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serynYou know you're being a slackard when you're going to have to buy your own copy of a library book. It's a new knitting book with sock patterns. Of course socks are hugely popular, so there is a long waiting list for the book. The book is under $15 from Amazon, so I figure I should just buy a copy and I'm not going to finish the socks before the book is due back. Mostly because I haven't started them. But somewhat because I haven't picked a pattern.
I did finish a bunch of fiction reading this week. I've read 4 real books in a week. It's weeks like this that make me think I should be doing the 50 books challenge again. (But the recasting as only "authors of color" put my back up, and I was functionally blogless as well. (If you're going to bitch at me for the POC comment, please understand that I often dislike the sort-by-author shopping methods stores employ and believe that past authorship is no indicator of future work quality.))
I read another of those Rita Mae Brown books that she "co-writes" with her cat. I don't know why I got it from the library. I hate her main character. I hate the setting. I hate the condescending tone the author has toward her readers. It always makes me annoyed. I should have bypassed it and kept my serenity instead. Specifically, the main character, Harry, was described by the narrator as not wasting time reading fiction. That's the author projecting and usually gets an "ohhkay, remind me not to pay for your books again then since you hate me for reading them." The mystery part of it was lame too because there was no possible way the reader could have known, it solely involved people who were introduced in this book and exist just to be "red shirts". If it'd been in England, the author could have had Miss Marple as the main character instead without changing anything about the plot. And, a huge problem in my perspective, the title had nothing to do with the story.
I just finished the latest J.D. Robb today. I really enjoyed how we got to visit with all the enormous cast of characters the alphabet-long series has engendered, without losing the context of the plot. The wrap-up was too Mission Impossible to me, but I'm not reading for that. I enjoy that there's a happily married female character anchoring a series and she doesn't want children. Most fiction treats marriage-and-children as a set. If there are no children, the marriage dissolves. Unchilded women can never be happy in most fiction, and I don't think that's reflective of my experience. I won't say that I don't enjoy books where the character is alien to my own mindset, but I definitely would not seek out an overly graphic crime/mystery series if the main female character was ooey-gooey pink-and-lace.
I don't remember if I mentioned the latest Charlene Harris's Southern Vampire series book. That was extremely short. I know I'm spoiled by fanfic because most fic authors are prolific. But to me, this was too little, too late. It's been years since the previous book. It's half the length it should have been--- and too much of that is wasted recapping previous books--- but mostly the story is completely non-compelling. I wonder if she's tired of writing these and busy focusing on her other series about the incestuous siblings who go around like itinerant tinkers (and yes I do know that it's not legally incest for children who are akin to Brady-boy and Brady-girl to have sex, but they were raised as siblings which makes it uncool.)
I have this huge ewwww! factor with a lot of Southern-set books, and what I did like was that there seemed to be less of that. Sookie seemed more worldly, being all judgmental about the hamlet of were panthers and dissing people who make sweet tea too sweet. We didn't hear her go on and on about tin roofs or clouds of pollen like snow. We didn't see her "automatically" ignore her own needs an interests because there was a man (probably should be typed in slang, maah-yun.) In short, Sookie is getting a lot more tolerable. But the story was pretty much a single chapter event, the weres "came out".
When I was writing, one of the things I explained to other people is that plots focusing on single events and their fallouts are short stories, or "one-shots" in the parlance. You can't make a 3-act play with multiple scenes if you've only got one thing. Otherwise it reads like you need an editor to trim the flab. It's hard with a long-running series because fans prefer the "well-marbled" meat and some are really looking for just the white part of the bacon where it's pure fat flavored with meaty story.
In the Sookie series, I've complained about how too much is going on in previous books. And that's because those things are all unrelated. It's a bunch of short stories forcefully crammed into a book into an artificial order when the sequence is mostly independent.
Yeah. I know that it seems unfair that I hate everything and then whine that there's not enough of it.
I've been seriously considering finding a new fandom because I want more stuff to read. I know a lot of people would think I'd go back to books, but I'm just not finding the quality in books in the genres I prefer. I'm also sometimes grossed out or nauseated by things in books that would have been plastered with warnings if they were fic. I know no one wants books to be censored and there'd be no avoiding that if books had warning labels (no store would carry things labelled "non-con, bestiality, drug use, violence" but I've read really decent things with all those warnings (and yes, even all those warnings at once) because the warning was for things that were mostly off-screen or done by peripheral characters.
I'm up for the latest Dresden later today.
I did finish a bunch of fiction reading this week. I've read 4 real books in a week. It's weeks like this that make me think I should be doing the 50 books challenge again. (But the recasting as only "authors of color" put my back up, and I was functionally blogless as well. (If you're going to bitch at me for the POC comment, please understand that I often dislike the sort-by-author shopping methods stores employ and believe that past authorship is no indicator of future work quality.))
I read another of those Rita Mae Brown books that she "co-writes" with her cat. I don't know why I got it from the library. I hate her main character. I hate the setting. I hate the condescending tone the author has toward her readers. It always makes me annoyed. I should have bypassed it and kept my serenity instead. Specifically, the main character, Harry, was described by the narrator as not wasting time reading fiction. That's the author projecting and usually gets an "ohhkay, remind me not to pay for your books again then since you hate me for reading them." The mystery part of it was lame too because there was no possible way the reader could have known, it solely involved people who were introduced in this book and exist just to be "red shirts". If it'd been in England, the author could have had Miss Marple as the main character instead without changing anything about the plot. And, a huge problem in my perspective, the title had nothing to do with the story.
I just finished the latest J.D. Robb today. I really enjoyed how we got to visit with all the enormous cast of characters the alphabet-long series has engendered, without losing the context of the plot. The wrap-up was too Mission Impossible to me, but I'm not reading for that. I enjoy that there's a happily married female character anchoring a series and she doesn't want children. Most fiction treats marriage-and-children as a set. If there are no children, the marriage dissolves. Unchilded women can never be happy in most fiction, and I don't think that's reflective of my experience. I won't say that I don't enjoy books where the character is alien to my own mindset, but I definitely would not seek out an overly graphic crime/mystery series if the main female character was ooey-gooey pink-and-lace.
I don't remember if I mentioned the latest Charlene Harris's Southern Vampire series book. That was extremely short. I know I'm spoiled by fanfic because most fic authors are prolific. But to me, this was too little, too late. It's been years since the previous book. It's half the length it should have been--- and too much of that is wasted recapping previous books--- but mostly the story is completely non-compelling. I wonder if she's tired of writing these and busy focusing on her other series about the incestuous siblings who go around like itinerant tinkers (and yes I do know that it's not legally incest for children who are akin to Brady-boy and Brady-girl to have sex, but they were raised as siblings which makes it uncool.)
I have this huge ewwww! factor with a lot of Southern-set books, and what I did like was that there seemed to be less of that. Sookie seemed more worldly, being all judgmental about the hamlet of were panthers and dissing people who make sweet tea too sweet. We didn't hear her go on and on about tin roofs or clouds of pollen like snow. We didn't see her "automatically" ignore her own needs an interests because there was a man (probably should be typed in slang, maah-yun.) In short, Sookie is getting a lot more tolerable. But the story was pretty much a single chapter event, the weres "came out".
When I was writing, one of the things I explained to other people is that plots focusing on single events and their fallouts are short stories, or "one-shots" in the parlance. You can't make a 3-act play with multiple scenes if you've only got one thing. Otherwise it reads like you need an editor to trim the flab. It's hard with a long-running series because fans prefer the "well-marbled" meat and some are really looking for just the white part of the bacon where it's pure fat flavored with meaty story.
In the Sookie series, I've complained about how too much is going on in previous books. And that's because those things are all unrelated. It's a bunch of short stories forcefully crammed into a book into an artificial order when the sequence is mostly independent.
Yeah. I know that it seems unfair that I hate everything and then whine that there's not enough of it.
I've been seriously considering finding a new fandom because I want more stuff to read. I know a lot of people would think I'd go back to books, but I'm just not finding the quality in books in the genres I prefer. I'm also sometimes grossed out or nauseated by things in books that would have been plastered with warnings if they were fic. I know no one wants books to be censored and there'd be no avoiding that if books had warning labels (no store would carry things labelled "non-con, bestiality, drug use, violence" but I've read really decent things with all those warnings (and yes, even all those warnings at once) because the warning was for things that were mostly off-screen or done by peripheral characters.
I'm up for the latest Dresden later today.
