54
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
54 points (98.2% liked)
Books
8313 readers
101 users here now
A community for all things related to Books.
Rules
- Be Nice. No personal attacks or hate speech.
- No spam. All posts should be related to discussion or reviews related to books. (Please avoid posts that are just a link to the book and a generic summary)
- No self promotion.
Official Bingo Posts:
Related Communities
- !books@piefed.world (Piefed Sibling Community)
- !comicbooks@lemmy.world
- !fantasy@lemmy.ml
Community icon by IconsBox (from freepik.com)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Go to a bookshop and don't mind judging books by their covers. Just see what appeals to you, which titles and what covers you like. Pick a nice looking book and read the back. If you still like the sound of it, start reading. If you're 10 pages in and have been standing there like an idiot, you've probably found your book.
I do exactly this, except I don't start at the first page but like 10-30 pages in. So that the writer has started to write normally.
Yeah, I take several random samples of the prose from throughout the book, just to get a good sense of the overall style. Though I do always begin with the first paragraph, and on at least one case, that was enough to immediately close and buy the book.
That being the over-the-top, sorta Victorian prose of Jacqueline Carey:
She then keeps going just like that for three large books, probably totaling something like 2k pages. I loved every page of it.
I had to hop off kushiel's dart, but you are spot on that the writing style is evocative.
Not a very accurate method, but any discerning reader should get into Nabokov right away from:
Wow, good call. That paragraph was uniquely unpleasant.