So I went on a 2000s-era light novel kick a while back and started going through a lot of the bigger ones. The Boogiepop, Monogatari, Haruhi. Even a few lesser known ones I picked up on impulse like Book Girl and Fragments of Grimm. Over and over they've impressed me and made me itch for the next volume. Index was always one of the big ones I'd heard about, so I was pumped for it. I bought the entire light novel series and...
I'm 4 volumes in and this is one of the biggest slogs I've ever read. Every book feels like it has an interesting setup and an interesting final stretch, then a lot of nothing interesting happening in-between. Every once in a while you'll get a couple pages of interesting lore, but they happen maybe three or four times over the course of 150+ pages.
Book 1 - This book got good the moment Kanzaki spelled out what the emotional stakes where. It wasn't bad up until that point, but it also wasn't really a page-turner until then. Overall I think it was the best of the four.
Book 2 - Cool setup with the vampire stuff and infiltrating the alchemist's school to get her back. Then it devolves into wandering around and fighting... a clone of the guy they're actually supposed to be fighting? It's baffling they wasted so much time on this instead of letting Aurorus be more involved in the plot. It feels like the author just needed an excuse to have them running around the school, then the plot got back on track once they met the real guy.
Book 3 - This one was more structurally coherent than 2, but it kind of had a similar problem where Accelerator is just this thing happening in the background until it's time to go confront him. We at least got a few glimpses of him killing the Misakas, I guess. I feel like this story would have worked a bit better if Mikoto were more present in the first two books, but it wasn't awful.
Book 4 - What the hell was that? Again, interesting premise, then it doesn't really do much with it. Most of the book follows a similar beat to book 2, where they spend most of it on a tangent fighting a guy who turns out not to be important, then the actual story resumes once that's done. It also has the same issue as volume 1, where something that feels like it should be one of the big emotional cores of the story starts in the last quarter of the book. Then the way it resolves is just baffling.
I assumed this was just early growing pains, but Angel Fall's climax was such a mess that I began trying to look into when the series starts to pick up. That's when I found this thread with multiple people saying the 2004 books (these four) were the strongest year of the series. Even speaking as objectively as possible, these four books just aren't very good. The characters are extremely one-note. The pacing is mess. The prose is flat. The lore and worldbuilding are interesting, but too small a part of the story to really make up for everything wrong with it. They absolutely have good scenes and moments, but they're just that: scenes and moments.
I've also had other people tell me book 3 was one of the series' high points, but it just read as "okay" to me. It had a stronger story structure than the two surrounding books, but I don't know that I'd even call it better than the first book. The first book had some REALLY poignant scenes (the chapter where Index is doing the ritual, the twist about what the "bad guys" were actually doing, the big reveal at the end that Touma had lost his memory), while I don't think book 3 really had the same amount of imagination put into it.
So finally I made this thread. Surely I'm misunderstanding something? These four books couldn't possibly be the strongest this 20 year old series has to offer, right? I see occasional glimpses of something good. Those must culminate into something better than these first books, right? If so, when does that happen? These early ones are really tiring me out to read.