Seeing as everyone seems to be talking about A Million Little Pieces, I picked it up off the prominent display at Target the other day. “Hmm,” I think, “I could use some light reading. Maybe I should buy this.”
I opened the book, and had to restrain myself from throwing it down in disgust. “Ghaa!” I think, “How the hell can anyone read this stuff?”
It’s stream of consciousness, with no quotation marks around the dialog. As far as I’m concerned, it can be a literary sensation, a Book among Books, a novel for the ages, but I’m not reading it if the author can’t make his point without resorting to gimmicks and fast and loose play with the basics of English syntax. If you’re interested, you can look through the book here.
This isn’t the first book I’ve passed up because of things like this, and it probably won’t be the last. Am I alone?
Any author who writes in such a way that they explain everything that happens in the style of “you’re an idiot who can’t figure out plot points, so here’s what’s really happening.” Terry Brooks’ Shannara novels, and Patricia Wrede’s Talking with Dragons, for example.
I can deal with the preachiness of Heinlein, because he wrote in a way that just seemed like there were things he wanted me to know. I get the feeling reading the above books that the authors actually believe their readers are idiots, and I won’t put up with that in a book. That’s what I have my favorite TV shows for.
I’m not sure what the style can be called, but i have tried to read The Lord of the Rings a few times, and juat cannot do it. It may be one of the finest pieces of literature ever writen, but my God, it’s klike walking through a swamp to get to soem treasure in the middle. Yes, the treasure might be worth it when allis said and done, but getting there is trundgingly slow and painful at times.
I’m another who isn’t fond of stream-of-consciousness writing. I never read that stuff unless I have to. Kurt Vonnegut is an example of a novelist I would probably like if it weren’t for all the arty, stream of consciousness stuff. I love his short stories, which were all written for the mainstream market, but his novels are just too much for me, I’ve never been able to finish one.
I also dislike gimmickey writing – when the author screws around with punctuation or spelling, that type of thing. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head except for one – some silly thing that had been ‘de-gendered’ with ‘women’ spelled ‘womyn’ and an invented pronouns used in place of ‘he’ and ‘she’ and ‘him’ and ‘her.’ I don’t remember the name of that one, though, or even if it was a book or a short story – I just remember that it was irritating as shit and I didn’t finish it, whatever it was.
The book won prizes, and Hoban is a highly-regarded writer. The concept is unorthodox and original in the extreme. I read it for a college course and had access to a professor and Cliff’s Notes.
I’m interested in it.
But I’ve never been able to finish it. Reading it is so much work!
Hoban virtually destroys and rebuilds the English language as a metaphor for the world destroyed by nuclear exchange. First the reader has to decipher the (literally post-Apocalyptic) spelling, then assemble the shattered grammar, then infer the creative use of idioms, false-etymology, and symbols, then reassemble the narrative in one’s head. THEN it’s time to ferret out the puns and repeated themes and images intertwined throughout.
Every time I’ve picked it up, it winds up annoying me more than it intrigues me, and my effort peters out.
Kudos to those who do like it.
Here’s a really long and excellent review of the book with several germane paragraphs focusing on Hoban’s use of language: graphesthesia review
Mark Twain. When I read Huckleberry Finn I just wanted to grab his lapels and shake the ever-loving Christ out of him: “Jesus, dude, it’s spelled ‘going’! Not ‘goin’, not ‘gawayne’, not any of the other 8 ways you’ve spelled it in this stupid book… going.”
Anything, and I do mean anything, by Tom Clancy, Robert Heinlein (Ok, yes, I will read Starship troopers some day) or Charles Dickens.
I am trying to work through Victor Hugo nowadays but sometimes he makes me sick, too…one guy *monologued * for three pages straight without a paragraph indentation.
Amen to that. It took me three failed starts at reading Stephen King’s The Regulators because it opens in present tense. That shit drives me bananas. Finally forced my way through it and got to the more readable parts.
I think Black House started that way, as well. Never did succeed in getting past the first few pages.
Anything by Robert Ludlum. The man committed crimes against syntax that should carry a gaol sentence. I kept reading his efforts for years in the hope that he would learn to write or acquire a competent editor; alas, in vain.
My pet peeve is overuse of adverbs, especially in dialogue. It’s a lazy shortcut, she said redundantly.
Another is repetition of unusual or “fancy” words. New horror writers are especially guilty of this. One “preternatural” is plenty.
I’m fine with reading dialogue without quotation marks or attribution. If the writer knows what he’s doing, you can tell who’s talking by what they say and how they say it. Don Robertson is brilliant at this, and so is Cormac McCarthy.
I don’t care for a flowery style. If a book is described as “lyrical”, that usually means flowery. Yuck.
When I read the subject line, I immediately thought of “Requiem for a Dream”. I figured that I liked the movie, so why not give the book a shot? It has the same style as described in the OP … just impossible for me to read. I’ll stick with the movie.
Harry Turtledove. I keep hearing what a great, imaginative author he is…so much so that I’ve actually read TWO of his books, despite the first one being a steaming load of crap. I heard so much good about him that I was finally willing to accept that perhaps I’d picked up a flukily bad example of his work by accident. Nope. The second one was just as bad. Out of the thousands of books I’ve read in my life, there have been maybe a handful that I’ve had trouble finishing. I wanted to throw both of these out the window.
It’s hard to describe exactly what it is about his style that’s so annoying. Let’s see if I can make up an example:
“I’d sure like to be at home cleaning the kitchen,” said soldier A, wryly.
Soldier B laughed at A’s joke, knowing that even though cleaning the kitchen is not a particularly enjoyable task, it would be far better than being stuck here in this war, where even the best day was far worse than a day spent cleaning the kitchen and also knowing that soldier A had a particular aversion to cleaning kitchens, which made his comment even more telling…
He thinks he’s a master of humor, apparently. He is constantly having his characters crack the feeblest of jokes, then other characters laugh uproariously during the next three paragraphs while he explains his incredibly feeble jokes in mind-numbing detail to us. And then he does it again. And again. And again. And then you shoot yourself in the brain.
That’s it for me. I’ve read two or three books like this lately and for some reason it bugs the ever-loving crap out of me. Call me childish, but I need quotation marks around the dialogue. I filpped through something the other day in the bookstore and realized it was another one of ‘those’ and plopped it back on the shelf. I’m not wasting my gift card on another one like that!
