Son of return of books I quit reading

[mrissa]

1. Some people whose taste I really respect loved this one. I got halfway through and caught myself thinking of it as a chore, really along the lines of "if I put the towels in the washer now I can have the darks out before lunch." I bounced off the characters, but I also suspect that the people I really respect have a great deal more interest in and background in the setting than I do, and that they were able to bring a great deal more to the book than I was. Or than I am interested in being able to do later. Sigh.

2. Okay, so here's my theory: choose whatever person/tense/voice combination you want. Fine. Go with it. I hate the second person, but I have read at least two second person novels in the last year and have not had to quit. But when you choose a nonstandard mode, such as first person limited plural, you need to own that choice. If you're writing from a specific "we," you're not limited in the same way that you would be if you were writing from a specific "I" or a specific limited third. But the limitations are there. If you start going outside them at random so that it's a first person limited plural book except when it might be inconvenient, that's going to throw me further out of the book than the initial choice of first person limited plural in the first place. Fail.

3. If you are going to depict edgy, tough, rebellious teens, you need to realize that edgy, tough, rebellious teens do not in general remain constant in the details of their speech and dress over the decades. I know you were really impressed by the punks you saw in 1978, but that's the year I was born. Sure, there are still punks now, but they are not the same punks. I promise. Giving your 1978 Tough Girl Archetype a cell phone is necessary but not sufficient to make her the 2008 model.

4. I don't know to what end you were going to hector and harangue me, author, since two chapters of stern didactic tone to no particular point turned me so thoroughly off your book.

5 (twice, different authors). If a book has been translated from Norwegian, it should not read like it went through Japanese, Greek, and Navajo along the way. Norwegian direct to English. By someone who speaks both languages. This is not too much to ask.

6 (twice, different authors). Your characters all hate each other. I can see why. Bye-eeee.

7. When Mike Ford wrote the Harry of Five Points stuff, he was being funny. It was not that all English monarchs before the Restoration talked that way accidentally, mixed in with thees and thous more or less at random.

8. Everything stood for something. In case you weren't sure what it stood for, the author was willing to tell you in some detail. It made no sense as an actual detail, only as a symbol. Next.

9. Why must people continue to shun the humble quotation mark? Why? Why? You can't say you didn't know, because I brought this up last time with a completely different author. Possibly the time before that, too. Use it! Love it! It is your friend! It is not a newfangled corruption!

10. I don't know everything about military service, but if everybody in your army is completely corrupt and stupid, a) you will probably lose, and b) I don't care to read the chronicle of your losing, and also c) I will not consider it a trenchant criticism of actual military personnel, some of whom I actually know personally, so I can vouch that they are not all venal idiots. Fail.

Comments

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Is it fair that you don't give us titles?

[sigh]

Ok, I'll just ask. Is the Kirsten Lavransdottir (spelling?) triology the focus of #5?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, I found the translation I read of that tolerable. It gets far, far worse from there, I'm afraid.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I have read one book with no quotation marks and it is to this day one of my very favorite books. HOWEVER, it also was one of the funniest books I've read in a long time (Perfect Skin by Nick Earles) and did have a quirky but nearly always foolproof way of presenting conversation so that I could reprogram my brain for the book and adjust. (I believe the real thing is that the main character is so self-centered (not in a conceited way, really, more in a "I only have time to deal with myself and my issues" sort of way.) that it almost makes sense that he is regular font all the time, and everyone else talking is Italic.)

That said, if not for the fact that the book was so amazingly good, it probably wouldn't have been worth reprogramming my brain like that.

[bafleyanne.livejournal.com]

I read a no quotation marks book recently. I really hate them. I don't understand that.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Dialogue scared me off from Spanish writing for years. Now I've lost a lot of Spanish, so the non-English punctuation is no longer the scariest thing... but boy is it tough to follow if you aren't used to it.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

It sounds like telling us what books these were would be a public service.

Also, your snark is hilarious.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read the Harry of Five Points thing before.

I have tears now. :)

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

I want to know what these books were so badly. If only to avoid them.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

#3 Hahahahahaha!!!!

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Everything stood for something. In case you weren't sure what it stood for, the author was willing to tell you in some detail. It made no sense as an actual detail, only as a symbol. Next.

Which is kind of the opposite of the ludicrous tour guides at the Liberty Bell monument/museum/shrine. They keep nattering on and on about how the thing is a SYMBOL, but they never say of what. They just keep punctuating their spiel about how the bell is a SYMBOL. And how it was toured about the land in 18XX because it's a SYMBOL. And how they built this monument/museum/shrine to house it in because it's a SYMBOL.

I had a vision of someone with limited English listening to this and turning to their companion to say, "Why the hell does he keep saying it's a cymbal? Any idiot can see it's a broken bell."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"It's a kitten."
"It's a bag of chips."
"We're going to punch the kitten in later, okay?"
"You're going to punch the kitten later???"

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

Not everyone in the military is corrupt and stupid, but most think that they're the only one's that know what they're doing, and everyone else is a complete moron. (Oddly enough, the military doesn't seem to fall apart when they retire.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That happens in a lot of corporate environments, too. "The idiots I work with" stories just get a little edgier when the idiots in question have been issued large weapons and/or military vehicles than when they've been issued a Xerox machine.

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

True, althougth most military folk can't figure out how to work a Xerox machine. (Hey, even our rocket launchers and mines have big arrows telling you which end to point at the enemy.)

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Most Xerox machines I've encountered have remarkably bad UI.

(And no, I'm not in the military.)

[redbird]

There's a difference between "I am the only competent person here," from inside and frustration, and "Corporal Singh is the only competent person at all of Fort Orr" from someone outside who only met Singh last week after dealing with lots of other people at that base.

Gonna party like it's 1978.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= Wait, I thought punk was dead in 1978. You must've killed it.

I watched some sort of punk biopic (I think it was Sid and Nancy) and there was an old punk in the audience (imagine Blank Reg from Max Headroom), babbling on and on about how the movie got everything wrong, had the wrong years for black leather jackets and Mohawk hairdos, etc. Not my idea of something to care about at all, but apparently he didn't embrace nihilism. Or maybe nihilism was some other year.

Re: Gonna party like it's 1978.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know for sure when punk died. I think it must have been really, really, for sure and truly dead by 1985, because that's when one of my little second-grader friends in Omaha, NE, went as a punk for Halloween.

It took so very long to wash all the green out of her hair. She stayed the night that night, she shampooed and shampooed and shampooed, and the water kept running green.

Re: Gonna party like it's 1978.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

"Punx not dead. It just smells that way."

=v= If punk dies, it'll be a death from a thousand cuts. When you were in the Bay Area, perchance you ran across those suburban kids who'd dye their hair, hop on BART to Telegraph Ave. or the Haight, and panhandle. So they could know what it's like to be oppressed, man.

Some of the good things about punk do live on, though Mohawks have been upgraded to dreadlocks. My cohort in Omaha, NE, were into D.I.Y., anarchy (we practiced mutual aid in the shadow of Mutual of Omaha), permaculture, and punk music played in basement venues. As authentic as anything that was happening "back in the day," I believe.

Re: Gonna party like it's 1978.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

What always got me about those kids was how blatantly expensive their punk-clothes were. They clearly had much more spending money than I did. And they wanted some of mine.

Sigh.

[aedifica]

Absence of quotation marks can be done well (Cry, The Beloved Country) but I certainly don't think it's a trend to be encouraged. You have to be really good to get away with it.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I can't even read any book where people refuse to use quotation marks to indicate speech. Ugh. I had to read Cry, The Beloved Country for school and I just couldn't get past that. It made it an extra slog for me just to follow along.

I have one of these books going on right now. My friend loaned it to me because of the cheesy title, and I am debating how far I will drag myself through it before I quit and give it back.

Mine would go:

Okay, so you started out great with this "vamp breaks a fang in a RealDoll" opening. Funny. But other than that, mostly this is boring. And you can't write Scottish accents worth crap. And really, if the heroine has seen blood drinking and coffins and fangs and the hero being dead during the day, and she still hasn't "figured out"/acknowledged she's hanging out in a vampire lair after around 200 pages? BITCH, PLEASE. The audience would much rather see her figure it out quickly and root for her (a la Cordelia on Angel discovering she's over at a vamp's house) rather than be forced to drag along with a dull (I mean mentally) heroine.