help me, f'list! i'm about 2/3 - 3/4 of the way through, and this thing is finally starting to annoy me...the bit at the beginning with the domestic stuff between daniel and armand, and the massacre at the rock concert, and the bit with laurent and baby jenks; that was all cool
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That drove me CRAZY the first two times I tried to read the book.
Finally, a friend told me to just start reading about 200 pages in as, yes, the first 199 pages are "These red-headed twins are important!" and not much else. I finally made it all the way through the book, but I can't say it was worth the effort. IMHO, the series should have ended after Vampire Lestat.
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i wanted to wait to watch the movie version until after i'd finished the book, but now i'm kind of tempted just to bail and call it the lesser of two evils.
as for the other books, i'm really loving the vampire armand...the historical research there doesn't bug me nearly so much, probably because it's layered into (and actually flipping relevant to) the plot.
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and it's a shame, really, because it could be a really excellent book if rice had just cut it back a little (a bit like the problem stephen king had when he started to get really successful). the first hundred or so pages are really engaging, as long as she's concentrating on the main characters. but then rice gets all enamored of this talamasca group she's created - which, wtf; they really have no bearing in this story and no real purpose in it at all - and then there's a HUGE fucking stretch of interminably long boring backstory about these stupid martyred twins (who are, btw, the biggest literary macguffins i've ever seen in my entire life).
i'm going to put my head down and see if i can make it through, but i'm already suspecting that the time i've spent on the majority of this book is time that i'll want back on my deathbed. >:P
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OK, Google (and Fandom Wank) is my friend. Apparently she threw a snit about some negative reviews on Amazon.
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it might be worth considering that when one's fan base has the perspective of, 'shall never buy another of this author's books again, if this is the sort of self-indulgent wank i'll be inundated with', then that is a perspective the author might possibly wish not to snottily attempt to invalidate, and instead re-examine why so many people are having that reaction.
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i'm willing to give memnoch and body thief a try, just because i like lestat as a narrator, and because armand's in them. don't think i'll be too eager to try and others though, even if they are available as cheap used copies.
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personally, i think qotd would have been a lot shorter if rice had just found three redheads and had a foursome with them, and gotten it out of her system right there and then.
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I would recommend skipping towards the end of Queen of the Damned cause the very end actually has some wonderful character interactions and reunions and almost makes up for the miserable middle part of the book.
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:)
the thing about the long-winded descriptions is, not only are they often lengthy distractions from the main plot; they're often thrown in regardless of character appropriateness. for example, i can see lestat or marius caring about the specifics of lavish furnishings, and knowing the exact proper names for such things. but there's a lot of that stuff in the vampire armand as well, which doesn't really belong there, considering that rice herself wrote in qotd that armand is kind of ADD and doesn't really notice those sorts of things; living more in the moment and not processing little details like furniture or decoration (i think her exact wording was that he liked clothes for 'what he thought they meant' instead of what they really meant).
agreed about the female characters too. i read a blurb in rice's coming-back-to-jesus book (called out of darkness, i think?) about how she never really wanted to identify with female characters, because they were often weak or silly. which i can ( ... )
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