I have had many a chat (don't ask me why) which centered on whether it was appropriate for other people to read Terry Goodkind novels, so I decided to read one myself so I could give my definitive judgment from upon high. I picked this particular one because it had a goofy picture of a statue on the front. It's midway through the series, but I really don't think I missed anything by skipping five or six or seven books.
Goodkind is notorious for his objectivist rants translated extremely poorly into a fantasy setting. Personally I enjoyed those parts the most, if enjoyed is the word. At least I felt some sort of response, even if that response was "Wow, that's a really stupid straw man argument" or "Wow, our hero Richard Rahl is certainly a bagful of Summer's Eve." Ayn Rand would come back from the dead and slap Goodkind for some of the crap he pulls in her name (and I'm certainly no fan of Rand) - I mean, there's an argument against pacifism that involves the nature of cheesemaking. It's really all very bizarre, and pretty funny in its way.
However, when Goodkind isn't going on about the principle of life, his writing actually drops in quality, as he feels the need to add tons of exposition to make sure that the reader gets that Rahl is the smartest smarty who ever clevered upon the face of the earth. Example: The first chapter is taken up by our heroes wandering through the desert, panicking because some big black birds are on their trail. Now it's obvious that the birds are following them for a reason, but Goodkind hammers this message home to the reader by describing the birds (they're big, and black - Goodkind is not exactly a master of poetic description), then having Rahl comment on the birds and their possible relationship to falcons, then having everyone else worry about the birds, then finally giving Rahl the last word, in which he reveals that yeah, those birds are big and bad and they are following us!
There's also a lot of rape and torture, which is par for the course in this sort of fantasy novel, as it allows the "good guys" to kill pretty much anyone they like and still come out looking morally decent, as at least they've kept it in their collective pants.
Anyway, Terry Goodkind. Very bad and very long. Avoid.
The lowdown on the Goodkind universe. His sword is powered by rage!
Showing posts with label i did not expect to like this book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label i did not expect to like this book. Show all posts
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Friday, 30 May 2008
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh dear Lord, this book pissed me off so much. Forgive me for going on at length, but sometimes it has to be done, for spiritual reasons, I suppose. Good for the soul!
I’ll start by pointing out one nice thing. One of the nice things about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has pictures, so there’s less of it to get through. However, the pictures themselves add nothing. Maybe it’s supposed to be “innovative,” but playing with text and pictures is nothing new – hell, Lawrence Sterne did it in Tristram Shandy and that was back when the printer was a man in a wig hunched over a wooden press. The thing is, Sterne was funny. 250 years later and we’ve regressed. Most of the photos are the equivalent of the clip art in a Powerpoint presentation - somebody doesn’t have enough to say about the future of, say, travel agencies, so they stick a cartoon of a smiling plane up on the slide. Safran Foer’s work is the same; the kid talks about a cat, there’s a photo of a cat. There’s a mention of the Staten Island ferry crash, so of course there’s a shot of a CNN report showing the busted-up ferry. And so on. Most of it’s dull, although I’m saving discussion of the money shot, so to say, for the end.
The text, what’s legible, isn’t that much better. Safran Foer can’t resist a “deep” moment, and it starts to become funny pretty quickly – who’s going to cry next, or come up with a cutesy Rube Goldberg contraption that reflects the Nature of Love, or throw out a trite reflection on Death, or write something, hence demonstrating within the text the limits of the writer’s form, or – well, it goes on. None of the characters are presented as anything other than appealing in a stock sort of way, despite the fact that they are all collections of tics and oddities. As an example, there’s a subplot that takes place in WWII Dresden, of all places, and the German family involved is sheltering a Jewish artist who makes pithy comments about the state of the world. Presumably if they hadn't been sheltering a Jew, or sheltered one of those pushy Jews instead, the reader would think that they were Bad Germans and deserved to have their lungs set aflame. No, I’m being going at this from the wrong direction – it’s much more likely that Safran Foer is constitutionally incapable of writing a character who doesn’t speak in the language of a Hallmark card. Some of the conceits would be cute or charming if they were spaced out into individual books, and I like a good love story, but thrown all together it’s like – to quote an Amazon reviewer with a better grasp of metaphor than Safran Foer – “reading a book in the middle of a swarm of bees.”
Back to the pictures: the book ends with a series of pictures of a man falling out of one of the WTC buildings. I know that this is the classic cry of the prude, but there’s really not much that will positively stop me from finishing a book. I may get bored, but content-wise I can deal with almost anything if it holds my interest. That said, I couldn’t get through the flipbook at the end. It was just too disgusting. I read the last page of text with my head turned to the left and then slammed the book shut because I knew what was coming. I mean, that’s a real person who died in a horrible way and here comes Jonathan Safran Foer to Marley and Me all over his splattered remains by putting him in a goddamn flipbook like something out of a Cracker Jack box. Perhaps I am a softheaded moralist, but I think rather that this reaction reflects some deep inner fear of mine, that one day I will die in a terrifying and humiliating way and then my remains will be immortalized in a mash-up of The Tin Drum and Love Actually.
I’ll start by pointing out one nice thing. One of the nice things about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has pictures, so there’s less of it to get through. However, the pictures themselves add nothing. Maybe it’s supposed to be “innovative,” but playing with text and pictures is nothing new – hell, Lawrence Sterne did it in Tristram Shandy and that was back when the printer was a man in a wig hunched over a wooden press. The thing is, Sterne was funny. 250 years later and we’ve regressed. Most of the photos are the equivalent of the clip art in a Powerpoint presentation - somebody doesn’t have enough to say about the future of, say, travel agencies, so they stick a cartoon of a smiling plane up on the slide. Safran Foer’s work is the same; the kid talks about a cat, there’s a photo of a cat. There’s a mention of the Staten Island ferry crash, so of course there’s a shot of a CNN report showing the busted-up ferry. And so on. Most of it’s dull, although I’m saving discussion of the money shot, so to say, for the end.
The text, what’s legible, isn’t that much better. Safran Foer can’t resist a “deep” moment, and it starts to become funny pretty quickly – who’s going to cry next, or come up with a cutesy Rube Goldberg contraption that reflects the Nature of Love, or throw out a trite reflection on Death, or write something, hence demonstrating within the text the limits of the writer’s form, or – well, it goes on. None of the characters are presented as anything other than appealing in a stock sort of way, despite the fact that they are all collections of tics and oddities. As an example, there’s a subplot that takes place in WWII Dresden, of all places, and the German family involved is sheltering a Jewish artist who makes pithy comments about the state of the world. Presumably if they hadn't been sheltering a Jew, or sheltered one of those pushy Jews instead, the reader would think that they were Bad Germans and deserved to have their lungs set aflame. No, I’m being going at this from the wrong direction – it’s much more likely that Safran Foer is constitutionally incapable of writing a character who doesn’t speak in the language of a Hallmark card. Some of the conceits would be cute or charming if they were spaced out into individual books, and I like a good love story, but thrown all together it’s like – to quote an Amazon reviewer with a better grasp of metaphor than Safran Foer – “reading a book in the middle of a swarm of bees.”
Back to the pictures: the book ends with a series of pictures of a man falling out of one of the WTC buildings. I know that this is the classic cry of the prude, but there’s really not much that will positively stop me from finishing a book. I may get bored, but content-wise I can deal with almost anything if it holds my interest. That said, I couldn’t get through the flipbook at the end. It was just too disgusting. I read the last page of text with my head turned to the left and then slammed the book shut because I knew what was coming. I mean, that’s a real person who died in a horrible way and here comes Jonathan Safran Foer to Marley and Me all over his splattered remains by putting him in a goddamn flipbook like something out of a Cracker Jack box. Perhaps I am a softheaded moralist, but I think rather that this reaction reflects some deep inner fear of mine, that one day I will die in a terrifying and humiliating way and then my remains will be immortalized in a mash-up of The Tin Drum and Love Actually.
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
"The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen
I have a confession to make. I have been lying to others about how crap The Corrections is. I was mainly going off the strength of this review, which quotes from Dune so you know it’s good (I mean that seriously, what’s better than Dune?) I’d never actually read the book – well, I had done the classic bookstore flip-through, but I’d never gone through and absorbed every word, beginning to end. And here I was using the book as an example of literary failure. I wanted to make things right. So I sat down and read the whole thing. And?
Dolan is right when he says that Franzen is a crap writer of metaphors. The “sinus” metaphor really does go on for pages, and then Franzen has the gall to reuse it later on. Some of it the writing was so bad that I started to think that it must be a put-on, that Franzen must be sitting somewhere laughing, or maybe emitting a small strangled sound while his lips twist in an approximation of a smile, over what he was allowed to get away with and win a National Book Award. A description of Manhattan executives as “supergentry” is barely technically correct, but what the “super” is doing there is anybody’s guess. And Franzen describes a Midwestern wind as like “Mexican violence.” Stormy like a burrito fart? Come on.
As for the charge of misogyny? I’m not sure if Franzen’s misogynist – not because he’s particularly kind to his women characters, but because all the male characters are loathsome as well. That said, there are an awful lot of scenes where a woman jumps through hoops to get a man interested in her; even the lesbian scenes have the femme partner degrading herself, while her girlfriend gets a kick out of turning her aside. Generally only the worst sort of women (two-timing golddiggers, slutty students who for some reason are obsessed with their distant professors) actually get to the point of consummation. Yeah, actually maybe he is misogynist.
There’s also a talking shit. Dolan doesn’t bother to mention the talking shit, but it’s not as much fun as Mr. Hankey.
The verdict? The Corrections isn’t terrible. The plot hangs together, and I was generally able to make out what was happening (although, come to think of it, Wizard’s Daughter was slightly better at conveying the passage of time). It’s a moving read, in parts. Not many parts, but in parts. And despite it reading like a fictionalization of David Brooks, it’s less egregious than, off the top of my head… Jed Mercurio’s Bodies. I wouldn’t have read it for pleasure, though, and the fact that I got all the way through it should stand as a lesson that lying doesn’t pay.
Dolan is right when he says that Franzen is a crap writer of metaphors. The “sinus” metaphor really does go on for pages, and then Franzen has the gall to reuse it later on. Some of it the writing was so bad that I started to think that it must be a put-on, that Franzen must be sitting somewhere laughing, or maybe emitting a small strangled sound while his lips twist in an approximation of a smile, over what he was allowed to get away with and win a National Book Award. A description of Manhattan executives as “supergentry” is barely technically correct, but what the “super” is doing there is anybody’s guess. And Franzen describes a Midwestern wind as like “Mexican violence.” Stormy like a burrito fart? Come on.
As for the charge of misogyny? I’m not sure if Franzen’s misogynist – not because he’s particularly kind to his women characters, but because all the male characters are loathsome as well. That said, there are an awful lot of scenes where a woman jumps through hoops to get a man interested in her; even the lesbian scenes have the femme partner degrading herself, while her girlfriend gets a kick out of turning her aside. Generally only the worst sort of women (two-timing golddiggers, slutty students who for some reason are obsessed with their distant professors) actually get to the point of consummation. Yeah, actually maybe he is misogynist.
There’s also a talking shit. Dolan doesn’t bother to mention the talking shit, but it’s not as much fun as Mr. Hankey.
The verdict? The Corrections isn’t terrible. The plot hangs together, and I was generally able to make out what was happening (although, come to think of it, Wizard’s Daughter was slightly better at conveying the passage of time). It’s a moving read, in parts. Not many parts, but in parts. And despite it reading like a fictionalization of David Brooks, it’s less egregious than, off the top of my head… Jed Mercurio’s Bodies. I wouldn’t have read it for pleasure, though, and the fact that I got all the way through it should stand as a lesson that lying doesn’t pay.
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