Squee!

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Mage and Psion!Bella send glowy warm fuzzies over my scalp and down my spine.

[ErinFlight]

The first three books are bad. After that they are okay progressing to good.

You might be able to get away with skipping however many gets you to your quality threshold by reading plot summaries.

Since I read only the first three books, that might explain my problem.
Marri also mentioned Butcher had intended the first few to be bad.

I really was disappointed. I loved his Alera series. I'll give the Dresden books another try.

[PlainDealingVillain]

The first ~two were supposed to be bad, and he took another one or two to find an interesting voice. Around the time I'd read books 8-10 inside of a week I still wasn't sure if I liked the series, but I still read ten books and three within a week.

[DanielH]

Why were the first two supposed to be bad?

[Ezra]

Young, aspiring, mid-90s Jim Butcher wanted to be an author. Not some boring hack writing stupid formulaic fiction. He wanted to write real stuff, original stuff, things people had never seen before. But he could never quite get his words to match his vision. His several novels all sucked. Deborah Chester, his writing teacher, insisted that he was going about it all wrong. Then (Jim Butcher via Wikipedia):

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

That's pretty much hilarious.

[Anya]

I've found that listening to James Marsters read the Dresden Files on audiobook makes getting through the first few books much less painful.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Ironically, the only Dresden Files book I've gotten around to reading all the way through was the first one and I liked it.

...On the other hand it's been a while and there used to be a time when I thought Twilight (not Luminosity, Twilight) was the bee's knees, so.

[DanielH]

Honestly, there are a lot of good parts about base Twilight. It depends on what parts you want to focus on.

On a different topic

"Crash the sun," breathes the summoner. "Did I just save the world?"

A brilliant white glow collects in the air around him, reaching up and down to join floor to ceiling in a solid column of light. When the glare clears mere moments later, he has acquired a pair of wings, raven-black with silver-edged feathers, mantled in startlement.

Yay!

Also, I think that just answered that question.

[ErinFlight]

Ironically, the only Dresden Files book I've gotten around to reading all the way through was the first one and I liked it.

...On the other hand it's been a while and there used to be a time when I thought Twilight (not Luminosity, Twilight) was the bee's knees, so.

I may be being too harsh on the Dresden Files.
The first book did have fun moments and was engaging. I wanted to know what happened.

I was just surprised by the gap I guess? I'd been hearing raving reviews and they just weren't that great, especially compared to Codex Alera. Also, Dresden kinda got on my nerves, and while I'm totally up to read books with characters like that, I need to otherwise really enjoy them.

But yea, I'll give them another try. Audiobooks are a good idea, and since I know the premise, I might also just read synopsis and skip to the first really good one.

Any suggestions? Is that book number 5?