Who cares what 4chan thinks? It’s the garbage pit of the internet and that is insulting to garbage.

However, libraries are good for growing a readership. They get books in the hands of people that will not think to buy them at a store. They also host smaller authors for events and can promote less known books. They keep the back catalog going for longer than most bookstores.

Got it in one. Blood, sex, and graphic violence sells. The exact mix varies by genre but at this point it’s the chief difference between YA and adult.

That still don’t mean Dresden is a book I’m ever going to recommend. It just means that Butcher is not a completely horrible writer. The Dresden books are still middling under a deep layer of crap. I bounced off after Harry wanted good boy points for not having sex with his best friend’s daughter who was put in his care. He is a creep and was written to be a creep.

I’ve dropped books for less. Dresden at least avoids rape which puts it above a good chunk of books like Pern and the dragon roofies.

Disney is the default reason. They have done everything possible to protect the Mouse. The moment Steam Boat Wiley, the first appearance of Mickey, hit the public domain they made it the animation studio trademark.

You want bleak, look at the current theory that we are destroying our ability to leave Earth by creating a giant junk cloud in low orbit. We are already having to track all kinds of junk to protect our satellites and more crap seems to arrive daily.,

Then go read that and see if you want to circle back to Sanderson. Sometimes you hit over saturation on a thing and need to clear your head. Others you just hit the limit of your tolerance for an author's quirks. Either way some distance will make it easier to judge. As you read more fantasy you may start drifting to a different style.

What were you expecting going in? Did you expect something like the show?

Lock in by Scalzi has two audiobooks. One is by Will Weaten and one by Amber Bensen. The characters feel completely different between the two versions. The words haven’t changed but the approach has.

If you use kindle there are accessibility settings meant for blind and low sight readers that will enable text to speech. You just got to buy the right adapter.

No. The second book opens with the MC once again sold to a sex cult. I bailed 2-3 chapters into book 2.

Do note the middle is one long love letter the the philosophy of Ann Rand.

You go the used bookstore route if you can. One of the ones where you trade in books for 1/4 cover and buy at 1/2 cover. It stretches things.

I would try the website of every major city library system and see if any do non-resident cards.

Also at a certain point you give up and start reading what the library stocks. This is why I went on a giant mystery and thriller bender in high school/college. I could not find fantasy but mysteries, thrillers, and romances had a lot of space.

That is the key. I have lost access to some adobe DRM files but they were easy to get in another format.

I'm wiling to bet only one of the 3 books will be Murderbot. The others will be other fantasy books.

If you don't mind a lot of religious backdrop with a near explicit evil Catholic vs good Protestant try Safehold by David Weber. It's a sci-fi series where the last colony ship was sent off into deep space with orders to go dark and emit nothing for a thousand years to escape the aliens that killed the rest of humanity. However, there was a revolt among the leadership and instead of knowledge being preserved it was destroyed with an oppressive controlling church put in charge. Now a robot is charged with ending the church in order to revive humanity's tech base to take the fight back to the stars. We are 10 books in and the key struggle is still against the not Catholic church.

Still, it does a good wide angle lens at different regions, some religious disagreements, scale and effects of the conflicts.

First book {{Off Armageddon Reef}}

That does still come off a bit better than the cartoony American.

That's fair. I'm getting to the point where I don't want to watch movies or TV shows about my favorite books because they are never good. You have to change too much to make a bunch of random people understand the story in an hour that took you weeks to read.

Studio Gibli tends to make movies based on vibes more than the actual source material. They did a similar thing with Borrowers vs the Secret World of Arrietty. It' a choice but I love Diana Wynne Jones books. I like the way she twists fairy tales but 6 is too young. You need someone who already knows the fairytales.