SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
Group Reads Discussions 2010
>
"Furies of Calderon" Writing Style: Third person vs first person (Dresden files) ** possible spoilers**
date
newest »
newest »
I've read all of the Dresden novels and only one of the Furies series, so I recognize that my opinion is only partially an informed one. Certainly it's true that Dresden gets better after the first few books and someone made a comment to that effect about this series too, though I can't speak to that. For my part, I felt that Butcher handled the urban fantasy, first-person tone far better better than he handled the epic tone. He notes in an afterward attached to many of the later Dresden books that he spent years trying to write epic fantasy after he fell in love with Tolkien, and none of it worked, and it wasn't until a teacher suggested a contemporary setting for his work that he wrote something saleable. I think that's relevant here. Whether it's an issue of POV or a matter of the style appropriate to the different sub-genres of fantasy, it seemed to me that Butcher is one of the better urban fantasy writers (admittedly, I haven't read a ton of other stuff in the genre, but Butcher's been better than what I have read there) but a fairly average writer of epic fantasy or high fantasy or what have you. Not bad, but nowhere near the top of the field.
I don't think the book was WOWing at least to my standards. I do have to say that I think his writing style was a lot better then what people were giving him credit for. There was a lot of "oh it gets way better" "Oh Dresden was better". I think it's like comparing apples and oranges because it was epic fantasy in third person as opposed to first person urban fantasy. I love Epic fantasy but really have a hard time pushing through on the urban fantasy part.
So at least that's why I thought it was better. I did notice there were lengthy paragraphs in areas or it seemed to be babble because he couldn't catch the wording.
The internal dialoge got to me occasionally too. "Oh what should I do." It's like just tell me what they do but beyond that I thought it was a decent effort.
I prefer the third person style over first person as a general rule. I'm the odd man out here, actually, since I've only read one Dresden novel (the first one). Urban fantasy, with Harry, can be fun, but not something I go out of my way to read. I struggled with the first half of the book because I kept thinking to myself this felt like YA fantasy. Now, about 70% of the way through, and the choices, consequences and predicaments are decidedly more mature.
I prefer his writing style in the dresden files. I think it flows better. One thing that has alway bugged me about Jim Butcher's writing style is that his word choice tends to get REALLY repetitive.
Word choice gets repetitive? Heck, although I agree about Dresden flowing better, there are times when it looks like he just copied and pasted descriptions from one book to the next. Not so much in the most recent volumes, but he was doing it for quite a while there.
IV READ ALL THE FURIES BOOKS AND ENJOYED EVERYONE. HAVNT READ ANY DRESDEN FILES. ARE THEY ANY GOOD? I CAUGHT AN EPISODE OF THE TV SERIES AND DIDNT THINK IT WAS GREAT.
Never scene the series. I thought the Dresden Files was definitely better that the Furies.
Joey wrote: "I prefer his writing style in the dresden files. I think it flows better. One thing that has alway bugged me about Jim Butcher's writing style is that his word choice tends to get REALLY repetitive."He has nothing on the dreck Stephanie Meyer tries to pass off as "writing".
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
While I've never read the Dresden files (its on my TBR list), I did seem to notice that Butcher tended to struggle at times with staying completely in third person. There were times where it could go to internal dialog or result to an awkward phrase such as "looking back on it he didn't remember doing this". While I enjoy those phrases in storytelling, in the book it almost took away the suspense because if Tavi is looking back on his events years later he obviously lives a lot longer. I think this is a habit of making the first person transition to the third person.