The Rolling Book Report, or, Tealin Looks A Gift Horse In The Mouth

[twirlynoodle]

I stopped doing my book reports in large part because I more or less stopped reading ... This happened about when I cleared my 'easy fiction' stack and moved onto the super dense French philosophy stack, oddly enough. I have dabbled in a little fiction here and there: Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tales, surprisingly a slog; Light

Comments

[chazzbanner]

Are goblins involved...or half one... in which case I read it but I don't remember a thing about it.

[twirlynoodle]

Yep, that's the one. Glad to hear I've got company on this side of the readership. :)

[tigerannesims2]

Well, I can already tell I won't be reading this book. I already don't like first person narrative all that much, and if it's full of long ranting monologues to boot, yeah no. The distinct impression I got from your review is that this author doesn't have any firm grip on "show, don't tell." I don't like that either. And then the trifecta is complete with bland, featureless characters.

As a life-long, hobbyist writer, the thing I enjoy most about storytelling is developing the characters. I love putting them in situations where their personalities play out against each other, changing the PoV and seeing it from the other person's perspective. A lot (or even most) of the time I use them to explore themes from different angles. They're all very imperfect characters, ranging from outright antiheros to just not being the best person for what they have to do. Well, there's one guy who's probably an actual good role-model, but he dies. >:)

Maybe one day, when your current book is done, you will indeed write a novel.

[twirlynoodle]

It's not first person, it's third-limited, and although it's largely told in something like an internal monologue, it's like a second-hand report of that monologue - 'X thought about ...' rather than 'X thought,' if that makes any sense. 'Telling not showing' gets to the heart of it, indeed. I am having a little bit of fun trying to suss out the writer in the writing; their descriptions are rather scant, but for some reason the hair and textiles always get the honour of attention. Not quite to the laughable degree of the weapons and vehicles in Clive Cussler, but still, it's curious!

TBH the prospect of novel-writing is growing more tantalising by the day. If I were writing a novelisation of the Expedition, I'd be done by now! Yet colour drags on ... and there are three volumes yet to go. By comparison, I could crank out decent, if not inspired, fiction by the armful. But I also know how hard it is to get anyone to pay the least bit of attention to it, so the incentive to switch over my career is not great...