There are very few books I do not finish. Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions is one of them. Unfortunately I bought this book off of Amazon before going to the bookstore and thumbing through it (my usual routine). Had I read even one page, I never would have wasted my money. I've never read a Danielewski book before so I don't know if this novel is representative of his usual style...or if he was just tripping on LSD when he sat down to write it. I couldn't make any sense of the book - there are multiple threads of writing (both forwards and backwards and in the margins) and it is just a jumble of words. Why this book was chosen as a NYT Most Notable is beyond me. I can't even imagine anyone actually reading the whole thing. What a disappointment. Now I have to decide what to do with it - any suggestions?
Thursday, August 30, 2007
My First DNF for this Challenge - Wendy's non-review of Only Revolutions
There are very few books I do not finish. Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions is one of them. Unfortunately I bought this book off of Amazon before going to the bookstore and thumbing through it (my usual routine). Had I read even one page, I never would have wasted my money. I've never read a Danielewski book before so I don't know if this novel is representative of his usual style...or if he was just tripping on LSD when he sat down to write it. I couldn't make any sense of the book - there are multiple threads of writing (both forwards and backwards and in the margins) and it is just a jumble of words. Why this book was chosen as a NYT Most Notable is beyond me. I can't even imagine anyone actually reading the whole thing. What a disappointment. Now I have to decide what to do with it - any suggestions?
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5 comments:
Wendy...I just went and leafed through all my back issues of Bookmarks Magazine, but I must be missing one. I know they did a commentary on this book, and they did talk about the very weird style. But they gave it a pretty high rating anyway, because they thought it displayed good ability by the author. I ended up not putting it on my list, because sometimes I think authors get gimmicky just to get attention, and I don't always like that. Sorry it was a loser for you!
Lisa, I don't mind unusual "style" but this book just was a mass of words and lost any meaning for me. I don't get how that can be enjoyable.
I know that one of his other books, House of Leaves, is written in a similar crazy style. I like one Amazon reviewers description of it:
"I had to have other, more normal, sane books going on at the same time. "House of Leaves" is over seven hundred pages long and it's loaded with literary detour signs, unexpected landmines (some duds, some live), and good old "holding the book upside down in a mirror so you can read the words printed that way" fun."
Okay, that would drive me bats. Who the heck wants to run to the mirror to read a book? To me this is just gimmicky writing; I wouldn't call it literature...it annoys me. What's wrong with just writing a really good story with beautiful language? I can tell you I will NOT read this author again (or should I say I will NOT ATTEMPT to read this author again)!
Hey Wendy! I agree with you on this book 100%, couldn't read it at all! BUT, the author is not always like this, in fact House of Leaves may be my favorite book of all time. Its not true that you have to hold anything up to a mirror! You never have to move, or turn anything upside down just like a book should be. This author isn't doing these things to be gimmicky, its more like art. I think you should drop by the bookstore and read the first few pages of House of Leaves :) It's an amazing book and it's even kept me up nights because of how terrifying parts are! (Darkness/Fear of the unknown. Not gorey or anything) There are some parts of house of leaves that use some stylistic stuff like putting only a few very spaced out words per page, to give you the feeling of a vast emptiness, but it still uses correct sentence structure and punctuation. I hope you'll try it out.
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