Friday 22 April 2022

Books that I like in theory but dislike in practice

The title of this entry is probably self-explanatory, but in case it isn't: there are some books that are recommended to you again and again over the course of your life, or which you see described in glowing terms on repeated occasions, and which you feel very strongly that you ought to like...but really do not care for. 

Here is a non-exhaustive list of mine:

  • Little, Big by John Crowley is really the paradigm case. A series of worlds, each contained within one another like Russian dolls, at the heart of which is a faerie realm, and the plot revolves around a house that has been built so as to contain a portal into that realm? I want to read that book very much. Just not the version of it that John Crowley ended up writing. The experience of hearing about Little, Big is one of intrigue and wonder. The actual experience of reading Little, Big is like that of having been dropped into a tin of treacle and being aware that the only way to stop oneself from drowning is to stop struggling and give up, then await rescue. 
  • Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I have made several running jumps at beginning this series, but the fact of the matter is that I just do not like Stephenson's prose - which somehow manages to be  both smarmy and bland - in any of its iterations. I'm willing to believe that it is all marvellously complex, interesting, insightful and immersive - for some people. I'm afraid I'm not one of them.
  • Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Some books are difficult - indeed, some are nigh on impenetrable - but you feel it is worth the struggle: The Critique of Pure Reason, Thoughts on Machiavelli, the Oresteia, The Mabinogion, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa... many others spring to mind. Books that you may not fully understand, or feel as though you do not, but which nonetheless seem enriching - as though the act of trying to understand them has made you more intelligent. Mason & Dixon belongs in the opposite category: books which are both difficult and substantively slight, so that at a certain point you feel as though to read on would be to somehow damage your soul - like being forced to do a job which is both boring and actively bad for you all at once.
  • Leviathan Wakes by James S A Corey. Whenever anybody tells me I should read this, which has happened to me more than a handful of times, I smile politely and say something like, "Sounds interesting" - but deep down inside I am crossing them off my Christmas card list forever, and quite possibly plotting their murder. This is a bad, bad book, though once again the thumbnail description - it's credible semi-hard SF in which humans have only just about colonised the solar system - attracts me. 
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan stuff. I am persuaded Erikson can write. I am also persuaded his books are probably the best modern epic fantasy has to offer. And the premise - turning epic fantasy to 11 (no, to fucking 12) with a plot of Byzantine complexity spanning millennia - is one I can thoroughly support. I dipped into House of Chains and really enjoyed it for the first two-thirds or so before it began to get samey and hard to follow. But I have tried to start Gardens of the Moon several times and found it so terribly po-faced that it is beyond cringe - like I would rather crawl into the nearest bin than have to go on reading it. 
  • Anything of the Iain M. Banks SF books. I've tried. God knows, I've tried. Is it just that I find the whole idea of the Culture to be stultifyingly dull, or is it just the mundanity of Banks' writing? Then again, why discriminate? It can be, and probably is, both.

What's on yours? 

[I am running a Kickstarter throughout April. You can read more about it, and back it, here.]

52 comments:

  1. As a fan of the Expanse TV show I'd be interested to see what makes you describe Leviathan Wakes as a "Bad Bad Book". Is it something morally off-putting? something in the prose? the structure? Haven't read the book yet.

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    1. Here's my review on goodreads, for what it's worth:

      "It rattles along (the authors are clearly from the Dan Brown school of novel writing: every chapter is below 10 pages and has a cliff-hanger at the end), and is a reasonably enjoyable read as a result. But apart from that it simply isn't very good. The dialogue is dreadful - a constant stream of cliche and pseudo-military 'banter' as heard through the tin ear of two SF nerds. But even that is more competently done than the by-the-numbers characterization; the most interesting character in the novel is himself a bundle of cliches (a world-weary detective, you say? And he's divorced and has an alcohol problem? Well, I never); the others are often actively irritating when not bland ciphers. The setting is interesting, but I found the plot fundamentally implausible and really rather silly - not in terms of the science but in terms of how actual human beings behave in reality. Overall, simply a vaguely entertaining pot-boiler whose appeal I just cannot fathom."

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    2. The TV show is cool despite (perhaps because of?) the characters being completely uninteresting and the dialogue being perfunctory.

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  2. I haven't found any of Stephenson's later writings to equal _Cryptonomicon_. Have you tried that one?

    Allan.

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    1. I've honestly never enjoyed anything of his I've read. His writing just isn't to my taste. I can't analyse why, really.

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  3. So.

    Little, Big on my list, too.

    The Silmarillion. Fight me.

    Perdido Street Station and its sequels. Not everything by China Mieville, mind you. Embassytown was great. But his fantasy world seems like something I'd love to just wander in through the narrative, taking in the sights. In practice, I'll plod on for a couple of hours and feel cheated.

    Book of the New Sun. I've tried about as many times as a smoker my age has tried to quit.

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    1. I happen to be currently re-reading the Book of the New Sun after many years. I was a little bit dubious about the first two volumes (there was enough in there to keep me going but I was suspicious Gene Wolfe was Up To Something when writing them) but I'm now most of the way through the third and I am a complete convert. It's amazing.

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    2. Its definitely one of those books thats a chore of you havent previously convinced yourself of Wolfes brilliance beforehand. I read it before reading Latro of the Mist or WizardKnight so was completely unimpressed by the apparent obscurantism.

      Once i got what Wolfe tries to do in his writing, the second reading opened up immediately and i found myself enjoying the structural ebullience, plot references, and characterization winks and nods that made the whole thing less like listening to the rambling adventures of a madman and more of being a companion to bildungsromanian idiot not unlike Forrest Gump.

      The fact that prose is clear without being boring or completely unadorned is a plus

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    3. Book of the New Sun is great as are the Books of the Long Sun - maybe a better intro to Wolfe than New Sun as they are a little more approachable to start with. Basically anything by Gene Wolfe is worth reading in the end.

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    4. Perdido Street Station would be better as a setting book than as the novel he actually wrote.

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    5. 100% with you on the Mièville. Which is funny because yesterday I listened to a podcast (recent episode of Adventure Tourism, about DCO) where they were singing the praises of his fantasy stuff but didn't like Embassytown.

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    6. I like The Scar and Iron Council. But I think fundamentally he's quite a lazy writer. Nice ideas, not very well followed through.

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    7. Not well followed through? I assume you're referencing his tendency to twist the endings to his (marxist I think) political leanings? All of his books are quite imaginative till the last 15% or so where he tries to make a point which somehow, although not quite ties in with the rest of the story.

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    8. No, I just think his plots in general are a bit rubbish, and the characterisation is always dreadful - obvious goodies and baddies, and everybody either sounds like China Mieville or speaks in absurd mockney.

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    9. The characters in Mieville's books are really thin, they barely exist. But his non-sequels are chock a block full of novel ideas. Perdido was a successful attempt to avoid the Tolkienesque while still remaining recognizably fantasy. Sadly, the related books all have sequelitis. His standalone book "The City And The City" is also quite good, especially in hindsight, and one of the most obvious influences on the popular game Disco Elysium.

      PS: The best Wolfe book to start with is probably "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus". The New Sun can be off-putting to readers who are not yet convinced of his (very real) brilliance.

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    10. I really enjoyed the Latro books. Wolfe is a tremendous prose stylist and he can spring a twist but reading him has, in general, been a big disappointment for me. The Fifth Head of Cerberus was 1/3 good and the reference to Vernor Vinge just reminded me of how much more I enjoy reading his books; the Knight felt like a pastiche of Poul Anderson that didn't have the same simple joy to it; and The Shadow of the Torturer, well goddammit, I'll give it one more shot.

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  4. The Dresden Files series was sold to me as a fun spin on the occult detective, with meaty lore to sink your teeth into. Instead I got Baby's First Urban Fantasy Setting, as narrated by a cookie-cutter protagonist whose only notable trait was being condescending to women.

    While it's not technically a book, if we're doing ideas that seem brilliant in theory but are rancid in practice I'd be amiss not to mention Cheat Slayers; a deconstruction of the isekai genre that ended up falling into all the usual pittraps of both pop-culture deconstructions and isekais, with copywright issues to boot.

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  5. Thank you for mentioning the Malazan books. I thought it was just me. Same goes for Book of the New Sun, but I'm going to try that one again.

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    1. See anove. The Book of the New Sun is worth persevering with.

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  6. Thanks for writing this - I too have wondered why I've bounced off many of the big/hot SF writers, like Banks, Stephenson and Mieville. I can happily read decent-quality genre fiction (including some guilty pleasure Warhammer stuff), but the more self-consciously "literary" SF quickly corkscrews into the uncanny valley. A related problem is the author who appears to be consciously writing to a model novel plan; the Dan Brown method your review above describes. My reader brain is very aware of the author brain working, and it's very distracting. Proper literature has ruined these authors for me.

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    1. Yeah, I know what you mean about the uncanny valley effect. I also think "literary" SF types who have some crossover success in the mainstream get captured by their audiences and start producing stuff for those non-genre-literate readers.

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  7. Bad call on Mason & Dixon. Do you feel that way about all things Pynchon (i.e. Gravity's Rainbow) or only this one in particular?

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    1. Mason & Dixon was enough to turn me off Pynchon for life, to be honest.

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  8. Given your other reviews, I'm surprised Jordan's Wheel of Time isn't on here.

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    1. I read the first volume and thought it was...ok. Not bad, not good.

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    2. WoT isn't even likeable in theory...

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    3. I read the first volume of it when I was about 19 or 20. I had a lot of patience for crap fantasy then (David Eddings, etc.).

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    4. Well this list was for books with interesting ideas but disappointing implementations. Wheel of TIme's elevator pitch is "yet another Tolkien pastiche!" but the implementation is interesting in a few ways, which makes it kind of exactly the opposite of what this post was about.

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  9. I actually read the whole (first) Malazan series. The first one is a slog but others are pretty fun. I like his sense of long history and and archeologists understanding of the past. It is, however, the chronicles of his bitching high level D&D campaign (crossed with heaping dose of The Black Company) and the serial numbers are not very filed off. It's definitely had it's influence on how I run and think about my campaigns. But yeah hard to get into and everyone's motivations don't always make a lot of sense.

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    1. I think it may have been GURPS fantasy, but yeah, you can totally tell it's based on an RPG campaign.

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  10. I agree with varying degrees about most of the examples you listed (i enjoy leviathan awakes, but as light easy reading you don't have to think to hard about, though I often wonder if the game they based the book on actually played out like that), but putting Ian M Banks on that list is verging on fighting words. Or a sign your brain is fevered or something.

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    1. I read and enjoyed Banks' best and first (if not first published) Culture novel, Use of Weapons, but I've had many people agree with me that they're pretty much a "read one, read them all" series, right down to the requisite twist endings.

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    2. I have got about a third of the way through I think three of them. I just don't see what it is that other people get out of him.

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  11. I really like some of Stephenson's books but, I agree about the Baroque Cycle. I've tried several times and just can't get into it at all. Ian M Banks (and Ian Banks) definitely shouldn't be on the list though! 😀

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    1. I never realised my blog readership was such a hive of Iain M Banks fans!

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    2. Huge Ian M Banks fan, as well. My problem with the Baroque cycle is that nearly all the characters have the same voice, save Half Cocked Jack. Some fun ideas in there but little to differentiate on character from the other.

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  12. I read Consider Phlebas and I couldn't tell you about anything that happened, except that it had a sort of vague & downbeat ending IIRC. I was almost shocked at how bland, uninteresting and pointless the whole thing was.

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    1. Yes, those are exactly the adjectives I'd use.

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  13. Malazan felt like a D&D campaign where the DM wanted you to read a large background document that needed a glossary.
    The Book of the New Sun felt like the DM had a huge, complex world but the players were meant to discover it by exploring in the world...
    Impressions from reading Book of the New Sun twice (first time in high school when I devoured books and could easily submerge myself in them, 2nd time more recently.) Malazan I attempted relatively recently, when I don't have long afternoons to lose myself into the whole world and remember all the various names, etc.

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    1. Yeah, the time of life you read these things definitely matters.

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  14. Entirely with you with the Expanse. Holden is insufferably "The Protaganist!!!!1!1" and the books are just unnecessarily longwinded. I could also never get Joe Abercrombie or Brandon Sanderson. Tried reading Mistborn but the the characters weren't interesting nor memorable, and the world utterly forgettable. Somehow original, but bland as well. Plenty heavy pagecount fantasy authors just bore me. Not original I suppose, but out of the norm for your standard fantasy reader.

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    1. Yeah, I can't tolerate Brandon Sanderson. Worldbuilding by numbers.

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    2. I quite like Abercrombie. The standalone books are much better than the trilogies but they also work better if you've read the trilogies, so it's difficult to recommend them. Best Served Cold is my favourite and probably the most remotely connected to everything else, which may not be a coincidence.

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  15. On Ian M Banks, I read a book of his short stories, including one Culture story, many years ago and loved it. Have read a couple of the Culture novels and quite liked but didn't love them. I think perhaps like Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series it's a brilliant conceit which is hard to turn into particularly interesting stories. I prefer the stuff he writes without the M.

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  16. Oh gosh, Banks. I want to like his books, I should like his books, but with only one exception, I've got to the end of one of his novels and have been hit with an overwhelming feeling of "Is that it?" I'm obviously missing something.

    (I quite liked Feersum Endjinn, even though it strikes me as probably a bad book, but at least it's a bad book that aligns with my tastes.)

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  17. The Name of the Rose. Because it relates closely to one of my areas of study, and because Umberto Eco has a certain intellectual allure, it's been recommended to me as something I should like many, many times. Perhaps I should: I've even spent a great of time wandering the bookstacks in an octagonal monastic library.

    And yet I could never, ever, get into it. And I've tried several times. Purely from the 'monk as sleuth' point of view, I'm tempted to say I prefer Cadfael, though when I've said that to fans of The Name of the Rose, I've got some dirty looks...

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    1. The Cadfael books are a real guitly pleasure of mine, and very authentic. Edith Pargeter's career puts the rest of us to shame. She was a phenomenon.

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  18. For those who admire Gene Wolfe this is an interesting collection of interviews with and essays by Wolfe on writing.

    https://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949/liverpool/9781846310577.001.0001/upso-9781846310577

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    1. Thanks for this! I am going to order it.

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  19. Oh boy, Gormenghast is this for me. I absolutely love the idea of a giant, labryinthian castle filled with secrets and intrigue, but I have never been able to make it halfway through Titus Groan despite several attempts. I blame my American attention span.

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    1. People will probably shriek with horror but although I did read all of Titus Groan, the second one defeated me. The books have their moments but they are seriously turgid.

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  20. Here's a few alternatives that may live up to the promise you had in the flops. Your mileage may vary, but I hope something here scratches an itch!

    1. Instead of Little, Big by John Crowley, try Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke or its excellent follow-up collection: The Ladies of Grace Adieu & Other Stories.

    2. Instead of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, try UNSONG by Scott Alexander.

    3. Instead of Thomas Pynchon, try David Foster Wallace. :P

    4. Instead of Leviathan Wakes by James S A Corey, try 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

    5. Instead of Steven Erikson's Malazan, try R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness that Comes Before.

    6. Instead of Iain Banks, try Peter Watts (Blindsight) or Alasdair Reynolds (House of Suns, Blue Remembered Earth)

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