3 ms·
For fiction, I flip a book open to about 1/3 of the way through and read a paragraph or two, which generally tells me everything I need to know. That avoids the
by sfink 4y ago
For fiction, I flip a book open to about 1/3 of the way through and read a paragraph or two, which generally tells me everything I need to know. That avoids the unrepresentative intro portion—I appreciate a punchy and/or gripping opening scene, but it's not very well correlated to how much I'll enjoy the rest of the text.
It's weird, there aren't that many ways of choosing a set of words to convey something, and yet an author's voice and style comes through roughly the same no matter where I sample from (except for the overworked parts, which usually includes the beginning.) And it usually comes through strong, which is great: sometimes I think my reading diet is mostly about sampling a variety of good-tasting styles of mental processing. (Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.)
- nobody9999 4y ago>Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically. I thought the authors of the Expanse[0] series did a pretty good job with that. AFAICT (but I have no way to confirm this), they split the storytelling so that each plot arc is consistent and speaks with a single voice. I can certainly see how multiple authors could muddle the "voice", but I think the quality (or otherwise) is more a function of storyboarding/universe creation and how well that's done collectively by the authors. Please note I'm not really disagreeing with you and, as a rule, your observation jibes with mine. Although (as I mentioned) there are some exceptions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)