They can't all be winners...
Nov. 9th, 2006 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
The problem with reading a few really good books in a row is that there's nowhere to go but down.
So I read The Story of O by Pauline Reage (actually, it was recently discovered that the author behind the pseudonym was Dominique Aury). It's the classic erotic story of a French woman (referred to only as "O") who gets inducted into a secret sex society and is made a slave.
I may have found a book less interesting than Moby Dick.
Maybe it lost a lot in translation, maybe I just know too many freaks ("maybe you're the biggest freak" cry my detractors), maybe it was just that when this book was written in the 50's vague allusions were the height of explicit description, but this book just dragged.
It's not just that the sex scenes were hastily sketched out, but that pretty much everything was sketched out. Dialog between characters was often truncated into a paragraph of third-person exposition. Action was often truncated into a paragraph of third-person exposition. Descriptions of people, places and objects sometimes hit the right notes of eroticism, but often they read like set descriptions in a script.
Dull, dull, dull. And O herself, since we spend a fair amount of time in her head is also very dull. Thoughts, feelings and emotions flit across her mind like movies on a screen, but in the end all you have is a blank screen.
It's a short book and it was a huge effort just to pick it up and keep reading. If you're looking for books in this vein, go grab The Marketplace by Laura Antoniou. A much better book in every particular.
Last night I also finished up The Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The illustrations by Dore are fantastic, but the story itself? It makes for interesting source material, but quite frankly, just about any session of the Baron Munchausen game will give you stories at least as entertaining. If Raspe sat down to play with a bunch of us today, we'd school his ass.
I dearly hope my order from Nightshade books comes in the mail soon, I've got high hopes for the stuff on order and hopefully we'll get some more interesting reviews in the near future.
later
Tom
The problem with reading a few really good books in a row is that there's nowhere to go but down.
So I read The Story of O by Pauline Reage (actually, it was recently discovered that the author behind the pseudonym was Dominique Aury). It's the classic erotic story of a French woman (referred to only as "O") who gets inducted into a secret sex society and is made a slave.
I may have found a book less interesting than Moby Dick.
Maybe it lost a lot in translation, maybe I just know too many freaks ("maybe you're the biggest freak" cry my detractors), maybe it was just that when this book was written in the 50's vague allusions were the height of explicit description, but this book just dragged.
It's not just that the sex scenes were hastily sketched out, but that pretty much everything was sketched out. Dialog between characters was often truncated into a paragraph of third-person exposition. Action was often truncated into a paragraph of third-person exposition. Descriptions of people, places and objects sometimes hit the right notes of eroticism, but often they read like set descriptions in a script.
Dull, dull, dull. And O herself, since we spend a fair amount of time in her head is also very dull. Thoughts, feelings and emotions flit across her mind like movies on a screen, but in the end all you have is a blank screen.
It's a short book and it was a huge effort just to pick it up and keep reading. If you're looking for books in this vein, go grab The Marketplace by Laura Antoniou. A much better book in every particular.
Last night I also finished up The Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The illustrations by Dore are fantastic, but the story itself? It makes for interesting source material, but quite frankly, just about any session of the Baron Munchausen game will give you stories at least as entertaining. If Raspe sat down to play with a bunch of us today, we'd school his ass.
I dearly hope my order from Nightshade books comes in the mail soon, I've got high hopes for the stuff on order and hopefully we'll get some more interesting reviews in the near future.
later
Tom
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 03:22 pm (UTC)I picked up Trial of Flowers and Majestrum.
These guys are rapidly becoming my favorite publishers.
later
Tom
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 05:13 pm (UTC)Hi,
You can look at the review here. Basically, the guy had three different things he wanted to write and then just sort of jammed them all together and near the end decided to go from first person to third and the big fight with the whale was a total shaggy dog story. Just obnoxious really.
later
Tom