A new obsession?
2010 Apr 28
Collections Dresden Files, fantasy, Harry Dresden, Jim Butcher, mystery, Storm Front 3 Comments
Lately, I got in the mood to read something that wasn’t romance. Okay, blame it on watching too much Doctor Who. And maybe a healthy dose of the Ghost Whisperer, although it has a heavy romance thread. So someone explain to me how I ended up reading Storm Front, the first book of the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher?
Weird.
All I can figure is that it was just laying around the house because my son had picked it up after the series was on the Sci-Fi network, read it and then left it for me years ago. I was suddenly curious the other day, didn’t have anything else to read and wasn’t truly in the mood for a romance novel for once. And there it was, staring at me. I mean just look at that cover. ‘Cause that’s the cover of the one that came out right after the show and not the current one available.
I liked it.
Now granted it took me awhile to get my head shifted into gear for the first person but once I did that, I enjoyed the mystery and the fantasy background. See, I can do first person with mystery plots involved. Or secrets or some such. There just has to be some reason for the use of first person other than pure naval gazing or I’m out of there.
Of course, there was Harry’s kind of whacky personality but then again that’s trademark detective style narrative so, again, I can live with that. Enough so that I think I may check out the next book in the series. How many of them I’ll actually read remains to be seen. I usually manage about three before bailing. I have this thing about trilogies being perfections. Four or five and people are pushing it, really. It takes an intriguing author voice to keep me going past that. 
What most people don’t realize is that most long running romance “series” don’t count that way because they’re spin-offs, not sequential. The reader can generally dive in any old place – as long as they’re not totally obsessive and anal retentive. :D It’s only when the connected groups in romances are truly written sequentially that it becomes a problem. But most romance series do not have that strong of a connected plot arc between the individual books.
Apr 29, 2010 @ 09:45:29
I’m slowly working my way through that series. I like the way the action clicks along – I feel tired by the end!
Apr 29, 2010 @ 10:57:54
Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it. I thought it was just me. I keep reading a chapter or two, putting it down, picking it back up and reading some more. It wasn’t that I was bored exactly, just that it was, well, not exactly intense but definitely packed with stuff. Particularly for a book that wasn’t all that big.
May 03, 2010 @ 07:43:34
He’s got that thing I call “page-turnability.” I WANT to keep reading in one shot, but it’s too much going on.