Book rage

[devi]

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. 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.

Comments

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

I do wake up upright in bed. But--I suffer fairly regularly from dreams in which I'm being chased, and sometimes they get quite dark and frightening, and sometimes I'm caught and wake up screaming, and when that happens I jerk upright or throw myself out of bed.

[cumbrianheart.livejournal.com]

*scratches all references to liquid diamond and falling falling from current crop of writing*
:)

[dakeyras.livejournal.com]

I never have, and I really really hope it never happens in this bed, as if it does then I'm going to hit the ceiling very hard.

[elethe.livejournal.com]

I went to a few of the writing a novel classes run by Mosse and her husband a few years ago when she was researching the book.

She seemed all right - but the classes (taken by her husband) were terrible.

And it was clearly all just a way to get pre-publication publicity for her book, which was the worst thing - she had a piss poor website where she 'shared' the research she wasn't using, supposedly to help other writers.

[j4.livejournal.com]

An ex of mine once actually sat, well, bolt upright -- sitting up, anyway -- in bed in the middle of the night and exclaimed "Life expectancy!"

Unfortunately, on waking himself up by doing this, he a) had no memory of having said it, and b) couldn't reconstruct his dream-reasoning for saying it. So I've still no idea where on earth it came from. Baffling.

What does "bolt upright" even mean? Like a bolt? Quickly, like "bolting" (I mean, of horses, not of doors)? I feel silly for not knowing this, now. Dead bits of language, though, like those huge growth things on trees, all gnarled (like the rough hardworking hands of yer gardener/cook/stout yeoman with 1 x heart of gold) and stuck-on.

Or something.

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

I have sat up bolt upright after a confusing scary dream and I was pretty surprised since I too thought it only happened to heroines in not-so-good novels discounted in shops. Then I was even more confused because I didn't know if I were awake, asleep or in a book.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

I'm quite impressed that she managed to write that book. It certainly beats Naomi Campbell's effort (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074932208X?v=glance) with a shitty stick.

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

I wake by sitting upright in bed fairly often.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

I sat bolt upright once. miroza_cat had landed on my thigh from a hight of 1 Wardrobe, and I was most of the way through shouting "Fulmenos Venite!" before I woke up.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

I’ve never woken up “bolt upright”. But I do wake up “with a start” sometimes, and occasionally with a shout too.

The publisher makes more money per book if you buy from a proper bookshop, right? So to punish them, you should buy your books from a supermarket if possible. But not impulse buy books in supermarkets. Except the proper bookshops will have gone out of business by the time publishers got the message.

[pyoor_excuse]

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?

Actually, I have, only once and it remains one of the wierder experiences of my life; with a partner at the time for whom weird experiences, missing time, light and stuff were the norm. Anyway, I woke up and I was sat completely upright in bed - and completely awake. Not dozy awake, but 100% awake. There's more to the story, but I'll leave it there for dramatic tension.

It think the duvet was crumpled around me like a Ford Mondeo after hitting an embankment, and the stars twinkled in the night sky like LED's flashing on an expensive network switch. :)

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

I put down Labyrinth in disgust, despite rather enjoying The Da Vinci Code and being personally fascinated with Carcasonne (the city, not the game).

Glad to know I'm not alone, is all.

[kagomeshuko.livejournal.com]

Yep, I have. I've had that typical falling dream - the one where I'm just falling in darkness, nothing. Then I'm suddenly awake, sitting straight, and needing to catch my breath.

Stein Auf!
Bridget

[dubnordie.livejournal.com]

You know if you go into places that sell cloth by the meter/yard, and you see all the different types of cloth stacked up against the wall? I always thought that the cloth, and the frame it was wrapped around was known as a "Bolt", so a "bolt of linen" or a "bolt of cotton". Stacking them upright would therefore be "bolt upright". Just me. Could be making it up.

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

Might I recommend crapathors.com ?

They are creatively vicious about King's Lynn's gift to children's literature, Sean Wright.
Mind you, once you read an extract or two from his books, or worse yet his hysterically self-puffing website (probably seanwright.com, though I wouldn't swear to it), you will be too...

[argyraspid.livejournal.com]

I normally wake up tryin to kick something. Luckily, the duvet tends to adequately ristrict my foot connecting painfully with a nearby wall.

I like to think it's me trying to go down fighting.

[parallelgirl.livejournal.com]

*grin* Really enjoyed reading this. Have sent the link to a writer friend, as it's a public post- hope that's ok. She was ranting in similar terms recently about a Jodi Picoult book (Salem Falls), which is similarly lazy in its imagery, and I think she'd enjoy reading this.

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

falling, falling
wakes; horizontal
Except for the bolt, upright

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

I recently wanted a copy of "V for Vendetta". I have no local independent comic shops I know of, so I started at the branch of the comic chain (no dice), smaller local bookshop (no dice), large national UK chain (succeess!). Had I still failed I would have gone onto large multinational chain, then Amazon..
Starting with the smallest assuages my guilt.

[rainsinger.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness that was hysterical, hysterical.
Your writing is always a treat and I save it up for when I can read it properly.

I remember a few times I've sat up bolt upright in bed - usually I was waking from some kind of lucid-but-horrific dream. But then I have also been known to sleepwalk but perhaps I am just weird.

[denara.livejournal.com]

I've done that at least once... but there was an earthquake. Strange since I've just lay there groggily during a 7.0, but maybe I was on the verge of waking up or something.

Oh yeah, and once when 3 of the Blue Angels buzzed my apartment (like within 100ft). Never from a dream though, and I have had plenty of those annoying verge-of-death-eascaping-disaster ones.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kent/]

The only time a single tear makes any sense is if the protagonist is a Real Man, and had experienced the most heartbreaking thing in the world - i.e. that his dog has died. At that juncture, a single tear happens. Not sure if it's liquid diamond, though.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

I wake up sometimes (well, rarely) sitting up, but it's always accompanied by me going "Wah?". And when it happens I'm awake at about the halfway-sitting-up stage.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

T is reading this at the moment, and keeps reading out to me particularly poor pieces of writing. You have to wonder, if Mosse hadn't been the administrator of the Orange Prize, would it have got published?

As for "bolt upright", my money is on it being a corruption of "bald upright", ie. sitting up so fast that your hair gets left behind on the pillow.

bookbuying

[annasilverlight.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about the idea of buying books in supermarkets. I like buying books in random little shops and charity shops. All my Iain Banks books come from Oxfam. Have you ever been to the bookshop Shakespeare and Co in Paris, where the owner has peripatetic writers with no money living between the books? I have just been reading a book about it and really want to go there.