By far the most horrifying part of Shadow Over Innsmouth is the actions of the US government.

The story comes from the early iron age ~2800 years ago and is set at the end of the Bronze age ~3200 years ago.

I think reading can't be divorced from the written text and that it is not possible to read an audio book.

This is a moron level concern.

E. This is like being afraid to read Brandon Sanderson novels because of 'let's go brandon'

Don't forget Brando Sando!

High School was a long time ago but from what I can remember:

The Year of Living Dangerously - Christopher Koch

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Fly Away Peter - David Malouf

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Despite BNW being a subversion of modernist thought it is still wildly optimistic compared to historic events and what science has revealed since the book was published.

Banishing all subversive and creative people to remote islands where they get to spend all their time thinking about things still seems like a pretty good future compared to what's on the horizon IRL with regards to climate change and ecological collapse.

Compared to the horrors of climate change, nuclear war and neoliberal technocracy, Brave New World seems pretty good.

Sci-fi and speculative fiction has its foundation in modernist thought which tends to be pretty optimistic about Humanity's prospects. In BNW Huxley inverted this assumption and pointed out how an instrumentalist approach to managing society could strangle the highest forms of Human thought.

Huxley probably wasn't thinking about how all the poets and philosophers would survive the collapse of agriculture and genocidal resource wars.

You can consume books faster if you only read a couple words from each sentence.

Modern multi-book series with a coherent overarching plot (ie not serialized) are what I would consider epics. These are usually sci-fi, fantasy or historical fiction novels. Examples include the Malazan, Wheel of Time and Masters of Rome books.

When I was 13 kids were reading Flowers in the Attic and scifi/fantasy novels with the weird authors' fetishes on display and we turned out ok.

I think I'd find a portrait of a marriage to be pretty boring if I only got the couple's POV. Especially as ugly marriages don't always seem ugly from the inside and vice versa.

It's my favourite fantasy series so it certainly works for me. Fewer perspectives would absolutely have diminished the series as there are multiple plot threads and characters that don't even appear in the same books until toward the end. Many characters enter the series half way through their own arcs or stories and one important character is only now having their story completed in a separate book series.

As for your chicken and egg story I think if you don't find the central story interesting then extra POVs won't make it any better. I've been reading big fantasy and sci-fi since I was a kid so jumping POV is something I expect and am totally comfortable with and the book in the OP actually sounds pretty interesting to me.

The Malazan series has 453 POVs across 10 books with the most common POV only getting 4% of the word count. For fans of epic fantasy and sci-fi low POV counts can feel very restrictive.