229 réponses à ce sujet

[Fredward]

Silfren wrote...
No kidding.  Literary snob or not, a book obviously has something WRONG with it if it takes a solid 50 pages to engage readers.  Of course, one person's boring is another person's exciting, so there's that, but still.  It's kind of obnoxious to go around claiming that "50 pages is awfully few" pages to give a book the chance to impress someone. 

Books should engage a reader on page one, and certainly within the two or three pages; and especially if a large population of people are finding that a given book doesn't interest them until they're more than fifty pages in, then there IS something wrong with the book itself.  If I've read fifty pages into a book, I'm almost certainly going to finish it, because something about it has been compelling enough to keep me reading--if I find a book to be genuinely bad, I'd sooner drink bleach than waste my time reading it.  Life's too short to read bad books.

Clearly I have weird standards. But some of the best books I have read (DFW's Infinite Jest, Mieville's Bas-Lag series, Bakker's Second-Apocalypse and Aspect-Emperor series') easily took more than fifty pages to build up the story. And it was totally worth it. Those books were exceptional. Mieville's books often only pick up after half the book is over where dozens of threads suddenly converge to create a bigger picture.

But yeah. If you only want to read a single page to guage the quality of the book who am I to judge. Maybe the books I read are just longer.

Modifié par Foopydoopydoo, 20 juin 2013 - 07:16 .

[Hazegurl]

Youth4Ever wrote...

It was okay. I mostly liked the plot, and receiving more lore or more detail on some lore, but I thought the book was too long, and every character annoyed me. Except Wynne, and *Spoiler Alert* I hate that she died for Evangeline. Bad end.

I agree. Most of those characters got on my nerves. i didn't mind Rhys much but he came across as a moron. disappointed that he didn't just kill Adrian.  Evangeline is such a loser. she had promise and potional at the start of the story when she stopped that idiot Adrian from getting into a fight. she seemed to understand her role as a templar to protect everyone. Sadly Gaider seems to pull the "If they are a likeable Templar then they MUST side with the mages." or something cause then she was just as moronic as Rhys.  She almost got the Thrask treatment, got fooled by a demon, and killed. i hate that Wynne died to save her.

[Plaintiff]

Foopydoopydoo wrote...

Silfren wrote...
No kidding.  Literary snob or not, a book obviously has something WRONG with it if it takes a solid 50 pages to engage readers.  Of course, one person's boring is another person's exciting, so there's that, but still.  It's kind of obnoxious to go around claiming that "50 pages is awfully few" pages to give a book the chance to impress someone. 

Books should engage a reader on page one, and certainly within the two or three pages; and especially if a large population of people are finding that a given book doesn't interest them until they're more than fifty pages in, then there IS something wrong with the book itself.  If I've read fifty pages into a book, I'm almost certainly going to finish it, because something about it has been compelling enough to keep me reading--if I find a book to be genuinely bad, I'd sooner drink bleach than waste my time reading it.  Life's too short to read bad books.

Clearly I have weird standards. But some of the best books I have read (Infinite Jest, Mieville's Bas-Lag series, Bakker's series whose names I just forgot [it's early don't judge me]) easily took more than fifty pages to build up the story. And it was totally worth it. Those books were exceptional. Mieville's books often only pick up after half the book is over where dozens of threads suddenly converge to create a bigger picture.

But yeah. If you only want to read a single page to guage the quality of the book who am I to judge. Maybe the books I read are just longer.

It's fine to take a while to get into the actual meat of the plot, but you have to have something to secure interest. Generally, I'm willing to give any story a certain amount of time to establish characters and setting before it gets into the nitty-gritty, but I feel that the best stories develop character, setting and plot simultaneously.

[Fredward]

Hazegurl wrote...

Youth4Ever wrote...

It was okay. I mostly liked the plot, and receiving more lore or more detail on some lore, but I thought the book was too long, and every character annoyed me. Except Wynne, and *Spoiler Alert* I hate that she died for Evangeline. Bad end.

I agree. Most of those characters got on my nerves. i didn't mind Rhys much but he came across as a moron. disappointed that he didn't just kill Adrian.  Evangeline is such a loser. she had promise and potional at the start of the story when she stopped that idiot Adrian from getting into a fight. she seemed to understand her role as a templar to protect everyone. Sadly Gaider seems to pull the "If they are a likeable Templar then they MUST side with the mages." or something cause then she was just as moronic as Rhys.  She almost got the Thrask treatment, got fooled by a demon, and killed. i hate that Wynne died to save her.

How good a book is shouldn't be judged on whether the characters are "likeable" though. Rhys was the boring trying-to-do-the-right-thing type hero but I'm not convinced Gaider was going for something else. I kept picturing Cassandra when Evangeline's scenes came up for some reason. I really liked Cole. He's complicated and having someone who's basically a demon (god I HOPE it's a demon) in a human skin promises to be all kinds of fun to deal with. Oh and Adrian was the PlotDeviceFriend.

[thats1evildude]

Silfren wrote...

I agree that it was odd to take a character who played a major role in the first game, who had different ending variables, and plop them into a story that requires a specific canon background for her to be in it in the first place, given that, by the ending, she seemed to have a specific purpose for being in the story...SPOILER: since it is by her death that Evangeline is restored to life, how is this supposed to work for DA3 world states in which Wynne died during the events of Origins?  It bugs me because Evangeline and Rhys seem to be written to be major characters for the next game, but Evangeline's existence kind of depends on Wynne's fate.

But if Wynne isn't present, then the story unfolds in a different way and the circumstances that lead to Evangeline being stabbed may never occur. Her absence doesn't affect just that one event, but the whole story.

Who knows? Without Wynne around, maybe Evangeline wins her fight with Lambert, or perhaps Cole kills him. Maybe they never fight at all — perhaps, without Wynne present, the Circle mages successfully hold their vote on separating from the Chantry and then simply fight off Lambert and his Seekers when they come to interrupt the conclave.

Modifié par thats1evildude, 20 juin 2013 - 07:25 .

[Fredward]

Plaintiff wrote...
It's fine to take a while to get into the actual meat of the plot, but you have to have something to secure interest. Generally, I'm willing to give any story a certain amount of time to establish characters and setting before it gets into the nitty-gritty, but I feel that the best stories develop character, setting and plot simultaneously.

Well yeah, but that development shouldn't be done in the first 50 pages (unless you're reading a book of like 250 pages and even then...) you're just asking for flat characters, a dull setting and predictable plot that way. The development should be continuous throughout and yeah good stories often put in hooks early so that the reader wants to read further but not all hooks work for all readers, some people just don't want that kind of story or they miss the point and the failure doesn't lie with the book then.

But anyway. 50 pages is still too short to get to anything really meaningful IMO. Unless it's a short book.

[Firky]

I think one of the most page-turney books I've ever read was The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak.

Pretty much everything you need to know about the narrator is told on the first page.

"First the colors.
Then the humans.
That's usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.

- small snip -

It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away."

So, I just got Asunder off the shelf and, actually, I think "I am the ghost of the spire" is a pretty nice first line.

[Ieldra]

Silfren wrote...
How do you mean that Stolen Throne and Calling were influenced by video game story conventions?  Could you give some concrete examples?

There are three aspects: Pacing, characterization and the little things.

Pacing:
Large parts of "The Calling" read like the novelization of a dungeon crawl. Now, extended dungeon crawls can be great fun in a game, but giving them comparable space in a book is a an excellent recipe for boredom. It appears to me that David Gaider was unaware of that. This effect can be balanced by good character interaction, except that - see below - characterization in "The Calling" wasn't that good either.

Characterization:
In video games, characters are usually created around one central trait, and they don't do and say much unrelated to that - or to plot information - during the game. Often that works because there is a low word budget for every character compared to a book, and there are limited opportunities for characters to reflect on each other because all there is is dialogue. Characters in a book have to be more elaborate - either more complex in their character traits or more varied in fleshing out the dominant traits, or the reader feels like they're getting sledgehammered. Most characters in "The Stolen Throne" and "The Calling" feel simplistic. Even Asunder doesn't avoid this problem completely: after some time, my reaction to Adrian was "Yes, yes, I know this is the fiery passionate one. Now can you please tell me something interesting about her!"
BTW, note how DAO works around this problem by giving some characters two conflicting traits and makes their story about that conflict, as opposed to DA2, which has the greatly simplified types we know from other video games. Also, we can talk with characters about other characters, avoiding the limitation that we only get first-person character information. DAO was really good in characterization.  
 
The Little Things:
When I read the first two chapters of The Stolen Throne (I think it was the first two chapters, it's been a few years), I came across a scene with Loghain and Maric. I thought "This is a civilian setting, we're not at war and nobody's expecting a fight. Why is this guy wearing heavy armor?" This appeared to me as mindlessly using the convention "warriors wear heavy armor" without taking into account that realistically, most warriors would avoid wearing that stuff except if they expect a fight. In a game, the lack of dressing for the occasion is mostly treated as a minor matter (it is most emphatically not a minor matter for me, but that's another story) because there is a need for archetypical visual presentation. In a book, there is no visual presentation, so you can't get away with "little" flaws like this without making it feel jarring.

To get to Asunder again: it completely avoids the pacing issues of the earlier books and has much better characterization. And if there have been some of those "little flaws" I mentioned, I didn't notice them.

[Ieldra]

Foopydoopydoo wrote...
Clearly I have weird standards. But some of the best books I have read (DFW's Infinite Jest, Mieville's Bas-Lag series, Bakker's Second-Apocalypse and Aspect-Emperor series') easily took more than fifty pages to build up the story. And it was totally worth it. Those books were exceptional. Mieville's books often only pick up after half the book is over where dozens of threads suddenly converge to create a bigger picture.

QFT. Bakker's books are among the best fantasy books I've ever read, but they take some time of getting into. Kellhus' "darkness that comes before" question is among my most favorite quotes. Actually, I think DA fans might profit from reading "The Prince of Nothing" - some of the themes complement each other.

[Xilizhra]

Silfren wrote...

Rawgrim wrote...

I liked Asunder very well. I think i gave it a 4 on Goodreads. My biggest gripe with it, though, was that Wynne got killed off. Would have been better if she had dies in a game, and not in an optional addition to the game-setting.

I agree that it was odd to take a character who played a major role in the first game, who had different ending variables, and plop them into a story that requires a specific canon background for her to be in it in the first place, given that, by the ending, she seemed to have a specific purpose for being in the story...SPOILER: since it is by her death that Evangeline is restored to life, how is this supposed to work for DA3 world states in which Wynne died during the events of Origins?  It bugs me because Evangeline and Rhys seem to be written to be major characters for the next game, but Evangeline's existence kind of depends on Wynne's fate. 

Wynne can canonically come back from the dead because of the spirit of faith. It's fairly easy.

[Solas]

I like all the books but Asunder is my favorite. Cole is a really interesting character to me

[Baelyn]

Asunder was incredible in my opinion. Totally captured the same spirit of DA:O with its characters and storyline. Not sure why so much hate for Rhys. I thought he was fantastic. I didn't think he was a moron at all. He defied a boring idealistic character approach at every turn, instead trying to be more objective at every decision, Rather than taking a side (templars or mages) he did what he thought best in each situation, rose above the false dichotomy if you will.

[Shaigunjoe]

Thats good to know. I read the stolen throne way back when it was first released, and I was not very impressed, at all. I think it is the biggest reason why I never really took to the DAO universe, first impressions and all that.

[Ieldra]

Shaigunjoe wrote...
Thats good to know. I read the stolen throne way back when it was first released, and I was not very impressed, at all. I think it is the biggest reason why I never really took to the DAO universe, first impressions and all that.

*chuckles*
It is generally not a good idea to let a book determine your first impression of a world presented mainly through video games. Most books based on video games are crap. "Asunder" is rather an exception.

[Baelyn]

simfamSP wrote...

Baelyn wrote...

Asunder was incredible in my opinion. Totally captured the same spirit of DA:O with its characters and storyline. Not sure why so much hate for Rhys. I thought he was fantastic. I didn't think he was a moron at all. He defied a boring idealistic character approach at every turn, instead trying to be more objective at every decision, Rather than taking a side (templars or mages) he did what he thought best in each situation, rose above the false dichotomy if you will.

There's hate for Rhys?

There is in this thread apparently 

Also, in that interview with Jessica Merizan by r/games, she STRONGLY suggest reading Asunder for more info on DA:I. Which characters would you guys like to see in game if any? My vote would be Cole for sure, quickly followed by Rhys, and by extent Evangeline. I'm wondering how her, ugh, "condition" will affect her (trying not to give anything away) 

[Beerfish]

Baelyn wrote...

Asunder was incredible in my opinion. Totally captured the same spirit of DA:O with its characters and storyline. Not sure why so much hate for Rhys. I thought he was fantastic. I didn't think he was a moron at all. He defied a boring idealistic character approach at every turn, instead trying to be more objective at every decision, Rather than taking a side (templars or mages) he did what he thought best in each situation, rose above the false dichotomy if you will.

Read my list earlier on in this thread why so much hate for Rhys.  He traipses through  the story doing only what he feels is good for him leaving ruin all around him as he goes.  He does it with a chuckle and an air of naivete but in the end he's not too bright and very selfish.

[Lord Gremlin]

I liked all DA Gaider's books but i have to agree Asunder is the best one. That said, I admit that in the end I really, really wanted to murder every single main character.
Which is good if next game allows that.

[Baelyn]

Beerfish wrote...

Baelyn wrote...

Asunder was incredible in my opinion. Totally captured the same spirit of DA:O with its characters and storyline. Not sure why so much hate for Rhys. I thought he was fantastic. I didn't think he was a moron at all. He defied a boring idealistic character approach at every turn, instead trying to be more objective at every decision, Rather than taking a side (templars or mages) he did what he thought best in each situation, rose above the false dichotomy if you will.

Read my list earlier on in this thread why so much hate for Rhys.  He traipses through  the story doing only what he feels is good for him leaving ruin all around him as he goes.  He does it with a chuckle and an air of naivete but in the end he's not too bright and very selfish.

How is he selfish? How is he not bright?

**SPOILERS**

Just because Lambert caught on to what Cole was before Rhys did, means nothing. Lambert was not the one being deceived.  Cole was directly influencing Rhys to manipulate him, it was easy for someone with a bit of knowledge of the matter looking on from the outside to tell what he was.

I beg to differ on him doing what "he feels is good for him." Most the times what he decided to do put himself directly in harmful situations. And he made those choices because they were what he thought was right, not because they were easy.

[Hazegurl]

Foopydoopydoo wrote...

Hazegurl wrote...

Youth4Ever wrote...

It was okay. I mostly liked the plot, and receiving more lore or more detail on some lore, but I thought the book was too long, and every character annoyed me. Except Wynne, and *Spoiler Alert* I hate that she died for Evangeline. Bad end.

I agree. Most of those characters got on my nerves. i didn't mind Rhys much but he came across as a moron. disappointed that he didn't just kill Adrian.  Evangeline is such a loser. she had promise and potional at the start of the story when she stopped that idiot Adrian from getting into a fight. she seemed to understand her role as a templar to protect everyone. Sadly Gaider seems to pull the "If they are a likeable Templar then they MUST side with the mages." or something cause then she was just as moronic as Rhys.  She almost got the Thrask treatment, got fooled by a demon, and killed. i hate that Wynne died to save her.

How good a book is shouldn't be judged on whether the characters are "likeable" though. Rhys was the boring trying-to-do-the-right-thing type hero but I'm not convinced Gaider was going for something else. I kept picturing Cassandra when Evangeline's scenes came up for some reason. I really liked Cole. He's complicated and having someone who's basically a demon (god I HOPE it's a demon) in a human skin promises to be all kinds of fun to deal with. Oh and Adrian was the PlotDeviceFriend.

Not having likable characters can diminish the joy of reading it. Not saying the book was bad but it sucked that the main characters didn't hold my interest. Then Wynne had to die just to keep one of the dullest characters alive.

[Sylvianus]

Hazegurl wrote...

Not having likable characters can diminish the joy of reading it. Not saying the book was bad but it sucked that the main characters didn't hold my interest. Then Wynne had to die just to keep one of the dullest characters alive.

+1

[Baelyn]

Sylvianus wrote...

Hazegurl wrote...

Not having likable characters can diminish the joy of reading it. Not saying the book was bad but it sucked that the main characters didn't hold my interest. Then Wynne had to die just to keep one of the dullest characters alive.

+1

I guess I'm just weird but I rather enjoyed Cole, Rhys and Evangeline. Adrian...now thats another story.

SPOILERS!!
Ironically one of my favorite characters turned out to be Lambert. Shame what happened to him in the end, as I was looking forward to my Inquisitor being the one to off him. 

[lil yonce]

Baelyn wrote...

Just because Lambert caught on to what Cole was before Rhys did, means nothing.

It means a lot. He was schooled in his area of expertise by a Seeker. It demonstrates exactly how foolish and careless he was. Rhys should have known as a Senior Enchanter-- a spirit medium with a specialization in demonology-- what he was dealing with, and he should have considered his actions in involving himself with a spirit without approval. He had opportunity to explain himself early on and he and blew it.

I beg to differ on him doing what "he feels is good for him." Most the times what he decided to do put himself directly in harmful situations. And he made those choices because they were what he thought was right, not because they were easy.

And what he thought was right could very well be wrong and turn out extremely bad for many mages. He made decisions out of passion moreso than reason. That is doing what feels good for you in the end.

[Xilizhra]

And what he thought was right could very well be wrong and turn out extremely bad for many mages. He made decisions out of passion moreso than reason. That is doing what feels good for you in the end.

Well, Cole killed Lambert; that's worth a heck of a lot. And Rhys definitely made the right choice in the end, if nothing else.