forgotten realms blows hot and cold for me. some of it is good and some of it is bad. the dark elf trilogy for example was pretty good. later i thought it got interesting again during the legacy of the drow books and then again during the sellswords and hunters blades books. all the books in between those though, which is half the series, were either dull or just plain bad. the transitions trilogy was the first one where only part of the trilogy was good, the first two were bad and the third fairly good. the neverwinter trilogy started out good with guantlgrym so maybe this trilogy will be decent. they're complete junk reading though, junk food for the brain.

he just randomly goes from good to bad with the series, its almost like two people are writing it. the good ones make for entertaining light reads its just unfortunate that they're mixed in with just as many bad ones.

 

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Agreed 100%. I hate Faulkner with a burning passion, and every English teacher seems to orgasm just thinking about his horrible books and inflicting them on a new generation of unsuspecting people.

Also, the Dune books for me.

First couple were sort of ok, nothing special, and later it was just boring boring boring.

 

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I think As I Lay Dying is important because the South isn't all that far away from where it was in Faulkner's day. Yah gotta forgive him - he did a good job on the script from To Have and Have Not even if it meant recompiling Hemingway.

Piers Anthony is AWESOMEly over-productive. Here is a simple rule: If it's a PA series of more than 3 books then he should have stopped at three. If he did manage to stop at three then he should have made it one book only. Stop while you are ahead fer goodnesssakes!

Me, 14, reading Catcher in the Rye: "I woulda had sex with her. Wow this guy is clueless!"

Dune: Stop at three. Herbert should have too. Great otherwise I thought.

 

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I don't know, I just reject the idea that a work of fiction can be important just because of what it is attempting to portray.

For example, if you wanted to understand the inner workings of a mentally handicapped individual, you could either go the route of a scientific description of their life(which might fail to reveal their true nature), their life from the perspective of a friend or family member that is not similarly mentally handicapped but interacts with the individual enough that you learn their nature vicariously, or their life from their own first person perspective, which would be relatively inaccessible to the average reader, but still firsthand and so supposedly the most "true" to the goal.

The problem with Faulkner is that his writing is mostly inaccessible imo. Sure it is true to his goal, but taken on its own merits it really is quite horrible.

Emily Dickinson and Hemingway are other good examples of that. Is it really some deep and profound writing style or did they just have a nice goal in mind, but they happen to not be very good at choosing how to go about it so that people might actually enjoy reading it?

 

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Take your pick of R.A. Salvatore works. They're hackneyed and awful for the most part. I gave a few of his more acclaimed works a shot and couldn't get into them at all.

But I'm not into really into series, even when it comes to genre fiction.

 

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Harry Potter
Twilight <---not that i would read that garbage
The Southern Vampire Mysteries<---the books true blood is based off of
Narnia books
Da Vinci Code
Anything written by Danielle Steel
Anything written by John Grisham

 

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Those Twilight books. I don't get the hysteria with this series. I really don't.

Loved Martin's works and noticed Erickson's series consistently recomended as an alternative, absolutely hated it.

Not that he is a poor writer, some of it is exceptional, from a strictly literary perspective he may very well be the finest author in the genre. I just found that where Martin sticKs to standard fare of dragons that breath fire and zombies that have to be burned type stuff - creating a framework of fantasy that has "rules", Erickson falls way to the other extreme and while incredibly creative all too often every page seems to reek of devine intervention.

It struck me as reading this as the inherent limitation of SF fantasy, why shows like Star Trek can be initially rather poorly recieved, but grow as audiences accept "the rules" You can beam from orbit to surface but not from planet to planet - thats against the rules - irregardless that both concepts are ludicrous.

 

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Harry Potter. Could not even finish the first book. Maybe if I had been much, much younger but I still feel I would have laughed it off then as well.

 

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the fk is wrong with you? harry potter books are awesome.

 

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