, but after that I'm done with him. I spend most of my time while reading his endless books wondering if I'm wasting my time and should just put it down. His books are about 50% waste of time and 50% awesome.

 

[tinkerdan]

Some of my worst writing was on a smith corona. I'd send you some of it but its the only copy I have and it serves as a reminder of how happy I am its so easy to slather out words now.

It is fatally easy to write on and on at a word processor. When people used to write on typewriters or by hand, I think it was less easy to slather out words and authors got the job done without blathering pointlessly on, dissipating much of the energy that might have inhered in their ideas.

Honestly speaking it only becomes slather if you don't go back and edit with a realization that 90% of the first draft was just for your own edification.

 

[Rodders]

I always had so much difficulty with the Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings.

 

[Extollager]

Honestly speaking it only becomes slather if you don't go back and edit with a realization that 90% of the first draft was just for your own edification.

I'm thinking about the reader's point of view. I lack patience for endless swatches of unnecessary dialogue.

 

[Extollager]

But others want that scope? I find older books sometimes don't develop characters as much as I'd like.

If a writer is running up endless detail about unimportant characters, as seemed to be the case in the example I cited from Lackberg, I'd object to it. The attention given to character development should be proportional to the degree of development needed for the best realization of the artistic potential of the whole.

Thus Tolkien is perennially criticized (by some) about his characterization in LOTR. I have to wonder if these critics understand what the "genre" of LOTR is. It is not intended to be a modern novel of character but largely to be a renewal, drawing on modern literary resources, of the heroic romance and the wonder tale.

Similarly, Tolkien shows great artistic tact in his rendering of the various locales and "cultures" in LOTR. The reader senses that they have depth, but Tolkien doesn't run on unnecessarily. Sure, readers might have questions. Mine is: where's all the waste removed from the mines of Moria? But this isn't something that Tolkien "needed" to explain.

Since I never get far enough to find out, I can't say if a lot of these so-terribly-copious authors really do have artistic justification for what they do; i.e. their work really does require all that dialog, all those characters, all those pages. My fallback position is: If the works are truly good, they will be around years from now, as LOTR is after so many years. They'll stand the test of time. But frankly I doubt that very many of them will.

 

[Timba]

I pretty much stick to science fiction and fantasy but anything under that broad umbrella I will generally take a stab at and usually find something to enjoy.

I enjoy lengthy series because I have a great deal of time on my hands these days and 300-400 pages goes by so fast. I love GRRM’s ASoIaF and really enjoyed Jordan's WoT. I enjoyed Zelazny’s Amber series, most of Anne Rice’s books although I have not tried the stuff from her born again period, Tad Williams MST is a favorite series, Mccaffrey’s Pern books and actually all she has written, Elizabeth Moon, Bujold, Weber, Drake, Flint are all snapped up as soon as they appear.

I do enjoy short stories but tend to read large collections of them, not magazine offerings.

My granddaughter loves sparkly vampires and Harry Potter. I found the vampires okay but Meyer’s book The Host was much better. I loved Harry Potter also. I really enjoyed the Rick Riordan YA stuff, Percy Jackson et all and I am a huge fan of Kathy Reich’s Virals series (I have read one of her Bones books and will undoubtably read more when I am in the mood for something outside of SciFi and Fantasy).

I enjoyed Anne Lyle’s Night’s Masque trilogy and Coby did not bother me at all. J

I suppose I could go on forever about what I like.


Steven Erikson has the honor of having written the only book I started but could not finish. Book one of Malazan put me off totally and I tried, I really tried but yikes what dreck.

 

[Extollager]

Where's all the waste removed from the mines of Moria?

In case this wasn't clear, I meant "mining waste" from tunneling out the insides of the mountain. Where did it all go? Who transported it, and how?

 

[Kissmequick]

Can't get into Sanderson (don't know why)

I want to like Meiville , love the prose etc, but find I put down a book a few chapters in and have no urge to pick it back up

As for Moria wastes, I'm good with the fact it happened a LOOOONG time ago (any slag piles now resemble hills). And prolly dwarves took it out.

 

[Elvraie]

I wouldn't go into ASOIF, as I heard too much about the extreme violence and grittiness.
In second, I'm just bored when there are too many sexual jokes in humouristic novels. They don't make me laugh, they are too easy, it seems, I'm more of into absurd or dark humour. Or give me Terry Pratchett humour in his early Discworld novels any time (Feet of Clay is my favourite). Also, I tried to read Foundation by Asimov, as I read everywhere that it was so 'brilliant'. But there was no characterisation and the style was just boring. Maybe, he's better at writing short stories...
Fantasy books or SF without any 'sens of wonder' at all, are turn off, or novels where the narrator tells a story told to him by someone else, it just lacks life.

 

[Toby Frost]

It's aspects of a book that put me off. Being expected to accept things that are poorly-thought-out; being ranted at by the author, usually through a surrogate character; the sense that the author is bitter or nasty; being bored stiff. So that's Starship Troopers out.

I will be put off (but won't necessarily not touch) novels that include a few worn-out tropes: vampires, zombies, super-soldiers, rebellious teenagers and wizard schools.

The world is full of novels, largely fantasy, that aren't good enough to justify their damn length. A Game of Thrones is a perfectly reasonable book - but nothing about it justifies wading through about 6,000 pages to see who makes it to the end.

Tolkien, I'm afraid, just leaves me - well, not exactly cold, but tepid.

 

[RCynic]

I didn't see this thread so I started another for this rant below and someone kindly suggested it might be more appropriate here. This is my current irritation.

I'm reading a novel now, Flightsuit, and there are parts of it, big parts, that make me nuts. I'm not picking on this author either because it seems very common. Then again, maybe this is just me so I'd like to hear what others think.

Very few writers are up to Ray Bradbury's quality of writing, IMO, in terms of being able, through words, to make an ordinary scene, something more than what it is...to make the image created by the words, more interesting than the subject itself, just by virtue of the quality of the prose.

So what makes me nuts, is for authors to go into excruciatingly boring detail about stuff, that really has nothing to do with advancing the plot. By this I mean that they'll spend a dozen pages describing some town, in equally boring prose, rather than letting the town be discovered through the action of the characters.

I was reading one book recently and an emergency alarm went off and two of the main characters sprinted across the grounds to investigate. The author at this point, right as they're running, decides that we need to know that the field was just prepped, how many men, what types of equipment (make, model and description) ad nauseum, was needed to get the mud to the condition it was. This went on for pages. When they got to the action, I had to go back and refresh myself as to what was going on before this detour.

Do some writers have a problem staying focused? Do they think they're adding texture, context and color to the story? I really resent having to read page after page of description especially when it really has nothing at all to do with much of anything, especially when the words are nothing more than simply descriptions. Do they think they're showing off a talent or knowledge?

To me it's just clumsy. I much prefer to see an environment discovered through the interaction of characters with it. Then it is relevant at least to the action occuring at the moment. OK, rant off. This has just been increasingly irritating to me lately and I had to gripe.

 

[The Ace]

'A Game of Thrones,' - sorry, but I think Martin's taking so long to finish it because he's run out of characters to drive the plot. I can accept that characters die, and that armoured knights are just rich, mindless thugs, but you can carry it to extremes.

'The Catcher in the Rye,' - I just wanted to give Holden Caulfield a good smack, he's nothing but a spoiled brat who doesn't know how lucky he is.

Stephen King - I've just never been able to empathise with his characters.

Sparkly vampires - Anne Rice, Laurel K Hamilton, and Stephanie Meyer should be staked and buried at the nearest crossroads. Vampires are monsters who stalk the edge of your nightmares, anything else is cr4p.

Stephen Donaldson - the best thing you can say about him is, 'Could do better.' The Thomas Covenant series had enormous potential, but it was never realised.

Terry Brooks / Terry Goodkind - I've never been able to separate these two in my mind. Both take the right ingredients, but somehow make a complete a**e of it.

To put it into perspective, I actually read Mein Kampf (in an English translation, my German isn't that good), so I think that I can safely say that I know what a bad book actually is - I only finished the dratted thing so that I'd never have to go back to it.

 

[Bick]

ASoIaF - started well, but the author's ruined a good series by killing off too many characters and taking too many pages to tell the story.

Virginia Wolfe - hate her work.

Urban Fantasy - what's that all about? Fantasy should have elves and dwarves and be pre-industrial. All this genre mixing is a dubious fad.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

Hard SF, most epic fantasy, and grimdark stuff all just turn me off.

I've read a few hard sf pieces that were good, but most are too dry and flat for my tastes. My preferences in reading run up to about 350-400 pages before falling off a cliff, so something that's written like epic fantasy without the absurd word count might be good. And the grimdark stuff... just blerg.

 

[psikeyhackr]

'The Catcher in the Rye,' - I just wanted to give Holden Caulfield a good smack, he's nothing but a spoiled brat who doesn't know how lucky he is.

I had to read it in high school. I was about the same age as Holden at the time. I regarded him as too stupid to be worth paying attention to.

psik

 

[RebeccaTheWrecker]

I just couldn't get into Good Omens - the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman one. It was funny sure, but by the third or fourth chapter I was out.

I actually don't stop reading many books, even if I dislike them, so they've got to really annoy me. Mostly it's when all the characters are completely unlikeable ala Casual Vacancy / Gone with the Wind. I need to care about at least one character - it's also a problem I have with ASoIaF, as I like all of three people and would prefer it if the rest died in some natural explosion.

 

[hitmouse]

[continuing my previous message]

If I seem unfairly sour, let me ask you to do a quick thought experiment. Imagine yourself a current author who gets the ideas for one of Alan Garner's YA novel The Owl Service. As Garner wrote it in the 1960s, it came out, as I recall, around 150 pages when it was reprinted in a Puffin paperback. Now I'm saying that if written today, that book would be spun out to maybe three to five times the length. You'd have the usual trite switching-back-and-forth of scenes between characters. The author would give us much more description of locales -- the town, the valley, etc. There could easily be scenes involving the myth-curse as it worked out in the past -- indeed one could work up a whole bunch of scenes with a whole bunch of additional characters who really do nothing for the main idea except play out the theme of the recurrent love triangle and death. Sexy stuff goes down well in YA novels today, so the author would give us many pages about Huw's mother's affair with the guy who became Huw's father. It would be easy to spin out the story into a typical bloated novel.

Imagine what would happen today with another well known YA fantasy novel The Hobbit if that was submitted for publication today.

Instead of a delightfully whimsical childrens' fantasy story, it would be padded out sufficient to make 3 full-length feature films. You'd have the usual trite switching-back-and-forth of scenes between characters. The author would give us much more description of locales -- the town, the valley, etc. There could easily be scenes involving the myth-curse as it worked out in the past -- indeed one could work up a whole bunch of scenes with a whole bunch of additional characters who really do nothing for the main idea except play out the theme of the recurrent love triangle and death.

 

[j d worthington]

I still like the old Conan stories but I figure it is nostalgia again because I read them so young.

psik

I'm not at all sure about that. While there are numerous faults with them, and they are definitely uneven, Howard was a master at building a world in a very few sentences, good pacing, and not a few passages of simply beautiful, poetic prose and imagery. Not high literature, but by and large they remain quite readable.

I fear that, for me, a large chunk of modern fantasy leaves me cold. I agree that it has become bloated and needs a LOT of trimming. But even a lot of earlier writers (Gardner Fox, Norvell W. Page, Lin Carter -- on the whole, for a few examples) were simply bad at any sort of literary quality, including, not infrequently, basics of decent writing. As for Jordon -- I felt that he did relatively well at capturing Howard's character and world, but other than that... nah. And when it came to handling women... oh, jeeeezus!!!!! And people talk about Howard's weak female characters.....

Never could get into Panshin's Rite of Passage -- I made it through, but gritting my teeth most of the way. I find Chambers' In Search of the Unknown largely worthless, though with a few good passages.

But, in general, I've been rather good at avoiding things I really find to be a waste of time.

Oh, and as for Don Quixote -- you should really read what Cabell has to say about that one.....