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With some extreme exceptions (Harry Potter for one), I’m generally opposed to book “phenomenons.” If I see everyone reading it on the subway I like to flatter myself that I’m above it all. I tell myself that I read “real” books (which as any reader of this blog can see, is not entirely true). I hate when non readers tell me I *HAVE* to read such and such book. It irritates me. Worse yet are the books that are made into movies, causing an explosion of books into the population, mostly non readers.
The Twilight series is one of those phenomenons, tween girls are crazed about these books (and the subsequent movie). But it’s not just kids, plenty of young adult women have been trying to push the series on me. I successfully resisted, until one of my best reading friends literally put the stack in my hand and said, “Read them, they’re fun.”
I think it was the fact that she didn’t fly into rhapsodies about how amazing and impressive they were that made me take them from her. Still, they sat on my bookshelf. I had no intention of reading them, I figured I would just hold them for an appropriate amount of time and then return them with a disclaimer that I was “too busy” to get to them.
But what I didn’t count on was that my foray into British history was coming to an abrupt halt with Roy Jenkins’ Churchill. That book was painful; somehow he made Winston Churchill seem boring. I had to give up, only halfway through. It was disheartening, and I just didn’t have it in me to start anything even remotely challenging.
“They’re fun,” she had said, and so I reached for Twilight.
We’ve talked about this before. A poorly written book with a good story at its core can still be very interesting. In fact in a lot of cases, it will be wildly popular and ridiculously lucrative. A badly written book can still compel you to keep reading. Even as you wince and groan at the language, you keep pursuing the ending. You want to see the story unfold, so you stick with it.
Unfortunately.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been slogging through the over 600 pages of The Historian, lugging its hardcover heft to work and back (so much so the binding broke) and all I can think is that 1) Thankfully I read this book when I was commuting by train again and 2) I’m glad I only paid $6 for this book.
This book commits a crime greater than just being poorly written. It’s a repetitive, drab, pedantic history lesson yes, but that could be forgiven (I loath little more than a character summarizing what another character has just said – apparently for the remedial reader’s benefit). The problem is that between verbose and awful, awful prose (example – “It was too serious to not be taken seriously”) there are hidden gems like this one:
“. . .but it seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. . .I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn’t look qualified to wrestle with the undead. ”
Sounds intriguing right?
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