France holiday reading

I was lucky enough to spend a week staying in the south of France with family. Here’s what I read while I was there:

The Search for the Dice Man by Luke Rhineheart – This has been on my list ever since I read The Dice Man. The Dice Man was really good: I liked the writing style, the plot was good and the characters were intriguing. The Search for the Dice Man, while retaining an enjoyable writing style, was otherwise not good: the plot didn’t seem to hang together and the characters (partly because of the terrible plot) didn’t seem meaningful or fixed in their attributes. This was an enjoyable book with a few good scenes in it (most notably at the very beginning and the very end) but if I were to choose again, I wouldn’t bother reading it.

Incompetence by Rob Grant – This is a ‘mystery’ but more of a comedy about a world where incompetence is no longer a barrier. Our hero, who is by turns Harry Salt, Harry Tequile and Cardrew Vascular, travels across Europe to follow the clues his friend has left him and struggles with pilots with vertigo, trains that don’t stop at stations and more. This book was hilarious – thoroughly recommended.

America Unchained by Dave Gorman – This is yet another travel book. In this one, Dave Gorman attempts to travel across America from coast to coast without giving any money to The Man (i.e. without shopping at any chain stores). For me, the key to this genre of book is the narrator, and Dave Gorman was brilliant. I’ll definitely be reading more by him.

God is Dead by Ron Currie – The premise of the book is in the title: having taken on the body of a young woman in the Sudan, God has died. This is a series of short stories about the world left behind, including an interview with one of the dogs who ate part of His body and the story of a man whose job is to stop people worshipping their own children because they have nothing to do on Sundays. The first few stories were good, but in general, I found the collection lacking and dull.

Musing Mondays – Publishing House

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about publishing houses …

Do you have a favourite publishing house — one that puts out books that you constantly find yourself wanting to read? If so, who? And, what books have they published that you’ve loved? (question courtesy of MizB)

Publishing houses have absolutely no effect on what I choose to read. Many of the books I read are from reviews online, and I don’t often see the book cover or know who the publisher is before I actually get a copy. I pick up a lot of books in charity shops too, but it’s the title that has the biggest effect on whether or not I choose to pick it up and the blurb that decides whether or not I actually read it.

What about you? Do you notice or care about the publisher of a book?

A Serious Dislike

This is a topic I’ve spoken about with a few people, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted about it on here before.

When I was young, I used to read a lot of series books. Nancy Drew, The Babysitters’ Club, Sweet Valley…I think I had over 150 Sweet Valley books at one point, and I read every single one of them. I also used to read shorter series. I watched a lot more TV back then too.

Over time, my opinions have changed a lot. For me, the problem with series is that you have to compromise. You can have a series that’s essentially one really, really long book broken into different volumes, which does give you the advantage of being able to have a complex story but also brings the disadvantage that you have to have the commitment at the beginning of the series that it’s going to be worth reading all the way through (or at least I do – I hate to start and not finish) and with stories that are that complex, things can often get confusing. You can have a series that works more like a brand, with each book in the series being a variation on a theme, which brings the advantage that there’s less importance placed on the order but also the disadvantage that things tend to get repetitive. And finally, you can try to have a plot that moves forward but also try to have each book have a plot of its own, which makes for a more interesting story as there’s no feeling left dangling but can sometimes feel forced.

The same problems apply to television series, which is why I’ve almost entirely stopped watching them -  I watch films and the news and that’s about it.

The specific example I was talking to my family about earlier is Harry Potter. I really enjoyed the first four books, ploughed through the next two without really taking anything in and never bothered to read the final one. The first four books are pretty self-contained and deal a lot with J.K. Rowling’s imaginary world. After that, though, the series seemed to move away from that and started getting into The Big Serious Plot. A lot of people kept reading, but I felt totally alienated at that point – I liked the books because I often have trouble suspending my disbelief (which makes reading fantasy very difficult) and they were realistic enough for me to be able to enjoy something different to what I normally read. After the fourth book, though, the series made the awkward shift from mostly self-contained books to being very plot-driven. I understand that the first four books were setting up for what happened later, but personally I think it would have been a better series if the major plot (which doesn’t really come about until the latter half of the series) had been introduced earlier. As it is, it felt like it was tacked on at the end for a grand finale.

Another series that let me down was the Lemony Snicket books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s also another series where it changed midway through: the first few books were mostly just repetition, up to The Awful Academy (at least I think that was the title), when the real plot kicked in. I carried on reading, confident that the ends would be tied up and I’d get a return in my twelve-book investment, only for the thirteenth book to be a total pile of rubbish that answered none of my questions. That’s what finally put me off series: I’d been looking forward to the answers, I’d put in a lot of time (and money, unusually for me) to getting them and I was gutted not to get the resolution I felt I deserved. At least if you read a bad novel, you’ve only put in the investment of one book (though you can run into similar problems when you read an author’s best book first and find all their others a disappointment).

Pretty much the sole exception to my dislike of series is detective books, which I like because I’m picky about the way I like my detectives, my murderers and my writing. Having discovered a good series of detective books, I know that each book will be almost entirely self-contained (at least you always get to find out whodunnit at the end, even if there’s some personal history you don’t quite get) and I’ve then got a source of some more to read. That’s going back to what I said about series sometimes being like brands – I’m not looking at the story, I’m looking at what I know I’m going to get by reading a book that’s part of that series.

I have a feeling that I could’ve structured this a bit better, but hopefully it still makes some kind of sense. What about you? Are you prepared to make the investment in reading series or do you too tend to avoid them?