Explanation - invariably I will read a fantastic book, beautifully written with a sweeping or moving story that is profoundly impactful…and some amateur reviewer will have written, “That book is so boring! Blah, blah, blah, nothing exciting ever happens!” 🙄
When I read these, I often pause to try to imagine what sort of book those reviewers WOULD like, lol. No doubt its probably an elitist, pompous exercise…but its fun imagining for a moment a book filled with non-stop, over the top action, gory or imaginative deaths by the dozens, torrid romantic liasons, CIA and KGB and SS agents around every corner, etc. Ive been tempted to write that book, tongue in cheek, just so those reviewers would have something to be happy about.
Then I thought…maybe someone has already done this? Intentionally written a book so egregiously over-the-top that even those action-aholics might be tempted to say, “too fast, and too much excitement…” in their reviews?
Robert Jordans the “Wheel of Time” is infamous for its slog, even among its fans.
Once his series was secure, he dabbled with many creative writing experiments, which included a phase of describing literally every mundane activity a character went through, to a part of the book where he literally wrote out the same chapters twice but slightly tweaked - to fuck both the readers and the characters with the feeling of dejavu as their timeline was getting fucked with.
Dude wrote 11 books in the series, many of them with over a thousand pages. It was finished after his death by Sanderson.
Well that doesn’t bode well for my wife’s and my streaming future - we just started the streaming series of “Wheel of Time” and enjoyed the first season, and just started season two. I wonder if it will somehow inject some of that craziness into the tv series??
They tightened up a lot for the TV show. It’s a tough job to fit 1200+ pages into one season, so they take some liberties in world building and lore to adapt it for new viewers on a different medium.
Personally I like WoT a lot (slog and all), both the books and the tv show in its own way. I hope you and your wife will enjoy!
It would be an interesting literary exercise to take such a thoughtful tome and just inject a lot of “Action” into it.
Yeah, his name is Dan Brown.
No joke, I only heard of this man Dan Brown for the first time a couple hours ago on a Masterclass ad. It’s funny that I now see him again on this thread.
I mean no offense by this but are you 25 or younger? This guy was one of the biggest authors of the 00s.
27 haha. And also European, maybe that has something to do with it.
You know, you have a point there! 😂
I remember reading Brown’s first book when it came out and enjoying it. But man, did he open a Pandora’s box of poor copycats…which included even himself.
But hey, he’s created a niche and populated it with his work and made millions. More than I’ll ever do.
I think I get that with John Grisham. First novels I read of him were like, “what if an idealistic young lawyer tries to help poor people?” or “what if a kid witnessed a murder haha”. Then I read a recent book and it was like “ok this guy rapes a girl and a black kid gets blamed and goes to prison 9 years on death row and and a whole BML movement happens and the rapist gets a brain tumor and decides to confess and the community doesn’t care and the black kid dies and the cancer rapist flees and suddenly the pastor of the cancer rapist is who we follow now?”
Ha, ive noticed that as well! Sort of gave up on Grisham over a decade ago.