Wed Reading Meme...It's a Matter of Style

[shadowkat]

You know you have an odd job when NY1 - the local news channel - alerts you to a project that will be coming your way soon. And you know more than the news commentators about it.

Anyhow...almost forgot to tape to television series starting tonight - The Shannara Chronicles on MTV (8pm) and American Crime on ABC (10pm) -- although DVRing doesn't necessarily mean watching them.
Been on a movie kick at the moment. And I don't have a lot of time for television. Nor patience for commercial television.

Wednesday Reading Meme

1. What I just finished reading

* Uprooted by Naomi Novick - which I reviewed in another post. It was okay. The narrator and writing style irritated me, so that was a problem, but I liked the overall story and metaphors.

Writing style, I've realized, is really in the eye of the beholder, and not always a deal breaker.

Co-worker (whose a lawyer, looking over a contract): this was clearly written by an amateur lawyer, because the writing isn't clear, clean or crisp. Lawyers want clean crisp writing - which we don't have to litigate.
Me: Unless it's fiction. If it's business related or a contract - I want it to be clear and clean, and crisp. If it's fiction...I'm more lenient. Just don't bore me.

Unfortunately most of the engineers and lawyers I deal with can't write. Clean crisp writing...I'd be lucky if I can make heads or tails out of it. Today's bit of legal prose...was the run-on sentence to beat run-on sentences. And it didn't make a lick of sense. I showed it to three people, including my boss, and no one could figure it out.

Uprooted's style is basic fairy tale prose. Read Brother's Grimm and there it is.

Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn't know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn't know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope.”

And...

“I'm glad," I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn't.”

Magic Stars - a novella by Illona Andrews - stars Derek and Julie. If you haven't read the Kate Daniels series, don't bother with it. You'll be hopelessly lost. I wonder sometimes how these series attract new readers? I mean isn't it a little daunting to come into a series that has 7 books and counting? I find it daunting. And expensive.

I prefer Andrews style to the vast majority of writers in the fantasy and urban fantasy genre. Her style is crisp and clear, conversational in tone, character-centric, not overly descriptive, witty or snarky (depending on your point of view), and well-paced. I don't like all her books though. Burn for Me did not work, too romantic, and the characters felt a bit flat. This world is built better and she seems to have a deeper sense of her characters. I like how she puts you inside their heads, and bodies. I smell, taste, and feel these characters.

Naomi Novik's style was too similar to many YA fantasy novels I've read or attempted and it doesn't work for me. Too rambly. Too serious in tone. With a somewhat whiny edge. And far too much description of setting, which confused me in regards to action scenes. The action and the setting competed with each other.

Both writers play with Eastern European metaphors. Illona Andrews is an immigrant from the Ukraine and speaks Russian, she references the stories from her childhood. Novick is Polish.

Clothes don't have magic powers. They don't mystically protect you from three-inch claws, rapists, or murderers. If someone decides to hurt you, they will do so whether or not you have a thin layer of denim over your skin.”

“How did it feel, Herald?” The memory of power ripping from her in a torrent surfaced in her mind, followed by a spike of pain as she said the power word after her incantation had paved the way. She heard the sound of Adams’ bones breaking and patted Peanut’s nose. “How did it feel?” The Herald of Atlanta smiled. “It felt good.”

The distinctions are subtle, but the characters are less passive here, and the tone is crisper with a dry wit or edge. While the other novel is more formal in its tone and more flowery somehow, reminding me, oddly, of a lot of romance novels I'd recently read with similar styles. You'd think it would be the opposite, since Andrews fancies herself a romance novelist at times, and Novick is more a YA fantasy novelist.

2.) What I'm reading now?

* Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - which I'm still reading in snippets before I go to bed at night. Atwood's writing style is...amazing. It's her story that I'm struggling with -- it's so bleak and tragic. Also, I'm not sure I like any of the characters, which is an issue. The protagonists are both rather passive-aggressive for my taste, which is required for the story to work, but it is insanely frustrating to read and I already know it will end tragically. Atwood gives us the ending first.

To give you an idea of how profoundly and beautifully written this book is, and to help explain why I'm sticking with it, here's a few quoted passages:

Some day when I'm feeling better I'll go back there and actually write the thing down. They should all be cheered by it, for isn't it what they want? What we all want to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one; a message that cannot be cancelled out.

But such a message can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate.

p. 428, Blind Assassin.

I tortured myself with visions of her, imprisoned, struggling, trapped in a painful fantasy of her own making, or trapped in another fantasy, equally painful, which was not her's at all but those of the people around her. And when did the one become the other? Where was the threshold between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through the gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar-- I say, you say, he and she say, it, on the other hand, does not say -- paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.

See? Pure poetry in motion. Word choice, rhythm, all pitch perfect. Reading Atwood feels like listening to Mozart.

* The Traitor Baro Commorant by Seth Dickensen - a story that reminds me a little of Uprooted in structure and theme. Also, style. So we'll see how long I stick with it. It put me to sleep on the train...but that was in part due to work and lack of sleep.

Also only 10-15 pages into it. It's a science fiction adventure tale about a young woman who is willing to do just about anything to save her world, and does it through subterfuge, in the process she falls for another woman. Ends tragically or at least I think it does (people on good reads appeared to be torn up over the angst-ridden ending). The premise is intriguing.

3.) What I'm Reading Next

The Pope's Daughter by Dario Fo for book club.