Disappointment
Jan. 24th, 2015 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI finished two books this week, both of which proved somewhat disappointing.
Into The Woods by John Yorke has the sub-title "How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them". He spends the first 200 pages summarising the findings of lots of other people writing about writing, repeatedly saying that they went so far but never asked the question "why?". He goes on an on about how he plans to answer this question - then, in the last chapter, he lists about six different theories and concludes that we can't ever really know. Gah!! Still, this is the first book where I've actually read the chapter end notes, and throughout the course of reading it, it prompted me to make several significant changes to, and further developments of, my own novel, so it certainly wasn't a waste of time overall.
I picked Fly On The Wall by E Lockhart (182 pages) as a pallet cleanser between mammoth Patrick Rothfuss (996 pages) and even more mammoth Steven Erikson (1182 pages). It's a modern retelling of Kafka's Metamorphosis, with the protagonist as a female teenage US high school student. I breezed through it in two days and found it quite difficult to put down - but I'm not really sure why, since it was almost completely irrelevant to me, I didn't find the main character remotely sympathetic, it was incredibly puerile in sections (do US teenagers these days really use the terms "gherkin" and "biscuits" to refer to their anatomy?) and it didn't go anywhere the least bit interesting. Hey ho.
Into The Woods by John Yorke has the sub-title "How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them". He spends the first 200 pages summarising the findings of lots of other people writing about writing, repeatedly saying that they went so far but never asked the question "why?". He goes on an on about how he plans to answer this question - then, in the last chapter, he lists about six different theories and concludes that we can't ever really know. Gah!! Still, this is the first book where I've actually read the chapter end notes, and throughout the course of reading it, it prompted me to make several significant changes to, and further developments of, my own novel, so it certainly wasn't a waste of time overall.
I picked Fly On The Wall by E Lockhart (182 pages) as a pallet cleanser between mammoth Patrick Rothfuss (996 pages) and even more mammoth Steven Erikson (1182 pages). It's a modern retelling of Kafka's Metamorphosis, with the protagonist as a female teenage US high school student. I breezed through it in two days and found it quite difficult to put down - but I'm not really sure why, since it was almost completely irrelevant to me, I didn't find the main character remotely sympathetic, it was incredibly puerile in sections (do US teenagers these days really use the terms "gherkin" and "biscuits" to refer to their anatomy?) and it didn't go anywhere the least bit interesting. Hey ho.
