Need to bitch for a second
Okay. Has anyone read (or tried to read) a book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl? If not, this won't be relevant, and I'll have nobody to talk to...but...
THIS BOOK IS INFURIATING ME. It is the literary equivalent of a show pony: overwrought, overwritten, psuedo-intellectual, pretentious. The similes are amazingly bad ("his Southern accent was so thick and gooey you could have spread it on dinner rolls"). The prose is so annoying, in fact, that I had to stop reading, even though I almost never stop reading books midway through.
Then I looked on the Internetz to see if anyone agreed with me. Did they? No. Except for a few beacons of sanity like The Guardian and The Economist, the book got almost universally positive reviews, and was named a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. In other words, I've lost faith in the critical establishment.
Umm....yeah. So. How is everyone?
THIS BOOK IS INFURIATING ME. It is the literary equivalent of a show pony: overwrought, overwritten, psuedo-intellectual, pretentious. The similes are amazingly bad ("his Southern accent was so thick and gooey you could have spread it on dinner rolls"). The prose is so annoying, in fact, that I had to stop reading, even though I almost never stop reading books midway through.
Then I looked on the Internetz to see if anyone agreed with me. Did they? No. Except for a few beacons of sanity like The Guardian and The Economist, the book got almost universally positive reviews, and was named a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. In other words, I've lost faith in the critical establishment.
Umm....yeah. So. How is everyone?