Thursday, May 11, 2006
Janet Maslin reviews Lee Child
in the NYT. I am delighted, I have been eagerly anticipating this one (The Hard Way) since the moment I finished last year's one but for some reason thought it wasn't coming out till June. It is a ludicrous admission, but this & the new Jilly Cooper are the two books I most want to read in the world right now, both of them keep up popping up in my head at distracting moments. Ah, it is possible I can even buy this at the airport next Thursday as a reward for getting out of Cambridge more or less unscathed....
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Interesting. I read that review and thought: It's perfect. It tells me a lot about the book, what it's like, while not giving the plot away, I can accept the critic's enthusiasm for it, and at the same time I can now be sure that I would hate this book.
ReplyDelete(jenny, you seem to have infected me with your serial comma.)
I don't know what is up with my serial commas! It is not at all what I do in my regular writing, although it is true that I've always had a very paratactic style; the semi-colon and the hyphen are my two favorite punctuation marks, and yet while blogging seems to make a large place for hyphens (at least in my style) I have almost completely abjured the semi-colon for this ridiculous and gramatically incorrect comma thing! I suppose it seems the best way of getting the feel of something like speech.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is no better practitioner of popular/commercial fiction practicing today than Lee Child. Are you really sure that you would hate his books? I find them the ultimate light reading, and they're so beautifully written and constructed that you feel at the same time you are learning something important about how to go about this whole business of writing novels.