Bride of son of return of books I quit reading

[mrissa]

1. "Boring person becomes interesting" is a really hard plot to accomplish: if the boring is too well done, I may not stick around to see whether the interesting ever comes around. If it's not well-done enough, I may not believe that the plot is actually going to function as intended, but somehow this latter case is rarely the problem.

2. I know that people date other people who are vastly unsuitable for them. I do know that. Really. And I have not been immune from screeching, "Why is he with her? Why?" or, "What in God's name does she see in that loser?" But usually when I calm down and it's been more than twenty minutes since I had to deal with my awesome friend's ill-starred sweetheart, I can think it through a bit. The bottom-feeder in question has some redeeming qualities, or has faked some long enough to fool my astute and interesting friend. If the main character (usually heroine) has a significant other with absolutely no visible redeeming qualities, I become extremely suspicious of how manipulative the rest of the book is going to be. And whether I'm going to want to spend it kicking the protag repeatedly.

3. Similarly, if the main character is supposedly awesome but has reached his/her middle age without any of the Philistines anywhere around him/her noticing it on any axis...yah. Possibly not so much with the awesome. And while I have some limited sympathy for poor little friendless waifs of 16, who have not had full control over where they were or what they were doing, poor little friendless waifs of 46 are significantly more suspicious to me. One friend. Just one. Or a mentor. Or somebody. Anybody, really. If you are truly that awesome, I really think that by the time you reach the age of majority, at least one person will be willing to speak civilly to you.

4. People in French novels speak French. People in French novels translated into English speak English, but are understood to be speaking French when they appear to be speaking English on the page. Okay so far. Yes. And there are words that just don't translate; fine. But there are words that are perfectly translatable into English, words like "oui" and "un petit peu" that in no way could be called inscrutably French. And! If you are writing a book filled with French people speaking French in France! Having them speak random bits of only high school French is really obnoxious! And you should stop doing it! Right now now now aughhhhh!

The High School Guide To Foreign Speech method of writing annoys me enough when the characters are meant to be speaking English and somehow can remember "labyrinth" and "conjunction" but not "thanks" or "apple." (I am looking at you, Gregory Benford!) But I read Le Ton Beau de Marot at a formative age, so when they're supposed to be speaking another language for the whole conversation and then have simple words of that language tossed in, my head explodes. And not in a good way.

5. The Norse gods are not varm fuzzy nice-nice. If you think they are, you are dumb. And not paying much attention.

6. I like competent protagonists. I don't mind supercompetent protagonists if they do interesting things with it. But I refuse to pant adoringly up at supercompetent protagonists just because the author wishes she had a really awesome weapon stuck in her garter. Stores sell garters. There are carry classes (where they will probably teach you that a garter high underneath a long skirt is perhaps not the best place for your only weapon, but never mind that). Go take such a class, get your cool weapon of whatever type, get it out of your system, and then go home and write characters with more than one dimension. Sheesh. Swashbuckling: yes. Mary Sue on a chandelier: no.

7. Terminal failure to care. This keeps showing up in these lists.

8. Small children, like Norse gods, are not varm fuzzy nice-nice. If you think they are, you are dumb. And not paying much attention.

9. Whimsy is like enthusiasm: if you have to fake it, it's not likely to come out right. Light touch. Light, light touch.

10. I have known several 12-year-olds in my time. Very few of them are consistently trying to sound like younger children. Most of them are trying to sound like older teenagers or adults. Keep this in mind when you're writing a 12-year-old protagonist, lest I set my 12-year-old friends on you.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

If the main character (usually heroine) has a significant other with absolutely no visible redeeming qualities, I become extremely suspicious of how manipulative the rest of the book is going to be. And whether I'm going to want to spend it kicking the protag repeatedly.

This may have been what you were referring to re: kicking, but this kind of situation always makes me wonder about the protag's taste. And then I feel vaguely guilty. But seriously, if you spend the first 3/4 of the book or movie mooning over someone who's a total jerk, I'm just not sure I'm going to trust you with the awesome other character you've been overlooking all that time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't feel guilty about wondering about the protag's taste. I don't feel guilty at all.

Also, it seems like the authors who give their protag a completely irredeemable SO to start with are often scarily, stupidly wrong about what makes an awesome one later. "He doesn't want to hang out with my friends because he wants me all to himself!" Run away! Run away!

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Mary Sue on a chandelier: no.

Oh, but if she stays on the chandelier, one could then go all Phantom on it.... *schemes*

And speaking as someone who used to wear garters on a fairly frequent basis, the idea of tucking a weapon in one strikes me as... unconvincing. It seems to me that sharp heels and a short skirt would be more conducive to effective -- well, whatever-- all around.

*nods in agreement at many of the other points*

[redbird]

I can see slipping an assassin's weapon in a garter, or something a la Vlad Taltos: a thin dagger or dart dipped in an obscure poison. But that's a different kettle of nitroglycerine.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Hopefully carefully tucked into a protective sheath. Stabbing yourself in the leg by accident with a poisoned dart would be so embarassing.

Now I'm trying to remember where Angelina Jolie hid her weapon - or if she used one - in the corset scene in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But she does have rather a lot of available concealment.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Rather a lot like Norse gods, really, if you look at them from the wrong direction.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I am with you all the way on #4: this was part of my problem with Delia Sherman's Porcelain Dove (http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/182289.html) - a good enough book that I kept on reading, but also good enough to know better...

I hadn't heard of Le Ton Beau de Marot: the title alone was hgood enough to send me scurrying off to Amazon. Thanks for the tip.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes: many of the reasons I quit reading books can be overcome by the right book. I even read a book that didn't use quotation marks for dialog last month, and enjoyed it. But the lack of quotation marks for dialog still bugged me.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

You will be thanking her even more heartily after reading the book, I'm very sure. I read it at a formative age too - in my case, I think it was my early thirties. I think any age I read it at would have been formative.

It's a love story. And a discussion of poetry, translation, how the mind works... and love. It's one of the few books I urge on people now and again, where the more I respect said person, the more likely I am to urge this particular book. (The other two are fiction, Freedom and Necessity and Gaudy Night.)

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

With those two for company, this looks like a book I need to read!

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I am similarly allergic to sprinklings of high school French. Oui translates perfectly well, thank you.

[aedifica]

I don't particularly mind a bit of French sprinkled here and there for flavor. What I object to is an author like Dorothy Sayers assuming that everyone knows French, so it's fine for her to put in entire passages in French without providing a translation. (When she uses German she translates it, because her readers can't be expected to understand it, of course.) Bah.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

And for publishers to continue this tradition to this day; I've never seen an edition that included a translation. Nor met anybody who spoke french well enough to provide one, though one friend said they understood it but couldn't express it in English.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

There's a complete translation available somewhere online, at least of Busman's Honeymoon. I'll try to find it and post a link later today. Also, there's the Lord Peter Wimsey Companion, recently reissued on CD.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I'm with David: it's somewhat more reasonable for Sayers to have assumed that everyone in her contemporary audience would have enough French to get through Busman's Honeymoon, but it's a great deal less reasonable for our contemporary publishers not to provide footnotes, endnotes, appendices, or something. And that's from someone who can muddle through the French.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Worse yet: Dorothy Dunnett. Who has no compunctions about throwing French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Arabic, German, Irish Gaelic, and Russian at the reader, usually without translation.

(Did I miss any?)

God love her, but any author who needs not one but two companion volumes to translate everything and explain the allusions is perhaps going a bit too far.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Someday, I am going to buy another set of her books, and I am going to go through and/or have others go through and footnote the hell of of them. With post-its and pencil both. Then I will be able to switch from one book to the other for footnotes.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

There is, in fact, a companion book which has done that for you. I haven't seen it, so I don't know how well, but at least it exists. Also websites which have quite a few of the references indexed.

The same is true for Sayers, in fact.

[brooksmoses]

I think it was appropriate when Ezra Pound did it, even if his Cantos probably also need at least that much companion volumage.

But that was poetry, which plays by entirely different rules. And there was only one Ezra Pound, which also matters.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

One of Sayers' tricky tendencies was to assume that her audience had exactly the same education she did, which wouldn't have been a problem except that she was a precocious student and rather better-educated than most women of her class at the time, to say nothing of the people who were considered of lower classes.

(One of the things that amazed me, reading a biography of Sayers recently, is just how strongly class-based British society was even at that comparatively late date. This explains why some of the things which give Harriet pause about marrying Peter are completely baffling to me even now. But I digress.)

I will note, though, that you couldn't translate the French in the short story of the Article In Question, because that would ruin the whole point. I don't remember any other French in Sayers that was a stumbling block for me.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

4. I struggled with the French question myself, though the conversation was being conducted in English, between one native speaker of French and one fluent student of it. So I sympathize with that issue. The simple words are not the ones the speaker will forget to translate, but they are easier for the reader to pick up, which is an argument in their favor.

5. They do, however, make good drinking buddies.

6. "Mary Sue on a chandelier" just went into my lexicon next to "Jesus Christ on a cracker" and variants thereof. I shall deploy it at every suitable opportunity, most of them being rants about badly-written books.

8. They do not, alas, make good drinking buddies.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

8. Depends on what you're drinking.

6. It does seem that it might be useful later, yes.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Cracker, eh? "Pogo stick" is my Messiah-delivery-vehicle of choice.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Or in a taxicab, or whatever suits the moment and possibly the surrounding alliteration. He was on a pogo stick in a post I made a couple of days ago.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

i'm afraid i have a friend who says "christ on a double-headed dildo" fairly regularly ... almost ... instinctively, ... i'm afraid.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And thank you so much for sharing it with the rest of us. Uff da.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

*obligatory Californian comment* you've heard it so many times from me i hardly need to even say it. ;)

[songwind.livejournal.com]

you must (must, must!) tell me what books #5 and #8 are about.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Are the 11 year olds boys or girls? I just want to be prepared with squirt guns or fingernail polish.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A mix, but don't worry: boys these days are more flexible about fingernail (or at least toenail) polish, and girls have been lethal with SuperSoakers for years.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I know my girls are, but the manicure will be done first.

There's something priceless about being around a group of kids that age. As long as you have a good sense of humor (aka love potty jokes) this age is wonderful.

[redbird]

On 4, I recently found it worked in small doses in a novel, set partly in 1920s England (and partly in 1990s England, and a little in 1990s France), where part of the point was that these two Francophones were speaking bits of French in front of their English friends: as with Monty Python quotes, it was partly a signal of belonging to a particular group. Nor did the novelist convey anything essential to the plot/mystery in the French. (And, later on, she uses it to signal the switch in language from French to English as someone visiting Paris realises that the elderly lady she has called on speaks fluent English.) But it's brief, which matters.

[garunya.livejournal.com]

Related to #4, this sort of thing bothers me a lot in stories with Asian settings. Sometimes it can be ok (ie. if an English translation would affect the meaning too much, AND the original can be understood in context), but often it comes across to me as the author just trying to show their own knowledge of the language.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The line between "here's some local color and stuff that's genuinely different from place to place" and "look how exotic these foreign foreigners are! with their foreignness! which is foreign!" seems like it's particularly problematic for authors writing in Asian settings. Paging Dr. Said....

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Especially given how very many things still do differ. Though I guess the ine gets blurry: if moving boxes fold differently in Europe than in the US and tissues come packed in plastic rather than cardboard in Asia, is that genuine difference? Or just mildly flavored, given that one is still using moving boxes to move between offices and buying packs of tissues to blow one's nose in the same way? I do think an author without much experience of different cultures (and some who do have it, sigh) are going to miss the little details.

(edited for typo)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that depends on tone -- if you're matter-of-fact about the plastic boxes and the folding of moving boxes, that's often good, or if the enthusiasm is "oh what a neat idea" rather than "OMG how FOREIGN."

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I must say in some ways my RL reaction was more like the latter - along the lines of "Well, I've been surprised at how many of even the littlest things were different, and this just exemplifies it all."

[evangoer.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. What about authors that insert snippets of source code?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As long as it's not done with undue Othering.

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

"Mary Sue on a chandelier" sounds like the kind of oath I ought to be using when the kids get annoying.