Does anyone here still read? No, video game text, comic books, or your screen at work doesn’t count. Nor do audio books. I’m talking about going to the book store, perusing your genre of choice, and being like, “This sounds good,” and taking it home. For me, that genre would have been fantasy, of course. 

I haven’t done that in what feels like 10 years, and it has probably literally been that long, if not longer. I fell out of place with reading. I think gamers like us tend to get so absorbed with our more media-driven hobbies that sitting down with a book just falls so far down the priority chain that it rarely ever happens. Add this to the fact that we aren’t the most socially driven sub-culture in human history, and you generally could go your entire life without talking to another game about what (if) they read. 

So you head to the bookstore by yourself. You figure, no problem. I’ll just go pick something up. But when you get there, and THIS is what you see, (not the two books, but the rows upon rows of books) the intimidation factor kind of takes over.

The entire face of the fantasy genre has changed. There are entirely new series’ that span multiple trilogies, games like Warcraft and Halo have their own expanded universes, and the Dragonlance books have exploded into an entire shelf worthy of being called “the RPG” shelf, where they can also dump the game strategy guides and D&D campaigns. 

So being a blog writer, I’m probably supposed to have the answer. I should be able to tell ya’ll, this is how you spot a good series, or this author is the bee’s knees, pick up his book today. But the last book I read was Christopher Paolini’s Eragon. And if you want my opinion on that… Well that’s another blog altogether. The two word review: It sucked. 

Hence the other problem. If you’ve been out of reading for so long, your tastes change. I’ve tried to get back into Dragonlance. But now I find that those books lack the maturity to keep me interested. Eragon suffered from the same problem. And people who actually CAN recommend good fantasy series’ are few and far between. It feels like an even more subjective market than regular reading, because once you take a dive into a series, if you can even find the first book, you’re in for the long haul. That seems to be a fantasy author’s end goal these days – suck someone into a world and keep them there for as long as he/she can keep the characters interesting. Makes you miss Tolkien. 

So without any further hemming and hawing about how lame the situation is, I’m gonna open this one up to you, the reader. (However few there are.) What do you read? Why do you read it? And for the love of god, do you know of any fantasy books better than Eragon? 

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Scott Strichart, stuff. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.