Is there a book/saga that you finished and cannot forget to the point where it gets harder to read other books?
For me, the first time this happened was with The Royal Assassin Saga from Robin Hobb, and then Metro 2033.
This year, it’s The Witcher saga… (I can’t move on) I love all those introspective books with thoughtful heroes trying to make sense of the world they are forced to evolve into.
Malazan Book of the Fallen was like this for me. Great worldbuilding. Big ideas and loads of characters. Lots of obscure detail, all the way down to potsherds and verdigris.
When I finished, I had a powerful impulse to reread the series immediately after finishing it.
I binged books 1 through 4 absolutely loved them. Then book 5 happened and I forced my way through it. And now starting Bonehunters, no energy to go on. I just needed a break is Midnight Tides exhausting for everyone? I was so thrown off with a whole book being a flashback.
Steven Erikson makes a lot of bold choices throughout the series that go beyond plot structure and character deaths. If you don’t like something about any particular book, it will probably be absent in the next book.
There are several times where (after 1000+ pages of build-up) he shifts to an entirely different set of characters on a different continent. You get thrown into the deep end and have to start over with no immediate clues about where you are, when you are, who the people are, and what it has to do with what you read before. A book or two later threads start to intersect.
A later book has Kruppe as the narrator, which is fantastic if you love Kruppe as much as Kruppe loves Kruppe.
I find storm light archive very difficult to pivot from. Mostly the prose used is gets so out of your face that you can focus on just consuming the story rather than the words.
I also found cradle by Will Wight sticking with me seeing as I read all 12 books in a month so I became quite familiar with the world and the characters
Charlie Huston’s “Caught Stealing Trilogy” or “Hank Thompson Trilogy”. One of my favourite modern noir pieces of work. A damn solid 3 book series about a guy who gets mixed up in shady stuff and can’t seem to find an exit.
I actually found and read the last book first, not knowing it was a trilogy. Which made me think it was trés cool how things in the past were referenced and added more weight to the main character/world. Turns out it was book 3 of 3. 🤪
All three made/make it hard to get into clunky modern pulp/noir style fiction since.
Yeah, after finishing the Wheel of Time series it felt like I really lost something important and it was so hard to get into other fantasy worlds for a while due to how immersed I was in it for so long.
I had the opposite with The Witcher, I couldn’t force myself to continue reading it. Andrej Sepkowsky is so horny, I was trying to read it for the story, but it read like some bad erotica, with the stories not having incredibly original or compelling ideas anyway.
On the other hand, the His Dark Materials trilogy has had a lasting impact on me, very thoughtful and interesting, not to mention entertaining, book.
The Witcher novels are one of the few epic fantasy franchises I’ve read and man, I didn’t really like them.
Unsurprisingly, I came from the playing the Witcher 3, and I loved the first two books; the collections of short stories. The actual main plot felt that it never knew clearly where it was going, and it often suddenly meandered at times that killed the pacing, and man was it horny.
I don’t mind horny either. I really enjoyed reading Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the authors horniness is prevalent throughout the novel, but it actually works to complement the narrative. Even in the Song of Ice and Fire series where GRRM can get distractedly horny, it doesn’t read as off-puttingly as Sapkowski’s “edgy horny” style.
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It’s so much better than any of this other writing that it’s actually upsetting. But that series stuck with me for a long time.
Someday I hope to make it past the first book. I have read almost every King novel leading up to The Dark Tower series but I couldn’t get through The Gunslinger and I couldn’t say exactly why, it just didn’t grab my attention like his other works.
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