I'm entertaining myself (still at work, yes) by cruising around publisher and author websites, reading excerpts from books and looking for new things to add to my growing, teetering piles of books. (One of these days, my reading pile will fall on me and I'll die in a tragic book-related accident.)

And I'm finding most of them practically unreadable. It's the prose, mainly -- the premise of the books sounds good, but the writing is clunky and plain and spells out everything in excrutiating detail. If these published novels were fanfics, I would have abandoned them in the first few paragraphs. The only thing that's enabling me to slog through some of these is mentally editing the prose into a sleeker, trimmer shape. (Also, the first one I ran into misspelled "tchotchke" in the first few paragraphs. I had to do a little Googling to remember how, exactly, it is spelled, but I knew it was wrong.)

This has been more and more of a problem for me over the last few years. I start reading books and have trouble fighting my way through the first few chapters. Once I get into the characters, I'm all right, but probably half the books I've started in the last couple of years have lost me in the beginning (temporarily or permanently) because of the quality of writing.

Hypothesis one: Maybe I'm just getting pickier. I've been doing a lot more writing lately and becoming more adept at ferreting out good from bad writing. And I don't think it's just my imagination that there are a lot of really, really skillful writers in SGA fandom. I've been reading fanfic for a long time, and I know that you always find a few gems even in the most barren fannish wastelands, but I've been completely blown away by the quality of the fic in this fandom. Being immersed in good writing all day long has to have had an effect.

Hypothesis two: I've simply been unlucky enough to run into a string of bad books. Or whole genres of bad books. What I'm poking at tonight is urban fantasy, a genre in which, despite my liking for it, I've always had a great deal of difficulty finding good books. Is this just me, or do other people experience this as well? I don't know if it's because it's mostly new/young writers, or lower editorial standards, or if it's more subjective than that -- something to do with the style that doesn't appeal to me, even though I love the concepts. In fact ...

Hypothesis three: It's not the quality of the writing, it's the style. Over the last couple of years, my fanfic-to-books ratio has been heavily skewed in the fanfic direction. Plus, the mix of fic is different: though it's definitely not the majority of my fanfic input, I've been reading more slash than was ever true of me before, and I don't think it's my imagination that slash has its own distinctive aesthetic. But I wonder if it goes beyond that -- if fanfic in general has a particular style, just like science fiction, on the whole, has a different style from romance. And maybe I've developed a disconnect between what I read, and thus what I expect to see on the page, and what publishing houses actually publish.

Or maybe it's simpler than that. The thing that's been bugging me most about a lot of published books I've read lately is how much they spell out for the reader: a character is introduced and the writer has to tell you about her. She travels to a new place -- cue infodump. I wonder if part of the problem is that I've been spoiled by the fact that in fanfic, the audience and the reader have a built-in frame of reference. It's like picking up the third or fourth book of a series -- the author doesn't have to tell you all about the characters and the world, but can simply immerse you in it without having to tell you about it. Once I get past the infodumps, I'm usually a lot better. Is it just that reading fanfic, where you start out on chapter 200 by default, has made infodumps jump off the page in a way that they never did before? Or, even more subjectively, is it that after reading so much fanfic, I subconsciously expect to start out with the same deep emotional connection to the characters that you have in fanfic, and get frustrated when it's not there, without realizing where the frustration is coming from?

I know it's not just that, because I've read a few books lately that have sucked me in from the very first page. (Octavia Butler's "Kindred" was one of those -- I really wish that "Parable of the Sower" hadn't been the first book of hers that I ever picked up, because it unjustifiably scared me off Butler for years.) But ... it seems like a book has to be much better than ever before, to keep me sticking with it.

Thoughts?