Does anyone else have a problem enjoying modern books?

Cafe Society
62

[Moderating]

Cool it, @mordecaiB. @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness did not insult you. He explicitly said that he did not think you were racist or misogynist, and he gave a number of suggestions of other books you might like based on that assumption that you were not racist or misogynist. If you can’t respond civilly to people who are trying to help you, that’s on you, not on them. Any further hostility along these lines will result in a Warning, and I recommend that you step away from this thread for a day or two if that’s what you need to cool off.

63

So, after the sidebar, I wanted to go back to the OP.

One thing I’ve found frustrating about modern books (other than my previous gripe about editing for readability) is the popularity of the big fat multi-novel story - and the consequences of these trends. Now, I am totally inconsistent in that I enjoy reading said BFMNS - but it has two flaws that drive me up the walls. The first is you read the first book, you get invested, and then wait 4-5-6 years for the next one. Robert Jordan was probably the first one I had the issue with, as I got into the series with the first novel. And while he wasn’t as bad as some (… Rothfuss I’m staring at you…), finding myself having to go back and reread from the start each time he got a new book out was one of the reasons I burned out on his work.

The other reason I burned out on his work is that in a BFMNS, the author has no incentive to actually finish their story. It got really obvious, really fast in the example above that after the first couple of best sellers, there was a ton more money to be made. So the story kept getting expanded, and bigger roles for previously bit characters, and subplots and so forth. So the fascination for the setting, characters, or the story kept getting buried in more layers until you just stopped caring at all.

While brings me to a last peeve, where you write your BFMNS, and get the awards and attention, and it maybe gets to your head or heart, and that next novel, well, you have conventions to do, and blogs to write, and mech to sell, so it ends up late, maybe a few years, maybe more than a few. And then there’s that next book, and wow, it’s been now 10 years since you wrote the first, and 7 since the second, and how time flies and wait I’m invested in this new project… NO, the author has no contractual obligation with me to finish the story, but it doesn’t mean I (and the other fans) are not disappointed. And it almost retroactively ruins the books I enjoyed previously.

A friend of mine, who has similar issues instituted a ‘no incomplete series’ rule for himself. If the series wasn’t finished, he wasn’t reading it, as a direct result of Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind novel and the the issue laid out above. I have considered it many a time…

64

I agree. From a publisher’s standpoint it makes sense: you lock in your audience. From an author’s standpoint it makes sense: your worldbuilding and characterbuilding are already in place to a large degree. And from a reader standpoint it sometimes makes sense: a new book in a favorite series can be a lovely blend of familiarity and novelty (pardon the pun).

But I read 70-80 novels a year, and if your second book comes out two years later, I’ll have forgotten like 99% of what happened in the first one. I sure as hell won’t remember the names of any secondary characters, and there’s a good chance I won’t remember anything else about them. And a lot of series, for obvious reasons, don’t have a complete story arc in a single book, robbing the reader of one of the form’s greatest satisfactions.

When I read a SF/F novel that’s a standalone, that in itself is a pure delight.

65

As I mentioned above, people recommended these type of books to me all the time but I never got involved with any of those. I didn’t like Jordan so I never even looked at his series. By the time the Ice and Fire books came along, you couldn’t have paid me to start those books, I knew exactly what was coming. Release date after release date pushed back. It started as a totally planned out five book series, suddenly it’s going to be a ten book series. New main characters turn up in book six and take over the narrative. And, in some cases they keep coming for years after the author has died. I don’t mind a long book series, but make the individual books self contained. Is it asking too much that a book have a beginning and an ending?

66

Oh, and before I forget (again), after taking a minute to go glance at my bookshelves (which triggers memories better than my kindle!), I wanted to mention a Conan-esque series that should world well. Specifically, the Drenai novels by David Gemmell. Now I will qualify this - the books based on Druss are great, the ones not based on Druss . . . well, I won’t recommend them.

In terms of published order it’s Legend, The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, and The Legend of Deathwalker. Chronologically, it’s the second, the third, and the first. I’d read in published order though. And the first is the best of the three, although they’re all worth a read. Aaaaand now I need to reread Legend again.

67

Thank you, I have none of those. Somehow or other, I do have the only crime/mystery novel he published, White Knight, Black Swan.

68

I just wanted to mention that I recently read a story that that had a strong feel for me of the Howard Conan stories: The Eric John Stark stories by Leigh Brackett. They have the peculiarity of being “planetary romance” stories, set on Mercury, Venus, and Mars, but if you can get past that they have a lot in common with Conan. They are mostly (I think) short, standalone novels or novellas. They are, of course, hardly modern and were originally in the pulps shortly after Howard’s period, but I think they are far less well-known today. Worth a look.

69

Many years later Leigh Brackett continued the Eric John Stark stories, but, since discoveries since proved that there was no way that Mars or Venus were at all habitable (and completely unlike the pulp standards of dead/desert Mars and swampy Venus), she re-set them on extra-solar planets, as many other pulp writers did after the 1960s.

(also from Wikipedia)

70

A couple titles:

And Lovecraft’s letters to other people:

71

Thanks to @Reno_Nevada_Jr and @CalMeacham . It looks like I have six of the Eric John Stark ebooks, and that appears to be all of them. Again, unread. I’d be embarrassed to say how old I was before I realized Leigh Brackett was a woman.

Thanks! I already have the Howard set , but not the Clark Ashton Smith. My understanding at the time was that these were only some of the letters and that they were heavily edited. I know there were a lot of foot notes that explained the context of the letters.

It’s becoming apparent from this thread that my problem is buying more books than I will ever read, rather than needing more books. Looks like I may have to admit my wife is right about this. :frowning:

73

That’s my biggest problem. I acquire books faster than I could read them. I now have a stack of roughly 5 dozen books I have to get around to reading. And I usually am reading two to three books at the same time.

74

I have been on an Adrian Tchaikovsky kick lately, and highly recommend his Children of Time and Children of Ruin books. I enjoyed the Bob series but it’s fun not thoughtful, the Children series (ETA: not really a series, the first book is standalone, but you will want to read it before the second.) is definitely more on the thoughtful side.

75

The problem I have is I’ll buy a totally reasonable number of new books . . . and then set them aside because something I was thinking about (see my earlier comment about Legend) takes over and I have to go re-read something. Repeat.

76

Only five dozen? Amateur!

77

I just finished reading a long train of Robin Hobb books, and am looking for something new and different. Which of his books do you recommend?

78

How weird do you want?

NOT THAT WEIRD: Hummingbird Salamander. It’s a basically linear tale, a near-future environmental catastrophe (sort of) mystery thriller.
WEIRD BUT NOT SUPER DISTURBING: Finch and Borne, the former a noir set in a world ruled by mushroom-men, the latter a post-apocalyptic book that starts with a 200-foot-tall golden bear flying over the ruins of a city and eating people and then gets strange.
WILL MAKE YOU WISH YOU HADN’T DROPPED ALL THAT ACID EVEN IF YOU’RE STONE COLD SOBER: The Southern Reach trilogy, starting with Annihilation: this is where he really shows his brilliance at building a sense of confusing dread in an uncaring, alien universe. The characters don’t know what’s going on, neither do you, but you both know that whatever’s happening is awful as hell.
WHAT EVEN THE NINE FUCKS IS THIS?: Dead Astronauts, far and away the most experimental of his works that I’ve read, playing with everything from extreme repetition of text to text in an almost unreadably light grey to numerical patterns appearing mid-text to more conventional stuff like nonlinear storytelling and unreliable narrators. It was very well done, but I’m not sure I’ll need to read anything else by him.

There’s also an anthology he and his wife edited, The Weird, a collection of stories in the genre from all around the world. My favorite, a novella called "The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos, still freaks me out and by itself makes this volume worth finding (although it’s also full of other gems).

79

Sounds like a winner. I’m all about uncaring alien universes like our own.