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alobearI picked up the first volume of Mike Carey's current comic, The Unwritten, last year and wasn't all that blown away by it. This year, my assumption that anything Mike Carey is involved with must be amazing superseded the memory of reading the first volume, and I bought the second volume anyway.
I reread the first volume again, and had a similar reaction to before - the story didn't really grab me until the last chapter, when it suddenly got interesting. The same thing actually happened with the second volume, too - I was just getting to the point when I was going to give up when the last chapter took things in a completely different direction and made it all interesting again.
However, this time, I think I'm not going to persevere (assuming I remember that by the time the third volume appears).
The books within the comic are too much like Harry Potter - I think that's probably part of the point, but it doesn't work for me. Plus, I don't really get what the story's trying to say - I think I must be missing something.
Then there's also my age old issue with comics. Why, oh why, do comics writers feel the need to put one word in five in bold? It's generally fairly obvious from both context and the pictures how the dialogue is being said. So, emphasising relevant words just makes the whole thing ridiculously melodramatic - or, in some cases almost nonsensical when entirely the wrong words are emphasised. I've never understood it and I always find it incredibly annoying.
On the audiobook front, I finished Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb this morning. I've read it before, but not for many years, and I only remembered the vaguest plot elements as I went along. It took me a while to get used to the narrator's accent - it sounded like he was an American trying to do an English accent and getting his vowel sounds mixed up. His pronunciation had a bizarre combination of short and long vowels that was a little disconcerting, but not enough to really detract from the story.
In terms of the book itself, it was pretty good. It suffered slightly from the opposite problem to The Painted Man - rather than skipping years at a time, it perhaps went into a bit too much detail of the protagonist's youth. For the most part, though, it was involving and well written, and I shall definitely be carrying on with the series in audio form, though not all in a row.
I reread the first volume again, and had a similar reaction to before - the story didn't really grab me until the last chapter, when it suddenly got interesting. The same thing actually happened with the second volume, too - I was just getting to the point when I was going to give up when the last chapter took things in a completely different direction and made it all interesting again.
However, this time, I think I'm not going to persevere (assuming I remember that by the time the third volume appears).
The books within the comic are too much like Harry Potter - I think that's probably part of the point, but it doesn't work for me. Plus, I don't really get what the story's trying to say - I think I must be missing something.
Then there's also my age old issue with comics. Why, oh why, do comics writers feel the need to put one word in five in bold? It's generally fairly obvious from both context and the pictures how the dialogue is being said. So, emphasising relevant words just makes the whole thing ridiculously melodramatic - or, in some cases almost nonsensical when entirely the wrong words are emphasised. I've never understood it and I always find it incredibly annoying.
On the audiobook front, I finished Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb this morning. I've read it before, but not for many years, and I only remembered the vaguest plot elements as I went along. It took me a while to get used to the narrator's accent - it sounded like he was an American trying to do an English accent and getting his vowel sounds mixed up. His pronunciation had a bizarre combination of short and long vowels that was a little disconcerting, but not enough to really detract from the story.
In terms of the book itself, it was pretty good. It suffered slightly from the opposite problem to The Painted Man - rather than skipping years at a time, it perhaps went into a bit too much detail of the protagonist's youth. For the most part, though, it was involving and well written, and I shall definitely be carrying on with the series in audio form, though not all in a row.
