Tag: Lian Hearn

TTT: Books I’ll never read

Top Ten TuesdayThis is a challenging topic, because I have fairly eclectic tastes, and because I thought it would be boring to list what seem to me to be the obvious choices—I have no inclination to pick up Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, and I assume I never will. So it came down to trying to find books that I will never read for reasons other than their utter lack of literary merit. Here are three series that I have avoided:

The Redwall series, by Brian Jacques. I missed the window of opportunity for this one, as I didn’t know about it until I was much past the age of being at all interested in animal fantasy.

A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin. This may not be entirely fair, as I did try to read the first book of the series (A Game of Thrones). Though I’ve been told repeatedly that the series gets much better as it goes on, I honestly did not find anything to distinguish this from every other medieval fantasy I’ve read (and there have been quite a few)—at least not in ways significant or compelling enough to hold my interest.

The sequels to Across the Nightingale Floor, by Lian Hearn. Though I am aware that Nightingale Floor is only the first book in (I think) a five-book cycle, I have always thought of it as a standalone. The story seems perfectly complete and any sequels extraneous. Also (spoiler warning) my favorite character doesn’t survive this one.

Genre roles

Historical/fantasy fiction blog Fresh-scraped Vellum has a good post on defining the “historical fantasy” genre here. Figuring out what genre my WIP should be classified in has been something of a headache for me; it’s reassuring to have some outside confirmation that I can still call it fantasy even though it has no magic.

Personally, I think that imaginary setting + constructed language should be enough to qualify a book as fantasy. But I admit that when I wrote the thing I wasn’t really thinking about how much of a challenge it would be to query it. How do you a query a book that reads like historical fiction but isn’t (and has elements of a political thriller and a family saga thrown in)? If I call it fantasy, most people are going to assume it has some sort of magic component; if I call it historical fantasy, most people are going to assume it has some sort of magic component and takes place in our real-world past.

Guy Gavriel Kay is the obvious go-to guy for comparison here, though from the (embarrassingly small amount of) Kay I’ve read, he still typically has some kind of skeletal magic system in the background. Lian Hearn, too; her Otori series still has a subtle magical thread running through it.

I console myself by telling myself that I wrote what I want to read. And I remember a quote from Charlaine Harris: If it pleases you and you can write at all, it’s gonna please somebody else.

© 2016 Amanda McCrina / Theme by Anders Noren