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I found out that the series I just started has 8 books and I ditched out. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by wowwoweowza@lemmy.world to c/books@lemmy.world

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Proud moment for me:

I made it through the second of 8 absolutely delightful, engaging, and extremely PLEASURABLE novels in a series about a topic I love.

But the first book ended POORLY... because they knew that fans like me would be the second. It’s like it LITERALLY had zero ending. Meaning there was this absurd violation of novelistic structure.

And the second cemented my creeping suspicion that this all... all all all... was trifling crap. It’s like porn for people who like fast talking smart alecks, snide, sarcastic, and battle after battle after battle.

One amazingly engaging battle after another. So enjoyable. Exactly what I love.

Except that there's zero heart, soul, message... oh... it takes a head nod in the direction of what is noble and how should people behave...

But at the end of the day...

Lovely useless battles of stupid.

So... I did not buy the third.

I'm done.

Victory.

I’m not going to mention the name of the series because I don’t want to get into it with fans who are fine reading the same book 8 times: Hero and partner in exotic setting fight stuff until they live or die.

That’s the book.

Sirens of Titan made me weep for three hours. This is what I expect a novel to do. Moby Dick changed the way I examine culture and society. Emma taught me to be expect the unexpected. Valuable books do valuable work. Entertaining books entertain. I get it. I consider the elevation of my human experience more valuable than being entertained for five hours. Thoughts?

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[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

But if you can, say, call up an intelligent portal virtually anywhere that’s near-omniscient and can transport things anywhere, well, that alone kind of limits the sort of things that you can run into that are real challenges to overcome. And that’s just one of the tools in Merlin’s toolbox.

Yeah, exactly - makes things a bit too easy.

Yeah…though to be fair, if the comparison is Corwin…a lot of the first book is just talking about how able he is to deal with situations and be cunning and see through intrigue even under extreme handicaps, like his damaged memory and with almost no information about what’s going on. That’s a high bar to follow.

Oh, I get it - like I said, I know it was an intentional choice by Zelazny. Merlin is young, where Corwin was hundreds of years old. He's a different char, and there's goodness in that. But I also found it annoying in a main character.