book meme - day 01

alg wrote up a nifty 30-day book meme (original entry here), and, well...I really like talking about books! I will probably give more than one answer for each question and may include graphic novels here and there, because that is how I roll. Here we go!

Day 01 - A book series you wish had gone on longer and/or a book series you wish would just freaking end already

I'm of the mind that it's far better for something to end early than to drag on and on and ON into awfulness and crap. Whenever I think of a book series that needs to be put out of its misery, I always think of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books. God, I used to love those books so much. I started reading them when I was 10 or so, and for years I just couldn't get enough. I bought the art books! The world guides! The short story collections that contained Pern stories! I don't even know how many dumb little stories I wrote where a shy, nerdy, and awkward preteen girl just like me impressed a gold dragon, SAVED THE WORLD, and was total BFFs with Menolly and Lessa and was also a harper and had a bunch of fire-lizards that were way smarter than other fire-lizards. Please don't judge me. I even liked The Dolphins of Pern, I was that much of a fangirl, and The Dolphins of Pern is really not a very good book. At all.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's the point when the series started going downhill, although I didn't really notice until All The Weyrs of Pern, which left me grouchy and disappointed. The series lost me entirely with Dragonseye, but apparently Anne and her son Todd are still cranking 'em out. I've read the Wikipedia summaries, and they sound truly awful. JUST LET IT DIE, YOU GUYS.

The Redwall books are kind of like this too, although I'm not sure if I stopped reading them because they were getting shittier, or because I was just getting too old for them. I suspect it's the former because I still enjoy kid!lit and YA!lit, but...*shrugs*.

ALSO! Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta books! You guys, those books made me want to be a forensic pathologist. They hit every single one of my medical and criminology nerdgasm buttons. Kay was smart, tough, and really good at her job. She had a family life and friends of both sexes and hobbies. People underestimated her all the time because she was a blonde lady doing what was traditionally a man's job, and she helped catch serial killers and andjsnfjdbnsjdjskjd they were SO AWESOME...and then the series went to absolute shit and to this day I don't really know what the fuck happened. Cornwell started killing off characters left and right, made other characters utterly unrecognizable, started piling all sorts of truly unbelievable ridiculousness onto her heroine. Point of Origin was a total wallbanger, and I stopped reading after that. Ugh.

As for a series I wish had gone on longer, I'm going to go with Tim Pratt's Marla Mason books. His publisher opted not to pick up the next books in the series, which is a damn shame because the existing books are very, very good. I really hope he's able to find another buyer for them, because Marla kicks ass from here to next Tuesday and she's immensely fun to read about.

I also wish there had been more in the way of Transmetropolitan (graphic novel alert!), but this is one of those rare cases where I know it ended at the right place, and I just wish there was more because it's so well-written/illustrated that I couldn't help but feel bereft when I finally had to leave the story behind.

( Other days of the book meme! )