Yesterday, like a kid on christmas morning I cracked open the 4th and last book in a hugely popular teen novel series which shall remain unnamed. This was exciting. Each book is about 150 or so odd pages longer than the last and this one is 755 pages to be exact and should successfully distract me from life for some time.
But, about 100 pages in, I finally let myself be truly annoyed by something that nagged at me throughout the last two of the three books I'd read — the constant recaps and summarization, sometimes long-winded, of each character's personality and history. Now, I've been laying in bed so pissed and thinking about it and I've got a hunch that this was something the author was required to do by the publisher for readers who might pick up only one random book in the series. Why would anyone only read one book in an amazingly awesome and entertaining series? I could see them picking up the first book (because they loved the movie so much) but the second? Third?
Well, what about the true fans who have made such a solid commitment (most of my free-time this summer so far, speaking personally) to this series? We know the effing characters because they've become our friends (and enemies), we name our pets...no, we buy pets so that we can name them after characters, we dream about being them, we dress up like them and make our lovers reenact our favorite parts of the story (or we play both parts alone), we make edible portraits of them out of our food and then slowly savor each bite, we forget to shower and eat or sleep because we want to have our heads in their world for as long as we can, we almost drown in the bathtub when things go wrong but save ourselves so we won't miss what happens next... my point is we deserve to not be treated like we are so stupid or uncommitted that we can't remember who these people are, even if we are only 13. Don't get us excited about an extra 150 pages of drama if it's just shit we already know.
And that's what really grinds my gears.
10 years ago
