Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I hope this is accepted as a comment about your thread rather than a comment about moderation...
When I read the OP I immediately thought to recommend the trilogy I am reading now (but decided to wait until I was finished the last book). This did strike me as a thread in which recommendations (or condemnations) would happen. I think it's a difficult conversation to have without getting into specifics.
I'm surprised how many new-to-me authors turn out to be at least okay. It seemed to me to be the nature of the beast that only a small number of authors are going to hit that sweet spot of writing a good story in a way that appeals to me. But, of those books that make it past my pre-filters, I am surprised how few end up getting only 1/5 or 2/5 scores, and even that low score is not necessarily a guarantee I won't be back...
Some recently new-to-me read authors that definitely didn't hit that sweet spot include Max Gladstone, Yoon Ha Lee and Guy Gavriel Kay. And yet each write well enough that I will probably give each of them another chance (in fact I have books lined up for this purpose). There others that missed the spot by a wider mark and won't get a second chance.
But in the last six months there have been several that did hit the sweet spot, including H.G. Parry, Alix E. Harrow and S.A. Chakraborty - I'm definitely looking forward to finding more from all these. And I have quite a long list of others that made 4/5 that I'm definitely watching. I guess some of these may not "pan out" in the longer term, but it still a pretty good list to start with, or so it seems to me.
Yes there are many that fall into that grey-land of 3/5 - that were merely okay. Mostly these fall back into the well where they must compete on almost equal terms with everything else trying to get my attention.
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We all have different taste in authors, one reason that I wasn't really looking for recommendations.
I like a number of Guy Gavriel Kay's books, though not all. I don't really try to rate authors, or rather it's more of a binary thing - do I want to read more books by that author or not. It does seem to me that a lot of authors only have so many good books in them. Some only write one good book, others a handful. A few are simply good story tellers and most of their books are good.
The thing that surprised me was how few new authors I've run across in the last 5 years that I liked. I think it goes back to my long standing issues with discoverability and finding new authors. Way back when, there were a ton of established authors I had never heard of, so I had all those authors and their backlists to read. Then I found a publisher (Baen) who's taste in books was pretty close to mine, so until he died, I had a steady stream of new authors that he found and published. I really had expected by now that we would have all sorts of curated lists of new books, book reviews and the like. Perhaps they are out there, but I haven't found them.
Perhaps, it's simply one of the regular dry periods and in a year or two things will pick up again.