in which interesting bloggers are not necessarily good creators

[jazzfish]

More and more I've been noticing a disconnect between 'authors whose blogs I like' and 'authors whose books I like.' It's very odd: I'd expected that if I enjoyed an author's blog posts I'd buy her books and get a big kick out of them as well. But many of my favorite authors blog rarely if at all, and some of the most prolific author-bloggers I read are people whose books just don't really connect with me.

No great insight; it's just weird.

I don't play a lot of video games these days either. At some point a few years ago I stumbled on Arcen Games and their flagship title AI War, which is a hyper-complex single-player space RTS. If this had come out ten or fifteen years ago I would have probably lost hundreds if not thousands of hours to it. As it is... I've tried it and I can't get into it. I can't see myself sinking the necessary time and brainpower into learning all the things I'd need to learn to be able to play well, and it is decidedly not a game that rewards casual play.

I've dabbled in a couple of Arcen's other titles as well, and they've all left me cold to varying degrees: the controls are just a little off for the action-platformer Valley Without Wind, the interface is too busy for Bionic Dues, etc. I keep hoping they'll make a game that really knocks my socks off. Shattered Haven (Zelda-style post-zombieesque-apocalypse) comes closest and even that isn't quite it.

And yet I really respect their design philosophy, and I enjoy the hell out of reading their blog posts, and I get all excited when I see they're working on something new and wild.

Curious.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I expect this would be the same as liking someone's essays/collections of letters but being indifferent to their fiction. I feel that way about Nabokov, for example. (I can admire his brilliant writing, but his fiction leaves me utterly cold, and he even explains why, inadvertently, in Lectures on Literature.)

In more modern times, Scalzi is another.

[jazzfish]

Huh. I have not read Nabokov (except for the first ~15 pages of Invitation To A Beheading) but I do get the impression I would enjoy his writing-about-writing a lot more than his actual-writing. And now I'm curious as to the why for you!

Yeah, the 2.5 that immediately came to mind for me were Scalzi, Hines, and to some extent Stross.

hm, and the only one I can think of that goes the other way is Italo Calvino. I could not get into Why Read The Classics? at all.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Do try Lectures on Literature Nabakpv's passion for literature shines through, and he makes many good points. But I disagree that bad readers empathize with characters, or imagine themselves along for the ride. Nabokov felt that literature must be an intellectual puzzle, very much akin to his lepidoptery--a novel to be truly enjoyed as an intellectual pleasure must be dissected and pinned out in bits.

I think that explains his fiction, with unsympathetic characters, etc. I understand and even admire his intellectual puzzle approach, but for me, literature is not math. I read to ride along with the characters, and to empathize with them. If I want to pick apart the hidden motives of unpleasant people, and scrutinize events looking for patterns, I read history.