I’m a hundred pages into it and I’m enjoying it. It’s reminding me of John Varley, which is a plus for my taste.
I finished “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy yesterday. I really liked this book. It was a very quick read, though, and I found myself wanting to know more. Also, sometimes the style of writing was a bit choppy (? not sure how to describe it) and that distracted me a bit. Other than that, I have no complaints. It was overall well-written, the characters were fascinating, and the story drew me in instantly. Next I think I’ll turn back to Hemingway, and try “A Farewell to Arms.” Also still reading “Shutter Island” by Dennis Lehane and listening to “War and Peace” during my workouts.
Finished it this morning and really liked it too. The choppy feel might have had to do with the fact that a lot of the book is dialogue (without quotation marks!) and, let’s face it, at least one of the characters wasn’t all that verbose.
Okay.
Okay.
I suspect an analysis would reveal that the average sentence length was somewhat lower than the norm. Maybe the sparseness of the language is meant to be a stylistic reflection of the setting of the novel?
I wasn’t much distracted by that, but it drove me nuts that contractions with not were rendered without the apostrophe (didnt, wouldnt). Other contractions were normal, so I don’t get it. Is “wouldnt” an acceptable variation?
Anyway, very moving story. Recommended.
Reading A Twisted Ladder by Rhodi Hawk, a suspense novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans. It drags a bit but I am keeping with it. Goes back and forth between a present-day woman and her great-grandmother in 1912, and some “river magic.”
I had forgotten about the lack of apostrophes. That was rather annoying. It wasn’t the dialogue that bothered me. It was the technique of using two to three short, incomplete sentences followed by a longer one. Here is an example:
They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.
I don’t know what it is about that type of writing that bothers me, but it does. I am a writer myself and believe that incomplete sentences have their place, just not so often.
I just started Toll the Hounds, the 6th (7th? whatever) Malazan novel. I know I’m supposed to read Return of the Crimson Guard before Hounds, and I tried, but Esslemont apparently didn’t have an editor. Sloppy sentence structure and typos make me uneasy. Erikson doesn’t have that problem.
I’m about to read The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch Albom
I read the new Diana Gabaldon book, An Echo in the Bone, over the weekend. Today I’ve just started The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. “A classic of time travel.”
We had our regular book club meeting on Sunday; our September pick was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which was pretty good - very Swedish, I liked the translation, leaving in plenty of flavour. I’ll try the sequel too. I forgot how much fun mysteries can be.
I am dreading our October pick - my veto vote was not enough to sway the rest of the club. Stupid democracy!
It’s this: Imani All Mine. From the Amazon reviews: “(the author) tells this story entirely in dialect, and although the lack of quotation marks sometimes creates confusion…” Urgh!
I quite enjoyed Sing Them Home this month, although the pace was pretty slow and it took me a while to get into the story.
In my book club, we take turns picking books. Let’s say you picked the book for the September meeting. At the end of that meeting, you’d write down a number between 1 and 100, showing it to no one. Everyone then guesses, and whoever comes closest to the number gets to pick the book for the November meeting (we’re always thinking two months ahead). No one gets a second pick until everyone at the meeting has already had a pick; you have to come to the meeting to get a chance to pick a book. Whoever picks the book also picks the restaurant at which we’ll meet, and leads discussion of the book. We’ve been doing it this way for 11 years and it’s worked well for us.
Link to October’s thread: October 09