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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1391028" data-attributes="member: 812">I guess, jes, that what I'm saying is I think it's perfectly acceptable to say in a review, "I didn't care for this book because the writer takes forever to say anything." A review ought to reflect the taste of the reader -- indeed, a review IS the taste of the reader, expressed in an essay-like form.I'm not arguing that masses of gooey prose are good OR bad -- I'm just saying that if you try to claim that gooeyness (?) is an objectively Bad Thing, your readers will be less inclined to listen to you. Because they know that's not true. If you say, "Erikson writes a whole mess of words and I don't much care for that," then you've given them a clear picture of the work, an honest position statement of your own, and they can draw their own conclusions.I would warn anyone looking to jump into Erikson that he is NOT a writer of easily read novels. I agree that the pacing is slow, sometimes glacially so (that's pun, for those of you who have read Memories of Ice). I agree that there are many, many characters and that it is oftentimes hard to keep track of who's doing what to who. And why, where and with what. People who don't like that stuff aren't going to like these books, and I wouldn't want someone to come to these books with unrealistic expectations.But I LIKE it for those very reasons. These books really reward careful re-readings -- there's always something new in them pages for me to discover. I don't agree that they would be better books if everything was up front, easy to reference and found the first time through. I like it better this way -- it encourages me to re-read the books, since I know there's more to be savoured in there.The best reviews, the ones I get the most out of, aren't ones that I agree with -- they're personal ones. Ones that reveal as much about the reviewer as they do about the work under review. Whether witty, insightful, savage, or full of wonder and admiration, great reviews are great pieces of writing and as such ought to be eery bit as personal as the works themselves. Put more of yourself into the review, and worry less about trying to claim correctness for your opinions, and even less than that about trying to second-guess the author's motivations. You're more interesting than any of that stuff.</blockquote>

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