(no subject)
I spent a good chunk of the weekend paying my travel tax: Not quite sick, but zero real energy to do stuff. Probably some lingering fun from my sinus infection that came two trips ago and never really went away.
I've spent a chunk of the prior year and mostly time on recent trips working my way through the Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan and ghost-written in the last few books by Sanderson. The series was started in 1990, the year after I got out of high school and only came to a conclusion a bit over two years ago. That time span was effectively the second thing most wrong with the series.
I had picked up the first 9 books of the series somewhere around 2001-2002 as one of the Science Fiction Book Club's regular "please come back! You can have X books for a penny and only need to buy another 3 books to fulfill your obligations." For those not in the know, SFBC was effectively the Columbia House of SF&F books. During that time, I was coming to an end of my regular book or more a week habit and moving more into outright tsundoku as other things in my life took that previously available time. Among those things was a large uptick in work devouring all time and effectively my first and only start-up experience.
I managed to work my work through about book 6, when I finally had the foresight to ask "when is this thing going to end?" Thankfully the Internet had enough speculation to realize that it was going to be *many* more books before the end - and that Jordan had slowed down considerably in how fast they were being written.
My memory is honestly crap. It means that if I'm going to go a few years between books, I'm going to forget enough significant plot details that it wasn't going to be worth completing the remaining books I had if the series was going to stretch that long. I shelved them and vowed not to come back until the series was done.
Incidentally, this is my biggest problem with George RR Martin's song of ice and fire (Game of thrones) series. If it hadn't been for the wiki around the series I would have given up on the most recent book since I had *no* interest in re-reading the full set; I hated books 3 and 4.
Jordan of course managed to die before he finished things off, but had left a competent ghost writer with his notes to finish things off. So, sometime last year I started a re-read as part of my low-brain-power downtime. That time has also been taken up by things on netflix like the Bleach anime and a few others and most recently Buffy the vampire slayer.
The length of time between books, as I mentioned, was the second biggest problem with the series. As with most extremely popular fantasy authors, their editors seem to lack the power to wield a strong red pen and cut out the fluff. When books are trickling out at a slow pace, that red pen would leave very little material in large portions of this series. I think it was book 10 when it came time to grab the Kindle version of the remaining books that had the warning in the Amazon reviews, "Nothing of significance happens in much of the book but you'll get sick of reading about Aes Sedai drinking tea." Basically, pieces of good fantasy story get swamped in meaningless detail padding the books. This is sometimes tolerable when you're reading the books in real-time as they come out every few years, but sorely sticks out when you're reading the thing end-to-end.
The first problem is perhaps symptomatic of the second one: Too many unnecessary details. Fantasy series already have a bad habit of splitting up the plot lines across geography and characters, and this one went crazy with it given the large cast of primary players. At some point, this may make for a great TV mini-series a la game of thrones, but I've gotten curmudgeonly about my fantasy. Give me the old days of a 150-200 page Zelazny novel.
The third to last book, as Sanderson becomes involved, seems to realize this simply needs to end when some of the ancillary characters are effectively tossed on a wagon and ushered out of the story. The remaining three books manage a good pace and seem to put all of the remaining characters in play to good use, but that still leaves a rather lengthy novel.
Things wrapped up pleasantly for a fantasy series, and I won't spoil the ending. But mostly, it *finished*. I'm done. Through. And ready to be rid of it.
As you can see in one of the attached pictures, I have a nice set of bookshelves that Chris had gotten me for Christmas a few years ago. These books had taken up quite a bit of one of the shelves in the library. While I don't read anywhere as much as I used to, the library isn't a place I consider as a graveyard of books - it's more a home for old friends that, especially due to my bad memory, I may visit again.
And thus, they're out. If a local is interested in the books, they're yours. If you're not local and are willing to pay for the postage, they're yours. It was pleasant to bring those lingering plot points to an end, but I won't be reading them again.
I'll be freeing up more space in those shelves as the year goes on. I've been splitting my time working both through stuff I'll buy "just in time" on my Kindle and through the lingering bits of my tsundoku of the past. Especially for paperback fantasy and given the amount of travel I do for work these days, the Kindle has been a better way to consume my reading - and with less "waste". It's arguably not cheaper, since books are still too expensive from Amazon via Kindle, but I'm simply not willing to deal with quite as much paper as I used to.
Now I just need to go back to netflix for my brain-dead chill-out stuff for the final round of working through Buffy.
I've spent a chunk of the prior year and mostly time on recent trips working my way through the Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan and ghost-written in the last few books by Sanderson. The series was started in 1990, the year after I got out of high school and only came to a conclusion a bit over two years ago. That time span was effectively the second thing most wrong with the series.
I had picked up the first 9 books of the series somewhere around 2001-2002 as one of the Science Fiction Book Club's regular "please come back! You can have X books for a penny and only need to buy another 3 books to fulfill your obligations." For those not in the know, SFBC was effectively the Columbia House of SF&F books. During that time, I was coming to an end of my regular book or more a week habit and moving more into outright tsundoku as other things in my life took that previously available time. Among those things was a large uptick in work devouring all time and effectively my first and only start-up experience.
I managed to work my work through about book 6, when I finally had the foresight to ask "when is this thing going to end?" Thankfully the Internet had enough speculation to realize that it was going to be *many* more books before the end - and that Jordan had slowed down considerably in how fast they were being written.
My memory is honestly crap. It means that if I'm going to go a few years between books, I'm going to forget enough significant plot details that it wasn't going to be worth completing the remaining books I had if the series was going to stretch that long. I shelved them and vowed not to come back until the series was done.
Incidentally, this is my biggest problem with George RR Martin's song of ice and fire (Game of thrones) series. If it hadn't been for the wiki around the series I would have given up on the most recent book since I had *no* interest in re-reading the full set; I hated books 3 and 4.
Jordan of course managed to die before he finished things off, but had left a competent ghost writer with his notes to finish things off. So, sometime last year I started a re-read as part of my low-brain-power downtime. That time has also been taken up by things on netflix like the Bleach anime and a few others and most recently Buffy the vampire slayer.
The length of time between books, as I mentioned, was the second biggest problem with the series. As with most extremely popular fantasy authors, their editors seem to lack the power to wield a strong red pen and cut out the fluff. When books are trickling out at a slow pace, that red pen would leave very little material in large portions of this series. I think it was book 10 when it came time to grab the Kindle version of the remaining books that had the warning in the Amazon reviews, "Nothing of significance happens in much of the book but you'll get sick of reading about Aes Sedai drinking tea." Basically, pieces of good fantasy story get swamped in meaningless detail padding the books. This is sometimes tolerable when you're reading the books in real-time as they come out every few years, but sorely sticks out when you're reading the thing end-to-end.
The first problem is perhaps symptomatic of the second one: Too many unnecessary details. Fantasy series already have a bad habit of splitting up the plot lines across geography and characters, and this one went crazy with it given the large cast of primary players. At some point, this may make for a great TV mini-series a la game of thrones, but I've gotten curmudgeonly about my fantasy. Give me the old days of a 150-200 page Zelazny novel.
The third to last book, as Sanderson becomes involved, seems to realize this simply needs to end when some of the ancillary characters are effectively tossed on a wagon and ushered out of the story. The remaining three books manage a good pace and seem to put all of the remaining characters in play to good use, but that still leaves a rather lengthy novel.
Things wrapped up pleasantly for a fantasy series, and I won't spoil the ending. But mostly, it *finished*. I'm done. Through. And ready to be rid of it.
As you can see in one of the attached pictures, I have a nice set of bookshelves that Chris had gotten me for Christmas a few years ago. These books had taken up quite a bit of one of the shelves in the library. While I don't read anywhere as much as I used to, the library isn't a place I consider as a graveyard of books - it's more a home for old friends that, especially due to my bad memory, I may visit again.
And thus, they're out. If a local is interested in the books, they're yours. If you're not local and are willing to pay for the postage, they're yours. It was pleasant to bring those lingering plot points to an end, but I won't be reading them again.
I'll be freeing up more space in those shelves as the year goes on. I've been splitting my time working both through stuff I'll buy "just in time" on my Kindle and through the lingering bits of my tsundoku of the past. Especially for paperback fantasy and given the amount of travel I do for work these days, the Kindle has been a better way to consume my reading - and with less "waste". It's arguably not cheaper, since books are still too expensive from Amazon via Kindle, but I'm simply not willing to deal with quite as much paper as I used to.
Now I just need to go back to netflix for my brain-dead chill-out stuff for the final round of working through Buffy.