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Oct. 4th, 2007
Book Review: North and South
Oct. 4th, 2007 10:02 pmEvery time I go to Boothbay Harbor I hit the porch of the building next to the library. They have hundreds of books there, and the recommended donation is ten cents per book. At that price, I can buy all sorts of stuff that I've never buy, otherwise.
One of the books I picked up last time was John Jakes' North and South. After I finished it, I found out that it was the first of a trilogy. So I picked up the rest of the books at the library (yay library!). All together they came to over 2,200 pages.
John Jakes has written science fiction as well as quite of few of those massive tree-killing multi-volume sagas telling the story of a family from the day it evolved from slime mold to the day its eldest son becomes King of the Universe (sorry, channeled a bit of National Lampoon's Newspaper Parody). He's not a bad SF writer, although most of his genre fiction came earlier in his career; I imagine that when he found out how much dough he could rake in with those historical megabooks, he found it difficult to write good old low-paying SF. But he wasn't a bad writer.
The North and South series wasn't bad. It killed a week or two of spare time. But I do have a couple of reactions:
1. I am an abused reader. I'm not kidding. The novels are set before, during, and after the Civil War. There's some pretty rough stuff in them. When I reached the first scene of semi-torture, I found myself tightening up. Feeling almost panicked...almost disgusted. Why? It was that fucking torture-porn book Chung Kuo by that asshole David Wingrove. I feel as if Wingrove tried to rape me, mentally, and now there's part of me that fears that each new book, each new author, will do the same.
John Jakes is an older-school author, of course, so he didn't get too extreme. And what torture there was, was less horrible because unlike that sick piece of shit David Wingrove, Jakes didn't glory in the torture. I swear, Wingrove probably masturbated to some of the filthy crap that he wrote.
Good heavens. I didn't realize I'd be swearing so much in this post. I honestly do feel as if I've been abused...I'm enraged at the mere memory of Chung Kuo.
At one point, the worst bad guy - a psycho - kills the wife of one of the protagonists. He cut her throat with a razor and uses her blood to write his name on her mirror, so her husband will know who did it. My reaction to reading that? "Thank god he didn't rape or torture her."
2. John Jakes didn't play fair with the reader. In the first book, he introduces a sympathetic character, Cooper Main; he's the older brother of one of the main protagonists. He's a southerner, but an extremely progressive and enlightened one. He opposes slavery, arguing bitterly with his father over the issue. His story is told in the second-person, but we get into his head enough to see that he is honestly sickened by slavery, and is highly intelligent and forward-looking.
When the war starts he is saddened, but surprised by a feeling of love for his home state. He takes a role in the Confederacy's navel research department, but it is soon clear that he doesn't believe that victory is possible, and that the war is a tragic mistake. Eventually he marries, and has two children. Then his son is exploded and drowned while they are attempting to run a Yankee blockage.
The character goes insane. He becomes hateful, obsessed with vengeance, spending day and night trying to build new weapons "to kill Yankees". He verbally and emotionally abuses his wife and daughter, and strikes his wife. This is all the more difficult to read because the story of how he met and courted his wife was quite a romantic story.
This behavioral change is consistent with PTSD, of course. It seems a bit extreme, even so, but I'll allow for a bit of artistic license. But Jakes didn't leave it there. The character got worse and worse, until I had to wonder why the hell his wife didn't leave him. Jakes was bending the plot so far that it was in danger of breaking! And then the character himself had a total breakdown, went insane, and suddenly came back to his senses. He was his old self, but changed: he now believed that peace was all-important, and declared that he was leaving the war department and returning to his ancestral estate to help sow the seeds of peace and reconciliation. It's clear that equality for the soon-to-be former slaves is part of what he planned.
But between the end of the second novel and the beginning of the third, the character apparently underwent a complete rewrite. No longer devoted to peace, he became a ranting, close-minded bigot and ally of the Ku Klux Klan - a pure villain. There was no explanation, no evolution of the character, just a sudden, massive change which Jakes pretended wasn't much of a change at all.
It was like "BOOM! I had a bad bowel movement. Now I'm an evil Southerner again!". Totally ridiculous and unfair to the reader. I can only guess that Jakes felt he was running low on antagonists, so he had to quickly convert a sympathetic character into an asshole.
That was annoying AND clumsy, Mr. Jakes. Did you think the readers wouldn't notice?
One of the books I picked up last time was John Jakes' North and South. After I finished it, I found out that it was the first of a trilogy. So I picked up the rest of the books at the library (yay library!). All together they came to over 2,200 pages.
John Jakes has written science fiction as well as quite of few of those massive tree-killing multi-volume sagas telling the story of a family from the day it evolved from slime mold to the day its eldest son becomes King of the Universe (sorry, channeled a bit of National Lampoon's Newspaper Parody). He's not a bad SF writer, although most of his genre fiction came earlier in his career; I imagine that when he found out how much dough he could rake in with those historical megabooks, he found it difficult to write good old low-paying SF. But he wasn't a bad writer.
The North and South series wasn't bad. It killed a week or two of spare time. But I do have a couple of reactions:
1. I am an abused reader. I'm not kidding. The novels are set before, during, and after the Civil War. There's some pretty rough stuff in them. When I reached the first scene of semi-torture, I found myself tightening up. Feeling almost panicked...almost disgusted. Why? It was that fucking torture-porn book Chung Kuo by that asshole David Wingrove. I feel as if Wingrove tried to rape me, mentally, and now there's part of me that fears that each new book, each new author, will do the same.
John Jakes is an older-school author, of course, so he didn't get too extreme. And what torture there was, was less horrible because unlike that sick piece of shit David Wingrove, Jakes didn't glory in the torture. I swear, Wingrove probably masturbated to some of the filthy crap that he wrote.
Good heavens. I didn't realize I'd be swearing so much in this post. I honestly do feel as if I've been abused...I'm enraged at the mere memory of Chung Kuo.
At one point, the worst bad guy - a psycho - kills the wife of one of the protagonists. He cut her throat with a razor and uses her blood to write his name on her mirror, so her husband will know who did it. My reaction to reading that? "Thank god he didn't rape or torture her."
2. John Jakes didn't play fair with the reader. In the first book, he introduces a sympathetic character, Cooper Main; he's the older brother of one of the main protagonists. He's a southerner, but an extremely progressive and enlightened one. He opposes slavery, arguing bitterly with his father over the issue. His story is told in the second-person, but we get into his head enough to see that he is honestly sickened by slavery, and is highly intelligent and forward-looking.
When the war starts he is saddened, but surprised by a feeling of love for his home state. He takes a role in the Confederacy's navel research department, but it is soon clear that he doesn't believe that victory is possible, and that the war is a tragic mistake. Eventually he marries, and has two children. Then his son is exploded and drowned while they are attempting to run a Yankee blockage.
The character goes insane. He becomes hateful, obsessed with vengeance, spending day and night trying to build new weapons "to kill Yankees". He verbally and emotionally abuses his wife and daughter, and strikes his wife. This is all the more difficult to read because the story of how he met and courted his wife was quite a romantic story.
This behavioral change is consistent with PTSD, of course. It seems a bit extreme, even so, but I'll allow for a bit of artistic license. But Jakes didn't leave it there. The character got worse and worse, until I had to wonder why the hell his wife didn't leave him. Jakes was bending the plot so far that it was in danger of breaking! And then the character himself had a total breakdown, went insane, and suddenly came back to his senses. He was his old self, but changed: he now believed that peace was all-important, and declared that he was leaving the war department and returning to his ancestral estate to help sow the seeds of peace and reconciliation. It's clear that equality for the soon-to-be former slaves is part of what he planned.
But between the end of the second novel and the beginning of the third, the character apparently underwent a complete rewrite. No longer devoted to peace, he became a ranting, close-minded bigot and ally of the Ku Klux Klan - a pure villain. There was no explanation, no evolution of the character, just a sudden, massive change which Jakes pretended wasn't much of a change at all.
It was like "BOOM! I had a bad bowel movement. Now I'm an evil Southerner again!". Totally ridiculous and unfair to the reader. I can only guess that Jakes felt he was running low on antagonists, so he had to quickly convert a sympathetic character into an asshole.
That was annoying AND clumsy, Mr. Jakes. Did you think the readers wouldn't notice?
Book Review: North and South
Oct. 4th, 2007 10:02 pmEvery time I go to Boothbay Harbor I hit the porch of the building next to the library. They have hundreds of books there, and the recommended donation is ten cents per book. At that price, I can buy all sorts of stuff that I've never buy, otherwise.
One of the books I picked up last time was John Jakes' North and South. After I finished it, I found out that it was the first of a trilogy. So I picked up the rest of the books at the library (yay library!). All together they came to over 2,200 pages.
John Jakes has written science fiction as well as quite of few of those massive tree-killing multi-volume sagas telling the story of a family from the day it evolved from slime mold to the day its eldest son becomes King of the Universe (sorry, channeled a bit of National Lampoon's Newspaper Parody). He's not a bad SF writer, although most of his genre fiction came earlier in his career; I imagine that when he found out how much dough he could rake in with those historical megabooks, he found it difficult to write good old low-paying SF. But he wasn't a bad writer.
The North and South series wasn't bad. It killed a week or two of spare time. But I do have a couple of reactions:
1. I am an abused reader. I'm not kidding. The novels are set before, during, and after the Civil War. There's some pretty rough stuff in them. When I reached the first scene of semi-torture, I found myself tightening up. Feeling almost panicked...almost disgusted. Why? It was that fucking torture-porn book Chung Kuo by that asshole David Wingrove. I feel as if Wingrove tried to rape me, mentally, and now there's part of me that fears that each new book, each new author, will do the same.
John Jakes is an older-school author, of course, so he didn't get too extreme. And what torture there was, was less horrible because unlike that sick piece of shit David Wingrove, Jakes didn't glory in the torture. I swear, Wingrove probably masturbated to some of the filthy crap that he wrote.
Good heavens. I didn't realize I'd be swearing so much in this post. I honestly do feel as if I've been abused...I'm enraged at the mere memory of Chung Kuo.
At one point, the worst bad guy - a psycho - kills the wife of one of the protagonists. He cut her throat with a razor and uses her blood to write his name on her mirror, so her husband will know who did it. My reaction to reading that? "Thank god he didn't rape or torture her."
2. John Jakes didn't play fair with the reader. In the first book, he introduces a sympathetic character, Cooper Main; he's the older brother of one of the main protagonists. He's a southerner, but an extremely progressive and enlightened one. He opposes slavery, arguing bitterly with his father over the issue. His story is told in the second-person, but we get into his head enough to see that he is honestly sickened by slavery, and is highly intelligent and forward-looking.
When the war starts he is saddened, but surprised by a feeling of love for his home state. He takes a role in the Confederacy's navel research department, but it is soon clear that he doesn't believe that victory is possible, and that the war is a tragic mistake. Eventually he marries, and has two children. Then his son is exploded and drowned while they are attempting to run a Yankee blockage.
The character goes insane. He becomes hateful, obsessed with vengeance, spending day and night trying to build new weapons "to kill Yankees". He verbally and emotionally abuses his wife and daughter, and strikes his wife. This is all the more difficult to read because the story of how he met and courted his wife was quite a romantic story.
This behavioral change is consistent with PTSD, of course. It seems a bit extreme, even so, but I'll allow for a bit of artistic license. But Jakes didn't leave it there. The character got worse and worse, until I had to wonder why the hell his wife didn't leave him. Jakes was bending the plot so far that it was in danger of breaking! And then the character himself had a total breakdown, went insane, and suddenly came back to his senses. He was his old self, but changed: he now believed that peace was all-important, and declared that he was leaving the war department and returning to his ancestral estate to help sow the seeds of peace and reconciliation. It's clear that equality for the soon-to-be former slaves is part of what he planned.
But between the end of the second novel and the beginning of the third, the character apparently underwent a complete rewrite. No longer devoted to peace, he became a ranting, close-minded bigot and ally of the Ku Klux Klan - a pure villain. There was no explanation, no evolution of the character, just a sudden, massive change which Jakes pretended wasn't much of a change at all.
It was like "BOOM! I had a bad bowel movement. Now I'm an evil Southerner again!". Totally ridiculous and unfair to the reader. I can only guess that Jakes felt he was running low on antagonists, so he had to quickly convert a sympathetic character into an asshole.
That was annoying AND clumsy, Mr. Jakes. Did you think the readers wouldn't notice?
One of the books I picked up last time was John Jakes' North and South. After I finished it, I found out that it was the first of a trilogy. So I picked up the rest of the books at the library (yay library!). All together they came to over 2,200 pages.
John Jakes has written science fiction as well as quite of few of those massive tree-killing multi-volume sagas telling the story of a family from the day it evolved from slime mold to the day its eldest son becomes King of the Universe (sorry, channeled a bit of National Lampoon's Newspaper Parody). He's not a bad SF writer, although most of his genre fiction came earlier in his career; I imagine that when he found out how much dough he could rake in with those historical megabooks, he found it difficult to write good old low-paying SF. But he wasn't a bad writer.
The North and South series wasn't bad. It killed a week or two of spare time. But I do have a couple of reactions:
1. I am an abused reader. I'm not kidding. The novels are set before, during, and after the Civil War. There's some pretty rough stuff in them. When I reached the first scene of semi-torture, I found myself tightening up. Feeling almost panicked...almost disgusted. Why? It was that fucking torture-porn book Chung Kuo by that asshole David Wingrove. I feel as if Wingrove tried to rape me, mentally, and now there's part of me that fears that each new book, each new author, will do the same.
John Jakes is an older-school author, of course, so he didn't get too extreme. And what torture there was, was less horrible because unlike that sick piece of shit David Wingrove, Jakes didn't glory in the torture. I swear, Wingrove probably masturbated to some of the filthy crap that he wrote.
Good heavens. I didn't realize I'd be swearing so much in this post. I honestly do feel as if I've been abused...I'm enraged at the mere memory of Chung Kuo.
At one point, the worst bad guy - a psycho - kills the wife of one of the protagonists. He cut her throat with a razor and uses her blood to write his name on her mirror, so her husband will know who did it. My reaction to reading that? "Thank god he didn't rape or torture her."
2. John Jakes didn't play fair with the reader. In the first book, he introduces a sympathetic character, Cooper Main; he's the older brother of one of the main protagonists. He's a southerner, but an extremely progressive and enlightened one. He opposes slavery, arguing bitterly with his father over the issue. His story is told in the second-person, but we get into his head enough to see that he is honestly sickened by slavery, and is highly intelligent and forward-looking.
When the war starts he is saddened, but surprised by a feeling of love for his home state. He takes a role in the Confederacy's navel research department, but it is soon clear that he doesn't believe that victory is possible, and that the war is a tragic mistake. Eventually he marries, and has two children. Then his son is exploded and drowned while they are attempting to run a Yankee blockage.
The character goes insane. He becomes hateful, obsessed with vengeance, spending day and night trying to build new weapons "to kill Yankees". He verbally and emotionally abuses his wife and daughter, and strikes his wife. This is all the more difficult to read because the story of how he met and courted his wife was quite a romantic story.
This behavioral change is consistent with PTSD, of course. It seems a bit extreme, even so, but I'll allow for a bit of artistic license. But Jakes didn't leave it there. The character got worse and worse, until I had to wonder why the hell his wife didn't leave him. Jakes was bending the plot so far that it was in danger of breaking! And then the character himself had a total breakdown, went insane, and suddenly came back to his senses. He was his old self, but changed: he now believed that peace was all-important, and declared that he was leaving the war department and returning to his ancestral estate to help sow the seeds of peace and reconciliation. It's clear that equality for the soon-to-be former slaves is part of what he planned.
But between the end of the second novel and the beginning of the third, the character apparently underwent a complete rewrite. No longer devoted to peace, he became a ranting, close-minded bigot and ally of the Ku Klux Klan - a pure villain. There was no explanation, no evolution of the character, just a sudden, massive change which Jakes pretended wasn't much of a change at all.
It was like "BOOM! I had a bad bowel movement. Now I'm an evil Southerner again!". Totally ridiculous and unfair to the reader. I can only guess that Jakes felt he was running low on antagonists, so he had to quickly convert a sympathetic character into an asshole.
That was annoying AND clumsy, Mr. Jakes. Did you think the readers wouldn't notice?
Sebastian's Sixth, prologue
Oct. 4th, 2007 10:10 pmSebastian has been promising stuff to kids at school. He apparently told his best friend that we'd be giving him and his brother a Wii. We felt bad, so we bought each of them a Webkinz. We told Sebastian NOT to promise things to anyone any more.
But it seems he simply couldn't resist. His birthday party on Sunday will be at Build A Bear; the kids are each going to get a "chocolate" or "vanilla" bear (not edible, these are actual teddy bears). But when we picked him up from school today we discovered that he'd promised an outfit for each bear as well.
We just can't afford that. We wouldn't have enough money to eat for the rest of the month if we did that!
He also promised one girl (who can't come to his party) a bear with a cheerleading outfit. She's his favorite, I think, and she likes him very much; it's so cute to see them playing together. So we're not sure what to do. We certainly hadn't planned to get bears for kids who didn't come to the party, after all! And if we buy it for her (which I'll admit we're tempted to do), we'll A) have a weird situation with the parents of the 3-4 other kids in his class who can't come to the party, and B) have a weird situation with her parents - they may feel obligated to buy him a gift after all.
It's an awkward situation. What would you do?
While I'm at it, another funny Sebastian thing: he insists that any small dog is a chihuahua. Vehemently.
But it seems he simply couldn't resist. His birthday party on Sunday will be at Build A Bear; the kids are each going to get a "chocolate" or "vanilla" bear (not edible, these are actual teddy bears). But when we picked him up from school today we discovered that he'd promised an outfit for each bear as well.
We just can't afford that. We wouldn't have enough money to eat for the rest of the month if we did that!
He also promised one girl (who can't come to his party) a bear with a cheerleading outfit. She's his favorite, I think, and she likes him very much; it's so cute to see them playing together. So we're not sure what to do. We certainly hadn't planned to get bears for kids who didn't come to the party, after all! And if we buy it for her (which I'll admit we're tempted to do), we'll A) have a weird situation with the parents of the 3-4 other kids in his class who can't come to the party, and B) have a weird situation with her parents - they may feel obligated to buy him a gift after all.
It's an awkward situation. What would you do?
While I'm at it, another funny Sebastian thing: he insists that any small dog is a chihuahua. Vehemently.
Sebastian's Sixth, prologue
Oct. 4th, 2007 10:10 pmSebastian has been promising stuff to kids at school. He apparently told his best friend that we'd be giving him and his brother a Wii. We felt bad, so we bought each of them a Webkinz. We told Sebastian NOT to promise things to anyone any more.
But it seems he simply couldn't resist. His birthday party on Sunday will be at Build A Bear; the kids are each going to get a "chocolate" or "vanilla" bear (not edible, these are actual teddy bears). But when we picked him up from school today we discovered that he'd promised an outfit for each bear as well.
We just can't afford that. We wouldn't have enough money to eat for the rest of the month if we did that!
He also promised one girl (who can't come to his party) a bear with a cheerleading outfit. She's his favorite, I think, and she likes him very much; it's so cute to see them playing together. So we're not sure what to do. We certainly hadn't planned to get bears for kids who didn't come to the party, after all! And if we buy it for her (which I'll admit we're tempted to do), we'll A) have a weird situation with the parents of the 3-4 other kids in his class who can't come to the party, and B) have a weird situation with her parents - they may feel obligated to buy him a gift after all.
It's an awkward situation. What would you do?
While I'm at it, another funny Sebastian thing: he insists that any small dog is a chihuahua. Vehemently.
But it seems he simply couldn't resist. His birthday party on Sunday will be at Build A Bear; the kids are each going to get a "chocolate" or "vanilla" bear (not edible, these are actual teddy bears). But when we picked him up from school today we discovered that he'd promised an outfit for each bear as well.
We just can't afford that. We wouldn't have enough money to eat for the rest of the month if we did that!
He also promised one girl (who can't come to his party) a bear with a cheerleading outfit. She's his favorite, I think, and she likes him very much; it's so cute to see them playing together. So we're not sure what to do. We certainly hadn't planned to get bears for kids who didn't come to the party, after all! And if we buy it for her (which I'll admit we're tempted to do), we'll A) have a weird situation with the parents of the 3-4 other kids in his class who can't come to the party, and B) have a weird situation with her parents - they may feel obligated to buy him a gift after all.
It's an awkward situation. What would you do?
While I'm at it, another funny Sebastian thing: he insists that any small dog is a chihuahua. Vehemently.