Reading--Narrative voice
My reading has been extremely sporadic. I hope to get to some titles of things I really liked later, but my timer today is just about out.
And I'd like to hear others' thoughts on something I discovered. I have always liked first person POV, or omni in which the narrator is present, even if briefly present a la Jane Austen. There is a writer whose works I've pretty much always enjoyed, with one or two exceptions. I was really looking forward to the newest book, as it was to be about dragons, and I love a good dragon tale, as long as it's not too much of a retread on Norton/McCaffrey and "impressment" or the super-pretty-people-who-become-giant-dragons trope, which so far hasn't floated my boat.
So I launched eagerly into this new one, bogged in the first chapter, which seemed to go round and round in setup chat. Second chapter same thing, but a hint of the story finally starting got me settling back into my chair. Okay, long beginning--maybe other readers will love the chattiness--here's some story, yip! The story bit I really liked, but then it slowed again, slowed, slowed, and then briefly sped up again for a section of coolness, and then slowed for the remaining fifty pages of the book.
What I finally identified was that the writer had done what put me off Heinlein's later work, which is to park the story and deliver pages and pages of opinion. Or get a line or two of story and then the rest of a long paragraph of opinion. Obviously a lot of readers like this, as Heinlein is a household word for anyone who likes SF. But I find myself skimming; I don't want a book which has, I would guess, about fifteen or twenty percent story (there are three or four discrete events in this particular YA novel) and the rest is all opinion. Which keeps the secondary characters at a far, far distance, as we get more opinion about them then we actually see or hear them doing anything.
Is this a narrative device you like?
And I'd like to hear others' thoughts on something I discovered. I have always liked first person POV, or omni in which the narrator is present, even if briefly present a la Jane Austen. There is a writer whose works I've pretty much always enjoyed, with one or two exceptions. I was really looking forward to the newest book, as it was to be about dragons, and I love a good dragon tale, as long as it's not too much of a retread on Norton/McCaffrey and "impressment" or the super-pretty-people-who-become-giant-dragons trope, which so far hasn't floated my boat.
So I launched eagerly into this new one, bogged in the first chapter, which seemed to go round and round in setup chat. Second chapter same thing, but a hint of the story finally starting got me settling back into my chair. Okay, long beginning--maybe other readers will love the chattiness--here's some story, yip! The story bit I really liked, but then it slowed again, slowed, slowed, and then briefly sped up again for a section of coolness, and then slowed for the remaining fifty pages of the book.
What I finally identified was that the writer had done what put me off Heinlein's later work, which is to park the story and deliver pages and pages of opinion. Or get a line or two of story and then the rest of a long paragraph of opinion. Obviously a lot of readers like this, as Heinlein is a household word for anyone who likes SF. But I find myself skimming; I don't want a book which has, I would guess, about fifteen or twenty percent story (there are three or four discrete events in this particular YA novel) and the rest is all opinion. Which keeps the secondary characters at a far, far distance, as we get more opinion about them then we actually see or hear them doing anything.
Is this a narrative device you like?