Narcissus in Chains is where I started really getting irritated with the LKH books.

Also, no chains.

Hoping my Buffista beta readers will kick my ass hard if/when I show signs of going bad.

Be nice to them! I'm thinking Hamilton must've pissed off her editors pretty bad for them to be allowing such drivel get published. ;-) But really, the first six books were great, the seventh was pretty good, and it just went downhill from there until Narcissus in Chains just made me give up on her hardcovers forevermore.

See, the thing I've been finding more and more with series fiction - or, to be fair, not finding so much as the penny dropping - is that series writers seem to start off with the Big! Grab-em! Book! and then do an Eddie Izzard: slowly collapse in on themselves like a flan in a cupboard.

I mean, I loved Martha Grimes when she first started out. By book four, I was going huh, wait, no, what's she doing, and by book seven she'd taken a hard turn down a weird road. She lost me, alas. And Charlotte McLeod did the same thing for a bit with the Sarah Kelling/Max Bittersohn series, set in Boston - I never go back to the more recent ones, but I cherish the first books.

I've been trying to do just the opposite with the MM&G series; I started off light in "Weaver" and the ghosts and crimes get more intense as the books go along. But I don't want to to screw it up.

I think a lot of the series writers don't understand two concepts - the characters need to grow/change and when they grow and change the relationship to the beginning character should be seeable. . I really liked the character in LKH' s series. - not identifiy, but she rang True. But It seemed to that she had to cross a line in evrybook. There don't seem to be anymore lines, so the books are boreing. I think Jill Churchill is an esample of one series done right. Her mysterries are light ,fun, and kinda like potato chips. You know they aren't doing you any good, but every now and again- they taste really good. Her sleuth - Jane Jaffery doesn't change much, but nor does she do anything wildly out of charactor or go around jumping across the grand canyon so that the character in the first book is so different from the last book. The changes in her are pretty much what you would expect of a widowed woman with three children ( one is in college now) - that gets invovled in a number of domestic mysteries. she has grown more confident and somewhat more ambitious, but she is still worried about what is going to be for dinner. VI Washorski - at the beginning I loved her fiestiness and her independence. The last two I read I was very pissed off at her , because after 10 other times learning she needed to be more honest and more careful with her friends - she forgot .

Really, I have no opinion on this subject.

Really, I have no opinion on this subject.

(loving beth)

msbelle, I had trouble with Middlesex too but I forced myself to finish it because I felt like I had invested so much time and effort into it, so I wanted to know how it all turned out. But it wasn't the enjoyable, engaging read I expected.

OK, I got a stack of Bujold books yesterday. I'd started on Mirror Dance but I'm doing the amazing thing of putting it down and trying to go back and read in order. I'm having to skip a bit anyway, since my husband took Borders with him to work, bitching constantly about how moronic and juvenile the books are.

Dude needs to get his T. Rex under control.

I liked the first Anita Blake book, but it didn't take me 7 books to give up. More like 4 or 5, and I'd already bought them all and loaded them on my PDA for a long plane flight. At least on a PDA no one can see what you are reading - I did feel like washing my hands, my PDA, and maybe wiping its memory a few times.

Of course, I gave up on Anne Rice 20 pages in to The Vampire Lestat. I've taken a running jump at some of her other books, including the Sleeping Beauty ones, but I just can make myself read them.

Anne Rice gossip: a friend of mine used to teach with her, and said that her given name at birth was George. WTF?

I think a lot of the series writers don't understand two concepts - the characters need to grow/change and when they grow and change the relationship to the beginning character should be seeable.

Anne Rice has this problem, too. In fact, I think Anita Blake's characters are recognizable as the same characters who started out in book 1, but I sure don't feel that way about Rice's characters.

I really liked the character in LKH' s series. - not identifiy, but she rang True. But It seemed to that she had to cross a line in evrybook. There don't seem to be anymore lines, so the books are boreing

I agree with you. And then when she started the Gentry books, she just made an elven Anita who didn't have the lines Anita had to find and cross, so she just fucked and got more and more powers.

If I ever finish this succubus book, please kill me if my character acquires a new power every other chapter. I mean, what's the point? If there's no weakness, then there's no conflict, right? And that's where the Anita books have gone wrong: there's no moral quandry anymore about killing or sex, or her love triangle. And there's no actual PLOT anymore -- when's the last time she had an actual CASE?

I always thought that a series that becomes boring often suffers from an author who started out crafting the first novel with great love and enthusiasm and ended up making a lot of money. Then author becomes distracted by the pleasures of wealth and devolves into ho-hum, crank out another one on schedule, I'm so important, pass me a scone.

edited, in an attempt at grammaticalness