The Sword and Laser discussion
What Else Are You Reading?
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Do you Lem? If so, why?
I lem things for various reasons. Boredom, bad writing, bad plotting, bad characterization, sometimes a book just isn't working for me so I'll lem it only to go back to it at a later date and love it. My most recent lem was Neuromancer. I didn't like Gibson's writing style so I quit. As far as I'm concerned, if you're not enjoying a book, lemming is a perfectly valid option.
If something is upsetting me terribly or it’s such a slog it’s interfering in other reading or making me avoid reading I lem. And I learned that the hard way earlier this year when I tried to give Classics Bingo my all. I have never hated a book more than The Three Musketeers, it’s nothing like the movies. It’s Get Rich and Die Trying wrapped in Semper Fi. They are the worst people and I could go on and on and on and i “had to” read bits daily on serial reader with the group... I quit half way when I was sure they weren’t all going to die long slow brutal humiliating deaths. It was awful to feel so angry every single day over a book.
I practically never abandon books. Last one I think was The Eye of the World about 5 years ago. Series, though? I abandon them often after the first book. I probably read 5 "book ones" for every book two i follow up with.Obviously it's fine if you don't want to keep reading a book, but I think there's kind of a weird culture around here of celebrating abandoning books though? There's even a cutesy name for abandoning a read and people seem to love pointing out that they've done it whenever they have a chance.
Sometimes, but rarely. That's mostly because I don't read things out of obligation (for example, I don't real all of the choices here just because they're choices) and I avoid subgenres that I don't like (zombies, post-apoc fiction, most grimdark). Of the stuff I do lem some of it is because I dislike it and will never come back but some is in the broad "this is OK but I'm not in the mood for this right now" bucket. For example, if I want to read straightforward, whizzy SF I'm not going to want to read a complex, literary fantasy. I might come back to it later, though.
Oh, another reason why... sometimes I'll hit a point when the author just very obviously does something to move the novel in a particular direction - the most egregious example was a novel where the protagonist was an educated, accomplished lawyer. Well off, rising star, all that. She comes under physical threat and decides to pull out a gun that she owned... and starts field-stripping it and cleaning it like a pro... this was 150 pages in and NOTHING had been said about her having any previous experience with guns - no "used to shoot with my dad as a kid", "was in the military", nothing. So, all of a sudden you have this 30-something high powered lawyer acting like Jason Bourne. That book literally hit the wall in the room I was in. But yeah, in general, the author overtly manipulating things in the book without making them credible is a turnoff and instant lem for me.
What does lem stand for? I learned it means abandoned here at Sword & Laser. I just called it DNF and have a folder that reminds me.
Lena wrote: "What does lem stand for? I learned it means abandoned here at Sword & Laser. I just called it DNF and have a folder that reminds me."As I remember, it came about after Veronica didn't finish Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanisław Lem. Since then, not finishing a book has been known as lemming it from the author's last name.
Yes, because life is short and I'd rather spend my time reading books I enjoy. If I don't enjoy what I'm reading I'll drop it and find something else. Forcing yourself to finish a book is just weird to me. Why torture yourself?
Oooh thanks Shad. Serious insider stuff lemming.
Yeah. I don't do it often. It has to be something I find no merit in. If I hate everything about it at that point, I don't continue.
Shad wrote: "Lena wrote: "What does lem stand for? I learned it means abandoned here at Sword & Laser. I just called it DNF and have a folder that reminds me."As I remember, it came about after Veronica didn't..."
Many thanks! I had been wondering that as well, and never plucked up the courage to ask!
Lena wrote: "Oooh thanks Shad. Serious insider stuff lemming."It’s funny you say that (and apologies for not including any explanation of the term in the opening post). I’m quite new here myself but by pure coincidence one of the very first S&L podcasts I listened to mentioned the term. I’ll edit the post to be more inclusive.
Mod
Re: Lemming definition.
If you ever need to know anything Sword and Laser. We do have an AMAZING S&L Wiki with everything you need to know about our book club.
It is maintained by a small band of contributors. Mainly me, Sean Sandaluk and Mark (mmtz)
There are over 140 pages of content.
- A page for every book we've read.
- A list of every author (and non-author) interviewed on the show.
- Episode guides
- Statistics
- and so much more.
Main Page (with links to all the sections)
Glossary of terms which includes Lem
In theory I'm all for abandoning books that you're not enjoying, but in practice I've only done it once recently - when we read Helliconia Spring a couple of months ago. It's the first I've abandoned since I started actively tracking all my reads on the website. I had to create a new shelf for it specially.Maybe this means I'm not daring enough in my reading selections - playing it too safe?
Follow up question: If you Lem a book do you still give it a rating? I choose not to, but wonder what everyone else thinks.
Colin wrote: "Follow up question: If you Lem a book do you still give it a rating? I choose not to, but wonder what everyone else thinks."I do, if it has so many issues that the writing gets in the way of my ability to read the work, or if there are so many things I actively can't tolerate that there's no possible way my mood or interpretation of one-off elements could be so off-base (ex. I rated one book at 15% because I hated the characters, put it down for a year, tried again and was so angry with the first paragraph of the next chapter that I knew this wouldn't work) or if I'm more than 50% done. If I just don't like it, and am less than 50% done when I give up, I say why but don't rate.
Colin wrote: "Follow up question: If you Lem a book do you still give it a rating? I choose not to, but wonder what everyone else thinks."If I find a book to be so bad, or boring, or cliched that I can't finish it then it's an automatic 1 star.
Colin wrote: "Follow up question: If you Lem a book do you still give it a rating? I choose not to, but wonder what everyone else thinks."I am trying to follow the following rules (with only partial success)
1) If I don't read beyond 10% (Kindle free sample) then I should not publish an opinion - rating or review - I don't have the knowledge to back it up.
2) If I can't bother to review, then I should be reluctant to rate - particularly on Goodreads, with only a five-star range. People coming across my rating would not know what the rating was based on.
3) One day I may publish a simple listing of my 'Abandoned Samples' and 'DNF' shelves (they don't appear on Goodreads at present). Just the list, I am not entitled to say more, under rule 1.
Anyone want to comment?
I used to not abandon books when I was younger (one time I was forced to abandon a Terry Brooks novel but only because I took too long reading it and I had to return it to the library). I regret not quitting books earlier, though--Poul Anderson's Genesis was not worth it for me, heh.I still abandon books now, but not at a very high rate (I do a fair amount of research into books I want to read).
Looking at some of my most recent abandonments, it looks like I quit Will Eisner's "The Best of The Spirit" because I didn't like the artwork and the storytelling was too old school for me. I quit Nisi Shawl's "Everfair" because I felt like it was more vignettes than an actual plot, and I didn't feel like there was much there, despite the interesting premise. I quit China Mieville's "This Census-Taker" because it was pretty obtuse and I didn't feel like it was going anywhere.
I've also quite books if I feel that I'm just not in the mood for them at that point in time. For instance, I quit The Fall of Hyperion but I could see myself making another run at it.
One book I quit for an unusual (for me) reason was "The World Before Us" by Aislinn Hunter--I quit it because I didn't like that it was apparently being told in first-person plural. *shrugs*
I only very rarely lem a book; maybe one every few years. The last one was 1Q84. I hate to give up in case something gets better but if it starts to drag on and it's a longish book then I might feel I'm missing better things. If it's a relatively short book I'll usually just motor through.I do rate books I've lemmed because I'm usually 1/3 to 1/2 done by the time I've given up and I do have to have a pretty strong opinion of it to trash it at that point.
I do sometimes skim through parts of nonfiction books that I'm finding tedious.
Almost never. I lemmed "Eldest" because it was painful to read, and gave up Harry Turtledove's "In the Balance" series because it was too implausible, but I usually soldier on through a book even if I don't like it. There's always potential to be surprised and pleased with the end or at least something further in, or for the things not working to iron themselves out, so I try not to quit. I know how it feels if someone lems mine, so I try not to do the same to others.
Colin wrote: "Follow up question: If you Lem a book do you still give it a rating? I choose not to, but wonder what everyone else thinks."No. I might review it and say something along the lines of "I didn't finish this because (reasons) so if that kind of thing bothers you, I dont recommend. If not, (further thoughts...)"
I don't often lem, but I have in the past and I will in the future. I have sometimes lemmed with extreme prejudice, but it has to be egregious writing for that.I, too, have abandoned series -- most of them, in fact -- and was also a completist in my younger days. I remember my first DNF, which left me feeling guilty at first, then I realized that was dumb. After that I felt free. Free!
Trike wrote: "I remember my first DNF, which left me feeling guilty at first, then I realized that was dumb. After that I felt free. Free!"Yup, haha
Never with audio books, occasionally with print books. Last book I remember lemming was Among Others by Jo Walton. It was a book of the month selection here. I only made it about 1/3 of the way through. It was soooooo boring.
Nearly lemmed my first audio book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman a while back. Despite being only about 9 hrs long it bored me to death and Gaiman's narration (he narrated his own book) was sooooo sleeeeepy. Took me weeks to struggle through 9 hrs whereas I'll normally churn out a 9 hr book in 2-3 days (I spend a lot of time in the car at work where I do my listening but I found radio preferable to this snooze fest).
Generally, if I make it past the first couple of chapters I keep going. I'm great at dropping a book within those first few pages - I know I'm a mood-driven reader, so if something's not grabbing me I drop it early and try something else. (This is a big part of why I often don't comment at all on a group pick.) I will most likely try that book again though at a different time.Now, since I'm pretty ruthless right off the bat, I rarely have to lem a book in the middle. Because if a book grabs me with something - could be a character or the plot or the setting - then I'll overlook a lot of small issues with the writing itself.
I did just lem a book yesterday - A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It sounded fun and quirky - I found it tiresome and trying too hard - ridiculous but not in a way I find fun to read. I thought I might get accustomed to the style, but nope. So, down it goes at 34%. I grabbed a little Regency romance to read instead and I'm already at 40%. Much better.
Colin wrote: "Follow up question: If you Lem a book do you still give it a rating? I choose not to, but wonder what everyone else thinks."It depends on the book. If I feel that the book is bad because of writing, plotting, or technical issues, I'll rate it. If it's more me and the book not working for my tastes, I won't rate the book.
I abandon books all the time. Life is too short to read books I'm not enjoying. I do rate books I haven't finished. Partly because I need to remember WHY I abandoned that book so I don't come back to it after I've forgotten it and partly because it's honest. I didn't like it enough to finish it so clearly something didn't work for me.
I lem books that feel poorly written to me. There are other books that I drift away from for many different reasons, but sometimes I'll come back to them and finish reading. Not quite lemming.
I used to always try to finish books but lately I've been lemming more often. At first I felt kind of guilty about it, but then last year I made a list of the most important books I really want to read this year. I finished some of them and some have carried over to this year's list. So I got to thinking, why am I wasting time on a book I'm not enjoying when I have books waiting on my To Read list?
Something I've noticed is that a lot of recent books seem to be very long - 500+ pgs . Is this a current trend or is it just my dumb luck picking long books?
Thank you for the links Tassie Dave - you do good work!So much love/hate in the terms link for The Magicians! I have not read that but I just finished An Unkindness of Magicians and found it highly entertaining, like a vicious magical version of Gossip Girl meets Omelas. I might try Magicians next year.
Alan wrote: "1) If I don't read beyond 10% (Kindle free sample) then I should not publish an opinion - rating or review - I don't have the knowledge to back it up."There are books you can read one page of and know the writing is so bad it's not worth continuing. That's plenty enough to give an opinion on.
Alan wrote: "2) If I can't bother to review, then I should be reluctant to rate - particularly on Goodreads, with only a five-star range. People coming across my rating would not know what the rating was based on."
I rate for my benefit, not for others. I am not concerned with others not knowing what my rating was based on. GR started primarily as a book cataloguing site and that is still my main use for it. To keep track of the books I've read and how I rated them.
Tina wrote: "Something I've noticed is that a lot of recent books seem to be very long - 500+ pgs . Is this a current trend or is it just my dumb luck picking long books? "I mentioned this a couple years ago, but I don't think many people have noticed. Possibly because they don't read the classics as much nor have as long a history with reading books as some of us oldsters.
By the mid-90s we were already into gargantuan books and the preference for series over standalones was already well entrenched, so anyone who came of age during the Harry Potter/Game of Thrones era was already accustomed to much longer works.
To be sure, there have always been popular books which were in excess of 400 pages, such as Moby-Dick or Doctor Zhivago, but it seems to me that the *average* book length has increased tremendously over the past century.
My internal measurement for "average length novel" has always been set around 250 pages, which is where most classics fall, especially SFF books. Although someone pointed out that word count is abetter measurement than page count, since typeface has a real impact on book size.
So far my lems fall in two categories:1) Books I started but put aside for a variety of reasons - too little time, or a library hold coming in and taking preference, or not in the mood to continue right now, or having a dozen other reads on the go at the same time. Those tend to stay in my "currently reading" folder for weeks and weeks and weeks, until I clean up and "officially" lem them. But I fully plan to get back to them at some later point.
2) I get pissed off with the author and won't finish it, EVER. This happens when someone blatantly lies to look better than they are in a memoir, or actively promotes values I abhor. In one case, the book turned out to be a novelised advertising campaign for a woman whom I personally believe to be a charlatan, in another case I was sold a "bestselling" novel that turned out to be written by someone who would barely pass a middle school writing essay. Those I won't touch again with a barge pole.
Kim wrote: "There are books you can read one page of and know the writing is so bad it's not worth continuing. That's plenty enough to give an opinion on. ..."
I'm curious - do those of you who lem books because it has bad writing (truly bad, not just in a style you dislike and yes, those are different things) find these books because you read a lot of self-pubbed stuff? Or that you try a lot of things without vetting the author first?
I think the reason I don't lem much is that I pre-filter - I rarely read self-published books (as in basically never) and I avoid subgeneres that I don't like.
Mod
So much love/hate in the terms link for The Magicians!."
That is more a product of when those terms were added, than an indictment on The Magicians.
There have been many polarising books before and since.
Well, the worst writing I ever encountered was self-pubbed, so I get what you mean. Worst case scenario, nobody checks anything before it gets thrown out there. But I don't pay much attention to the publisher at all if the cover looks decent and the blurb sounds good. I have read some truly brilliant stuff and found out later it was self-pubbed, so it's not all bad.
I do stay clear of badly advertised self-pubbersm though. A picture of a badly photographed sunrise with Comic Sans Title and Flowery Script Author Name in wild colours and off-centre will make me give it an auto-pass, no matter how good the writing might be. Why? Because it tells me the author has put it together themselves, and didn't bother to invest in a professional looking cover. Which means they most likely edited the manuscript themselves as well and didn't get an editor (who costs much more than a decent cover). If the blurb reads "A mix of Hemingway and Tolstoy, don't miss this riveting novel!" instead of giving me a clue what the story is about, it has no chance in hell to get touched by me.
But as I said in the beginning of my post, I have read brilliant self-pubbers who did have good covers and interesting blurbs, and could have passed as trads.
Rick wrote: "I think the reason I don't lem much is that I pre-filter - I rarely read self-published books (as in basically never)"Same here. I feel like if a book is half-decent it'll get a real publisher eventually and I can read it at that point. I have no desire to accept the low hit-rate that comes with self-published books in order to "get in on the ground floor." Editors are not optional.
Brendan wrote: "I have no desire to accept the low hit-rate that comes with self-published books in order to "get in on the ground floor." Editors are not optional...."Yeah, but I know that there are people who by a lot of self-pubbed stuff rather indiscriminately because it's cheap and the get a lot of reading in whatever genre they like. I can see that resulting in a fairly low hit rate and bad writing (and hence lemming because of bad writing).
On the other hand, I rarely see truly bad writing in a trad pubbed book. Not that it's all sparkling prose but it's usually technically competent at least and to me bad writing is more about that, than about whether I like the prose style.
As Kat notes, though, some self-pubbed stuff can be quite good. I've run across a few like that in the last year but even those I filtered into my reading based on things like starred Kirkus reviews, etc.
I feel no guilt in not finishing a book. There is already not enough time to read everything I would like to. I also feel no guilt at rating a book I didn’t finish. I obviously have feelings about it, so why not share them? The one thing I tend to waffle on is if it’s okay to change a rating after a reread. That one keeps me up at night.
" I also feel no guilt at rating a book I didn’t finish. I obviously have feelings about it, so why not share them?"Well.. because you didn't read the book. Now, if you read 70% of it? fine. But if you lem a book 20 pages in, you can't really say much about the quality of the entire book, can you?
If the quality of those first twenty pages was so bad that I stopped reading, then that says something about the book and not subjecting myself to a few hundred more does not invalidate my opinion of the work.
Trike wrote: "Tina wrote: "Something I've noticed is that a lot of recent books seem to be very long - 500+ pgs . Is this a current trend or is it just my dumb luck picking long books? "I mentioned this a coup..."
I wonder if SF&F novels used to be so much shorter, on average, partly because they were usually serialized in magazines first before being published in book form.
Also the perceived audience for SF used to be teenaged boys who wanted quick, exciting, adventure stories.
Maybe. I'm hoping someone will take a deep dive into this some day and give us a definitive answer.I know that books as diverse as Emma and The Last of the Mohicans and For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Two Towers and Dune are all roughly the same word count, yet any one of those books is only 1/2 the length of the longest Harry Potter or 1/3 the longest Game of Thrones novels. (The entirety of Lord of the Rings is just a little bit longer than A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in Martin's series.)
Thanks for all the responses to my initial question folks, this sparked off loads of great discussion!If you're interested, I've written a blog post on this topic summarising some of what we've said here.
https://ruthdehaas.wordpress.com/2017...
[if links to personal blogs are against forum etiquette let me know and I'll take it down]
Dont confuse length for quality. There are plenty of long books that are full of filler chapters, esp in fantasy where there seems to be a contingent of readers who simply want to revisit a world and spend time there (what I think of as fantasy tourism). Christopher - if any appreciable number of the books you read are really that bad, you probably need to filter choices more. Curious - are these usually self-pubbed?
Rick wrote: "Dont confuse length for quality. There are plenty of long books that are full of filler chapters, esp in fantasy where there seems to be a contingent of readers who simply want to revisit a world a..."I generally view longer books as full of filler, based on experience. I think long books are rarely examples of efficient storytelling. Moby Dick has all kinds of extraneous non-story stuff in it, such as an entire chapter on rope. Neal Stephenson does that sort of thing every time. Now, whether one considers that quality is a personal choice. Dickens makes me grind my teeth because he overexplains and overdescribes everything, but I'd guess I'm in the minority on that.
That’s the mind wander part of the audiobook, chapter on rope.
Phil wrote: "Trike wrote: "Tina wrote: "Something I've noticed is that a lot of recent books seem to be very long - 500+ pgs . Is this a current trend or is it just my dumb luck picking long books? "I mention..."
My own theory is that the increase in average book length increased with the rise of the word processor, which meant that authors no longer had to worry about actually physically typing their entire manuscript multiple times as they made drafts & revisions.
Joseph - IIRC, it also had something to do with book binding technology improving so that publishers could put out large mass market format paperbacks without making the type ridiculously small. Charlie Stross wrote about this a few years ago here - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...Trike - I really like Harry Connolly's "The Way" trilogy which, aside from being a really good story that's well-written, was deliberately written to avoid any and all fantasy tourism. There's no fluff chapters at all, everything moves the story forward.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/1141...
The Sword and Laser
Books mentioned in this topic
Spook Country (other topics)1Q84 (other topics)
The Illuminatus! Trilogy (other topics)
Atlas Shrugged (other topics)
Assassin's Quest (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Brandon Sanderson (other topics)Kameron Hurley (other topics)
Daniel O'Malley (other topics)
Henri Charrière (other topics)
Stanisław Lem (other topics)
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My reasons for Lemming something vary (too much physics was one recent reason, for The Clockwork Rocket ) and I also dislike anything too rapey, but the most common is that I’m simply bored.
So I’m curious... do you Lem if you’re not enjoying something, or are you completist? And what are the things which make you nope out?