nicanical

Mort is cozy and charming. I like the dry levity of Death's personification, and the lighthearted worldbuilding. Mort's pluckiness in spite of his naivete endears him. While I don't find the style of satire here to be particularly funny, this didn't distract from the story.

Terry Pratchett's prose is largely straightforward with a warm, playful narrator. However, I had to backtrack some because he is sometimes wordy and explains too much—the latter might be what neutered a lot of the humor for me.

I actually tried to start in publication order with The Colour of Magic. Its weakness as an entry to the series is apparently well-known. That book put me off Discworld for a few years. Fortunately Mort rehabilitated the series for me.

A fun, funny read with wonderfully playful prose. Savor it like poetry. The prose is very rich, so this is a series that might need to be read in intervals. Narrative structure is simple: dialogue and characters interacting, and few descriptions of settings. P.G. Wodehouse's style reminds me of Raymond Chandler's, down to the brain-tickling similes.

Peep these, fellow literati:

• I met them going around London like a couple of sailors on shore leave.
• . . . I had only to inform Spode that I knew all about Eulalie to cause him to curl up like a burnt feather.
• She had been as tough as a restaurant steak, and she continued as tough as a restaurant steak.
• The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road . . . .
• He writhed like an electric fan.

Coincidentally, Wodehouse and Chandler both attended Dulwich College. Not at the same time though. I wonder if there was a class or a teacher in common that was pivotal to their literary gifts. I'll have to read some C.S. Forester too now. He's another Dulwich alum.

The Dispossessed is recommended, together with The Left Hand of Darkness, as a good first read for readers new to Ursula K. Le Guin. It's an irresponsible recommendation without disclaiming the book's slow start. The story is captivating but it takes its sweet time getting there.

The Dispossessed follows Anarresti physicist Shevek as he journeys from Anarres to Urras, which Anarres orbits. The journey is a matter of principle for Shevek, and for Le Guin, a medium for contrasting between diametrically-opposed values: Anarchism and Capitalism, Individualism and Collectivism, as represented by the Anarresti and the state of A-Io on Urras.

The chapters alternate between Shevek's present and past like Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. Here though, both of Shevek's narrative streams proceed forward in time. The even-numbered chapters eventually lead to the events of the odd-numbered chapters. I only noticed this structure after a few chapters. Until then, I wondered why the story felt so disjointed.

Dry exposition is front loaded into the first third of the book and you just have to power through it. The book reads better after that as Le Guin shifts more to "showing" with her characters and also focusing on Shevek's relationship with his wife Takver. The latter adds more depth to the world than any of the exposition ever did.

The Dispossessed is recommended, together with The Left Hand of Darkness, as a good first read for readers new to Ursula K. Le Guin. It's an irresponsible recommendation without disclaiming the book's slow start. The story is captivating but it takes its sweet time getting there.

The Dispossessed follows Anarresti physicist Shevek as he journeys from Anarres to Urras, which Anarres orbits. The journey is a matter of principle for Shevek, and for Le Guin, a medium for contrasting between diametrically-opposed values: Anarchism and Capitalism, Individualism and Collectivism, as represented by the Anarresti and the state of A-Io on Urras.

The chapters alternate between Shevek's present and past like Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. Here though, both of Shevek's narrative streams proceed forward in time. The even-numbered chapters eventually lead to the events of the first (odd) chapter. I only noticed this structure a third into the book. Until then, I wondered why the story felt so disjointed.

Dry exposition is front loaded into the first third of the book and you just have to power through it. The book reads better after that as Le Guin shifts more to "showing" with her characters and also focusing on Shevek's relationship with his wife Takver. The latter adds more depth to the world than any of the exposition ever did.

The Deep Blue Good-by moves swiftly and hits hard. John D. MacDonald's writing reminds me of Raymond Chandler's—much more than that other oft-recommended Macdonald, Ross Macdonald.

Writing for the pulps, John D. MacDonald understood, like Chandler, to let scenes outrank plot. Also like Chandler, MacDonald's metaphors and similes have an effortlessness to them:

The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statues.

Nevertheless, Good-by doesn't rise up to a definite reread for me. It suffers from issues of composition like dialogue occasionally going on and on, and the climax is messy and hard to follow. It is also a bit too brutal to its female characters for me. Not gratuitous, but close.

I'd like to check out more of the series though.

There are some nice poems in here. About a dozen grabbed me and demanded to be dog-eared. There were more freeform poems (free verse) in here than I expected of which I'm not a fan.

I feel like I got tricked into reading this. A recommendation elsewhere described Outline's prose as lyrical, descriptive, but not purple, with clear sentences that are easy to follow. It starts out like that then quickly takes on the qualities of a tar pit.

The dialogue is all indirect speech. All inline, no paragraphs, quotation marks, or any such visual delineation. Little distinguishes narrative from dialogue, and there's so little white space that it reads like a textbook.

Each chapter is a conversation. The protagonist's engagement in these conversations is minimal, effectively turning them into monologues. Long, meandering, and very boring. The subject matter is often failed relationships and lamenting thereof. Big deal.