Discussion Question: Would you read it?
Note: Rambling ahoy!
Recently a friend recommended The Vesuvius Club to me. She said it was a steampunk novel and quite funny, and hadn't I been looking for that sort of thing? Yes, I had, so I poked around and managed to locate both the original story and a graphic novel. Ordered them both through book-swapping websites, but when they arrived I was in the middle of a novel so I popped them on a shelf and promptly forgot all about them.
Fast forward to last week. I spotted the books in my room and decided to give the graphic novel a go before tackling the novel. Now that I've read the graphic novel, though, I'm really on the fence about whether I want to read the full Vesuvius Club. The art was annoyingly inconsistent, but that's exactly the sort of quibble you avoid in a book, right? Since part of the appeal of the novel (I've been told) is the voice of the narrator, Lucifer Box, and that can't really be conveyed effectively in the graphic medium (which forces the reader out of the narrator's head to become an external viewer) I have faith that the characters would be less flat their their comic-book counterparts. But I'm not sure of these elements, and I found the plot really predictable (and bits of it quite unappealing), so I'm having trouble convincing myself I need to re-visit Vesuvius Club, even in another format.
So I guess that what I am trying to decide is this: if I did not enjoy the characters/plot as presented in the graphic novel, will the entertaining writing style found in the novel be enough to 'save' The Vesuvius Club? Do I want to bother to find out?
*shrug*
So what would you do?
Think of a book that you were interested in - but had not read - until you saw an adaptation of that book (comic book, TV series, movie, play, whatever) that you didn't really enjoy. How did that affect your decision to read the book later?
Recently a friend recommended The Vesuvius Club to me. She said it was a steampunk novel and quite funny, and hadn't I been looking for that sort of thing? Yes, I had, so I poked around and managed to locate both the original story and a graphic novel. Ordered them both through book-swapping websites, but when they arrived I was in the middle of a novel so I popped them on a shelf and promptly forgot all about them.
Fast forward to last week. I spotted the books in my room and decided to give the graphic novel a go before tackling the novel. Now that I've read the graphic novel, though, I'm really on the fence about whether I want to read the full Vesuvius Club. The art was annoyingly inconsistent, but that's exactly the sort of quibble you avoid in a book, right? Since part of the appeal of the novel (I've been told) is the voice of the narrator, Lucifer Box, and that can't really be conveyed effectively in the graphic medium (which forces the reader out of the narrator's head to become an external viewer) I have faith that the characters would be less flat their their comic-book counterparts. But I'm not sure of these elements, and I found the plot really predictable (and bits of it quite unappealing), so I'm having trouble convincing myself I need to re-visit Vesuvius Club, even in another format.
So I guess that what I am trying to decide is this: if I did not enjoy the characters/plot as presented in the graphic novel, will the entertaining writing style found in the novel be enough to 'save' The Vesuvius Club? Do I want to bother to find out?
*shrug*
So what would you do?
Think of a book that you were interested in - but had not read - until you saw an adaptation of that book (comic book, TV series, movie, play, whatever) that you didn't really enjoy. How did that affect your decision to read the book later?