Your Humble Blogger has written before about shopping for airplane books; the most recent trip involved the purchase of Storm Front. I hadn’t read any of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, and they are, you know, popular and bathtub-ready, so I figured it was worth a try. There’s this about reading your first taste of an author’s work, knowing that there’s a lot of it out there: you read with an eye toward building up Author Points for future purchase.
Digression: I know that’s not quite how My Gracious Host uses Author Points. Or, rather, I know Author Points are properly redeemable at their highest value in the same work they are first awarded. I’ll quote here: “author points are most often relevant in deciding (a) whether to keep reading at any given point in the story, and (b) whether to put in extra work to look below the surface for meaning”. My Gracious Host confusingly uses letters for both his points, which does make it difficult to differentiate them, but it was probably an oversight. Anyway, I’m putting the quote in my own Tohu Bohu for reference, as I most likely will talk about Author Points again. For the purposes of a novel series, or a series of novels, or whatnot, the obvious given points for deciding whether to continue are at the ends of the discrete books, and those points are so obvious that a reader goes into the book altogether aware of them as decision points. The (b) up there is more relevant to his work as an editor, and to his taste as a reader, although it now occurs to me that I will resort to this to address some factors in Turning on the Girls. Have any of y’all read that? No? Well, then end Digression.
I don’t remember very much of Storm Front, actually. I remember there were some exasperating bits, and there were a lot of the jokes weren’t all that funny, alas. But there was some good action, and Mr. Butcher is pretty good at writing an action-packed scene where I can actually tell who is hiding where while trying to get to which exit and dodging what. Overall, I was left with positive Author Points: I am willing to pick up with the next book.
Oh, this is the point I was planning to get to, and forgot: when I know that there’s a treasure trove of further works out there (ten more books in that series, plus others), there’s a sort of Author Points multiplier. If I am favorably inclined by the middle of the book, I am extra-pleased that I have discovered hours of Good Stuff ahead, which puts me into a good mood. If I am cranky by the middle of the book, I find myself extrapolating the flaws to grotesque proportions by the middle of the third book, and become extra-grouchy. This is unfair, of course, but then the whole Author Points business is a little unfair, dealing as it does with readers and their sources of pleasure, which can include not only the words on the page but the weight of the book or the aromas in the room. I will say that it is particularly unfair when (as I believe is the case with Storm Front) the first novel in the series is the novelist’s first published work. The development of craft or hackery is unpredictable, and I am granting Author Points on the basis of the existence of extra books, when after all book four might absolutely suck, but I wind up reading it anyway, while books six and seven really are quite good, and I wouldn’t have read them if I hadn’t had some leftover Author Points hanging around (see Paretsky, Sarah).
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.