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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Thursday Thoughts


Good grief, but my TBR pile is huge. I have two bookshelves, one for books I've already read, and one for the books I haven't started. The shelves are starting to bow in the middle. I think a serious purging is over due.

I don't read as fast as I used to, but I've also become pickier. I often read books recommended by others, just based on their comments, or from reviews I've read. It's about a fifty/fifty chance I'll like them. I'm surprised by how disappointed I am with some of the series I've started to read (and been unable to finish), and I'm talking urban fantasy because that's about all I read anymore. I think the problem might be that the books published now were contracted right around the time the genre really took off. Desperate to get new urban fantasy books on the shelves, there's a chance publishers weren't as discriminating as they should have been.

Now the field is more competitive so I'm hoping there'll be more decent books released in the coming months. I'm not going to disrespect authors of the books I didn't care for by posting titles. Though I'd love to warn readers of time-wasting tomes, it's only my opinion. Since many of these books were recommended by readers, obviously someone enjoyed reading them. I'm just… super picky.

All this being said, I have to exclaim my thrill over finding Liz Williams' Inspector Chen series. I just started reading SNAKE AGENT and it's superb! Tightly written, intelligent, original, intriguing, and unlike some books I've started reading lately, it's not rotting my brain!

So if you like UF and haven't read anything by Liz Williams, I encourage you to do so. She's a fabulous author!

4 comments:

Liana Brooks said...

I don't know how you feel about sci-fi but I love Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series. It's intense space battle though, not for everyone. But fun!

Karen Duvall said...

I like sci-fi, especially sociological sci-fi. Not so much space adventure stuff, but technology advances on our planet. Love Greg Bear.

Creative A said...

I can empathize with this. The more I read, and the more developed my taste gets, the picker I become. I drives me nuts because I go back and look at books I used to love, and am appalled at the loose writing/bad characterization, etc. Sob! But I have to admit, something about this makes the really good books even better.

Karen Duvall said...

Now that is an awesome observation, Creative. The bad books make the good books better. Yes! Like the book I'm reading now, it totally clicks for me and I'm enjoying the total immersion into another world that got me hooked on reading fiction in the first place. I thought I'd lost the ability, but I just hadn't found an author to take me back there again. My thanks go to Liz Williams for making it happen.