Eddings progress report
Jun. 24th, 2009 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgI'm half-way through David Eddings' Castle of Wizardry and starting to get the point.
The earlier books were front-heavy on the ponderous history exposition, and the characterisations were thin with a generous dusting of teen farm boy emo whininess. And teen princess whininess.
After a while, however, the unbelievable anthropology, sociology and psychology ceased to grate quite so much. Most of the gathering of bits and pieces and people was done, and the central characters started to assume the comfort of recognition and reliability. Emo boy hero developed at an unlikely but reassuring rate, and everyone else remained the same.
I stopped hearing the rattle of dice every time the party encountered a monster.
So perhaps the secret to this stuff is the phat in phat fantasy: you have to hang around long enough to attain the comfort of familiarity, and suspend a lot of extra disbelief to feel any attachment to the geography of the place. At this point too it's easy to read very very fast indeed without any sense of missing out of subtletlies.
So it's still not great writing, and the strategy doesn't appeal to me personality, but he deserves points for luring me in this far.
The earlier books were front-heavy on the ponderous history exposition, and the characterisations were thin with a generous dusting of teen farm boy emo whininess. And teen princess whininess.
After a while, however, the unbelievable anthropology, sociology and psychology ceased to grate quite so much. Most of the gathering of bits and pieces and people was done, and the central characters started to assume the comfort of recognition and reliability. Emo boy hero developed at an unlikely but reassuring rate, and everyone else remained the same.
I stopped hearing the rattle of dice every time the party encountered a monster.
So perhaps the secret to this stuff is the phat in phat fantasy: you have to hang around long enough to attain the comfort of familiarity, and suspend a lot of extra disbelief to feel any attachment to the geography of the place. At this point too it's easy to read very very fast indeed without any sense of missing out of subtletlies.
So it's still not great writing, and the strategy doesn't appeal to me personality, but he deserves points for luring me in this far.
