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akujunkanWow. This week marks the one year anniversary of my return to the Homeland. That's a rather odd feeling. Anyway, massive assigned readings last week meant, once again, only read one book for pleasure.
1) A Knot In The Grain – Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley is one of my favorite authors. I say this because when she is at the top of her game, she is brilliant (see: Spindle’s End and Beauty, which continues to entrance even though I’ve pretty much memorised it by this point). Even the rest of her catalogue, while not jaw-dropping, merits at least one read (Rose Daughter being the exception to that rule). This volume, however, is close to the bottom of the heap. That’s both a good and bad fact; good in that it proves that even talented authors are capable of producing sludge, and bad because most of it is, well, sludge. This latter point is all the more frustrating because you can see the McKinley brilliance trying to shine through the muck (alas, “Touk’s House” is the only story where it mostly succeeds). Several flaws prevent this from happening. The first being that McKinley penned these stories in a horrid stylistic attempt at “poetic” cadence (note the quotations). In other words, sentence after sentence, page after page, is constructed in a cookie-cutter series of dependent clauses and overuse of conjunctions. You find yourself searching for a paragraph; and it is not there, and the sentence continues as would a winding path through desolate wilds, and you sigh and turn the page, yet there is still no period, and you find yourself as yet wandering throughout the endless pointless clauses. But they continue even still, and tedium sets in, and yet you read on, for you hope that there might be some point to all of this, though yet you see it not. But there is not, and so you… You get the picture. The second major flaw is that McKinley tells, tells, tells her way through many of the stories (“Buttercups” and “A Knot In The Grain” being the worst offenders in this regard.) With precious little action and no chance to build one’s own sense of the characters, why should readers care about the minutiae of their internal thought processes or their morning wake up routines? The answer is that one doesn’t, which changes the game from pleasure reading to an endurance slog to the final page. Finally, although McKinley cribs as heavily as ever from Western fairytale tradition in this volume, she puts much less of her own spin on it, further deepening the ennui (not only do you not care about these characters, you know from page five what’s going to happen to them). Final verdict: hardcore fans should read just to have read it, but it’s certainly not worth owning.
That will be all.
1) A Knot In The Grain – Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley is one of my favorite authors. I say this because when she is at the top of her game, she is brilliant (see: Spindle’s End and Beauty, which continues to entrance even though I’ve pretty much memorised it by this point). Even the rest of her catalogue, while not jaw-dropping, merits at least one read (Rose Daughter being the exception to that rule). This volume, however, is close to the bottom of the heap. That’s both a good and bad fact; good in that it proves that even talented authors are capable of producing sludge, and bad because most of it is, well, sludge. This latter point is all the more frustrating because you can see the McKinley brilliance trying to shine through the muck (alas, “Touk’s House” is the only story where it mostly succeeds). Several flaws prevent this from happening. The first being that McKinley penned these stories in a horrid stylistic attempt at “poetic” cadence (note the quotations). In other words, sentence after sentence, page after page, is constructed in a cookie-cutter series of dependent clauses and overuse of conjunctions. You find yourself searching for a paragraph; and it is not there, and the sentence continues as would a winding path through desolate wilds, and you sigh and turn the page, yet there is still no period, and you find yourself as yet wandering throughout the endless pointless clauses. But they continue even still, and tedium sets in, and yet you read on, for you hope that there might be some point to all of this, though yet you see it not. But there is not, and so you… You get the picture. The second major flaw is that McKinley tells, tells, tells her way through many of the stories (“Buttercups” and “A Knot In The Grain” being the worst offenders in this regard.) With precious little action and no chance to build one’s own sense of the characters, why should readers care about the minutiae of their internal thought processes or their morning wake up routines? The answer is that one doesn’t, which changes the game from pleasure reading to an endurance slog to the final page. Finally, although McKinley cribs as heavily as ever from Western fairytale tradition in this volume, she puts much less of her own spin on it, further deepening the ennui (not only do you not care about these characters, you know from page five what’s going to happen to them). Final verdict: hardcore fans should read just to have read it, but it’s certainly not worth owning.
That will be all.