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Book rage
Have you ever woken yourself up by sitting bolt upright in bed? Ever? I know I haven't. But people do it pretty much constantly in books and films. Why? And why is it always "bolt upright" anyway? Why not some other way of saying upright?
I do have a reason for asking. I bought Kate Mosse's Labyrinth last Friday night for a couple of quid in Tesco after a knackering week at work. I was buying comfort food and this looked like a comfort book, a nice fluffy historical timeslip thing. It's awful. Awful awful awful. (Well, judging by the first hundred pages or so. I haven't had the stomach to go any further.) It's clearly been rushed into the shops to surf the Dan Brown wave. I don't know what came over me.
Please indulge me while I rant for a moment.
Our story starts in the South of France. "Delicate flowers" "peep out from their hiding places" and pastures are "speckled with yellow buttercups". A boulder leans against a cliff face "as if it had been placed there by a giant hand". Branches are "alive with" birds and newly exposed earth is alive with worms and beetles. The archaeology student who is our heroine is digging around the aforementioned boulder. When the boulder falls over and exposes a doorway in the rock, she goes inside and walks for like fifty metres, then looks around a spooooky cavern, with no illumination but a lighter. Has she got asbestos fingers?
Then we're with some old dude who's writing about having "watched the green of spring give way to the gold of summer and the copper of autumn give way to the white of winter as I have sat and waited for the fading of the light". Then some other dude gets killed and crumples to the floor "like a rag doll".
People keep "running, running" and "falling, falling". I know I used to do this one but I don't any more. Or at least when I catch myself doing it I stop. There's a dream sequence with lots of falling, falling and running, running, but the main character can do all sorts of things like picking and sniffing clumps of leaves even while she's running, running. Then she finds a "pillar of twisting fire… its shape ever shifting". Inside it there are faces "contorted in silent agony". She starts to fly. (At least she isn't "flying, flying".) This bit really doesn't make sense.
Next chapter: we're introduced to another character as she sits bolt upright etc etc. Something or other vanishes like "wisps of smoke in the autumn air". Then we have like twenty pages of this character wandering through the medieval castle where she lives, saying hello to all the other characters. A cook (with a rough exterior but a heart of gold) cuffs a kitchen-boy on the back of the head. The kitchen-boy yelps, of course. Implausibly, the character goes for a walk on her own outside the city and, even though she lives in the 13th century, becomes hysterical and catatonic at the sight of an unknown corpse.
That's as far as I've got, and I'm not terribly arsed to go on any further. No one seems to have proofread the damn thing either.
At least it's not as bad as Eragon by Christopher Paolini.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wimble introduced me to this Anne McCaffreyish book last night. And to the net communities dedicated to hating it. It has a passage about a shaft of moonlight shining through a barred window on the face of a beautiful girl. "A single tear rolled down her face, like a liquid diamond." Ew! Ew ew!
Since finding out how booksellers' discounts work I feel kind of bad and wrong about the whole idea of buying cut-price books at Tesco in any case. I was mulling this over on the way to the checkout. I don't mind Kate Mosse not getting any money, but by buying a book there I'm encouraging the whole deep-discounting, small-number-of-Tesco-selected-mega-bestsellers culture, aren't I? So it serves me right that I don't like it.
Actually I remember once on a family holiday I was sharing a room with my brother and he managed to leap right out of bed and end up crouching by the far wall as he woke up from a nightmare about killer wasps. But that's still not your bog-standard sitting bolt upright.
I do have a reason for asking. I bought Kate Mosse's Labyrinth last Friday night for a couple of quid in Tesco after a knackering week at work. I was buying comfort food and this looked like a comfort book, a nice fluffy historical timeslip thing. It's awful. Awful awful awful. (Well, judging by the first hundred pages or so. I haven't had the stomach to go any further.) It's clearly been rushed into the shops to surf the Dan Brown wave. I don't know what came over me.
Please indulge me while I rant for a moment.
Our story starts in the South of France. "Delicate flowers" "peep out from their hiding places" and pastures are "speckled with yellow buttercups". A boulder leans against a cliff face "as if it had been placed there by a giant hand". Branches are "alive with" birds and newly exposed earth is alive with worms and beetles. The archaeology student who is our heroine is digging around the aforementioned boulder. When the boulder falls over and exposes a doorway in the rock, she goes inside and walks for like fifty metres, then looks around a spooooky cavern, with no illumination but a lighter. Has she got asbestos fingers?
Then we're with some old dude who's writing about having "watched the green of spring give way to the gold of summer and the copper of autumn give way to the white of winter as I have sat and waited for the fading of the light". Then some other dude gets killed and crumples to the floor "like a rag doll".
People keep "running, running" and "falling, falling". I know I used to do this one but I don't any more. Or at least when I catch myself doing it I stop. There's a dream sequence with lots of falling, falling and running, running, but the main character can do all sorts of things like picking and sniffing clumps of leaves even while she's running, running. Then she finds a "pillar of twisting fire… its shape ever shifting". Inside it there are faces "contorted in silent agony". She starts to fly. (At least she isn't "flying, flying".) This bit really doesn't make sense.
Next chapter: we're introduced to another character as she sits bolt upright etc etc. Something or other vanishes like "wisps of smoke in the autumn air". Then we have like twenty pages of this character wandering through the medieval castle where she lives, saying hello to all the other characters. A cook (with a rough exterior but a heart of gold) cuffs a kitchen-boy on the back of the head. The kitchen-boy yelps, of course. Implausibly, the character goes for a walk on her own outside the city and, even though she lives in the 13th century, becomes hysterical and catatonic at the sight of an unknown corpse.
That's as far as I've got, and I'm not terribly arsed to go on any further. No one seems to have proofread the damn thing either.
At least it's not as bad as Eragon by Christopher Paolini.
wimble introduced me to this Anne McCaffreyish book last night. And to the net communities dedicated to hating it. It has a passage about a shaft of moonlight shining through a barred window on the face of a beautiful girl. "A single tear rolled down her face, like a liquid diamond." Ew! Ew ew! Since finding out how booksellers' discounts work I feel kind of bad and wrong about the whole idea of buying cut-price books at Tesco in any case. I was mulling this over on the way to the checkout. I don't mind Kate Mosse not getting any money, but by buying a book there I'm encouraging the whole deep-discounting, small-number-of-Tesco-selected-mega-bestsellers culture, aren't I? So it serves me right that I don't like it.
Actually I remember once on a family holiday I was sharing a room with my brother and he managed to leap right out of bed and end up crouching by the far wall as he woke up from a nightmare about killer wasps. But that's still not your bog-standard sitting bolt upright.
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