Tuesday, November 22, 2011

A Carrion Death, odds & ends

Michael Stanley have created a good main character in A Carrion Death.  Detective Kubu is funny, engaging, and feels rounded.  Unfortunately, I didn't like anything else about the novel.  The other characters are flat, the thriller plot isn't interesting, and the Botswana setting didn't do anything for me.  The best thing I got from the book was that it triggered me to check if James McClure's books are on the kindle, and they are.

Finally finished The Faerie Queene!  Yay!  That was quite a project...  No more long books like that for a little while...

Couple more thoughts on Savages...  Don Winslow is a bit of a chameleon; in three different books, he's had three pretty different narrative styles.  Savages was the flashiest; wonder where he'll go from there?

The more I think about Wood's How Fiction Works, the more I feel like it's a great book and a terrible one, with very little in-between.  Dismissing it because Wood has no understanding of the importance of plot misses his insight into narrative styles.

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