blahIt all started with the last Gemmell book, Swords of Night and Day, which I had been looking forward to. The problem is, he won't cut to the chase. I keep digging through page after page of crap and he hasn't even put together the team yet. You know how it is in fantasy novels...there's always an adventuring team which goes out to fight evil, steal women and rape horses. In this case, you can see all the members of the team to be just floating around oen another but nothing has cemented them into place yet. Of course, until you set up the team you you can't start the adventure and have them go off and pound the big bag and that's pissing me off. It's ironic that I'd be running into this problem with Gemmell too. The guy manages to pack more into fewer pages than any writer I've ever run across. It's one of those cases where there could be like 10 freaking pages left and the heroes have only just arrived at the impregnable evil stronghold and you can be sure that by 9 and a half pages he'll have the main bad guy's head on a pike. It might not be the sweetest wrapup, but you can be sure it's a wrapup. That being the case it's sorta pissing me off he's wasting all this wordage on setup when IMO, it's completely unnecessary.
From there I went to Elminster's Daughter by Ed Greenwood. At his best, Greenwood's a passable writer and if it wasn't for the fact that he has longloved characters to mangle and play with, I can't imagine anyone chosing to read any of his works. Just a couple dozen pages in and I figure it's going to be another one of those name-dropping, 'you'd understand this if you were in my head and had read every FR sourcebook in existance' sort of crap. I can understand how Elminster is supposed to be carefree and impish, but a good chunk of the time he just comes off as being stupid.
From there it was on to the new Phule's company book by Asprin and Heck. The less said about the downturn this series has taken is better. I have no clue what the hell is up with Robert Asprin but it's something that no amount of literary partnering is going to fix. The guy's got issues. Maybe it's time for electroshock or some intensive psychopharmacology. Actually, I'd wager he's already been experimenting with the latter.
Feh.
