On the dubious pleasures of rereading
Posted 18 Jan, 2009 at 20:30 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
Every now and then I'll pick up a series that I really liked when I was in high school. I should remember to stop doing that, because I'm almost always happier with the memories than the experience.
Right now I'm going through Jack Chalker's Quintara Marathon trilogy. There's a lot of things that I recall liking about Chalker when I was reading his stuff as a teenager: his use of diverse cultural and mythological elements, his ways of talking about technology, his depictions of different worlds. Neat ideas, neat plots, neat settings; these things make for decent space opera.
But the writing! His characters in this particular series have backgrounds that shift as the books go on, often flatly contradicting facts established at the very beginning. There's a lot of telling not showing as far as character traits go, and the way the story is set up means that there's a lot of decisions and discoveries that are repeated multiple times among multiple groups of characters... and it's not that interesting to read the third description of a tesseract in fifty pages, really.
What this probably means is that I need new, better fiction in my life; my recent spate of library borrowings have been almost entirely non-fiction, the lone exception being Patricia McKillip's lovely The Bell at Seeley Head. Suggestions, oh possibly imaginary readers?
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I'm a big fan of the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. You can get the first one in the series On Basilisk Station for free in almost any e-book format for free, by the way. IMHO, it's the worst of the series, but I'd still recommend it, if you're in the mood.I've just started Tad William's City of Golden Shadow (part of the Otherland series). It's got strong hooks.
Posted 2009/1/21 22:42:54 by Kael