I just purchased this book. If any of yall have read this what were your thoughts on this book. So far it seems very wordy and pretentious.I am still interested in it though.
One of my favourites. Yes it has a lot of words! I enjoyed them. I am an older reader though and possibly just used to that kind of book. It’s less common now for commercial fiction to be like that. Authors write more plainly and even editing uses less punctuation. Could be the style is just unfamiliar to you and throwing you a bit.
Sometimes if you read on it will just click into place for you. So I say read a bit more of it.
rilldene on
I didn’t like it at all. None of the characters appealed, in fact. they seemed vacuous. The story was boring and I found the book tedious! IMO you’d be better reading Babel (which I read before this). I appreciate that I am in a minority.
EytanThePizza on
I adore that book.
It feeling wordy and pretentious is actually intentional- think about postmodern approaches to writing (in terms of being ‘meta’, as we call it nowadays)- The book is about pretentious, wordy ancient Greek students, so stylistically, the writing matches the content and gives you a feel of the environment.
I think the main draw was- once the mystery started, I was just unable to put it down. It was incredible at building suspense and keeping you on edge. I say, try it for 150 pages and drop it if it’s not for you. Happy reading!
3 Comments
One of my favourites. Yes it has a lot of words! I enjoyed them. I am an older reader though and possibly just used to that kind of book. It’s less common now for commercial fiction to be like that. Authors write more plainly and even editing uses less punctuation. Could be the style is just unfamiliar to you and throwing you a bit.
Sometimes if you read on it will just click into place for you. So I say read a bit more of it.
I didn’t like it at all. None of the characters appealed, in fact. they seemed vacuous. The story was boring and I found the book tedious! IMO you’d be better reading Babel (which I read before this). I appreciate that I am in a minority.
I adore that book.
It feeling wordy and pretentious is actually intentional- think about postmodern approaches to writing (in terms of being ‘meta’, as we call it nowadays)- The book is about pretentious, wordy ancient Greek students, so stylistically, the writing matches the content and gives you a feel of the environment.
I think the main draw was- once the mystery started, I was just unable to put it down. It was incredible at building suspense and keeping you on edge. I say, try it for 150 pages and drop it if it’s not for you. Happy reading!