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So many books, so little time
r/books
I am a lover of fantasy and sci-fi. I am also an adult with a full time job, and interests outside of reading as such I try to get the most out of my time with them. I am no stranger to long stories, over 1000 pages, and if there is a reason for it to be that long I will happily devour it.
What I have an issue with is that writers these days can’t seem to edit their story or possibly push their stories to be long enough to have sequels.
Every time I visit the local book store I look at what’s happening on the fantasy and sci-fi sections. And oh boy. Books with 500+ pages, which is pretty standard for a story lure me in, get me all interested just to realise they are only part of a series of other similarly bulky publications.
I am talking modern, contemporary books. If you look at the Lord of The Rings trilogy, or Pullman’s Dark Materials or even Asimov’s Foundation epic those series are not as…lengthy as the ones I see on the shelves. The above writers also have standalone publications. Asimov’s I Robot are stories set in the same universe and despite the slim volume it sure packs a punch. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World didn’t need a trilogy. Pratchett’s Discworld books can be read and enjoyed as standalone stories. King’s The Talisman is a fantasy which could be done in a single book despite how action packed it is.
Everyone raves about the Expanse series so I checked it out and it’s TEN books. The Mistborn series 4 books all just shy of 600 pages each except the last one. Game of Thrones, same thing.
I have tried my hand with Holly Black’s Cruel Prince which is also part of a series. The amount of filler in the first book was astonishing! At the end I was just sitting there like “If the rest of the books contain so little action and have similarly large margins and spaces between letters this whole trilogy could easily be compressed into a single book.
The above of course is my personal opinion, and is a general rant. I might post it in three parts and make it into a trilogy. 😉
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Way back in 1993, I was a 13-year-old that was just about to go on a cross Canada trip with my family for a summer vacation. I was huge into fantasy at the time, and a family friend lent me the first four books of the Wheel of Time series. I quickly took to them and spent a lot of the travel time/down time reading them. At the end of the summer, I had finished the 4th book and was impatiently waiting for another (I figured that the 5th – and obviously last – book should be coming out soon, and I distinctly recall thinking that it should only take the author a couple of months to write it, for some dumb reason).
When the 5th book came out, I picked it up as soon as I could and tore through it quickly, only to find – again – that the story was not yet done. Which then set up the following pattern that I followed for almost a decade:
New book comes out.
I re-read all prior books to refresh my memory as to what is going on in the story.
I read the new book, only the find out that the story is not yet done.
I followed this pattern until Crossroads at Twilight (Book 10 - 2003), at which point I decided that I was done with that pattern, and I was going to wait until the series was finished once and for all. So, I put the books back on the shelf….and for a long, long time, I forgot about them. My favorite genre, fantasy, did not appeal to me as much as it used to, and I went on a very long non-fiction kick – and primarily only read during my commutes on the train (which totaled for 3 hours each day). My life changed….I got into a relationship, got married…then moved somewhere where I no longer had that commute, and my reading as a whole just….stopped. That was about 10 years ago, and without commuting to set aside the time, my recreational reading just abruptly ended.
That hiatus came to an end a couple of years ago, when I rediscovered the library and started to get back into reading fiction. (It’s a good way to unwind before bed). Then, just about a year ago, I had to move some of my books and I found that I still had the WoT series….and a quick search revealed that the series is now indeed complete (and that Robert Jordan died? Like 15 years ago?). I figured that now was a good a time to finish the series as any, and started to plug away that them again, finally finishing A Memory of Light just the other day. I’m glad I did, not only for the story itself, but because of a couple of things I realized while re-reading the books – which I guess is the whole point of my preamble 😊
Re-reading the books not only reminded me of the story as when I originally read it, but also of the people I was with and the places I was in when I was reading them. That family trip came back into mind. Reading in my room when I still lived with my parents. Being in university and reading them again – as well as my first place after graduating. Family and friends that I had spent time with. The family friend who lent me the original books way back has been gone for a long time now, as is one of my parents. Friends that I was inseparable from during the original reads are now far flung, with time and distance making visitations a rare thing. It was opening a window back to my younger self, and it was not something I was expecting when I started my re-read.
Being now in my early 40’s, instead of my early teens/early twenties has changed how I view characters or some writing tropes that occurred within the series, and not always for the better:
Teenage Me – Why are all the main characters treated like kids? They are obviously old enough and mature enough for what they are doing.
42 year-old me – YOU. ARE. ALL. KIDS. Even the ones in their 20's.
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I know the original Swedish didn't have people's weights in pounds, the majority of the Anglosphere uses kg, so just stick to kg. I feel like I'm being pulled out of Sweden into the US, I don't need that, there's enough books, TV and movies set there.
If a book is set in Ireland, and written by an author who went to school in Ireland, why is the MC studying 'math' and telling us the temperature in F? Again stop pulling me into the US.
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