#reading woes

[asukaskerian]

Jfhh hjxj j sEGUE IS THE WORD

NOT SEGWAY

Seeeeegue please stop sliding from a topic to the next on motherloving sideway skateboard things.

[kaltain-1]

You know something that always makes me mad is how much I crave to read fan fics or just books in general but my tastes are WEIRD and aren’t the normal stuff so I can never truly find what I want to read

😭😭😭

And yes this is mainly about TWST

[whumpbby]

Not gonna lie, Xie Lian is such a meh character to me.

"Oh he went through so much, and still choses to be kind!" Tbh his "kindness" falls pretty flat and melodramatic for me. His character is consistently a flat line.

Maybe it's because the whole "800years of every horror a loteral God can throw upon you" reminds me of these early fanfics where Mary Sue went through Everything, and I just find it hilarious more than dramatic. His attitude is just flat, the moments of "snark" off putting and the *romance* that just happens to him (like pretty much everything else does) is not even exciting.

Reading TGCF with Hualian at the centre is like reading the most 2000's wish-fulfillment fic of all time. If not for the side-characters, I wouldn't pay for the paper the thing is printed on.

[peppermintquartz]

I think I would enjoy Jane Austen more if I didn't have to struggle with the language.

And before anyone tells me I need to read more, I do read plenty and across genres, and no matter how often I give Austen another go I just lose interest within the first handful of paragraphs. (To be fair I also lost interest in Jane Eyre within three pages, but I had to read that for A Levels. I similarly couldn't get into Wuthering Heights.)

Yet somehow I plodded through Vanity Fair, Anna Karenina, War and Peace. It's not about the length either; Lonesome Dove was a brick, too, and about as subtle; LotR has been an annual read for ages.

Idk. Sometimes I think I should read more classic lit by women authors, and yet when I try I just get frustrated.

[alex-guerin]

I fell down a reading rabbit hole after getting my library card. Little known secret, I am a sucker for a good romance story...and became hella obsessed when I found queer romance stories. Like, I've been going nuts reading gay romance stories the past couple of weeks.

Just one problem I have been running into a lot lately...I HATE 1st Person POV writings. I hate them. I can't get invested in them, I don't know why, I just can't (yeah yeah, we're skipping the irony of the fact that in the past I have written a few fics in 1sr Person POV, shuddup). And there are SO. FUCKING. MANY books written in 1st Person. SO MANY! It seems like when I find out that the summary sounds interesting for, I'll click to read a sample only to be hit with: "I wish I could tell you..." or "We didn’t know it would go like this, I swear!" And I just...nope. I can't do it. I forced myself to read one and just finished it and like...I felt NOTHING during it.

Though, maybe that also had to do with the fact it was almost 100% a gay retelling of "Notting Hill" but like, a speed run on crack, 0 to 1000 in .02 seconds, ridiculous amounts of sex in just a week of knowing each other, version of one of my favorite movies. And this coming from a person who wrote their OWN "Notting Hill" AU fic several years ago for Clint/Coulson!

Still, fact remains, I can't do 1st person stories, and that seems to be 95% of the gay romance stories out there! I've found a few that aren't and were fairly decent...but now I'm seriously struggling to find some that aren't.

[otherworldseekers]

I think I'm beginning to understand all those polls where people said they avoid first person in fanfic. Lately I've noticed as I search for books to read that there's definitely a flood of books written in first person where it adds nothing to the narrative and the author clearly doesn't understand that first person isn't supposed to just be third person limited with different pronouns. I imagine if this is true in published fiction then it's probably true in fanfiction as well. I adore a well written first person narrative but I have not found a single one in the books I've tried recently. I've found a few that were fine but none that were good.

Listen, writers, DO NOT use first person unless your POV character has a very strong, unique and entertaining voice. Just don't. Resist that temptation.

[kiminoan]

The woes of a self-indulgent book

There are many good self-indulgent books in the world. Tolkien is an iconic example. Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my favourites. They're everybody-be-damned-I'm-writing-this-for-me books and they can become absolute legends and they can also feel like a punishment.

The Goblin Emperor is definitely a self-indulgent book. The back ephemera should be about 200 pages longer than it is, because everything I've looked up there isn't there.

I suspect the author has an incredible memory. I do not have even a decent memory. I sing myself little songs so I don't forget what I was about to do while transitioning from one room to the next. I write myself notes and task lists because I will never, ever remember without that aid. I can handle a book with about 8 characters without additional aid, maybe up to 20 if they're introduced slowly and are all interesting and unique and relevant to the story. This book? I think it has at least 400,582 characters. I think it might be slightly less than that because I think at least some of them are the same person with different titles depending on context. Sigh.

I genuinely like the premise and overall shape of this story. I'm still reading. But I'm getting really frustrated. I have no idea who tf Osmer Nelar is. I think Osmer might be a title because there's also an Osmin that appears for some women, but it's not in the sizable listing of persons, places, things, and gods in the back of the book. And I suspect I already know Osmer Nelar's actual first name and that he's probably a prominent character. I think it might even be the main character's cousin Setheris, but I'm not sure.

The thing about Tolkien and Le Guin ... even if they did allow themselves some self-indulgence in their world-building and story-telling, those works were still incredibly readable. This feels like homework. I don't have some of the facilities this author needs me to have. So... I'm struggling. And it's frustrating. And I really want to know what happens without being frustrated and impeded by somewhat less than 200,291 characters with two or more distinct names or titles.

I have come to the point where I'm basically going to have to go back to the beginning and take notes so I can keep reading beyond p. 168 where I have become paralyzed by not knowing who tf Osmer Nelar is. Sigh.

[dove-da-birb]

The pain of remembering a fic that you read years ago and loved BUT YOU CAN'T FIND IT