reading index to future posts
Feb. 13th, 2010 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynTrying to decide between making a handful of posts or one big one....
I also spent a lot of time composing my reply about disliking recommendations I get from friends and the tangential conversation about what I like reading. I pasted the whole thing into a DW post but then marked it private because I think I rambled too much.
I am going to excerpt the salient parts:
- Finished Icy Heat by Leigh Wyndfield via Kindle For PC
- Finished Witches Incorporated by K.E. Mills (aka Karen Miller)
- Finished Phoenix [Something] (it's the third book and the title adjectives don't really mean anything usefully mnemonic, we'd have been better served if they'd used "one" "two" "three" instead) by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory
- Finished Jigsaw by Kathleen Nance
- Reviewed The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge already.
- Read "The Janus Rose" by richardgloucester which was a Snape/Sprout one-shot fic. It's available just about everywhere and I really liked it. (linked to Petulant Poetess, but this is not a restricted fic and one does not need an account to read it)
I also spent a lot of time composing my reply about disliking recommendations I get from friends and the tangential conversation about what I like reading. I pasted the whole thing into a DW post but then marked it private because I think I rambled too much.
I am going to excerpt the salient parts:
[Starting with the recommendations part]
People around me consistently recommend non-genre fiction to me. Pretty much I can't stand it. Non-genre fiction is inevitably about people who have a life I could have and whose life sucks in some defined way. Then we watch them suffer for the entire book. There's no imagination to it whatsoever. It might as well not be fiction. No one ever writes books about people whose lives don't suck, but the ones that have a story aside from sadistic voyeurism on the part of the reader bother me less.
[....]
I can't stand Austen. I don't like historicals. I rarely read non-fiction or pop political works. I don't like gore or graphic war. I hate humor books... even if it's normally a book I would like; if the author tries to make it "funny" I'm put off. I'm disappointed if there's no happy ending. So when people recommend books, I usually just smile and nod while internally thinking, "You know I'm never going to read that. In fact, I probably won't look to see if the library owns it."
[Later when asked what I do like, having said I like SFF books because when it's set in an alien situation normal stuff is illustrated to highlight the differences...]
If it's a book about here and now, set in real life, nothing is explained because we're all assumed to have shared context and it would be condescending of the author. I generally find, for example, characters in books set in New Orleans to be much less comprehensible than the Heralds in a Mercedes Lackey book. But no one writing a book, even a vampire hunter book so it's not quite like regular reality, set in New Orleans ever bothers to explain why no one left after Katrina even though there are 70 pages out of 200 spent whining about the destruction of everything. We're supposed to just understand even though it's completely incomprehensible to someone who grew up with the tenet "bloom where you're planted".
[even later, after digressing to the movie Lost In Austen]
I love how the modern girl who obsesses about the romanticism of the era sees how ugly and oppressive it is when she's swapped in for Lizzie. I'm hoping that she changes things and those girls all get careers and buy property through shell corporations, but somehow I think I may be hanging too much expectation.
That would be really an awesome use for modern accounting practices if they could be used to protect freedoms of oppressed peoples within a society.
People around me consistently recommend non-genre fiction to me. Pretty much I can't stand it. Non-genre fiction is inevitably about people who have a life I could have and whose life sucks in some defined way. Then we watch them suffer for the entire book. There's no imagination to it whatsoever. It might as well not be fiction. No one ever writes books about people whose lives don't suck, but the ones that have a story aside from sadistic voyeurism on the part of the reader bother me less.
[....]
I can't stand Austen. I don't like historicals. I rarely read non-fiction or pop political works. I don't like gore or graphic war. I hate humor books... even if it's normally a book I would like; if the author tries to make it "funny" I'm put off. I'm disappointed if there's no happy ending. So when people recommend books, I usually just smile and nod while internally thinking, "You know I'm never going to read that. In fact, I probably won't look to see if the library owns it."
[Later when asked what I do like, having said I like SFF books because when it's set in an alien situation normal stuff is illustrated to highlight the differences...]
If it's a book about here and now, set in real life, nothing is explained because we're all assumed to have shared context and it would be condescending of the author. I generally find, for example, characters in books set in New Orleans to be much less comprehensible than the Heralds in a Mercedes Lackey book. But no one writing a book, even a vampire hunter book so it's not quite like regular reality, set in New Orleans ever bothers to explain why no one left after Katrina even though there are 70 pages out of 200 spent whining about the destruction of everything. We're supposed to just understand even though it's completely incomprehensible to someone who grew up with the tenet "bloom where you're planted".
[even later, after digressing to the movie Lost In Austen]
I love how the modern girl who obsesses about the romanticism of the era sees how ugly and oppressive it is when she's swapped in for Lizzie. I'm hoping that she changes things and those girls all get careers and buy property through shell corporations, but somehow I think I may be hanging too much expectation.
That would be really an awesome use for modern accounting practices if they could be used to protect freedoms of oppressed peoples within a society.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-14 12:26 am (UTC)Anyways, no spoilers, I finished the first book of the second trilogy and can't find the stupid second one (I have it in the house...somewhere... and refuse to re-purchase a $7 book that I'm going to read like twice).
Even some genre fiction bugs me. My grandmother liked mysteries for the background and also because she liked the puzzle of figuring out who did it; I like romances for sort of the same reason, because I like settings and I also like the "how will they" puzzles. But if the background is something I could get anywhere, from any regular person, who cares? I like romances about interesting people with interesting lives: vintage dress retailers, cake decorators, the kind of person you'd enjoy talking to even if you weren't dating them.
I need to make more time to review fic-- not just the stuff I loved, but what I didn't, and why. I think the secret to finding good recs is finding someone who either shares your taste or is close enough that they can articulate what they like, and you can pick from that.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-14 01:03 am (UTC)I like mysteries like your kind of romances... Dick Francis mysteries were always about some guy with a really interesting career. The first one I read was Proof and it was about a guy who is a scotch taster. There was a glass blowing one. A lot of them were horse-racing related jobs, but enough of the characters were genuinely people you would like to talk to at a party. His son/nephew/heir who has been "cowriting" hasn't the knack for making the character interesting.
I think it's hard to review fic honestly in public. There's no room for it in any fandom as far as I can tell. You still see fic where the writer says they are holding the next chapter hostage until they get N reviews. You still see people who say "reviews are the only payment fic authors get".... They don't mean review they mean praise. I have actually seen fic writers say a negative comment is like stealing from them because all the reader has to do is stop reading.
I figure if they don't want to hear what I have to say, if they're going to put words in my mouth, then there should just be a ticky box so I don't have to waste my time trying not to plagiarize their "gimme candy" demands.
One of my other reasons for not liking non-paranormal romances... aside from the standard plot being that neither of them wants to admit their feelings in case they're unrequited so they both lie to each other to save their pride... is that the goal seems to be to prove the couple is in love by making the woman pregnant. Or at least having an epilogue where they are living happily ever after with 4 kids. Because the more in love they are, the more children the couple will have. The obvious implication is false, "If they don't have children, they're not really in love." Paranormals don't usually link reproduction and affection like that.
I have no idea why Mercedes Lackey continually titles her books in this way. The Vanyel series was Magic's [whatever]. There was the Storm [whatever] trilogy... there's a reason people refer to them by the starring characters.