Storm Raven said:
No, it's not, stating that the analogy doesn't make sense isn't bruqe, it's truthful.
Stating it in a brusque manner makes it brusque. In a perfect world, I carefully consider all the facts, regardless of the tone in which it's delivered. In this world, you've made it wholly unlikely that I'd agree with you on anything.
And you miss the essential reason that the book-chair analogy doesn't make sense by devolving into a side discussion about utilitarian items vs. entertainment. You see, the distinction doesn't fall along the lines of utilitatiran vs. entertainment, but along a more fundamental distinction: chairs generally do not develop over time.
Maybe I deleted the bit where I was talking about how the chair required you to sit in a different position, which might eventually make you more comfortable. I might've thought the analogy was taking up too much screen-space.
A book, on the other hand (and any other sequential media), needs to be moved through to evaluate. What happens in the next twenty pages may radically alter the last twenty, and may change you opinion tremendously.
I might be coming at this from too professional a viewpoint. When I spent a summer reading manuscripts in New York (short fiction, not novels), the editor in question watched me read a few short stories all the way through before form-rejecting them, and then she asked me when I knew that the story was bad. I said, "The first or second page." She said, "Then that's when you reject them."
She is not in the minority in the editing field. Now, granted, all the fiction that gets published has passed this test with at least a few editors, but as a consumer, I can very quickly decide whether or not I'm being entertained. And thus, I can decide whether or not to continue.
And that doesn't make the book bad in an objective sense, but, as I've said twice with no response from you, when you're reading a thread titled "What's the worst you've ever read?", I think it's fairly obvious that we're talking about personal opinion rather than objective critical discussion. And thus, "It was bad" can be read as "I did not enjoy it" without much irate discussion on the subject.
No, you are saying "I read a tiny portion and decided it was bad, but I don't really know what I'm talking about because I didn't read through the book". Its an opinion, but it is an uninformed and unuseful opinion.
With respect, bull. It's interesting, because I thought that you just didn't get (or didn't accept) that we were talking opinion, here. But now I know that according to Storm Raven, I'm not even allowed to have an opinion until I finish the novel. I mean, dude, I own that it's good form to note that you didn't finish, but if you have a problem with, "In my opinion, this book was so bad that it wasn't worth finishing," then you and I must be reading different stuff. Now, mind you, I finish most books, but that's stubbornness (and the knowledge that someone somewhere would have called me out for not reading all the way through Wizard's First Rule and declared that I wasn't entitled to my opinion that it was a pretentious, derivative, poorly written bunch fof drivel, which is what I'd figured out by the third chapter, but I was home sick with a cold and that was all I had to read).
I'm gonna have to come down on the side of people who have read enough and have enough critical thinking ability to know whether a book is likely to turn around in a positive way for them in some great last-minute twist. I've had a few books thud at the end with a twist I didn't like, but it's been a long, long time since any book has surprised or shocked me with a twist that redeemed what was otherwise bad.
If you can't figure out that a book is atrocious without reading it all the way through, that's your problem. Ain't nothing could've happened in the last quarter to make Wizard's First Rule a good book.
To use the Covenant books as an example, they extend over just more than 3,000 pages. To say that the books are bad after reading the first 100 pages is tantamount to saying that Babylon 5 or Farscape are bad television series because you didn't like the pilot episodes. I don't think anyone would take seriously anyone who evaluated those television series' and attempted to make a pronouncement on their quality after such a short viewing, but you seem to think it reasonable for someone to make a similar judgment regarding a series of books after an even smaller sliver of knowledge.
As much as you enjoyed declaring the ineptitude of my chair metaphor, I'm going to have to turn this analogy down. A book series is not a television series. The media are different, and the number of variables are different, and it's perfectly possible for a show to dramatically improve or decline. Perhaps they get a bigger budget. Perhaps there's a change in the main cast. Maybe they bring on
new writers. None of these things are possible (or matter to the same extent, at least) in books. R.A. Salvatore doesn't have to worry about Drizzt Do'Urden's actor getting hospitalized in a car accident. Martin doesn't have to worry about the budget for his fight scenes. Jordan doesn't lose sleep wondering if Fox is going to air his books out of order in order to save the most exciting ones for sweeps.
Now, I'll agree that improvement is possible -- a singleton book that everyone loves can get a contract for multiple sequels, giving the author the chance to turn something that had to be self-contained into something that can have a larger scope. That's definitely good. So if plot was the only thing keeping you from enjoying a story, it's possible that you could like the followups, when the author has more books to work with.
But if you hated the author's tone, characterization of his people, fight-scene depiction, setting, system of magic or technology, or use of dialogue... you can usually be sure that it's not going to improve in the last hundred pages. Or at least, I can. 'Cause that's been my experience in the books that I've read all the way through.
No, I'm requiring a certain level of knowledge as a requirement before your opinion holds water. Saying "these books are bad" after reading through 3.33% of the text makes your opinion not worth bothering with.
Perhaps we'll just agree to disagree here.
Suffice to say, the basic argument remains valid - disliking part of something is a perfectly reasonable precursor to disliking the entirety, even if the whole is not read/consumed/watched/whatever.
