Author spends 4 paragraphs describing the scenery

>author spends 4 paragraphs describing the scenery
>2 lines of dialogue
>2 pages more of scenery

Tolkien is to blame for this nonsense isn't he.

No that shit started in the 1800s

>reading Emil Zola
>Its a fucking botany manual

>>Its a fucking botany manual
holy shit this stop this fucking hell i'm not trying to become an expert on local flora and fauna i want a STORY

at least with stuff like Neuromancer and James Joyce the way things are told, the actual style of writing, is entertaining in and of itself

with shitty fantasy its not even that its just a bore

True, but Zola writes great dialogue too

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbor until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets of a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted the chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Could be worse.

>Tolkien is to blame for this nonsense isn't he.

No, it's called realism you dumb fuck

Thomas Hardy did this as well. Melville's cetology parts would fall under this category. So too with Euclides da Cunha in Rebellion in the Backlands, and the detailed depiction of the land is integral to the events in the latter part of the book

>reading Moby Dick
>Melville spends like five chapters listing off whale facts

>later on he gives a detailed explanation of what it's like when different kinds of ships meet each other on the sea that barely has relevance to the plot

I always feel retarded when reading paragraphs of just scenery. I suck at picturing the scene in my mind.

Never read Lovecraft but does he always write in these long meaningless meandering sentences?

>trying to read a story of a rescue mission of a captive princess on the greek islands
>get a ship catalog

> spending a paragraph setting up the scenario
> spend the next three paragraphs describing the type of building the person lives in, political conflict and gang violence which has nothing to do with the current chapter instead of gradually developing it as the book goes along

Literally my 20 year old little brother. It's like reading something by someone with ADHD.

The different ships meeting each other is completely relevant. The pequod crosses paths with many ships, the final ship being the ship that saves Ishmael from the Pequod getting motherfuckin' rekt. The whale facts and whaling method chapters also set the context and subtexts for the upcoming narrative based chapters. Just have some patience, my man, it all comes full circle.

Yes.

Get out.

>i want a STORY
>Neuromancer and James Joyce

Out of my lawn

It happened way before him and Tolkien at least got the excuse that Middle earth is basically one character and the most important bit in the story.

>2017
>Considering Tolkien to be anything other than a shitty author who shitty writers love
1/10 Made me respond.

I'd rather have two pages of scenery descriptions so I can get my dick /out/ and masturbate rather than 2 pages of "witty" dialogue between idiotic and shallow characters I don't care about. It gets to the point where you can skip all of the dialogue and the story still carries.

At least dialogue is easier to skip or skim through due its form, while there might be something relevant hidden in a landscape description but it's harder to see.

did you literally read my post

i said i want a fucking story but if you aren't going to have a coherent one at least make it interesting stylistically so i still want to read it, like the 2 aforementioned things