I read a different, good book last night and now I'm doing penance for it.
OK, I'm going to start off with a list of pet peeves the author managed to hit in the first three paragraphs of chapter 4:
1. Random Capitalization. This is the most singularly annoying form of Emphasis in my book. I got nine words in to the chapter before I ran into it and had to take a few deep breaths before continuing.
2. Utterly nonsensical similes. "Settle like dust"? Of course, this was not how it was actually written. She had to throw in a couple of hyphens to break up the monotony of rational sentence structure.
3. Those fucking godawful citations. You do not cite the Odyssey as "Homer, Hellenistic Period." I do not fucking care if you are translating from the original greek, it does not work that way. Me and my Hum 110 indignation are going to go breathe into a paper bag until I can face the rest of this chapter now.
I worry that these summaries are getting slightly repetitive, so there are some things I'm not going to explicitly comment on and you're simply going to have to take for granted. The parentheses, hyphenations, and goddamn capitalizations are a start. There's also the complete de-humanization of anyone who isn't Blue or her father, and the…
Sorry, I had to stop to read the part about moving in to a house that Blue will stay in for some time, and it is made explicitly clear that Blue's father is every bit the smug, dehumanizing piece of shit Blue herself is. Silly reader, service personnel don't need to be treated like real people!
Moving on before I "accidentally" chuck this thing in the fireplace. It's not currently lit, BUT IT COULD BE.
Her father really is as hateable as Blue herself, now that you get to know him. He dispenses pithy advice like "always live your life with your biography in mind" in between treating women and anyone who isn't Blue like utter crap. There's a sentence on how he refers to his students that I'm going to let you use your imagination on. You know how Blue refers to his girlfriends in terms of insects? Yeah, it turns out she was being complimentary.
OK, if you can't decide what descriptors to use, have someone else pick for you. Leaving your indecision intact just leads to word salad. "He found standstills, halts, finishing points, termini, to be unappetizing, dull." Those were good commas, and you sent them to die.
…So. It turns out Blue's father's secret desire, at least according to Blue, is to return to his home country and lead a revolution, which Blue reads into how readily he denies it. I keep hoping this is a satire. And then she describes him and cites "Iconography of heroes." THIS IS MY SUBTLETY BRICK, LET ME SMACK YOU WITH IT. WAS THAT A LITTLE UNCLEAR? HERE, LET ME WIND UP AND TRY AGAIN.
OK, so you know how I said at one point that I was pretty sure she would start referencing herself? No? Well I did, and she did. So far it's just been the drawings, very clearly done by the author herself (they are exactly as terrible as you imagine), but there's a distinct urge to cite previous chapters here. I wonder if that's the one place where her editor held firm, or just convinced her to wait a few more chapters. Sadly, I'm going to find out.
Chapter five kicks off with the introduction of a new character, about…oh, five chapters too late to do any good. Of course, while it's made clear that this is going to be someone important, at the start Blue and her father treat her like any other sack of organs in this book. There's even that attitude of smug superiority, when she introduces herself with a bit of trivia that, horrors, Blue and her father already knew and somehow she was supposed to intuit this.
I reached the end of chapter 5. I now have a little activity for you, dear reader. I'm going to reproduce two paragraphs from this wretched excuse for a book, and you're going to gape in horror at them and tell me if you see as much wrong here as I do. This is Blue's father talking to her after interacting with this new individual, who actually gets a personality of sorts.
"Your guess is as good as mine. As I've told you, these aged American feminists who pride themselves on opening their own doors, paying for themselves, well, they're not the fascinating, modern women they imagine themselves to be. Oh no, they're Magellan space probes looking for a man they can orbit without end."
One of Dad's favorite personal comments regarding the sexes was his likening assertive women to Spacecraft (fly-by probes, orbiters, satellites, landers) and men to the unwitting subjects of these missions (planets, moons, comets, asteroids). Dad, of course, saw himself as a planet so remote it had suffered only a single visit - the successful but brief Natasha mission.
Between what's wrong from a writing perspective and what's just WRONG about this passage, I could devote an entire post to it. I'm lazy, so I'm devoting the comments section of this one while I curl up in a corner and weep.
1. Random Capitalization. This is the most singularly annoying form of Emphasis in my book. I got nine words in to the chapter before I ran into it and had to take a few deep breaths before continuing.
2. Utterly nonsensical similes. "Settle like dust"? Of course, this was not how it was actually written. She had to throw in a couple of hyphens to break up the monotony of rational sentence structure.
3. Those fucking godawful citations. You do not cite the Odyssey as "Homer, Hellenistic Period." I do not fucking care if you are translating from the original greek, it does not work that way. Me and my Hum 110 indignation are going to go breathe into a paper bag until I can face the rest of this chapter now.
I worry that these summaries are getting slightly repetitive, so there are some things I'm not going to explicitly comment on and you're simply going to have to take for granted. The parentheses, hyphenations, and goddamn capitalizations are a start. There's also the complete de-humanization of anyone who isn't Blue or her father, and the…
Sorry, I had to stop to read the part about moving in to a house that Blue will stay in for some time, and it is made explicitly clear that Blue's father is every bit the smug, dehumanizing piece of shit Blue herself is. Silly reader, service personnel don't need to be treated like real people!
Moving on before I "accidentally" chuck this thing in the fireplace. It's not currently lit, BUT IT COULD BE.
Her father really is as hateable as Blue herself, now that you get to know him. He dispenses pithy advice like "always live your life with your biography in mind" in between treating women and anyone who isn't Blue like utter crap. There's a sentence on how he refers to his students that I'm going to let you use your imagination on. You know how Blue refers to his girlfriends in terms of insects? Yeah, it turns out she was being complimentary.
OK, if you can't decide what descriptors to use, have someone else pick for you. Leaving your indecision intact just leads to word salad. "He found standstills, halts, finishing points, termini, to be unappetizing, dull." Those were good commas, and you sent them to die.
…So. It turns out Blue's father's secret desire, at least according to Blue, is to return to his home country and lead a revolution, which Blue reads into how readily he denies it. I keep hoping this is a satire. And then she describes him and cites "Iconography of heroes." THIS IS MY SUBTLETY BRICK, LET ME SMACK YOU WITH IT. WAS THAT A LITTLE UNCLEAR? HERE, LET ME WIND UP AND TRY AGAIN.
OK, so you know how I said at one point that I was pretty sure she would start referencing herself? No? Well I did, and she did. So far it's just been the drawings, very clearly done by the author herself (they are exactly as terrible as you imagine), but there's a distinct urge to cite previous chapters here. I wonder if that's the one place where her editor held firm, or just convinced her to wait a few more chapters. Sadly, I'm going to find out.
Chapter five kicks off with the introduction of a new character, about…oh, five chapters too late to do any good. Of course, while it's made clear that this is going to be someone important, at the start Blue and her father treat her like any other sack of organs in this book. There's even that attitude of smug superiority, when she introduces herself with a bit of trivia that, horrors, Blue and her father already knew and somehow she was supposed to intuit this.
I reached the end of chapter 5. I now have a little activity for you, dear reader. I'm going to reproduce two paragraphs from this wretched excuse for a book, and you're going to gape in horror at them and tell me if you see as much wrong here as I do. This is Blue's father talking to her after interacting with this new individual, who actually gets a personality of sorts.
"Your guess is as good as mine. As I've told you, these aged American feminists who pride themselves on opening their own doors, paying for themselves, well, they're not the fascinating, modern women they imagine themselves to be. Oh no, they're Magellan space probes looking for a man they can orbit without end."
One of Dad's favorite personal comments regarding the sexes was his likening assertive women to Spacecraft (fly-by probes, orbiters, satellites, landers) and men to the unwitting subjects of these missions (planets, moons, comets, asteroids). Dad, of course, saw himself as a planet so remote it had suffered only a single visit - the successful but brief Natasha mission.
Between what's wrong from a writing perspective and what's just WRONG about this passage, I could devote an entire post to it. I'm lazy, so I'm devoting the comments section of this one while I curl up in a corner and weep.