I love to read. A good book is one of the great pleasures in life. It provides you with a glimpse into a different world. It is a chance to escape and visit far away places. It is an opportunity to interact with the exotic and unfamiliar as well as a chance to educate you about things/people/places you might not encounter.
As someone who has a passing interest in writing I have a strong interest in following the work of my favorite writers. I spent a few minutes trying to determine just how many books that I have read in my life. To be honest I want to say more than 10,000 but that sounds like it might be a little high.
Just for kicks lets reduce that dramatically to a thousand. Out of that 1000 I have read multiple series. Typically there are one or two books in a series that are much weaker than the others. I would speculate that these are books that really weren't meant to be standalone but were forced upon the public due to monetary reasons and or because their inclusion in one of the other books would have made them exceptionally long.
This is really where we hit the meat of this post. These extra books can be difficult to swallow because they are so poor compared to the other members of the series. Usually it is not the writing that is bad, it is the plot. For whatever reason these particular books are quite weak there. The plot meanders back and forth and you learn far too much about characters that are not central to the story nor very interesting.
Unfortunately my little mind is at a loss for more than one example of this so I'll go with the one that comes to mind. Robert Jordan and his Wheel Of Time series. This started so well and then it really went downhill.
To be fair I must admit that I have lost my muse on a number of occasions. I do not think that it is easy to produce so much content and have it all be top notch, but the rules of the blog dictate honesty and it would be wrong if I didn't speak my mind about this.
2 comments:
I agree with you about this series. I think that his publishers probably wanted to make as much money from the series as possible and pressured him to drag it out.
Have you read number 11 yet? I am waiting for the paperback to come out.
Hi WBB,
I haven't read it yet. I'll probably hit it one day. The last couple were such a task to get through.
Stephen Donaldon restarted the Thomas Covenant series. He did a really good job with that. I am hopeful that he maintains it as this series is one of my favorites.click here,
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