People have been recommending Jim Butcher to me for ages now, so I'm thinking that may be the next series of books I tackle now that I have all manner of down-time.
Most of my thoughts about The Dresden Files are here (post and comments) with fan-relatedaddenda. Basically, I don't think he's a great writer—he started with a throw-together of urban fantasy clichés and then sort of bootstrapped his way into three dimensions along with his protagonist, meaning there are certain immutable facts about the world, like its metaphysics, that are just a mess—but he's improved visibly with each book and he's almost at the point where he can really pull off the complex emotional effects he's started to aim for. I don't know if the language will ever be more than serviceable, but at least it's serviceable with a high proportion of quotable lines. The secondary characters are terrific; Butters is the one I imprinted on, but I've become fond of Thomas and Molly as well. There's an astonishing pull of and then what happened? I wouldn't bother with the first book, though. If I hadn't been actively invested in getting to the later ones, it would have stopped me cold and permanently.
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People have been recommending Jim Butcher to me for ages now, so I'm thinking that may be the next series of books I tackle now that I have all manner of down-time.
Most of my thoughts about The Dresden Files are here (post and comments) with fan-related addenda. Basically, I don't think he's a great writer—he started with a throw-together of urban fantasy clichés and then sort of bootstrapped his way into three dimensions along with his protagonist, meaning there are certain immutable facts about the world, like its metaphysics, that are just a mess—but he's improved visibly with each book and he's almost at the point where he can really pull off the complex emotional effects he's started to aim for. I don't know if the language will ever be more than serviceable, but at least it's serviceable with a high proportion of quotable lines. The secondary characters are terrific; Butters is the one I imprinted on, but I've become fond of Thomas and Molly as well. There's an astonishing pull of and then what happened? I wouldn't bother with the first book, though. If I hadn't been actively invested in getting to the later ones, it would have stopped me cold and permanently.
If you want actually, painfully good urban fantasy, you want to read Tim Pratt's Marla Mason.