Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Challenge: Why I stopped reading a series

This is part of the weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. If you'd like to participate, you can find the prompts here. They also put up a post every Wednesday where you go and link your response -- and see everyone else's. Check out their homepage to find it.

The challenge for this week is "reason why I stopped reading a series I loved".

Easy answer: it was the bathtub scene.

The series was Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. A friend of mine recommended it to me, with the warning that the series was quite long and still unfinished, an observation which would remain true through ten years and five or six more books.

I started with The Eye of the World, found it fascinating, and plowed ahead through the next several books. They really were excellent: the prose was amazing, the world-building was excellent, the characters were... well, perhaps a little too prone to lifting one eyebrow at each other and squabbling when left alone together, but on the whole enjoyable. I finished book five (as I recall) and waited patiently for book six, then purchased and read it immediately when it came out. Book six was excellent. Book seven was a little slower, a little less focused; it expanded to follow developments with a lot of side-characters, among other things. Still, I finished it.

And then somewhere around book eight or nine (I think it was nine), I tried to dive in and realized that absolutely no amount of excellence in an author's prose will disguise the fact the I just spent three pages reading about someone taking a bath. Oh, she was ruminating on what she knew of various situations in various places, but still: three full pages, probably 3,000 words, devoted to someone taking a bath. After that, I just couldn't. I just... set it down and backed away slowly.

And that was why I stopped reading a series I loved.

16 comments:

  1. Oh, funny! But I definitely see why you stopped with that series at that point

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    1. It was just too much. It's one thing to get involved in your world and want to explain all the neat things, but this just felt... bloated.

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  2. Wow! Was the person alone? ;) I can see why you would have stopped. Thanks for sharing!

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    1. Yeah, three pages devoted to a bathtub scene with any sort of interaction could work, but nope; this was just someone getting warm and clean.

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  3. lol.... yeah.... I get that. My post is here if you want to come by: http://jhthomas.blogspot.com/2020/04/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge_29.html

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    1. Thanks for dropping by! (I'll probably make the rounds this evening - today's been busy...)

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  4. You got that right. I was the same way with Anne Rice's Feast of all Saints where she describes a man walking down he street for twenty pages.

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    1. I have this suspicion that once authors cross a certain point in sales, they get more leverage to say "I must follow my vision! No editing!" and the work frequently suffers for it.

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  5. Probably doesn't take anyone that long to TAKE a bath, let alone read about it. Man...

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    1. Maybe if you're reading and relaxing in the bathtub?

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  6. Yes, some authors seem to get wordier as they run out of ideas. I wonder if other readers notice, or if they stick with it to the bitter end? Life's too short to read badly written books.

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    1. I really think it's that the more popular they get, the less the publisher is able to say, "Dear gods, you really need to trim this!"

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  7. Yeah, that's a bit much! I can understand why you stopped.

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  8. LOVED this, Michael. Very funny!!

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  9. That made me laugh - and I agree, that would annoy me too!

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  10. I love that you're reason was this specific. And it was funny! Thank you!

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