this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Fiction Books

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The discussion of fiction books! Please tag spoilers and follow instance rules.

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Like books that got very popular but you never really could get into.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All GRR Martin. The writing is so dry I couldn’t get into it. Super word usage was just weird, like his insistence on “breaking the fast”, but most of it is still modern English, so this word choices stand out as sore thumbs.

After a while, it seemed to me that the white point of the books was to show how many plot twists the author could string one after the other. Still read the first four books, hoping it would get better.

[–] yggdar 7 points 1 year ago

Indeed! I read all of the GoT books, and they are just not good. There does not appear to be any logic to the world. The dude just keeps adding elements, never explaining how they fit in the world. Just cheap tricks and twists that are based on nothing.

I enjoy good fantasy, and magic is a part of that. But a good fantasy world usually only has a few sources of magic, and somehow they are connected to create a world that's coherent and follows its own rules. Bad books just keep randomly adding new incoherent elements whenever the author gets stuck and refuse to explain anything:

  • Dragons
  • Bunches of different and unconnected gods
  • Weird shadow assassin creature created by two people having sex, and some kind of intervention from one of the random gods
  • White walkers
  • Weird trees up north
  • Bran's magical magic of magicness
  • The entire plot with assassin's that change face
  • ...

It all honestly reminds me of a book that was written and self-published by a friend of a friend. It was self-published because they couldn't find a publisher that was interested... And every two damn pages they added a new random type of magic. Martin is just better at dressing it up and selling his crap, but I think Martin and that friend of a friend have similar world building skills.