I got the Vampire Accountant book on Kindle and read it. It's fun. A bit episodic, but that makes it easier to read in chunks. I definitely recommend it for light reading.
Read that one, too, I'd say it is at best as good as Sword Diplomacy, the character starts off interesting, but the episodic format leaves much to be desired, there were bits and pieces of politically correct crap like the OP girfriend and there was too much modern nonsense and hypster stuff piled in on top of the thing.
It was nowhere near as bad as Jake, and at best maybe as good as Sword Diplomacy.
We've gotten off to a bit of a rocky start and I'm of the opinion it was a mistake to go for recently written books instead of things that have held up a few years and shown some legs. I intend to nominate a few oldies for a while and see if that gets better results.
This happens, and I would agree with you that maybe we should focus on older stuff with less modern garbage thrown in it, like the desire to produce infinite numbers of doorstops, excessive pandering, overly-quirky and forced dialogue, social media pandering/written by committee feel and above all, no decent editing to begin with.
In general, I agree with your assessment, Sword Diplomacy had nothing particularly wrong or offensive and was decently written but, ultimately, it was mostly stock characters and stock plots. I think the author spent too much time on TV Tropes and tried to incorporate their "wisdom" into his writing, which is a trap many modern authors fall into. TV Tropes is literally the worst thing you can use as a guide because the stuff that they call a trope is what everybody else calls a stereotype/cliche. Hey look! There's a trope about a ferris wheel malfunctioning and the hero saving the day! Clearly putting this in will make my superhero story original and riveting because there hasn't been fifteen thousand ferris wheel saves that were the reason it got put on the site in the first place!
More like social media but I agree.
It was not great, not terrible, either.
If it's in TV Tropes, it's because it's already been done to death, otherwise they wouldn't decide it was a trope. Further TV Tropes generally fails to explain why and how a trope works, so you wind up only using a superficial appearance rather the substance of storytelling. F'rex they have a trope that's entirely "The character uses a whip." TV Tropes says that women using whips are usually clad in leather, and guys are generally officers or evil ringmasters. Okay, how does that influence your storytelling? What is the symbolism of the whip, how does the imagery of a whip make a character distinct from one with an axe? They got nothing, and also no explanation for why Simon Belmont and Indiana Jones are going around with whips because they're looking purely at the appearance of it and don't understand the deeper symbolism involved.
If you're wondering, whips are associated with speed and agility. Any hero with a whip will always be a fast bugger who relies on finesse instead of brute strength. Whips are also associated with acrobatics, with grabbing things at range and with swinging around, further emphasizing the speed and flexibility of a character compared with other weapons. Due to the association with speed, whips are always used by impetuous and/or reckless characters. Depending on the writing, either this will turn out to be a fatal flaw (many villains with whips foolishly antagonize something much stronger and tougher than they are in a fit of rage, and their speed avails them not) or a big advantage in the case of a hero who makes up his plans as he goes and is more flexible than other, less whip-using villains who can't adapt to the whip-wielding hero's speedy changes in tactics. Simon Belmont and Indiana Jones both use whips because they are fast, agile, and up against enemies far stronger than they are that have to be outmaneuvered and outwitted rather than met by brute force, so the symbolism works for them in spite of TV Trope's superficial understanding of whips.
Ahem, maybe the whip and the leather can be there for the fan service effect.
To be honest, most new books have been a huge disappointment to me, too, but I don't share your pessimism, the first books were entertaining to the majority, and we had fun talking about them, dissecting them and lampooning them.
Not great, not terrible, either.
If you wish we can put in a theme or a prerequisite for each month, like no Social media age books being nominated or only works by
SF&F Grand Masters ?
The thing is that a lot of us have read the classics and we want new content, and most of the new content is shit.[/QUOTE]
