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Wed Reading Meme...
Sep. 10th, 2014 08:53 pmAs a brief aside...I keep having lengthy discussions with my mother about Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and the writer in general. The latest one was regarding a friend's locked blog post on my flist - by a professional writer regarding self-indulgent writing. Now, here's the thing about The Goldfinch - a lot of professional critics and writers love this book, but a lot of readers do not. I don't know anyone who has read this book that I liked it (offline and in my personal life). And like my mother and myself, they read or have read and loved heavy duty literary novels. Lengthy ones.
My mother has a habit of spoiling me on the plot specifics of books that she doesn't like - in order to prevent me from wasting my time reading them. So, I know the plot of The Goldfinch - and it appears to suffer from what I like to call Great Gatsby syndrom or passive narrator. The main problem with The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the reason why it doesn't quite work as a movie is the protagonist just wanders through the book, yanked here and there by Gatsby, comments on the action, but doesn't really do anything. Which sort of makes it hard to care about him or invest much in his story. But hey, who cares, Fitzgerald's prose is beautiful, and the theme resonates long after you read it, right? Tartt like Fitzgerald and to a degree Neil Gaiman, has a tendency to tell stories from the perspective of passive narrators or protagonists. Their protagonists are yanked from place to place, passively observe things, and don't really do much of anything. It's one thing to read a 100-200 page book such as the Great Gatsby stuck in the point of view of a passive narrator and quite another to read an 800 page book stuck in a passive narrator's point of view. I actually think this may be the problem a lot of people are having with it.
1. What did you just finish reading?
Nothing quite so literary as the Goldfinch. I've been busy, I want light fair. Finished To Seduce a Sinner by Elizabeth Hoyt - the second in the Four Horsemen series. Hoyt is a bit different - she likes to write in various points of view, and create a sort of world around her characters. So each book in the series focuses on a different solider from the 28th Regiment in the French and Indian Wars.
Not many people write about the French and Indian Wars - circa 1754-1763. These books take place six years later. The only other writer that I've read that dealt with them was James Feminore Cooper - who I don't recommend reading. The 28th Regiment was brutally massacred by the Wyandot Indian tribe in an ambush. In the first book in the series - the title of which keeps escaping my memory even though I'm currently reading it - they discover someone had betrayed the regiment to the French, who had the Indians attack them. (Some day I'd like to read this from the French perspective or Indian perspective...instead of the British. Whom I seriously doubt were as valiant and nice as they make themselves out to be.) The survivors were brutally tortured in various ways before being set free. The books deal with the aftermath, or the soliders who have returned home to their lives, yet remain haunted and wounded by the war...and unable to quite shake it off. Each female character is rather strong, but in some respects constricted by the time period and society.
Hoyt introduces each chapter with snippets from a fairy tale that she tells at the same time. The fairy tale is from a Prussian book of fairy tales about four soliders returning from a war - which the heroine's in each novel are either reading, translating or transcribing. And the tale that introduces the chapters in each novel - is sort of analogous to the one in the book.
Hoyt tends to be a bit hit or miss though. In this book, I admittedly found the servants to be a bit more interesting than the main characters at one point. But overall I enjoyed it. And it did have the nice twist of having the heroine seducing the hero sexually.
Some may have issues with the explicit sex scenes. My mother did, not for prudish reasons (trust me, this is a woman who has no problems discussing sex in embarrassing detail and read Rosemary Rodgers when I was a kid) - but because she just finds lengthy sex scenes boring and repetitive. (They are. But I also find war scenes and fight scenes boring and repetitive. Action scenes are hard to write well - and most writers tend to draw them out much longer than needed. I'm looking at you George RR Martin!)
Mom: I skipped over the sex scenes. They were boring, explicit and unnecessary. Less is more.
Me: You do realize that some people read these books just for those sex scenes right?
Mom: Why? They are boring.
Me: ......
2. What I'm reading now?
The next in this series...or rather the first book in the series, which is entitled "Tempting..." something or other, I want to say Bride, but it could be fate. I keep forgetting. It keeps putting me to sleep at any rate. Like I said previously, Hoyt tends to be hit or miss. My mother directed me to it - she jumped to it, then to the last book in the series, skipping "To Beguile the Beast" because she's burned out on the Beauty and the Beast trope and has no interest in it. And was intrigued by the last book - To Deal with the Devil...or something along those lines. Which ironically is the book other people did not like. I, on the other hand, bought To Beguile the Beast - because I'm still a sucker for that particular trope.
This book is about a former American Indian Tracker, colonial, who is now a prominent Boston exporter. He wears moccassins and runs everywhere. The romance is between the tracker and a widow, who is engaged to his former commanding officer. She's prissy, he's rough around the edges. Meanwhile - he's trying to figure out who betrayed his regiment, and attempting to deal with a severe case of PTSD from the War, not to mention guilt for running and getting help, instead of staying and being tortured.
3. What I'll be Reading Next?
On the fence - I'll either continue with the four horsemen, to see if the next book is better. Or jump over to someone else. My mother is reading Daniel Silva's The Heist. She goes through a book a day now.
My mother has a habit of spoiling me on the plot specifics of books that she doesn't like - in order to prevent me from wasting my time reading them. So, I know the plot of The Goldfinch - and it appears to suffer from what I like to call Great Gatsby syndrom or passive narrator. The main problem with The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the reason why it doesn't quite work as a movie is the protagonist just wanders through the book, yanked here and there by Gatsby, comments on the action, but doesn't really do anything. Which sort of makes it hard to care about him or invest much in his story. But hey, who cares, Fitzgerald's prose is beautiful, and the theme resonates long after you read it, right? Tartt like Fitzgerald and to a degree Neil Gaiman, has a tendency to tell stories from the perspective of passive narrators or protagonists. Their protagonists are yanked from place to place, passively observe things, and don't really do much of anything. It's one thing to read a 100-200 page book such as the Great Gatsby stuck in the point of view of a passive narrator and quite another to read an 800 page book stuck in a passive narrator's point of view. I actually think this may be the problem a lot of people are having with it.
1. What did you just finish reading?
Nothing quite so literary as the Goldfinch. I've been busy, I want light fair. Finished To Seduce a Sinner by Elizabeth Hoyt - the second in the Four Horsemen series. Hoyt is a bit different - she likes to write in various points of view, and create a sort of world around her characters. So each book in the series focuses on a different solider from the 28th Regiment in the French and Indian Wars.
Not many people write about the French and Indian Wars - circa 1754-1763. These books take place six years later. The only other writer that I've read that dealt with them was James Feminore Cooper - who I don't recommend reading. The 28th Regiment was brutally massacred by the Wyandot Indian tribe in an ambush. In the first book in the series - the title of which keeps escaping my memory even though I'm currently reading it - they discover someone had betrayed the regiment to the French, who had the Indians attack them. (Some day I'd like to read this from the French perspective or Indian perspective...instead of the British. Whom I seriously doubt were as valiant and nice as they make themselves out to be.) The survivors were brutally tortured in various ways before being set free. The books deal with the aftermath, or the soliders who have returned home to their lives, yet remain haunted and wounded by the war...and unable to quite shake it off. Each female character is rather strong, but in some respects constricted by the time period and society.
Hoyt introduces each chapter with snippets from a fairy tale that she tells at the same time. The fairy tale is from a Prussian book of fairy tales about four soliders returning from a war - which the heroine's in each novel are either reading, translating or transcribing. And the tale that introduces the chapters in each novel - is sort of analogous to the one in the book.
Hoyt tends to be a bit hit or miss though. In this book, I admittedly found the servants to be a bit more interesting than the main characters at one point. But overall I enjoyed it. And it did have the nice twist of having the heroine seducing the hero sexually.
Some may have issues with the explicit sex scenes. My mother did, not for prudish reasons (trust me, this is a woman who has no problems discussing sex in embarrassing detail and read Rosemary Rodgers when I was a kid) - but because she just finds lengthy sex scenes boring and repetitive. (They are. But I also find war scenes and fight scenes boring and repetitive. Action scenes are hard to write well - and most writers tend to draw them out much longer than needed. I'm looking at you George RR Martin!)
Mom: I skipped over the sex scenes. They were boring, explicit and unnecessary. Less is more.
Me: You do realize that some people read these books just for those sex scenes right?
Mom: Why? They are boring.
Me: ......
2. What I'm reading now?
The next in this series...or rather the first book in the series, which is entitled "Tempting..." something or other, I want to say Bride, but it could be fate. I keep forgetting. It keeps putting me to sleep at any rate. Like I said previously, Hoyt tends to be hit or miss. My mother directed me to it - she jumped to it, then to the last book in the series, skipping "To Beguile the Beast" because she's burned out on the Beauty and the Beast trope and has no interest in it. And was intrigued by the last book - To Deal with the Devil...or something along those lines. Which ironically is the book other people did not like. I, on the other hand, bought To Beguile the Beast - because I'm still a sucker for that particular trope.
This book is about a former American Indian Tracker, colonial, who is now a prominent Boston exporter. He wears moccassins and runs everywhere. The romance is between the tracker and a widow, who is engaged to his former commanding officer. She's prissy, he's rough around the edges. Meanwhile - he's trying to figure out who betrayed his regiment, and attempting to deal with a severe case of PTSD from the War, not to mention guilt for running and getting help, instead of staying and being tortured.
3. What I'll be Reading Next?
On the fence - I'll either continue with the four horsemen, to see if the next book is better. Or jump over to someone else. My mother is reading Daniel Silva's The Heist. She goes through a book a day now.