where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
I was all confused when 
liseuse posted her Wednesday reading today, because it's still Tuesday here! but I did want to discuss a book that I picked up and put down this weekend, and while it probably should go in the Wednesday meme, I feel like the stuff I have to say about it is more about a narrative choice that applies more widely than about this book in particular (especially since I only got about 45 pages in), and I have a lot to say about some other things I read over the past week, so those will probably take up a lot of space too.
Anyway! So I mentioned that Saturday I went out to MCU* Park in Coney Island for the Cyclones game, which means around 90 minutes (or up to two hours, depending on wait times/delays etc.) on various bits of public transportation. This is prime reading time for me, and I was looking forward to starting a new book. The one I chose was A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin, which I had picked up because it was recommended in the same breath as the Rivers of London and Felix Castor series, both of which I enjoyed (though admittedly, the former more than the latter).
The story opens with about 35 pages of the narrator - who doesn't quite know what's going on - describing things. Now, he has his reasons for being so disoriented (and they are pretty good), but good lord, it's page upon page of overwritten descriptions of things without any meaningful interaction with other characters (except for an interaction with something trying to kill him, i.e., the litterbug, which was clever and should have been entertaining, but the writing was so bogged down in endless metaphors and neither the writer nor the narrator seemed to have any sense of whimsy or humor in dealing with it), and I realized that unless your narrator is super charming, like Peter Grant, whose personality pops off the page right on page 2, or your writing is both enjoyable to read on a sentence level and moves the story along, I'm just going to get bored.
I realize that this is at least 75% about me and my reading taste (and my very limited attention span for scenic description) and only 25% about the writing, but I'm begging you, as an avid reader: don't waste a promising start like your main character waking up from being dead for two years on endless, overextended metaphors about garbage (um, that's not me being judgy; he spends a lot of time talking about the trash littering the street where he is) without ever giving a sense of who the character is. I mean, I guess this was a guy who thought up a lot of ways to describe garbage? IDEK. It just went on and on and on, and there I was on the D train thinking, "I can't with much more of this." And I was kind of a captive audience, you know? (Had I had a paper book and not my iPad, I would have been a captive audience and I'd have been much more pissed off about it.) And yet it went on for another five pages. And then he finally does meet up with another person and he's a huge asshole about it and I was like, "I am so not here for this jackass," so I closed out of it, opened up Lords and Ladies and enjoyed the rest of my epic train ride.
And it's not that I can't or don't enjoy asshole characters (I can, and do), it's that having spent 40 pages on my own with this guy, I had no desire to go further. And even when I do like a character, if you send them off on their own to have an epic internal monologue for fifteen or twenty pages, I am probably going to get bored.
This was also my main issue with the third Steerswoman book. I really like Rowan a lot! But I did not want to read a whole section of her on her own observing creatures doing the same things over and over again. It is boring! This is also why I tend not to enjoy reading solo Batman adventures. He's going to investigate broodily. Then he's going to narrate broodily. He's going to brood a bit - broodily. Then he's going to punch some guys broodily. And then there's going to be more broody narration because he's a noir hero and his parents are DEAD and wah wah wah please talk to someone soon before I claw my own face off, Bruce. And no, Jason's case doesn't count.
Ahem.
To get back to this book in particular, then there's the part where there was no frisson of delight - the metaphors were lugubrious and landed like wet blats of used paper towels on the floor of a public restroom. Like, with Kraken, last week I said I wasn't getting the same sense of glee that I have from other writers, who seem to really enjoy what they're writing in a way that comes through to me as a reader, but in the end, I did feel like Mieville was pretty pleased with the crazy shit he put in the book, if in a gloomier and more subdued manner. And it certainly had a sense of wryness, a deadpan that permeated the gloom. (And it was entertaining even if it wasn't particularly emotionally engaging.)
This book did not have that, not in the small bit I read, anyway, and it needs to come through to leaven both the ponderous narration and the character's unpleasantness. Someone needs to be having a good time somewhere, even if it's just the writer enjoying putting the characters and the reader through the wringer! And this book did not have that spark at all and I just didn't like it.
(Interestingly enough, I did finish another book this week that I also didn't like very much, but which I found much more compelling and interesting to read. I'll talk about that tomorrow though.)
Anyway, like I said, this is in large part a matter of taste - I also can't stand most of Dickens or Theodore Dreiser, which has gotten me the side-eye more than once - so if you enjoyed this book, or books in this style, um, mileage obviously varies! And my mileage is much more interested in books that don't do this.
--
*it stands for Municipal Credit Union, not Marvel Cinematic Universe OR Major Crimes Unit
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/686868.html.
people have commented there.
liseuse posted her Wednesday reading today, because it's still Tuesday here! but I did want to discuss a book that I picked up and put down this weekend, and while it probably should go in the Wednesday meme, I feel like the stuff I have to say about it is more about a narrative choice that applies more widely than about this book in particular (especially since I only got about 45 pages in), and I have a lot to say about some other things I read over the past week, so those will probably take up a lot of space too.
Anyway! So I mentioned that Saturday I went out to MCU* Park in Coney Island for the Cyclones game, which means around 90 minutes (or up to two hours, depending on wait times/delays etc.) on various bits of public transportation. This is prime reading time for me, and I was looking forward to starting a new book. The one I chose was A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin, which I had picked up because it was recommended in the same breath as the Rivers of London and Felix Castor series, both of which I enjoyed (though admittedly, the former more than the latter).
The story opens with about 35 pages of the narrator - who doesn't quite know what's going on - describing things. Now, he has his reasons for being so disoriented (and they are pretty good), but good lord, it's page upon page of overwritten descriptions of things without any meaningful interaction with other characters (except for an interaction with something trying to kill him, i.e., the litterbug, which was clever and should have been entertaining, but the writing was so bogged down in endless metaphors and neither the writer nor the narrator seemed to have any sense of whimsy or humor in dealing with it), and I realized that unless your narrator is super charming, like Peter Grant, whose personality pops off the page right on page 2, or your writing is both enjoyable to read on a sentence level and moves the story along, I'm just going to get bored.
I realize that this is at least 75% about me and my reading taste (and my very limited attention span for scenic description) and only 25% about the writing, but I'm begging you, as an avid reader: don't waste a promising start like your main character waking up from being dead for two years on endless, overextended metaphors about garbage (um, that's not me being judgy; he spends a lot of time talking about the trash littering the street where he is) without ever giving a sense of who the character is. I mean, I guess this was a guy who thought up a lot of ways to describe garbage? IDEK. It just went on and on and on, and there I was on the D train thinking, "I can't with much more of this." And I was kind of a captive audience, you know? (Had I had a paper book and not my iPad, I would have been a captive audience and I'd have been much more pissed off about it.) And yet it went on for another five pages. And then he finally does meet up with another person and he's a huge asshole about it and I was like, "I am so not here for this jackass," so I closed out of it, opened up Lords and Ladies and enjoyed the rest of my epic train ride.
And it's not that I can't or don't enjoy asshole characters (I can, and do), it's that having spent 40 pages on my own with this guy, I had no desire to go further. And even when I do like a character, if you send them off on their own to have an epic internal monologue for fifteen or twenty pages, I am probably going to get bored.
This was also my main issue with the third Steerswoman book. I really like Rowan a lot! But I did not want to read a whole section of her on her own observing creatures doing the same things over and over again. It is boring! This is also why I tend not to enjoy reading solo Batman adventures. He's going to investigate broodily. Then he's going to narrate broodily. He's going to brood a bit - broodily. Then he's going to punch some guys broodily. And then there's going to be more broody narration because he's a noir hero and his parents are DEAD and wah wah wah please talk to someone soon before I claw my own face off, Bruce. And no, Jason's case doesn't count.
Ahem.
To get back to this book in particular, then there's the part where there was no frisson of delight - the metaphors were lugubrious and landed like wet blats of used paper towels on the floor of a public restroom. Like, with Kraken, last week I said I wasn't getting the same sense of glee that I have from other writers, who seem to really enjoy what they're writing in a way that comes through to me as a reader, but in the end, I did feel like Mieville was pretty pleased with the crazy shit he put in the book, if in a gloomier and more subdued manner. And it certainly had a sense of wryness, a deadpan that permeated the gloom. (And it was entertaining even if it wasn't particularly emotionally engaging.)
This book did not have that, not in the small bit I read, anyway, and it needs to come through to leaven both the ponderous narration and the character's unpleasantness. Someone needs to be having a good time somewhere, even if it's just the writer enjoying putting the characters and the reader through the wringer! And this book did not have that spark at all and I just didn't like it.
(Interestingly enough, I did finish another book this week that I also didn't like very much, but which I found much more compelling and interesting to read. I'll talk about that tomorrow though.)
Anyway, like I said, this is in large part a matter of taste - I also can't stand most of Dickens or Theodore Dreiser, which has gotten me the side-eye more than once - so if you enjoyed this book, or books in this style, um, mileage obviously varies! And my mileage is much more interested in books that don't do this.
--
*it stands for Municipal Credit Union, not Marvel Cinematic Universe OR Major Crimes Unit
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/686868.html.
people have commented there.