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Reading and watching
Jan. 25th, 2007 06:16 amHere's more reviewing, because that seems to be all I can write about these days.
Almost Famous: I know this was big several years ago, but I'd never seen it. Good movie, not great, but interesting. Since I'm not one to adore a certain genre of music above all others (I have favourite artists, but they tend to be all across the board), the whole love of rock 'n' roll thing didn't really move me, though I can understand being so obsessed with a song or a band that you eat, sleep and breathe it.
The Stand (Stephen King): I've felt for some years that given the popularity of some authors, I should really try to read at least one of their offerings, though I may not expect much. Not being a big fan of horror novels, I was never drawn to King's books, though I know that he writes more than that (The Dark Tower has been recommended to me by more than one person as good fantasy). This book wasn't horror, at least not of the monsters variety, but a killer-flu-kills-off-almost-everyone tale. The things that annoyed be about the pacing come, I'm guessing, from the fact that King is trying to build up tension by describing every... little... action and every... little... thought the characters have. Necessary? No, it's mostly a waste of time because it ends up being repetitive, especially since the characters are pretty easy to understand and none of them go through any great changes, it seems. The book is over 1100 pages long and I'm sure at least 400 of them could be cut*, probably more; it takes half the book to set up the characters and how the plague wipes out life as we know it (with many pages of gratuitous violence as society implodes). Thankfully, it reads pretty quickly, or I would have given up long before the action starts. As it is, the resolution seems almost anticlimactic, it takes so long to get there.
The writing wasn't too bad, but I was annoyed by the the dialogue a bit too often. It's one thing to have your characters speak with colourful, local expressions (the characters are from Maine, New York, Texas, etc.) but they all sounded the same to me and honestly, do people really use so many similes in everyday speech? One character keeps a diary with a totally inconsistent writing style, the length and variations of which seem totally unrealistic to me, given that she's travelling through a post-plague world, camping outside, scavenging for food and exhausted. Another complaint is that while the university prof spoke as you would expect him to, the others seemed to speak pretty much the same. There are supposedly working-class people without a high school diploma who nevertheless make reference to obscure names from greco-roman mythology (can't remember who) that I didn't even get. And I like to think my knowledge of such things is at least average, so unless there was a popular movie or tv show featuring said character around when the book was written, I'm not buying it.
* The edition I read was a ten-year-later reedition, with a preface by the author explaining that when it was originally published, he'd been told to edit for length and so had cut it down considerably -- this is the book "as [he] meant it to be read".
Almost Famous: I know this was big several years ago, but I'd never seen it. Good movie, not great, but interesting. Since I'm not one to adore a certain genre of music above all others (I have favourite artists, but they tend to be all across the board), the whole love of rock 'n' roll thing didn't really move me, though I can understand being so obsessed with a song or a band that you eat, sleep and breathe it.
The Stand (Stephen King): I've felt for some years that given the popularity of some authors, I should really try to read at least one of their offerings, though I may not expect much. Not being a big fan of horror novels, I was never drawn to King's books, though I know that he writes more than that (The Dark Tower has been recommended to me by more than one person as good fantasy). This book wasn't horror, at least not of the monsters variety, but a killer-flu-kills-off-almost-everyone tale. The things that annoyed be about the pacing come, I'm guessing, from the fact that King is trying to build up tension by describing every... little... action and every... little... thought the characters have. Necessary? No, it's mostly a waste of time because it ends up being repetitive, especially since the characters are pretty easy to understand and none of them go through any great changes, it seems. The book is over 1100 pages long and I'm sure at least 400 of them could be cut*, probably more; it takes half the book to set up the characters and how the plague wipes out life as we know it (with many pages of gratuitous violence as society implodes). Thankfully, it reads pretty quickly, or I would have given up long before the action starts. As it is, the resolution seems almost anticlimactic, it takes so long to get there.
The writing wasn't too bad, but I was annoyed by the the dialogue a bit too often. It's one thing to have your characters speak with colourful, local expressions (the characters are from Maine, New York, Texas, etc.) but they all sounded the same to me and honestly, do people really use so many similes in everyday speech? One character keeps a diary with a totally inconsistent writing style, the length and variations of which seem totally unrealistic to me, given that she's travelling through a post-plague world, camping outside, scavenging for food and exhausted. Another complaint is that while the university prof spoke as you would expect him to, the others seemed to speak pretty much the same. There are supposedly working-class people without a high school diploma who nevertheless make reference to obscure names from greco-roman mythology (can't remember who) that I didn't even get. And I like to think my knowledge of such things is at least average, so unless there was a popular movie or tv show featuring said character around when the book was written, I'm not buying it.
* The edition I read was a ten-year-later reedition, with a preface by the author explaining that when it was originally published, he'd been told to edit for length and so had cut it down considerably -- this is the book "as [he] meant it to be read".
