Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2648606" data-attributes="member: 5171">Jezter: In that case, I was also jumping the gun and responding to something you wrote in another thread. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> You did not specifically say that JD was a Martin fanboy. Whether or not you implied it is a matter of discussion. Not here, though.But if you want to avoid people thinking that you're attacking people who bring up Martin, you might want to avoid writing, "I would just like to thank you for giving an objective appraisal of the series rather than the generic "Goodkind is teh suxx0r. Martin r00lz!" post that pops up seemingly every time a thread mentions Terry Goodkind." Food for thought.And for the record, I come to the assistance of the person I believe has the point in the given conversation, not the person I like better. Even if it's somebody I actively dislike.Interesting. In what ways? I wasn't trying to be simplistic. I was trying to be broad. And if you're slapping a judgment on the word "simplistic", as it often carries the secondary meaning "stupid", then I'd like to know why you felt it was simplistic.Being impressed by ideas is not a bad thing. I'm not, but that doesn't make me better than someone who is. The books I mentioned are not necessarily books I personally like, but they are generally books that have a lot of ideas packed into them. People who are impressed by ideas in books might like them.Being unfamiliar with a lot of other fiction out there is not a bad thing. I am familiar with other stuff, but that's just because, frankly, my mom started buying it for me and leaving it on my desk, even when I said that I'd rather keep reading the Hardy Boys books I was reading at the time. That speaks more to my mom's insistence on me broadening my horizons than it does to any genius on my part. The books I mentioned in there are also books that I consider good "Starter Books". I don't like all of them now, but I did read all of them, and enjoyed most of them at the time -- although I'd suggest that Brooks be last on the list, since I think his early stuff suffers the most today.And liking romantic stuff and soap-opera-like emotional upheaval is not a bad thing. If it were, there wouldn't be so many Buffy and Angel fans. There wouldn't be more shelves devoted to romance in the average Borders than there are to fantasy. If you don't like to think of yourself as the kind of person who might like reading a romance novel, that speaks to your ability, or lack thereof, to accept the things you enjoy. I'm not making an attack here.I don't read a lot of romance, but I've read a few of the Nora Roberts fantasy books and liked them -- great dialogue, good emotional development, good characterization. Her plots move a bit slower than I'd like, so I wouldn't read her all the time, but as a change of pace, it's fun stuff.There's some good romantic fantasy out there. Heck, Blue Rose is all about that stuff, so you might be into Mercedes Lackey or Melanie Rawn (listed as inspirational source material) or Kristen Britain or Lorna Freeman (similar in feel) if what you liked about Goodkind was the emotional wringing-out of the characters. Those are probably better suggestions than Nora Roberts, too, since they are still trying to be fantasy first and romance second. Despite Goodkind's stated assertion that he doesn't consider his books to be fantasy, I'd still suggest that, at the least, "Wizard's First Rule" is a fantasy first and a romance second.If you read "people who like ideas, people who haven't read a ton of fantasy, or people who like romantic fantasy" and took that as some kind simplistic insult, that says more about you than it does about me. I didn't like "Wizard's First Rule", and I don't exactly make a secret of it, but I have this apparently rare ability to separate what I personally like from general reality. My dislike of the books is my own opinion. The stylistic conventions Goodkind uses are general reality, although if you think that I've overlooked other broad categories of people who enjoyed Goodkind, I'm welcome to hear them.(For the record, I can and do also come up with categorizations of people who like other stuff. I'm sure I'm overlooking stuff here, but people who enjoy Martin's books tend to be a) people who like grittier fiction and b) people who like political manipulation. I'm leaving out other obvious stuff, like "likes to have scary things happen to characters" because, well, almost everyone likes to have scary things happen to characters. That doesn't narrow the field a ton.It's very possible to like both authors for different reasons. I can see somebody who likes the emotional hand-wringing in Goodkind's work also liking the political manipulation (which leads to a lot of emotional hand-wringing, albeit described in less detail) in Martin's work.)</blockquote>

Verification