What’s on your to-do list this week for books? What have you read in this past week? Give a shout-out to your favorite author you’re enjoying, or just take a peek at what everyone else is into right now.
P.S. Don’t let the name of the post scare you, I like lemmy because so far the culture doesn’t concern itself with thread ‘necroing’. Come and have a chat here even if it’s monday!
I was a productive little rat these past two weeks, and actually managed to finish TWO books! One, mildly disappointing, the other, quite good!
#Book 1
The first book was ‘A River Enchanted’ by Rebecca Ross. I listened to it as an audiobook, because work usually has me driving around 3-4 hours a day… and maybe that plays into my perception. I’ll talk more about that. Anyway. I didn’t really enjoy the book. It had a great premise, the first chapter had me so eager for the rest… and then it just sort of squished into a mediocre ball of goo. The setting had a great feel… but then it didn’t really feature much in the story. The characters were varied and interesting and stood out… and then their behaviors and motivations just went, “blagh,” as they trudged through the plot. The plot was pretty standard, but good… and then it went in silly directions so the conflicts could be set up. Now, credit where credit is due: the writing of the action/conflict scenes and the way they were handled was well done. The narration of the audiobook was also amazing. The reader really brought the characters out with voices and such. The audio quality wasn’t the best (seriously, audiobooks need to get better about volume changes and while, yes, a character yelling or whispering should have something different in the reading, making it ear-splitting or unintelligible is not the answer). And, finally, the dialogue? Yeah… it couldn’t be described as even mediocre.
spoiler with examples
Just to throw some examples out there to give you an idea:
The main female protagonist kept using “my old menace,” as some nickname for the main male protagonist, and it was written as if there was some heavy gravity and meaning behind it… and yet we barely get even a small narrated throwaway a few times from the main male protagonist about the childhood mischief that he (supposedly) got up to. At least give us a few flashbacks, with some actual meat in their story, to make the dialogue not something just eye-rolling.
The ‘elements’ that give the series its name were described pretty neatly, but their appearance in the book just felt like window dressing rather than having any big, deep effect. The winds’ ability to share gossip was neat, but just seemed both too commonplace to the characters and too disregarded/ignored at the same time. The magic that could be used felt as if the characters in the story (and the author) couldn’t decide if it was common or incredibly rare and unknown.
The dialogue/characters just generally seemed to be completely servile to the plot’s necessary movements. Especially with the children, it didn’t feel ‘real,’ so to speak. Especially the way minor characters reacted to events that were taking place, like when the main female protagonist had her background shared, the clan’s sudden and vicious turn just felt forced. The decisions each person made didn’t feel like they came from ‘within,’ but rather everything just had a post-hoc explanation done by small narration… this part really irked. I would almost wager money that the author needed something to happen and then just came up with a reason why.
Overall, I guess I should have paid attention to the ‘genre’ being described as a romantasy. It had some neat elements from fantasy, but then every terrible quality of a bad romance novel, including random on/off moments of feelings from the main characters, bad dialogue that was forced and didn’t match other behaviors or even ‘logically’ follow from ongoing events, seemingly just to get the plot to where it needed to go next.
#Book 2
Oh, man, this one I enjoyed. This book was ‘A Tainted Cup’ by Robert Jackson Bennett, and it. was. great! I had started reading his first series a while ago and never finished it, but this one just sucked me in. I could only describe it as sherlock holmes meets (slightly more ‘happy’) call of cthulhu in a byzantine rome. The setting is amazing, with a neat flair and just enough uniqueness to the magic of the world to leave a reader clueless as to what cool thing is going to be taught next. The tensions in the plot rise and fall appropriately, and the characters are pretty fantastic as well. There are certainly a few that seem caricature-like, but they don’t stand out in a bad way or pull you out of the world’s headspace. The plot is a nice, well done standard murder mystery, and has the necessary and fun twists and turns as the protagonists piece together what is happening.
I’m not the biggest fan of the sherlock holmes/dr. watson duo tropes, but the holmes stand-in doesn’t devolve into the insufferable know-it-all with no charisma that you sometimes see, and the dr. watson is just clueless enough while being a fun point of view that you forgive any excesses of ‘a person living in this world should already know such a thing, hmm?’ that pop up. The secrets of the main duo that pop up are well integrated into the characters, and don’t seem like they’re tacked on to give the illusion of depth.
Three thumbs up from me!
#Afterword
I believe I mentioned something about audiobooks somewhere today, and I wonder if I should broach the subject to see what thoughts others had. I think in the last few months, almost all of the books I’ve read and not loved were audiobooks. I have this welling curiosity inside, where perhaps if I had read the text instead of listening to it I wouldn’t have rated it so harshly. I’ve always thought I enjoyed audiobooks… I definitely sought out the audiobooks of brian jacque’s stories, or brandon sanderson’s, and enjoyed listening to them after I had already read the texts. I may grumble about how they pronounce a fantasy name differently than I would, but overall they were good experiences. Perhaps it was just with these ‘romantasy’ books that the audio brought out the worst parts in ways that couldn’t be ignored. Would I have simply sped through the cheesy dialogue if I was reading the book, or had the time for by brain to wander and start wondering whether X action really would have come from Y character in Z situation… perhaps. Oh well. I’ll just have to keep on keeping on. The library application I use (or, really, the library’s online catalogue) doesn’t have a lot of books in text version as counterparts to the audiobooks, so some books I can only read by listening to, which means I’ll get to nurse this theory of mine a little longer.