Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 17th, 2014 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Finished Reading
Jaleigh Johnson’s The Mark of the Dragonfly, which never quite gelled for me, unfortunately. The premise of a world where objects from other worlds fall out of the sky intrigued me, but the book doesn’t end up doing much with it - the objects don’t seem to have had any real effect on the world’s culture, except as curios. Moreover, the pacing is off, and I felt the romance was shoe-horned in. (I often feel this, especially in YA books. Nothing is so damaging to YA as a genre as the fact that romance has become absolutely required.)
Not that a boy who can turn into a dragon...bat...creature isn’t cool, but I felt like we were told rather than shown why they liked each other. Moreover, it distracted from Piper’s friendship with Anna. Which we were also told rather than shown to a certain extent, but at least I haven’t been told about this sort of relationship five thousand times before.
Also William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, because I am a glutton for punishment. Why do all of Faulkner’s characters have such issues with women? And they all have different issues with women. You have Quentin’s weirdly incestuous obsession with his sister - it’s not so much that he actually wants to bang her, he just wants to make sure that no one else ever touches her ever again. If only they go down to hell together, where they will be cut off from the rest of humanity by eternal flame!
But this is positively cuddly in comparison to Jason, who I am pretty sure is a sociopath. He sees himself as the only sane man in a family of lunatics and the only person in the world who is of any value, and therefore finds it easy to justify to himself when he does things like have his mentally challenged brother Benjy castrated (!!!) or steal all the money his sister sends for the upkeep of her illegitimate daughter.
It’s all so unpleasant. Is there a minimum unpleasantness number that books have to reach before they're allowed to be American classics?
What I’m Reading Now
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Rider on a White Horse. Yes! After hauling this around for the last five months, I’ve finally started reading it! Um, probably because its due date is finally approaching. I’ve only gotten a couple of chapters in, but I’m really enjoying it so far. Why did you put it off so long, self?
What I Plan to Read Next
The Goblin Emperor.
Jaleigh Johnson’s The Mark of the Dragonfly, which never quite gelled for me, unfortunately. The premise of a world where objects from other worlds fall out of the sky intrigued me, but the book doesn’t end up doing much with it - the objects don’t seem to have had any real effect on the world’s culture, except as curios. Moreover, the pacing is off, and I felt the romance was shoe-horned in. (I often feel this, especially in YA books. Nothing is so damaging to YA as a genre as the fact that romance has become absolutely required.)
Not that a boy who can turn into a dragon...bat...creature isn’t cool, but I felt like we were told rather than shown why they liked each other. Moreover, it distracted from Piper’s friendship with Anna. Which we were also told rather than shown to a certain extent, but at least I haven’t been told about this sort of relationship five thousand times before.
Also William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, because I am a glutton for punishment. Why do all of Faulkner’s characters have such issues with women? And they all have different issues with women. You have Quentin’s weirdly incestuous obsession with his sister - it’s not so much that he actually wants to bang her, he just wants to make sure that no one else ever touches her ever again. If only they go down to hell together, where they will be cut off from the rest of humanity by eternal flame!
But this is positively cuddly in comparison to Jason, who I am pretty sure is a sociopath. He sees himself as the only sane man in a family of lunatics and the only person in the world who is of any value, and therefore finds it easy to justify to himself when he does things like have his mentally challenged brother Benjy castrated (!!!) or steal all the money his sister sends for the upkeep of her illegitimate daughter.
It’s all so unpleasant. Is there a minimum unpleasantness number that books have to reach before they're allowed to be American classics?
What I’m Reading Now
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Rider on a White Horse. Yes! After hauling this around for the last five months, I’ve finally started reading it! Um, probably because its due date is finally approaching. I’ve only gotten a couple of chapters in, but I’m really enjoying it so far. Why did you put it off so long, self?
What I Plan to Read Next
The Goblin Emperor.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-17 01:35 pm (UTC)It's so **frustrating** when a book has a cool idea, and then the story doesn't do the idea justice. I can see how it happens. I sometimes get cool ideas, but if I can't construct a good story around them, I let them lie for precisely that reason. Kraken was an example of a story with a superfluity of cool ideas, and they were even pretty coolly portrayed... and yet the story didn't support them well enough, to my mind. Whereas, Railsea, for me, did it perfectly: had cool ideas that were justified in the story, and well used in the story--integral.
I agree with you about the shoehorning in of romance. Imagine if there were some other arbitrary requirement--like what if all YA novels had to have a scene where a person rolls up their jean (has to be jeans) and reveals interesting socks. Imagine if in any book, we had to see how this element was brought in. Sometimes I feel like romance has about as much necessity.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-17 03:30 pm (UTC)A badly shoe-horned romance can stop the plot just as effectively as a "look at my socks!" scene could. Even when the romances are fairly well-done, I'm often left with a niggling sense that it's there because publishers require it, not because the story or the characters really needed it. I liked Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races a lot, for instance, and the romance develops much more naturally than in The Mark of the Dragonfly...but at the same time, I think the book would be stronger without it, because it leaches page time away from everything else.