The Sticky Review

[sartorias]

Here's a question I've been asking in person, where I can see the answerer and where I tend to get a blunter answer. Only the answers I keep getting have so many other hands on it, it's pretty much got universal tentacles

Comments

[sartorias]

Yes, that occurred to me about what won't work.

The "everybody is talking" thing is problematical. If they all sound the same, or like they're making a demagogue out of the author rather than discussing the book, I'm outa there. (Neil Gaiman discussions were this way two, three years back--nothing against the gent himself, but wow, the squee made his work sound dull.)

OTOH three times in my life I was actually engaging with something when "everybody" began talking and it was tremendously exciting--to actually be part of the zeitgeist. LOTR in the mid sixties, Dorothy Dunnett in the mid seventies, and Patrick O'Brian in the mid-nineties.

[makoiyi]

I'm with papersky though, when I pick up a novel in a book store, I really am one of those folk who will put it down after a paragraph if I don't connect with the 'voice'. If I like that then I'll read what the story is about. I ignore any of the exclamation-mark reviews, those just annoy me. I don't care if so and so liked it *I* have to like it. Enthusiasm, yes, from others of the "Have you read...?" variety are good because individuals pick out different things, and as you say further down, the 'buts' often make it interesting. SpoileryÉ i think you have to sometimes, forex with J S Fancher`s novel - if you open a novel with someone slaughtering their family... you aren`t exactly spoiling the plot you are making me ask `whyÉ`foo, silly text thing keeps changing on me - sorry.

[sartorias]

Oh yes, the page 97 test, definitely.

But I'm trying to narrow things here to "what will get you to go out and try the book in the first place?"

I'm getting all kinds of useful ideas here.

[makoiyi]

For me, because I like `voice`then a snippet that is intriguing enough for me to go whoa! Gotta find out what happens next, basically.

[sartorias]

Yeah . . . I was thinking about this. The only time a snippet catches me is if there's humor that matches with mine.

So-called lyrical prose or poetic too often seems like it's trying too hard in snippet, where sometimes (depends on the author) in context I like it fine. (I don't when the work is all "voice" but no actual "there" there.)

[sartorias]

Yes! Exactly that.

[nipernaadiagain]

Excluding the part about book-talk baing hard to get into (it may be that I pre-select what I read quite heavily), I agree about you on snippets (and when I remember, then it amazes me how different the paragraph I randomly read in library or shop while selecting the book sounds when I finally encounter it in its proper place).

Yet - I do like to get some feel of the book and closer to the end of the review, when I have been introduced to the book and having some idea of it already, I am likely to welcome a quote from it and if I like the quote, I am also more likely to buy the book.

[pnh]

The premise of Among Others is that a teenager in late 1970s England and Wales is dealing with a difficult family situation that has a scary and threatening magical aspect to it...while, at the same time, she's also discovering the great works of modern science fiction, which are blowing the top of her head off.

I think that's a pretty interesting premise. I cannot think of another fantasy novel containing a scene depicting the protagonist's excitement at discovering a hitherto-unknown-to-her novel by Samuel R. Delany.

Among Others is a novel about any of us, in that vulnerable state before we managed to connect with Others Like Us. It's about real magic, and the incredible dangerousness of being a teenager, whether the magic is real or not. And it's about why stories and science fiction matter, and the specific and particular mechanisms of how they matter.

People need to run out and buy this book. No, really.

[sartorias]

It's liminal is so many ways it seems to embody (insofar as I understand it) Clute's equipoise. Making it harder to write about effectively.