They, whoever 'they' are, say you should write about what you know. Deborah Harkness is an American academic who has studied European History including some of its more arcane and occult babblings. She has also written a trilogy (for starters) of novels, of which the first is A Discovery of Witches, themed on a young woman who is studying at University and falls in love with a vampire. This is not really my bag. I'm not part of the demographic for this target audience. But I like to make my own discoveries...and it was a free ebook. After a tedious start, which I recognise as the authors need to display their research, the story romps along enjoyably. The only bit I resented was the Trilogy format which meant that the book really ended 3/4 of the way through and the rest is setting up the second book. The trend of designing the writing structure for TV and film adaptation is inevitable but very frustrating for a reader like myself who will never be a devotee of the box set for this particular brand.
A diary of art exhibitions, books, concerts and records - all opinions personal and open to change.
Monday 20 June 2016
A Recycling of Witches
They, whoever 'they' are, say you should write about what you know. Deborah Harkness is an American academic who has studied European History including some of its more arcane and occult babblings. She has also written a trilogy (for starters) of novels, of which the first is A Discovery of Witches, themed on a young woman who is studying at University and falls in love with a vampire. This is not really my bag. I'm not part of the demographic for this target audience. But I like to make my own discoveries...and it was a free ebook. After a tedious start, which I recognise as the authors need to display their research, the story romps along enjoyably. The only bit I resented was the Trilogy format which meant that the book really ended 3/4 of the way through and the rest is setting up the second book. The trend of designing the writing structure for TV and film adaptation is inevitable but very frustrating for a reader like myself who will never be a devotee of the box set for this particular brand.
Thursday 16 June 2016
Here be dragons
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those novels that had everything going for it from my perspective. Mythology, landscape, self-discovery through a journey and the sense of understatement and restraint that comes from a Japanese sensibility filtered through Englishness in the early writing courses at the University of East Anglia. But frankly it is the writing style that is the problem here. It's not a literary approach versus a hack sci-fi/fantasy problem as I think high and so called lowbrow are useless concepts when it comes to assessing quality, as are genres. By which I mean it is useless to try and assess something by a set of aspirations to which the author never aspired to in the first place. The problem is that the style is deliberately clunky. In trying to emulate the sing-song declamatory style of epic myth the dialogue is stilted and the narrative laboured. It probably would have been a much better book if Kazuo had dashed it off more quickly and less self-consciously. So for what it's worth KI write again soon.
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