It's book of rare, though perhaps not rare enough, quality that defeats me. Even the books that I am really not enjoying I tend to worry at - a dog with a bone - until I have managed to pick all the flesh from them, read the last page, buried the remains and stretched my metaphor to breaking point.
Numbered in this very short list I remember getting almost half way through Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon before realising that its ponderousness was causing me to lose the will to live. I had no such trouble with de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mondolin, a book I attempted three times, never managing to get through more than about fifty pages.
I'm sure there were others, though right now I'm struggling (though not very hard) to remember them. There is however Dan Brown. I have read the first few chapters of The Da Vinci Code and, in the bookshop only, the first few pages of Angels and Demons and of The Lost Symbol. It's hard to come up with an author that I like less and harder still to sit here and explain exactly why he's so awful.
So I won't.
Instead I'll give you a couple of links that do it far more savagely and efficiently than I ever could.
Numbered in this very short list I remember getting almost half way through Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon before realising that its ponderousness was causing me to lose the will to live. I had no such trouble with de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mondolin, a book I attempted three times, never managing to get through more than about fifty pages.
I'm sure there were others, though right now I'm struggling (though not very hard) to remember them. There is however Dan Brown. I have read the first few chapters of The Da Vinci Code and, in the bookshop only, the first few pages of Angels and Demons and of The Lost Symbol. It's hard to come up with an author that I like less and harder still to sit here and explain exactly why he's so awful.
So I won't.
Instead I'll give you a couple of links that do it far more savagely and efficiently than I ever could.
First there is this marvelous bit of sarcasm from Steven Poole.
Then there is this excellent top twenty worst bits of Dan Brown.
1 comment:
Tried on my own to read the Da Vinci Code, whole three times (!) and wouldn't make it further than the first chapter.
However there are also a few left of which I kind of fear to finish, either because I find myself to know before how it ends or because I can't bare the end - not finishing them allows me to keep their momentum as well as hope, that I might be wrong alive.
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