So...what's everyone reading?

[EUOL]

..OOKLA POSTED!  Wow.  Things must be slow over at his OTHER web site (you know, the one with millions of pageviews and hoards of zombie-like manga fans.)


Anyway, I read the first trilogy (and wrote reviews on them.)  I really liked the first and second books--and gave them quite stunning reviews.  However, two main things about the series disappointed me.

1)  They were just SO depressing.  Everything always happened for the worst.  It's good to have life hard and gritty--that's Hobb's style.  But it just got overwhelming.

2)  The third book, in my opinion, was terrible.  It had some good moments, but mostly it seemed horribly out-of-place and contrived.  I felt like, as you said, she had no idea where she was going with the series, and by the third book had written herself into so many corners that she had to struggle to make things work.  The story never addressed the things that I thought of as the main plot conflicts, and the main character just never really had anything important to do with the plot.

That said, the first two books are still excellent.  I've considered the other trilogies, but I feel very 'hit or miss' with Hobb.  I really like some pieces of her books, and I really dislike others.  I haven't been sure if I wanted to take another chance on her or not.

[Eagle Prince]

I didn't look at gender. For three main reasons:
1) i was trying for archetypal lit, and there aren't that many women in archetypal literature as heroes (Yes, there are exceptions, you could argue Sheharezade, for example)
2) length: I only had 10 works to use, since I had the above emphasis, I had to REALLY narrow down the field.
3) my thesis was the hero as an embodiment of cultural values which meant that what I was really saying was that you define what the culture's values were by their archetypal hero's values. An argument partially come up with because of the cultural conflict theme of the Iliad.

However, now that I think about it, this wouldn't have been a good argument for not including women, although I would have had to do it deliberately, and ignore the length requirements -- i've already observed that given enough length, you could find enough archetypal literature to write something about. In a campbell-esque book I could write TONS using example of how the cultural values are different for men and women, and how being heroes would therefore make different requirements. hrm.... time to expand the paper by another 20 pages or more.

Hey if you still have it kicking around I wouldn't mind reading it.  I'm pretty interested in the subject for writing purposes.

[Eagle Prince]

One of the biggest argument against Campbell's archetypal theory is exactly that--his hero in the hero's journey is most definitely ALWAYS male. I believe he might have stated once or twice that it works for female heros, too, but then half his theory is thrown off if you plug in a female protagonist.

I can't remember a lot about the model itself, since the last time I really looked through it was in 9th grade or something.  But from what I remember, it doesn't really have anything to do with what it takes for someone to be a hero as such, its more like a model for telling a story about a hero.  Sort of like the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action thing.  Its just sort of the standard opertation or guideline, it doesn't really explain why a story is good or anything.  So for the hero model, its not so much that its what a hero should do to become a hero, its just a guide on how it generally happens in a story.  Hopefully that made a little sense.

[Eagle Prince]

Right now I'm reading "The Last Coin" by James R Blaylock, which btw is out of print and fairly hard to get ahold of.  So I'm not sure if you could just walk down to the library and borrow it.  Its about the 30 silver pieces Judas got for betraying Jesus, and this villian guy called Pennyman is trying to collect them all because when they are all gathered together, it will start the Apocalypse.  Its pretty interesting and all the characters are kind of quirky.  I think it would have been a lot better with a cooler main character.

Before that I read the complete works of HG Wells (The Time Machine, Island of Dr Moreau, Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, etc).  I'm sure most people have read at least some of those, so no real point in going over them.  Although I am kind of interested in knowing if many other people read older books like that.  I used to read mostly just modern scifi/fantasy, but for the last few years or better I mostly read old classics like Dickens, Poe, Shelley (Frankenstien), Stoker (Dracula).  When the new Planet of the Apes movie came out they finally republished the original novel so I finally got to read it.  That's one thing I hate about older books, for being the "classics" they are often hard to get ahold of.

Which reminds me, after they put out the new Cout of Monte Cristo movie, they reprinted that story as well and I finally got to read it.

[EUOL]

Ah, when will the glorious days of cheap, in-bookstores Print On Demand arrive?  Please be soon.

[Eagle Prince]

Heh, yeah.  I've tried more than once to get the old Conan, Death Dealer (not that old), Elric, and probably a couple more that I'm forgetting.  One that comes to mind was for a paperback of the first Death Dealer series on Ebay which I bid like 30 bucks on and I still lost the bid.  And this was a fairly trashed 6$ paperback, its insane.

[Fellfrosch]

I just finished Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. It's obviously less mature than American Gods--I think it was Gaiman's first novel, in fact--and you could tell he was looking for his voice throughout most of it. It's still a great novel, though, with sort of equal parts George Lucas, Stephen King, and Douglas Adams. Some of the resolutions weren't as tight as I wanted them to be, which is one of the complaints I had about American Gods, but the images and the ideas were in turns fascinating, funny, and epic. It would make a killer movie, if you get a good production designer.

[Entsuropi]

All of a sudden, i'm up to my eyebrows in books. My mom just gave me "The amulet of Samarkland" by johnathan stroud, and "The re-discovery of cordwainer smith". The latter looks like a dune style sci fi thing (Yeah, yeah i know dune is space opera...). I am reading the silmarrion on the bus to work, i should really finish off the lotr corebook, not much of that left to go, and i should read EUOL's book sometime. Its fantasy, and i'm in the mood for fantasy since RotK, so that will probably be next.

Plus, i'm trying to work out the whole "buy a new pc" thing. Too many options.

[EUOL]

Just a warning, Entropy--I was doing an edit the other night, right after I sent you the book, and ran into a pretty big flaw.  Just be warned to ignore everything that happens with Shinri in chapter nine.  It happens over again--done much better--in a later chapter.  

[Entsuropi]

Her fiance disappearing in the earlier chapter, and sinking at sea in the later one? Yeah, i spotted that. I'm up to "shinri 1-2 v4".

[EUOL]

Doh.  Too late.  Oh well--never mind, then.  From there on most of my recent changes are small, so you shouldn't have any problems.  

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

/me explains to Entropy about "spoiler" warnings.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

1)  They were just SO depressing.  Everything always happened for the worst.  It's good to have life hard and gritty--that's Hobb's style.  But it just got overwhelming.

I agree that there were pretty depressing parts. However, everything works out in the end...unfortunately, I mean by the end of the third trilogy. Some of the depressing stuff left at the end of the first trilogy is finally resolved in the end of the third.

2)  The third book, in my opinion, was terrible.  It had some good moments, but mostly it seemed horribly out-of-place and contrived.  I felt like, as you said, she had no idea where she was going with the series, and by the third book had written herself into so many corners that she had to struggle to make things work.  The story never addressed the things that I thought of as the main plot conflicts, and the main character just never really had anything important to do with the plot.

Hmm...what did you think were the main plot conflicts, that never got addressed?

I agree that the third book is definitely the weakest of all of them. It was wandering all over the place and really unfocused for a lot of the way through. I thought it had a good climactic trilogy-ender for the last part of it, but it seemed like the end to a different trilogy than I was reading in the first 2 books...ha ha ha

Even so, though, I probably liked the third book better than Eye of the World (though for me that isn't saying much).

However, the flaws of the first trilogy aren't there in the second at all. It takes place in a different part of the world, though chronologically after the first, with very different characters. It felt to me like it was planned from start to finish, and doesn't have the plot problems of the third book. You could read the second trilogy and really enjoy it without having read the first trilogy.

The third trilogy has some more of the depressing stuff that the first had, but as I said, it does get resolved in the end.

[EUOL]

Here's the thing.  I read the first two books, and felt Hobb building up this incredible mystery surrounding the Forging and the White Ships.  I kept thinking "Wow.  When is Fitz going to get captured by one of the ships?  When are we going to see Forging in process?  When are we going to find out the secret to this magic?"

None of that happened.  Instead, we got this strange 'epic fantasy' style final book, when the first two were very tense political intrigue novels.  The climax didn't really involve Fitz--another of my big complaints about the series--and it felt very Deus Ex.  Not that it came out of nowhere, but that it solved their problems too easily without ever really letting us expeirence the beauty of the magic system.

As I've said, I found the first two books to be excellent.  Hobb has an amazing narrative style.  However, I felt she didn't know where she was going with the third book, and poped out a very cliche ending, which I found dissapointing.

But, on to other things.  When are you going to read over THE WAY OF KINGS, Mr. Editor man?

EDIT--Uh, I just got your email.  Never mind.

[stacer]

Speaking of Mr. Editor man, where are you at right now, Peter? Where are you working?