Booky things

[woodwindy]

Is anyone reading C.S. Friedman's Magister Trilogy? I want to talk about the third book with someone who knows what's going on... be warned, I have rather strong feelings about it!

Also, whew, up all night last night finishing A Storm of Swords. I still have mixed feelings, and I can see why people were telling me they thought the series started

Comments

[word_geek]

I don't think that many people thought that Storm of Swords itself was bad (although they'll probably correct me if I'm wrong) -- everybody I know who read it was busy being stunned by you-know-what. The "off the rails" feeling came immediately after, and was, I believe, because we had a series that was rolling along nicely, with new installments every two years, and then suddenly the writing ground to a halt. The author changed his plans multiple times, threw stuff out and rewrote, and finally took five years to bring out a volume that had only half the character we wanted to read about, in which very little appeared to happen.

I should be clear that he's perfectly entitled to do all the waffling and rewriting he needs to; that's how writing works, sometimes. His mistake, in my mind, was doing it in public. He would project the book to be finished by a certain date on his blog, and then weeks or months later he'd recant and say he'd had to throw out a bunch of stuff and start over. As the years passed, the readers began to get somewhat annoyed with this, and when the final product was not the greatest work of fiction ever produced by a human, they were disappointed.

And then he did it again with the next book. But all the new readers who just came in thanks to the TV show weren't around for that part, so maybe it doesn't look that way to them. For me, I have a vivid memory of finishing Storm of Swords at Christmas of 2000, when my house was brand new, none of us had any kids, and the world was a different place. And the idea that the plot hasn't advanced all that much since then...well, that's a little hard to swallow.

[woodwindy]

All of that makes a good deal of sense.

Yeah... I think "Winter is coming" isn't *actually* in English. Really it's in old High Valyrian that just happens to sound like English and if you translate it, what it means is "Sucks to be a Stark, huh?"

[word_geek]

I will admit that I haven't read DWD yet. I got it, my wife read it, I tried when she was done, got 200 pages in, and gave up out of boredom. I put it aside for a few months, and decided to restart the series from the beginning, in the hopes that doing so would give me some momentum, as it were. And wow, Game of Thrones is really, really good (understatement of the year), but it's also speedy -- the plot just flies along. You'll come back to a PoV character and find out that six weeks has passed for him while you were reading other chapters. The later books just don't seem to have that.

[orichalcum]

This is basically spot on. SoS distressed me because of Awful Horrible Things happening to characters I cared about, but didn't make me irritated or angry at GRRM. It's the fact that, two books later, very little new stuff has happened besides the introduction of 18 new viewpoint characters and whole new lovingly detailed sections of the world. Sometimes the vagueness of "Here Be Dragons" is your friend, GRRM. But if you are the sort of person who loves reading sourcebooks just for the world info, you will probably enjoy them. If you care about plot-involving-the-Starks, well, I'd wait another few years, maybe.

Brought to you by the faction that Really Doesn't Care About Dorne.