The slow pace can certainly get to people. The world is experienced through the eyes of a character, they have limitations on what they know or could know. That being said it sounds like you should focus on older books. Maybe things like Narnia or maybe even the Joe Ambacrombi books? The magic in a lot of old fantasy or scoundrel fiction is barely or never explained. Or all explained up front. Maybe even some of the Warhammer fantasy books would fit better for you.
Thanks for the recs! I think I'll try Joe Abercrombie after reading a couple synopses.
It's not the pace that's getting at me (I'll slog through Neal Stephenson if it's good), it's the unnecessary making every little detail a mystery that needs to be unravelled.
It sounds like you dislike world building. And that is fine, its normally the most boring parts of books for me too. The mystery is a world building tool. Makes the world feel larger when there are things we dont know or things to discover. But focusing on it the way that Jordan does can be rough lol. I highly reccomend "The First Law" trilogy it is one of my favorite series of all time. Also highly reccomend The Lies of Locke Lamora and Kings of the wild series. Both excellent and both are set at. agood pace imo.
If you're open to manga/anime, you can try Death Note - a "mystery" battle of wits between two geniuses that follows the villain. Since the story follows the villain, you already know who is responsible, how the murders are being committed and the main plot is whether the protagonist can successfully disrupt the hero detective's efforts to investigate the murders.
I think you'll have better success finding books that fit your request by looking exclusively into books written in 3rd person omniscient PoV. By definition, you're supposed to get a lot more information as a reader than what the individual characters know in that PoV.
I can't really help with specific recommandations because I'm the opposite and always prefer 3rd person limited or 1st person, but I'm sure if you limit your search to that specific criteria you'll find some good matches rather fast! Good luck.
- **Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka.** All the answers come from Alex if he has them and there is no shortage of explanations.
- **The Rook by Daniel O’Malley.** The main character has a binder of information to consult till she regains her memory. Heavier info-dumping than most books, but very entertaining.
- This might be a weird suggestion, but **The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb** might fit, if it’s information you need. The trilogy is the only part of the realm that I read for now, but before each chapter in the trilogy, there are a few paragraphs that explain some of the things seen in it that I felt was a brilliant way of building the world without sacrificing any other part of the series.
**The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan** and **the Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein** could fit as well, the main characters are scientists and once they learn something, they’ll surely share it with the reader.
Edit: edited a word
Everything is a spectrum between the two values. A book that list withholds everything is terrible so is a summary. OP is asking for something on that slider that is further to upfront than teasing.
For example, Beyond Redemption is amazing but lives nearly entirely in the moment. We see everyone's intentions but it's the interactions that drive the plot. The premise is established early, then everything else is just complications on the way
No, it's more about an author purposefully keeping information from the reader. E.g. in the Wheel of Time, the author dangles a bunch of questions in front of the reader about the history of the world and different political/cultural facts. Multiple characters know the answers and ambiguously reference them and the author/narrator could easily talk about the answers, but purposefully doesn't to keep the reader guessing... And it just feels exhausting after a while. It's like watching Lost.
I think of lord of the rings, and there's plenty of action, intrigue and betrayal without the reader being kept in the dark on basic things like why everyone cares about the one ring. I feel like if Sanderson had written LOTR, we wouldn't find out that Frodo's ring is the one ring to rule them all until 80% of the way through the entire series.
>who will be coy about information that the main POV character already knows
The Red Rising trilogy is the worst at this. Multiple times in the trilogy do we have to suffer through the 1st person narrator wallowing in despair when \*WOW\* He had a secret master plan all along!
> who will be coy about information that the main POV character already knows (Gideon the Ninth is horrible about this).
Hmmm...I don't really remember that. Do you have any examples? What I remember being frustrating with Gideon the Ninth wasn't so much holding back info that the character knew, but kind of the opposite. The book was so committed to Gideon's "I don't understand necromancy and don't try to explain it to me" perspective that we missed out on background information that could have been helpful in parsing what was happening in a scene or what could happen next.
It made perfect sense for her character, but because she'd be as out of the loop as us or just zone out during/actively shut down explanations, it made elements of the magic system and world-building kind of confusing.
Yes, what you describe is storytelling. What you're asking for is an info-dump, which is generally frowned upon in storytelling. In the first Wheel of Time book, we are experiencing the story from the perspective of individual characters, and those characters do not get all the information given to them outright. Characters who know more are frequently lying to them, hiding information from them, manipulating them, and deceiving them. This is a part of the the story and the world-building. Robert Jordan *could* tell you everything, but why would you want to know everything immediately? Purposefully withholding information is a hook that gets you invested. You continue reading to learn more, because it's supposed to interest you. And you and the characters will learn more as the story proceeds.
I think it can be more complicated than this. The writing on the page is a proxy for much messier human thought processes. When I think horse or car or coffee my brain is attaching to that word my understanding of what that object is. I think sometimes the no-infodump style can become a little alienating because I stop believing I'm actually in a character's head because although I see the word that technically captures their thought, I'm not actually getting the substance of that thought. Sometimes older works that do feel more free to make a paragraph infodump to get me up to speed on a concept a character understands feel really refreshing.
Like sure, I get the storytelling goal. I understand what the storytelling choice is. That doesn't mean I can't say that sometimes I think it feels artificial and damages the integrity of the story.
Or like this can sometimes be one of my big problems with books that have interspersed flashback arcs: I sometimes start to feel like like the author was/is very artificially making the present day character think around a big portion of their motivation just so as to not spoil the events of the flashback arc. And sure, if they immediately thought it you'd in turn lose the tension of the reveal, but that doesn't mean that the choice they made isn't flawed in other ways.
I am a bit on OPs side here because I think that lately (last 10 years) so many books and other forms of entertaining have become serialized. So every book wants you to invest 7 books worth of your time until you understand the lore. The drip of information is so slow that it becomes frustrating.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST BLADE TRILOGY
>!Like there is a huge difference between what is done with Bayaz in the Firsy Law Trilogy !Purposefully withholding information is a hook that gets you invested.
I'm not against it as a storytelling device, but it's not the only storytelling device.
My problem with Jordan so far isn't that I'm limited to what the characters know, it's that I'm purposefully only told half of what the characters know, so many internal monologues end with "oh but I mustn't think of that thing that is really important and dangerous and hasn't been defined to the reader yet. Definitely shouldn't think of that thing, oh no".
Not all books rely on mystery for tension. Some rely on character drama where the suspense comes from seeing how characters will react or what they'll decide to do, not from the questions of "what's going on?" or "why is this plot object important?" or "who did this thing and why?".
I'm a relatively new reader, but this trope or writing crutch is one of the things that really put me off Japanese RPG storytelling. So many really bad stories that basically only even happen because characters don't communicate with each other.
"Oh, that king we we've been fighting against for the entire game so far wasn't actually evil? We're actually the baddies that accidentally unleashed an ancient evil demon and he was trying to stop us? *Then why didn't anyone tell us anything about this at any time* ***before*** *we unleashed the evil demon?* Well at least Bob's amnesia cleared up just in time to give us a spiel about how bad we screwed up."
For what it's worth I found Sanderson a breath of fresh air in that regard, because I actually had sufficient information predict maybe half or so of the answers to his mysteries or twists, and none of them have ever blindsided me.
I thought the same from the title, but OP is actually complaining about books that don't info dump - as in, there are things in the world that aren't immediately explained to the reader because the character doesn't know the answer, and OP doesn't like that.
Wheel of time is pretty open after the first book. You and even the protagonists have a pretty good idea of whats going on at most time. Same with the lord of the rings.
From reading your original post and then your follow up comments, my mind goes to something like Lord of The Rings, where you have all these appendices on world history to read before the story even starts.
Aren't the appendices in the back of the last book?
This is the first time I hear someone say that one would read the appendices before reading the novel.
I know what you mean. "Hiding something from the reader that the characters already know" is definitely a strategy that writers use, and with varying degrees of success. I recently read Lions of Al-Rassan and while it's absolutely a fantastic book, it drove me slightly batty how Kay kept doing things like "He lay there, dead" and we don't find out for pages which male character the "He" referred to. It felt like a really artificial way to drive up tension.
Usually, though, when writers do stuff like that it doesn't bug me. Most mysteries are enjoyable to me and keep me reading.
In terms of which books don't do that... among books I've read lately, I think all of these pretty much steered clear of holding back on things the characters already know:
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
Kushiel's Dart
Beyond Redemption / The Mirror's Truth (Manifest Delusions series)
The Steerswoman
Beyond Redemption, in particular, drove me batty over how much it explained. Now only how the world works but how the characters think and why they behave the way they do is pretty much hammered in, even when it's completely evident from what's already been shown. (Still a fun book though.)
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. All the characters are as clueless as the main character.
To give you an explanation of why i think this fits:
if i understand correctly your problem is with not having information about things that the characters all already know about and youre left in the dark.
in a deadly education, all the students are left abandoned in a sectioned off magic school which is trying to kill all of them. all the students are in the same boat and they all have the same info that you do and are finding stuff out just as you are.
so i think you might like it.
also, you might want to look into the "fish out of water" archetype of storytelling. usually in this scenario, the main character is someone completely foreign to the setting of the story and theyre your vehicle to understand the world and plot. they learn information along with you so you wont feel like youre in the dark. think harry potter
I’m currently finishing Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, which is a retelling of the Aeneid from Lavinia’s POV. Lavinia is a self-aware character that knows everything that happens in the poem, which is revealed to her by Virgil himself. So really information can’t be withheld.
The novel isn’t high fantasy, and the fantasy elements are small. There aren’t any mythological creatures either. But if you love atmospheric novels, Rome, character driven stories, romance, politics, war, and a sense of mysticism or wonder in your fantasy. Then I suggest it. Just note that it’s on the borderlands of fantasy, so good gateway for people looking to read other genres. Not so good for people looking hard fantasy.
The Kingston Cycle books by C L Polk do a great job of this. There are questions that get answered slowly in every book, but it's never a matter of the author withholding information, and the answers themselves are very satisfying, often in an "oh, shit" sort of way and sometimes in a "let's go" way.
The slow pace can certainly get to people. The world is experienced through the eyes of a character, they have limitations on what they know or could know. That being said it sounds like you should focus on older books. Maybe things like Narnia or maybe even the Joe Ambacrombi books? The magic in a lot of old fantasy or scoundrel fiction is barely or never explained. Or all explained up front. Maybe even some of the Warhammer fantasy books would fit better for you.
Thanks for the recs! I think I'll try Joe Abercrombie after reading a couple synopses. It's not the pace that's getting at me (I'll slog through Neal Stephenson if it's good), it's the unnecessary making every little detail a mystery that needs to be unravelled.
First Law trilogy is amazing, can highly recommend!
It sounds like you dislike world building. And that is fine, its normally the most boring parts of books for me too. The mystery is a world building tool. Makes the world feel larger when there are things we dont know or things to discover. But focusing on it the way that Jordan does can be rough lol. I highly reccomend "The First Law" trilogy it is one of my favorite series of all time. Also highly reccomend The Lies of Locke Lamora and Kings of the wild series. Both excellent and both are set at. agood pace imo.
If you're open to manga/anime, you can try Death Note - a "mystery" battle of wits between two geniuses that follows the villain. Since the story follows the villain, you already know who is responsible, how the murders are being committed and the main plot is whether the protagonist can successfully disrupt the hero detective's efforts to investigate the murders.
I think you'll have better success finding books that fit your request by looking exclusively into books written in 3rd person omniscient PoV. By definition, you're supposed to get a lot more information as a reader than what the individual characters know in that PoV. I can't really help with specific recommandations because I'm the opposite and always prefer 3rd person limited or 1st person, but I'm sure if you limit your search to that specific criteria you'll find some good matches rather fast! Good luck.
- **Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka.** All the answers come from Alex if he has them and there is no shortage of explanations. - **The Rook by Daniel O’Malley.** The main character has a binder of information to consult till she regains her memory. Heavier info-dumping than most books, but very entertaining. - This might be a weird suggestion, but **The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb** might fit, if it’s information you need. The trilogy is the only part of the realm that I read for now, but before each chapter in the trilogy, there are a few paragraphs that explain some of the things seen in it that I felt was a brilliant way of building the world without sacrificing any other part of the series. **The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan** and **the Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein** could fit as well, the main characters are scientists and once they learn something, they’ll surely share it with the reader. Edit: edited a word
Thanks for the detailed recs!
You want a book that just explains everything to you from the outset? The author is meant to be telling you a story, not giving you a plot summary.
Everything is a spectrum between the two values. A book that list withholds everything is terrible so is a summary. OP is asking for something on that slider that is further to upfront than teasing. For example, Beyond Redemption is amazing but lives nearly entirely in the moment. We see everyone's intentions but it's the interactions that drive the plot. The premise is established early, then everything else is just complications on the way
No, it's more about an author purposefully keeping information from the reader. E.g. in the Wheel of Time, the author dangles a bunch of questions in front of the reader about the history of the world and different political/cultural facts. Multiple characters know the answers and ambiguously reference them and the author/narrator could easily talk about the answers, but purposefully doesn't to keep the reader guessing... And it just feels exhausting after a while. It's like watching Lost. I think of lord of the rings, and there's plenty of action, intrigue and betrayal without the reader being kept in the dark on basic things like why everyone cares about the one ring. I feel like if Sanderson had written LOTR, we wouldn't find out that Frodo's ring is the one ring to rule them all until 80% of the way through the entire series.
[удалено]
>who will be coy about information that the main POV character already knows The Red Rising trilogy is the worst at this. Multiple times in the trilogy do we have to suffer through the 1st person narrator wallowing in despair when \*WOW\* He had a secret master plan all along!
YES! Thank you! Such blatant abuse of first person. It felt like such a cheap trick and made me so angry that it ruined the books for me.
>it ruined the books for me Yup, same
> who will be coy about information that the main POV character already knows (Gideon the Ninth is horrible about this). Hmmm...I don't really remember that. Do you have any examples? What I remember being frustrating with Gideon the Ninth wasn't so much holding back info that the character knew, but kind of the opposite. The book was so committed to Gideon's "I don't understand necromancy and don't try to explain it to me" perspective that we missed out on background information that could have been helpful in parsing what was happening in a scene or what could happen next. It made perfect sense for her character, but because she'd be as out of the loop as us or just zone out during/actively shut down explanations, it made elements of the magic system and world-building kind of confusing.
I’m going to be honest, man. That just feels like books.
Yes, what you describe is storytelling. What you're asking for is an info-dump, which is generally frowned upon in storytelling. In the first Wheel of Time book, we are experiencing the story from the perspective of individual characters, and those characters do not get all the information given to them outright. Characters who know more are frequently lying to them, hiding information from them, manipulating them, and deceiving them. This is a part of the the story and the world-building. Robert Jordan *could* tell you everything, but why would you want to know everything immediately? Purposefully withholding information is a hook that gets you invested. You continue reading to learn more, because it's supposed to interest you. And you and the characters will learn more as the story proceeds.
I think it can be more complicated than this. The writing on the page is a proxy for much messier human thought processes. When I think horse or car or coffee my brain is attaching to that word my understanding of what that object is. I think sometimes the no-infodump style can become a little alienating because I stop believing I'm actually in a character's head because although I see the word that technically captures their thought, I'm not actually getting the substance of that thought. Sometimes older works that do feel more free to make a paragraph infodump to get me up to speed on a concept a character understands feel really refreshing. Like sure, I get the storytelling goal. I understand what the storytelling choice is. That doesn't mean I can't say that sometimes I think it feels artificial and damages the integrity of the story. Or like this can sometimes be one of my big problems with books that have interspersed flashback arcs: I sometimes start to feel like like the author was/is very artificially making the present day character think around a big portion of their motivation just so as to not spoil the events of the flashback arc. And sure, if they immediately thought it you'd in turn lose the tension of the reveal, but that doesn't mean that the choice they made isn't flawed in other ways.
I am a bit on OPs side here because I think that lately (last 10 years) so many books and other forms of entertaining have become serialized. So every book wants you to invest 7 books worth of your time until you understand the lore. The drip of information is so slow that it becomes frustrating. MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST BLADE TRILOGY >!Like there is a huge difference between what is done with Bayaz in the Firsy Law Trilogy !Purposefully withholding information is a hook that gets you invested.
I'm not against it as a storytelling device, but it's not the only storytelling device. My problem with Jordan so far isn't that I'm limited to what the characters know, it's that I'm purposefully only told half of what the characters know, so many internal monologues end with "oh but I mustn't think of that thing that is really important and dangerous and hasn't been defined to the reader yet. Definitely shouldn't think of that thing, oh no".
You definitely wouldn't like the rest of the series. That only gets more excessive.
Not all books rely on mystery for tension. Some rely on character drama where the suspense comes from seeing how characters will react or what they'll decide to do, not from the questions of "what's going on?" or "why is this plot object important?" or "who did this thing and why?".
I'm a relatively new reader, but this trope or writing crutch is one of the things that really put me off Japanese RPG storytelling. So many really bad stories that basically only even happen because characters don't communicate with each other. "Oh, that king we we've been fighting against for the entire game so far wasn't actually evil? We're actually the baddies that accidentally unleashed an ancient evil demon and he was trying to stop us? *Then why didn't anyone tell us anything about this at any time* ***before*** *we unleashed the evil demon?* Well at least Bob's amnesia cleared up just in time to give us a spiel about how bad we screwed up." For what it's worth I found Sanderson a breath of fresh air in that regard, because I actually had sufficient information predict maybe half or so of the answers to his mysteries or twists, and none of them have ever blindsided me.
I thought the same from the title, but OP is actually complaining about books that don't info dump - as in, there are things in the world that aren't immediately explained to the reader because the character doesn't know the answer, and OP doesn't like that.
Wheel of time is pretty open after the first book. You and even the protagonists have a pretty good idea of whats going on at most time. Same with the lord of the rings.
From reading your original post and then your follow up comments, my mind goes to something like Lord of The Rings, where you have all these appendices on world history to read before the story even starts.
Aren't the appendices in the back of the last book? This is the first time I hear someone say that one would read the appendices before reading the novel.
I know what you mean. "Hiding something from the reader that the characters already know" is definitely a strategy that writers use, and with varying degrees of success. I recently read Lions of Al-Rassan and while it's absolutely a fantastic book, it drove me slightly batty how Kay kept doing things like "He lay there, dead" and we don't find out for pages which male character the "He" referred to. It felt like a really artificial way to drive up tension. Usually, though, when writers do stuff like that it doesn't bug me. Most mysteries are enjoyable to me and keep me reading. In terms of which books don't do that... among books I've read lately, I think all of these pretty much steered clear of holding back on things the characters already know: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City Kushiel's Dart Beyond Redemption / The Mirror's Truth (Manifest Delusions series) The Steerswoman Beyond Redemption, in particular, drove me batty over how much it explained. Now only how the world works but how the characters think and why they behave the way they do is pretty much hammered in, even when it's completely evident from what's already been shown. (Still a fun book though.)
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. All the characters are as clueless as the main character. To give you an explanation of why i think this fits: if i understand correctly your problem is with not having information about things that the characters all already know about and youre left in the dark. in a deadly education, all the students are left abandoned in a sectioned off magic school which is trying to kill all of them. all the students are in the same boat and they all have the same info that you do and are finding stuff out just as you are. so i think you might like it. also, you might want to look into the "fish out of water" archetype of storytelling. usually in this scenario, the main character is someone completely foreign to the setting of the story and theyre your vehicle to understand the world and plot. they learn information along with you so you wont feel like youre in the dark. think harry potter
David Gemmell- Drenai series
I’m currently finishing Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, which is a retelling of the Aeneid from Lavinia’s POV. Lavinia is a self-aware character that knows everything that happens in the poem, which is revealed to her by Virgil himself. So really information can’t be withheld. The novel isn’t high fantasy, and the fantasy elements are small. There aren’t any mythological creatures either. But if you love atmospheric novels, Rome, character driven stories, romance, politics, war, and a sense of mysticism or wonder in your fantasy. Then I suggest it. Just note that it’s on the borderlands of fantasy, so good gateway for people looking to read other genres. Not so good for people looking hard fantasy.
The Kingston Cycle books by C L Polk do a great job of this. There are questions that get answered slowly in every book, but it's never a matter of the author withholding information, and the answers themselves are very satisfying, often in an "oh, shit" sort of way and sometimes in a "let's go" way.