They're among the things I know I can't touch now if I want to still think well of them, if you know what I mean.
Totally. There is a ton of once-beloved YA genre fluff that I'm just as fearful to pick up again, now that I'm very critical and jaded; I'd rather just leave them as vague, happy memories.
All the recs for stuff like Brooks and Eddings wouldn't have bugged me so much if they hadn't been so uncritical. If those friends had been more like "well, the prose is a little clunky and the plot is a bit derivative, but I really like these characters" I would have had more realistic expectations when I picked them up. But it was more in the vein of gushy "oh, it's the coolest thing since Tolkien!" and...no, just not even close. I got burned a few times like that following their recs, since we *did* have a bunch of favorite books in common and some of their recs (mostly SF) did click with me, but I eventually figured out that in epic fantasy in particular, our tastes just Did Not Synch very well. I'm really just insanely hypercritical and anything that whiffs even slightly of being too derivative or genre-cliched, or some prose styles that I could forgive in other genres, put me right out of the groove in high fantasy. Maybe back when I was reading fantasy more voraciously I could have enjoyed those, but not anymore.
I have a feeling the book was something I saw at the bookstore the other day that sounded like something you'd like and I'd planned to ask if you'd read it, but forgot to write it down.
Was it F/SF? If it was, and something published in the last 15-20 years or so, the answer is "probably not". If it was something more on the horror/paranormal side of the fence, odds are slightly better.
I am curious about the Bear/Monette books, now though.
It's a one-shot, A Companion To Wolves, published late last year. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like it's very, very much my sort of thing. Here's a bit from matociquala's journal in 2005 when they were first cooking it up:
It's like the sex and mud and beard lice in A Companion to Wolves. No sex, no beard lice, no book. Because part of what that book is about is an argument with the tendency, in certain tendrils of the fantasy genre, to kind of sweep anything vaguely unpleasant under the rug. The Inciting Incident, of course, was the infamous semi-elided dragon-mediated rapes and less-infamous extremely-elided institutional homosexuality in the early Pern novels. But then the book takes on a life of its own, and the worldbuilding does too, and if you pull out that one thread (i.e., isn't a bit icky that dragonriders are making off with teenaged boys, some of whom are going to wind up bonding to green dragons, and we all know what those green dragons are like, and wouldn't it be interesting to tackle those social issues head-on rather than eliding them) then the whole structure of the book collapses. And you essentially have a fuzzy wish fulfillment fantasy about a boy and his wolf fighting trolls and obtaining an understanding of the world, and the world really doesn't need another one of those.
And yet, I know perfectly well that if that book goes to press, there's going to be a faction of readers who are like "oo, icky, the sex totally ruins this nice YA novel!" (nevermind the beheadings: beheadings, okay to many people's perception of YA) (no, it's not a YA novel, put down the axe--but some people think any book with a teenaged protagonist must be YA) and there are going to be readers who are like "there's all this sex, and it's not erotic at all, what's with that?" and then, Goddess willing, there will be a faction of readers who are like "Whoa! Genderfuck! And an honest appraisal of the difficulties in living your life while dealing with a physical response to the biological rhythms of another species! And negotiation and compromise and people making sacrifices to defend their families! And the psychic cost of war! And dude, pitched battles in Lovecraftian troll-tunnels, and beheadings, and beard lice, and GIANT PSYCHIC DIRE WOLVES! How cool is that?!"
And it's that last guy I'm aiming for. Dead between his eyes. Because there are books for the other two already, and they don't need my book.
no subject
Totally. There is a ton of once-beloved YA genre fluff that I'm just as fearful to pick up again, now that I'm very critical and jaded; I'd rather just leave them as vague, happy memories.
All the recs for stuff like Brooks and Eddings wouldn't have bugged me so much if they hadn't been so uncritical. If those friends had been more like "well, the prose is a little clunky and the plot is a bit derivative, but I really like these characters" I would have had more realistic expectations when I picked them up. But it was more in the vein of gushy "oh, it's the coolest thing since Tolkien!" and...no, just not even close. I got burned a few times like that following their recs, since we *did* have a bunch of favorite books in common and some of their recs (mostly SF) did click with me, but I eventually figured out that in epic fantasy in particular, our tastes just Did Not Synch very well. I'm really just insanely hypercritical and anything that whiffs even slightly of being too derivative or genre-cliched, or some prose styles that I could forgive in other genres, put me right out of the groove in high fantasy. Maybe back when I was reading fantasy more voraciously I could have enjoyed those, but not anymore.
I have a feeling the book was something I saw at the bookstore the other day that sounded like something you'd like and I'd planned to ask if you'd read it, but forgot to write it down.
Was it F/SF? If it was, and something published in the last 15-20 years or so, the answer is "probably not". If it was something more on the horror/paranormal side of the fence, odds are slightly better.
I am curious about the Bear/Monette books, now though.
It's a one-shot, A Companion To Wolves, published late last year. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like it's very, very much my sort of thing. Here's a bit from
It's like the sex and mud and beard lice in A Companion to Wolves. No sex, no beard lice, no book. Because part of what that book is about is an argument with the tendency, in certain tendrils of the fantasy genre, to kind of sweep anything vaguely unpleasant under the rug. The Inciting Incident, of course, was the infamous semi-elided dragon-mediated rapes and less-infamous extremely-elided institutional homosexuality in the early Pern novels. But then the book takes on a life of its own, and the worldbuilding does too, and if you pull out that one thread (i.e., isn't a bit icky that dragonriders are making off with teenaged boys, some of whom are going to wind up bonding to green dragons, and we all know what those green dragons are like, and wouldn't it be interesting to tackle those social issues head-on rather than eliding them) then the whole structure of the book collapses. And you essentially have a fuzzy wish fulfillment fantasy about a boy and his wolf fighting trolls and obtaining an understanding of the world, and the world really doesn't need another one of those.
And yet, I know perfectly well that if that book goes to press, there's going to be a faction of readers who are like "oo, icky, the sex totally ruins this nice YA novel!" (nevermind the beheadings: beheadings, okay to many people's perception of YA) (no, it's not a YA novel, put down the axe--but some people think any book with a teenaged protagonist must be YA) and there are going to be readers who are like "there's all this sex, and it's not erotic at all, what's with that?" and then, Goddess willing, there will be a faction of readers who are like "Whoa! Genderfuck! And an honest appraisal of the difficulties in living your life while dealing with a physical response to the biological rhythms of another species! And negotiation and compromise and people making sacrifices to defend their families! And the psychic cost of war! And dude, pitched battles in Lovecraftian troll-tunnels, and beheadings, and beard lice, and GIANT PSYCHIC DIRE WOLVES! How cool is that?!"
And it's that last guy I'm aiming for. Dead between his eyes. Because there are books for the other two already, and they don't need my book.