witzelsucht
Really interesting as a historical item but hard to review as a book. Accessibly written with plenty of historical context in my edition. Much shorter and gayer than expected.
This is the first ‘how to write' book that's truly resonated with me. Klinkenborg proposes a sentence-first method, where syntactical rigour and accuracy of vocabulary are the keys to good writing, and together beget more and better ideas. I really liked that: that every sentence should have a reason for being the way that it is, and no other way, and that you should know why and consider every element fully. He eschews ideas of ‘flow' and ‘naturalness' in the writing process, arguing that ‘flow' is something the reader experiences, not the writer, and that writing isn't natural and should demand your effort.
Klinkenborg's method is a sort of discovery writing, though it's never called that in so many words, and it encourages patience and deliberation before you even put a word to the page. Knowing the right words and trusting your own powers of observation are more important here than outlining or drafting. If that all sounds very abstract and internal, it is, but the vigour and clarity of the author's argument are strong testimony.
You see some practical applications in the last section of the book, where Klinkenborg critiques example sentences from student writers. Some are just slightly off and others are barely intelligible, and he rewrites, restructures or discards them with a dry humour and easy efficiency that I enjoyed. Many other writing books wimp out of discussing sentences – even though to me, as a reader, they are the experience – so I appreciated reading one in which sentence-level confidence and craft are instrumental. A really motivating and thought-provoking read.
A beautiful and wonderfully written book - my first by this author, and a complete delight. I loved the romance, melancholy, and subtlety of it. I was at first unsure of the multiple viewpoints, but quickly felt at home in each one, drawn in by the characters' warmth and flaws and Kushner's eloquent prose. It's a “small” story but I would gladly have spent much longer with it.
The first third of this book is slow and heavily bogged down by long, dry passages of O'Brian showing off his scholarly knowledge of ships. I like ships and admire the attention to authentic historical detail, but God, Pat! It's turgid stuff. You cannot and will not understand all the nautical jargon in this book, to such a degree that another dude wrote a whole other book just to help.
The quicker you can get through those early rocky waters, the better. The sprinkling of great Aubrey/Maturin character moments just about got me through, as their relationship is the star of the show from the first chapter. Their different types of naivety and dog-vs-cat contrast in personality are so entertaining and endearing. O'Brian's character work is wonderful and witty, and I also really enjoy his omniscient, bygone-era style of narration.
The book gets exponentially better as it goes on, delivering the ship-based combat, tense pursuits, bad weather, and interpersonal drama I wanted from the start. I understand that the later books in the series are less laden with dumpings of encyclopedic technical detail, so I look forward to getting into those in future. This one's a challenging but ultimately worthwhile opener.
Beautiful, immersive writing about one of the most insufferable guys you can imagine. Sedate to start with but gripping once it gets rolling. I enjoyed the meticulous descriptions of food, nature and domesticity by the sea. Looking forward to reading more Murdoch!
A really snappy and fun sort of fantasy heist. Vlad Taltos - assassin, social climber, male witch, short king - is an enjoyable first-person POV character despite his career in murdering. He's clever, tongue-in-cheek and debonair, but fallible and mortal enough to not get annoying. The worldbuilding can be a bit confusing but is original and intriguing. The writing is pacey and modern, a little rough around the edges but already confident. I'm happy to see there's sixteen more of these.
Most loathsome guy of all time, but I could've read more of him, as the book ends quite abruptly for me. I enjoyed the jumbled love-it-or-hate-it prose and the ampersands.
If you can meet it halfway as a children's wish-fulfilment tale in which a moody tweenage girl can outwit numerous adults to get into the wrong school, befriend the king of thieves, and swordfight a demigod, then it's fine. The world and characters lack detail, the writing is basic, and the whole thing's a bit too cute and convenient. I enjoyed the training stuff the best. The climax is nonsense out of nowhere. All that said, there's something I fundamentally like here, and I gather Pierce's books get better. I'll check them out at some point.
Such a mixed bag for me. I loved it at first - the world felt delightfully whimsical, fun, clever, and bursting with promise. A secret agent solving crimes against literature in a setting where dodos still exist and Wales is a separate socialist republic. How could this be boring?
Quite easily, it turns out. Before the halfway point, the novelty wore off for me. It becomes quickly apparent that Thursday Next is a charmless character to be stuck with in first-person, which Fforde seems to realise because he ditches her off for third-person at jarring intervals. She gets a bland, tacked-on romance subplot, of course. There's very little characterisation for anyone else beyond having joke names that get old fast. The dialogue is functional at best and conspicuously rubbish at worst. Despite all the colourful meta potential, a lot of the story and writing comes off as oddly po-faced and boring.
I really expected more craft and wit from a book whose whole schtick hinges on the literary, but the execution fails to live up to the lofty premise. Maybe the series gets better, but I'm not rushing to find out.
Approached this with high hopes and really wanted to like it. The plot's worthy of some wretched erotic novel from the depths of the Kindle Store (Kidnapped and Forced to Marry a Hot Scot?) but is somehow spun out for at least 400 pages too long. It had some moments of genuine interest, but was mostly a tedious and sour experience. Erratic characters with only momentary glimmers of behaving and reacting like real people. Sex scenes worthy of Jean M. Auel. Too much dubious consent. Too many adverbs. Loch Ness monster not “historically accurate”.
I have so much time for this man – I could read him talking about writing and wiping his arse with poison ivy all day long. I enjoyed the memoir and the “on writing” elements equally. His plotting process (or lack thereof) is still bewildering to me. A welcome palate-cleanse after reading Anne Lamott's memoir/writing book Bird by Bird, which was the churlish antithesis of “inspiring”.
This was a re-read for the first time as an adult, to see how a childhood favourite held up. The Redwall books were a vital formative influence in my life, introducing me to good-versus-evil fantasy full of perilous journeys, ancient prophecies, and heroic battles, at an age when I wasn't quite ready to tackle The Lord of the Rings (and perhaps didn't have a full grasp on what fantasy was). I absolutely devoured and lived in these books, to a degree that I haven't really experienced with any series since.
It took a couple of years for the flatness of the books' worldview to wear on me. Why were mice always good and rats always bad? If otters and badgers were good, why were weasels and ferrets, their cousins, always evil? Where would mink (surely equidistant between an otter and a ferret) fit into this world? These were big thematic questions for me as a tween! The few books that dipped a toe into moral greyness never did enough to satisfy me. Though this black-and-whiteness was the author's intention, it bothered me, and pushed me towards books like Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels, which allowed for characters with more interesting ambiguity. But it's to Brian Jacques' credit that he got me thinking about that kind of thing at all.
Anyway, about this specific book. I love how uncertain and odd (perhaps even “bad”) the worldbuilding is compared to the rest of the series. In this iteration of the setting, we have horses and cows, French cuisine, and the implied existence of Portugal and Virginia. It makes no sense and the scale of the world is impossible to reconcile, which will bother some, but I really enjoy the almost fairytale-like ambiguity. It's like a bedtime story that the teller is working out as he goes along, fully committed to the drama but a bit hazy on the details.
All the hallmarks of a Redwall book are here: a sadistic villain, a stalwart hero, exquisite banquets, strange riddles, acts of derring-do, strong West Country accents, violent deaths, and a big climactic duel. The plot is straightforward and the characters don't hold up to much scrutiny, but I like that Jacques' formula hadn't yet calcified. In terms of prose, he was no slouch and didn't patronise his young audience – Redwall is written with a more ambitious vocabulary than some current fantasy for older readers.
The tone is all over the shop, and surprisingly dark in places, with death and violence described in unequivocal language. You go from cosy scenes of mice lunching on wholesome food to enemies lying in “a red mist of death”, getting slowly strangled, or being killed with boiling water. As a kid these deaths sometimes disturbed me. Reading them as an adult, I'm surprised and sort of impressed that Jacques would go there. It may be a cute little mouse's world, but the stakes are life or death and the body count is sky high.
Even though this entry isn't perfect and hasn't all aged well, I can totally see how the series sowed in me a love for books with rich descriptive language and a degree of darkness, even (or especially) when aimed at younger readers. It encapsulates so much of what I still look for in books and in my own attempts at writing. I'm thankful to Jacques for having me reading grisly deaths and looking up words like “legerdemain” and “alacrity” as a child. I never read his last few books, but maybe I'll finally get around to it now.