help, i'm trapped in the library
Yeah, it's one of these entries again.
I shall distribute it to authors who take an incredibly awesome premise - like, say, the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West, or maybe the Borgias plus mirrors - and then mess it up royally. And I'm giving it to Jasper Fforde for starters, because sweet baby Jesus. The idea for the Thursday Next series is absolutely wonderful, all of this Books As Srs Bsns stuff, people stealing manuscripts and characters and all shizzle. And the library has The Eyre Affair, and I need to check books out for the Reading Program, so I got it. I read about 57 pages. Aaaand I gave up, which has happened to me about never. It's just truly atrociously written. It's lazy, all exposition and very little showing (I really, really don't want to see "I loved my father very much" in the narration of any book aimed at people older than fourteen, and that's never-minding the "world buidling", which was cool but in such big non-shown doses...).
Then the main character... she can't even get being a Mary Sue right (and I will take a lot of Sue from a fantasy protagonist). She's sort of aggressively average, like Fforde thought he'd make her more realistic, and I'm all for that - but then he can't really follow it through. The people and circumstances around her are all gearing up for giving her a Destiny, and it contrasts so clumsily with her semi-average life until that point... I don't know. I got to the main villain reuniting with her as she throws herself about ever-so heroically and informing her that she was the best and brightest pupil he'd ever had and that was it.
So that started a bad trend, because then I tried Mercedes Lackey's Joust, and... got a hundred-odd pages in and had to give up again. It looked all to the good - dragons plus pseudo ancient Egypt, yes please - but it was plainly not going to be able to handle the slevery themes it had set up, because Lackey was so preoccupied with her main characters being DIFFERENT and MORE SPECIAL. MC dude has it so much worse than anyone else, and I could be more down with that if she wasn't pounding it into our heads and repeatedly making the point by contrasting him with slaves, who are so much better off than serfs. And he gets carried off, in a legal sort of way, by some Jouster who is the only one whose dragon will obey him without being drugged, and then MC dude proceeds to prove himself just the hardest little worker ever, and he wouldn't dream of stealing from his captor (who is member of a race that's enslaving his people) because that would be wrong. So then he bonds with the dragon in a very boy-and-his-dog sort of way, and with his new master, who is very special and sensitive but NOT GAY, DOES NOT LOOK AT THE PRETTY BOYS. And it's totes okay that Jouster-man dragon-napped his steed, because he is treating it nicer and respects it; it's like some sick Pokemon thing.
Throughout, there's this strain of such childish idealism - people can't be people. Being an ex-slave who's anxious to assert the fact that now you can order other people around = EVIL. Being ugly and fat = EVIL. Being a high-born young idiot who believes that you needn't hang out with serfs = EVIL. If Lackey was prepared to deal with any of this shizzle maturely, that would be different, but... yeah no. And again with the awkward exposition and not showing me any damn thing because she's so busy telling.
SO I AM GOING TO READ THE HARUKI MURAKAMI BOOK I FOUND INSTEAD AND THAT WILL SHOW THEM TO DISPLEASE ME.
I shall distribute it to authors who take an incredibly awesome premise - like, say, the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West, or maybe the Borgias plus mirrors - and then mess it up royally. And I'm giving it to Jasper Fforde for starters, because sweet baby Jesus. The idea for the Thursday Next series is absolutely wonderful, all of this Books As Srs Bsns stuff, people stealing manuscripts and characters and all shizzle. And the library has The Eyre Affair, and I need to check books out for the Reading Program, so I got it. I read about 57 pages. Aaaand I gave up, which has happened to me about never. It's just truly atrociously written. It's lazy, all exposition and very little showing (I really, really don't want to see "I loved my father very much" in the narration of any book aimed at people older than fourteen, and that's never-minding the "world buidling", which was cool but in such big non-shown doses...).
Then the main character... she can't even get being a Mary Sue right (and I will take a lot of Sue from a fantasy protagonist). She's sort of aggressively average, like Fforde thought he'd make her more realistic, and I'm all for that - but then he can't really follow it through. The people and circumstances around her are all gearing up for giving her a Destiny, and it contrasts so clumsily with her semi-average life until that point... I don't know. I got to the main villain reuniting with her as she throws herself about ever-so heroically and informing her that she was the best and brightest pupil he'd ever had and that was it.
So that started a bad trend, because then I tried Mercedes Lackey's Joust, and... got a hundred-odd pages in and had to give up again. It looked all to the good - dragons plus pseudo ancient Egypt, yes please - but it was plainly not going to be able to handle the slevery themes it had set up, because Lackey was so preoccupied with her main characters being DIFFERENT and MORE SPECIAL. MC dude has it so much worse than anyone else, and I could be more down with that if she wasn't pounding it into our heads and repeatedly making the point by contrasting him with slaves, who are so much better off than serfs. And he gets carried off, in a legal sort of way, by some Jouster who is the only one whose dragon will obey him without being drugged, and then MC dude proceeds to prove himself just the hardest little worker ever, and he wouldn't dream of stealing from his captor (who is member of a race that's enslaving his people) because that would be wrong. So then he bonds with the dragon in a very boy-and-his-dog sort of way, and with his new master, who is very special and sensitive but NOT GAY, DOES NOT LOOK AT THE PRETTY BOYS. And it's totes okay that Jouster-man dragon-napped his steed, because he is treating it nicer and respects it; it's like some sick Pokemon thing.
Throughout, there's this strain of such childish idealism - people can't be people. Being an ex-slave who's anxious to assert the fact that now you can order other people around = EVIL. Being ugly and fat = EVIL. Being a high-born young idiot who believes that you needn't hang out with serfs = EVIL. If Lackey was prepared to deal with any of this shizzle maturely, that would be different, but... yeah no. And again with the awkward exposition and not showing me any damn thing because she's so busy telling.
SO I AM GOING TO READ THE HARUKI MURAKAMI BOOK I FOUND INSTEAD AND THAT WILL SHOW THEM TO DISPLEASE ME.