For me, the first time this happened was with The Royal Assassin Saga from Robin Hobb, and then Metro 2033.
This year, it’s The Witcher saga… (I can’t move on) I love all those introspective books with thoughtful heroes trying to make sense of the world they are forced to evolve into.
Do you have any other book like that?
The Expanse made other sci-fi seem like fanfic
I had the opposite with The Witcher, I couldn’t force myself to continue reading it. Andrej Sepkowsky is so horny, I was trying to read it for the story, but it read like some bad erotica, with the stories not having incredibly original or compelling ideas anyway.
On the other hand, the His Dark Materials trilogy has had a lasting impact on me, very thoughtful and interesting, not to mention entertaining, book.
The Witcher novels are one of the few epic fantasy franchises I’ve read and man, I didn’t really like them.
Unsurprisingly, I came from the playing the Witcher 3, and I loved the first two books; the collections of short stories. The actual main plot felt that it never knew clearly where it was going, and it often suddenly meandered at times that killed the pacing, and man was it horny.
I don’t mind horny either. I really enjoyed reading Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the authors horniness is prevalent throughout the novel, but it actually works to complement the narrative. Even in the Song of Ice and Fire series where GRRM can get distractedly horny, it doesn’t read as off-puttingly as Sapkowski’s “edgy horny” style.
The Expanse.
Don’t think I’m alone either.
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It’s so much better than any of this other writing that it’s actually upsetting. But that series stuck with me for a long time.
Someday I hope to make it past the first book. I have read almost every King novel leading up to The Dark Tower series but I couldn’t get through The Gunslinger and I couldn’t say exactly why, it just didn’t grab my attention like his other works.
I binged the Dredsen Files, and after that found it a little difficult to reset. Same for the Dune series.
Then I binged all of the James Bond books, and by the last 2 or 3 I was more than ready to be done with those.
