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alobearThis year, the Wordy Birds' challenge is all about reading outside your usual choices, so I signed up to One Random Book for a year, and my first (very) random book arrived on Tuesday.
It was Empire: Wounds of Honour by Anthony Riches, the title of which sounds like it should be read in a really deep and dramatic film trailer voice. It's about a Roman soldier, Marcus, being exiled to the campaign on Hadrian's Wall in AD 181, after being falsely accused of treachery against the empire. So, it's definitely not something I would normally pick to read.
I didn't get on very well with it at first. I'm doing a lot of editing of my own novel right now, so my impressions of the first chapter were of unnecessary adverbs, over-explanation, characters telling each other things they would already know, too much telling rather than showing, and a very muddled point of view that made it difficult to tell who was where and doing what at any one time.
The sentences were also far too long, with way too many subordinate clauses, particularly in the action scenes. I'm not really a fan of very detailed fights in books, but this book took it to extremes. In the final paragraph of an important fight that secured the protagonist's reputation, the sentence lengths were: 41 words, 66 words, 40, 11 and 24.
The story found its feet and started to get more interesting around page 100, and I was actually rather enjoying it by page 150, but I normally wouldn't give a book much more than 50 pages to grab me before giving up. However, once Marcus arrived at his new military camp and started making his mark as a centurion, the book was quite fun for a while. It tailed off again when the main campaign started, and I rather lost track of what was going on amidst all the troop movements, skirmishes and war room meetings. I thought it was at its best when it focused on Marcus and his relationships with other individual soldiers, and I kind of skimmed the second half.
Still, it was a venture into unfamiliar territory, and I'm still excited to see what turns up in the post next month!
It was Empire: Wounds of Honour by Anthony Riches, the title of which sounds like it should be read in a really deep and dramatic film trailer voice. It's about a Roman soldier, Marcus, being exiled to the campaign on Hadrian's Wall in AD 181, after being falsely accused of treachery against the empire. So, it's definitely not something I would normally pick to read.
I didn't get on very well with it at first. I'm doing a lot of editing of my own novel right now, so my impressions of the first chapter were of unnecessary adverbs, over-explanation, characters telling each other things they would already know, too much telling rather than showing, and a very muddled point of view that made it difficult to tell who was where and doing what at any one time.
The sentences were also far too long, with way too many subordinate clauses, particularly in the action scenes. I'm not really a fan of very detailed fights in books, but this book took it to extremes. In the final paragraph of an important fight that secured the protagonist's reputation, the sentence lengths were: 41 words, 66 words, 40, 11 and 24.
The story found its feet and started to get more interesting around page 100, and I was actually rather enjoying it by page 150, but I normally wouldn't give a book much more than 50 pages to grab me before giving up. However, once Marcus arrived at his new military camp and started making his mark as a centurion, the book was quite fun for a while. It tailed off again when the main campaign started, and I rather lost track of what was going on amidst all the troop movements, skirmishes and war room meetings. I thought it was at its best when it focused on Marcus and his relationships with other individual soldiers, and I kind of skimmed the second half.
Still, it was a venture into unfamiliar territory, and I'm still excited to see what turns up in the post next month!
