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The worst books you've ever read (pg. 4)
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| Meat187 |
| Let me also point out that James Joyce is the greatest literary prankster ever and that everything he has ever written is complete and utter bull. :) |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
Let me also point out that James Joyce is the greatest literary prankster ever and that everything he has ever written is complete and utter bull. :) |
That's because John doesn't die at the end, I suppose :p |
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| Meat187 |
OK, right, as usually I'm massively exaggerating. But I really do think that "Portrait..." is a bad and uninteresting novel, while "Ulysses" is more of a ridiculous prank on literature fags than anything else.
And I also believe that the first part of "John dies at the End" is the greatest work ever. Read it already, Lira, you won't be disappointed. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
OK, right, as usually I'm massively exaggerating. But I really do think that "Portrait..." is a bad and uninteresting novel, while "Ulysses" is more of a ridiculous prank on literature fags than anything else.
And I also believe that the first part of "John dies at the End" is the greatest work ever. Read it already, Lira, you won't be disappointed. |
I will as soon as I get my finances back on track again. My doctoral studies aren't being funded just yet :) |
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| kadomony |
some book about tainted meat or something. i wanna say it was by michael crichton.
anyway, in one part of the story, the main character cracks open his daughter's ribcage as she's dying and tries to perform heart massage on her without anesthesia and finds just a pulpy mass due to this diseas (e coli?). it was pretty over the top. |
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| Tasty Onions |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
...while "Ulysses" is more of a ridiculous prank on literature fags than anything else. |
Not Ulysses.
Finnegans Wake. |
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| Tasty Onions |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
"Yanking his Manurhin MR-93 revolver from his shoulder holster, the captain dashed out of the office." |
But concrete detail is so important! |
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| Joss Weatherby |
Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon... The overt racism is pretty... wow.
Actually pretty much all Tom Clancy books suck ass. The only good one is Red Storm Rising and thats mainly because Larry Bond co-wrote it. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Tasty Onions
But concrete detail is so important! |
I think the idea is to impart "military realism" thriller schtick onto the text, but it's just such a clumsy ing way to do it, for so many reasons. Pullum is exactly right when he says "The details have no relevance to what is being narrated".
Brown is always giving the full make and model of firearms in the middle of fast, kinetic scenes. I'm sure there's a scene in The Da Vinci Code where a character is running down a street and we still find out he's readying his "Heckler and Kock MP5 submachine gun". If you're writing an action scene that is rapid and kinetic, your prose has to have those properties as well. If you description of an event is drawn-out, the event itself will feel drawn out. Detailing the make, model and type of gun as well as the holster it came from prolongs the sentence, and so all that urgency of "yanking and dashing" is completely drained away.
For me, this is the classic mistake of this generation of thriller writers who grew up watching films. Their books are really written like films - they are visual, descriptive and usually very literal. They don't understand how literary narrative operates, how it differs from cinematic narrative. Writers like Brown want to write scenes - prose images - that have the vividness of a cinema shot, so they cram their prose with details without seeming to realise how the chronological representation will be affected. It's why I find the whole genre so unbearable, because you can just see these writers picturing their story as a movie, and writing what they picture. It's ing amateurish. |
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| Alex |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon... The overt racism is pretty... wow.
Actually pretty much all Tom Clancy books suck ass. The only good one is Red Storm Rising and thats mainly because Larry Bond co-wrote it. |
I'm the opposite in this regard.
I liked The Bear and the Dragon but hated Red Storm Rising. |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alex
I'm the opposite in this regard.
I liked The Bear and the Dragon but hated Red Storm Rising. |
What didn't you like about Red Storm Rising? I thought it was really good. The amount of story telling from the Russian side is really what sets it above most other military fiction.
Also SYSTEM-J, it depends on the book really, sometimes its important to know what sort of weapon the character is using, even at the expense of tension sometimes. You can't just say "picked up a bazooka and fired it at the tank" in military speculative fiction. You need to know what type of AT weapon it is, is it an ATGM, an AT rocket, what make is it so you can determine the warhead type, what type of tank is it? All of that leads to the atmosphere and the realism of the book.
Harold Coyle does this really well in Team Yankee. There is really no holding back on the acronyms and military terminology during the course of the book and events. It does have a reference in the back of the book that helps, but he doesn't break pace explaining the minute details but does describe the pieces used in combat (some pages even have maps showing the NATO symbols where their positions are and their battle maneuverer's). |
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