You're probably all getting really sick of listening to me talk about this, but today I'm working through Memory, the (depending on how you count them, because the books were written and published all out of order and they still manage to be brilliant) tenth book in the Vorkosigan series.
This book suffers from the same problem that every series seems to face eventually. There's stuff that has to happen, the mundane, taking care of business stuff. Recovering from what happened in the last book, set up for the next one. You gotta do it. But it's not terribly interesting, at least not on the re-read. Not if that's all you're doing, with no other plot stuff woven in.
The first third of the book has some pretty significant stuff going on. There's a big "oh, shit" for Miles in there, and something major happens for Gregor. If this was Gregor's story, the first third of the book would be fascinating. But it's not, and it's not. At about the one-third mark the real business of the book is introduced and things pick up. At the half-way point, where I am right now, things are really getting hot. If I didn't have other stuff I had to do, I wouldn't have put down the book to write this.
But the first part of the book? Meh.
Ah the ups and downs of series reading...i bailed on book 8 of dh's beloved Wheel of Time series when I demanded to know if anything actually HAPPENED in the book and he said, "The author had to get everyone in position for book 9 so there's a lot of moving around."
ReplyDeletewth?
I prefer the Princess Bride-esque "with one thing and another, three years passed." Spare me the details!
So maybe I'm not cut out to read series fiction.
That sounds like a very NaNo-ish trick. "And some stuff happens here that I'll figure out later. On to the next interesting bit!"
ReplyDeleteI don't remember that about the Princess Bride, but it's been years since I read that one. I can't say it surprises me at all. It seems like the kind of irreverent thing you'd find in there.