The first two things I had that feeling about were Silver on the Tree and The Courts of Chaos... most recently I had it with the new Kirsteins.
There's this weird thing with pacing, with a series, because as a reader there are these huge gaps between volumes in which you re-read. And, for me, into that re-reading comes thinking about what happens next, and sometimes that becomes thinking what ought to be the shape of what happens next -- and that's bad, because if the author has thought of something else, then it will at least initially disappoint me. (This is, incidentally, why I don't go to fragments of novel readings at conventions. If I've heard chapter one, my brain will fill in the shape around it, and then when I get the real book, it won't fit that.)
The worst case of this ever was Sylvia Engdahl's Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. In this case, it wasn't Engdahl's fault that I had a twenty-five year gap between reading the first book and the sequels -- the first one was published in Britain and the others weren't, I couldn't even ILL them. But because Heritage of the Star/This Star Shall Abide was Puffin, it had an author bio with names of other books, and the name of Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains was there, and, even better, (worse) I knew what that meant, because it's a line from something in the book. I re-read the first book a million times between the ages of eight and thirty-five, and my Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains was about the wonderful culmination and success of the project... no book could have lived up to that, and the real BtTM was a very strange experience.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-11-20 05:25 am (UTC)There's this weird thing with pacing, with a series, because as a reader there are these huge gaps between volumes in which you re-read. And, for me, into that re-reading comes thinking about what happens next, and sometimes that becomes thinking what ought to be the shape of what happens next -- and that's bad, because if the author has thought of something else, then it will at least initially disappoint me. (This is, incidentally, why I don't go to fragments of novel readings at conventions. If I've heard chapter one, my brain will fill in the shape around it, and then when I get the real book, it won't fit that.)
The worst case of this ever was Sylvia Engdahl's Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. In this case, it wasn't Engdahl's fault that I had a twenty-five year gap between reading the first book and the sequels -- the first one was published in Britain and the others weren't, I couldn't even ILL them. But because Heritage of the Star/This Star Shall Abide was Puffin, it had an author bio with names of other books, and the name of Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains was there, and, even better, (worse) I knew what that meant, because it's a line from something in the book. I re-read the first book a million times between the ages of eight and thirty-five, and my Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains was about the wonderful culmination and success of the project... no book could have lived up to that, and the real BtTM was a very strange experience.