reading and its discontents

[aslant]

i've started commuting to work on the free college shuttle, which is pretty awesome. more time to read! unfortunately, this means more time to get pissed off about sloppily written books.

things that are pissing me off in the first 85pgs of the memory keeper's daughter:

1. preserved fruit does not "gleam like gems," fuck poetic license.
2. i'm so glad that lady's husband is an orthopedist, so we can insert lots of shitty bone metaphors and poetic bone images and generally obsess about bones every time someone holds a hand or whatever.
3. someone did a little too much research about pregnancy and breastfeeding, why do i care that books about breastfeeding were hard to find in the 1960s? all kinds of random pregnancy factoids scattered in the text, not really integrated in the story at all. it's like the author had a list of Poetic Images from a pregnancy book and felt compelled to add them all.
4. did suburban 1960s women who didn't go to college really know about expensive french red wines?
5. do i really need to know that your sister has "long, white legs" every time she appears?
6. if i read one more description of a baby's hands like stars or their back being the size of your hand, i will puke.

ugh ugh ugh. so many writing cliches in this book! i am just barely supressing my annoyance in order to read the story, which is mildly interesting. it would have been more interesting if the surprise were saved for the reader, instead of waiting for the character to learn the truth and learning all the mundane details about it all along.

sometimes i wonder if editors or copyeditors read through manuscripts like this one, that end up on the nyt bestseller list and are actually semi-competent, and can tell that a book is great but kind of cluttered up with crap. it's subtle, in this book, but once i started to notice this kind of stuff it appeared everywhere.

Comments

[brickred.livejournal.com]

I recently read this book and I had the exact same impression, that although the story was a pretty good idea, the writing was very trite in places and full of cliches, or just a little too elementary. that said, I actually found after I was through that I had enjoyed the book, so either it gets better as the story progresses, or you gradually become desensitized :) :)

[aslant.livejournal.com]

i'm glad i'm not alone! this book is also unfortunately one my mom recommended, and all love aside, my mom has corny taste in books. ah well. so i've got to get through it somehow.

i do hope the story improves. maybe it's reading it in short spurts that makes me feel it's stalling out.

[manganese.livejournal.com]

That was my last book club book, last as in I quit the book club after they kept on picking books like that.

You know what I just read on vacation that was really great? Dostoyevsky's "The Double." Oddly enough.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

ha. i can see how it could be a great book club book if you want to talk about the ethical/emotiona dilemmas in the book, but as a piece of literature it was a total heap of fail.

the double, how appropriate! i haven't read anything of his except crime & punishment.