Books

[dsrtao]

Blood Noir, Laurell Hamilton.

It's an Anita Blake book. It is not good. The total plot would not make a short story -- maybe a short-short, two pages in a magazine. This series has jumped the shark, blindfolded it, tied it up, dragged it down to a dungeon, and is abusing it mercilessly.

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

At least twice a day? With multiple partners and some kitchen paraphernalia?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

What did you have in mind? Eggbeaters? Butter churn?

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I hadn't planned the (sexual) assault on a shark particularly carefully.

I was more just making fun of Anita Blake/Laurell Hamilton. What once worked, is now failure.

[evilnicola.livejournal.com]

I thought that the first half was good, that it was shaping up to be way more plot-full than the last few. Then the sex started...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

So much like life. :-)

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

Why are you still reading these books? I've heard nothing good about the most recent ones. (Hell, I hated the first one.)

[dsrtao]

...
So, you know how if you consistently reward someone for an action, you can get them to perform the action over and over again? And if you slowly reduce the frequency of rewards, but still have them pop up randomly, you can keep most subjects repeating the actions indefinitely?

Yeah, that's me.

I thought the first one was a B, which is enough to keep me reading. The next four or five ranged up to A-. Then Anita started having sex for the first time in eight or nine years, and things started to go downhill. Gradually the monster-hunter stories got thinner and thinner and the monster politics and sex quotients went up. Then suddenly there was an all-plot monster-hunting story, and it had real character development and essentially no sex.

(I'm not against sex in books. I'm not even against explicit sex. I'm not even against porn, which I define as depictions of sex for the sake of turning on the reader or author, as opposed to carrying out some in-story purpose. But this... I don't find it well-written, and in fact I skim over long paragraphs and pages looking for someone to say something substantive.)

And since that book, there have been random good story bits keeping me going.