The WH Smith’s in the Gatwick airport was having a 2 for £20 sale, and so before we left, Shelley picked up two new novels for us to read (The Historian and State of Fear) and a couple of books of su doku puzzles for me to do on the two long plane flights—seven hours from London to Newark; 4 hours from Newark to Salt Lake City.
I’ve not mentioned this yet, but for some reason, on this trip I’ve managed to read the following:
Caleb Carr, The Alienist
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
Tracey Chevalier, Girl With A Pearl Earring
Half of Emma (re-reading for the umpteenth time)
~1500 pages of The Magdalen’s Friend and Female Home’s Intelligencer
Oh, and my stupid Star Trek novel. Chalk it up to lots of time on the tube every day and a reading light over my side of the bed in our apartment in London.
So on the flight I take The Historian, which I’d seen people reading on the tube. I’m also sick to death of Crichton, whose novels drive me nuts. Anyway. It’s a vampire novel. From the back flap, I gather that it’s a bit of a Dan-Brown-writes-a-vampire-novel novel. It is also quite long (642 pages) and printed in a large-ish octavo size.
Good plane reading, I thought.
I read nearly 300 pages of this novel on the trip back, and I thought I’d get this off my chest:
It could use a lot of editing.
A lot.
Loads.
Blech. I just finished The Da Vinci Code and “Dan-Brown-writes”-anything doesn’t inspire me to do anything but ignore it.
I bought The Historian just to see what the big deal was all about. I haven’t started it yet, but I loaned my copy to someone who used the word “tedious” in response. Now I’m really looking forward to it.
Sharon: It spends a lot of time riffing on that Bram Stoker “hey let’s tell the story from 11 different perspectives using a variety of different technologies” but without really making it clear WHY the narrative is so fragmented. I mean, one of the narrators leaves a “note” for his daughter shortly before he disappears. The note is apparently 400 pages long and takes up half the novel. Seems to me to be either a really bad joke, a really bad homage, or a poorly planned narrative structure.
Todd: Read Angels and Demons. It’s far better than TDC.
AM just read The Historian–I think he liked it okay, but he said it had some serious flaws, which you’ve identified. Btw, I also recently read The Alienist and White Noise. I think we have the same reading list–our own little Oprah’s book club…only without that annoying Oprah.
I got hooked on sudoku while there, and then I got home to discover that the LA Times now prints sudoku on the comics page every day!
Love the reading list. No interest in the Historian though. What did you think of the Fforde novel? One of my guilty pleasures, the whole stinking series.
And I could not help thinking about your last remarks. If I ever wrote a novel: it could use a lot of editing.
The Fforde (pronounced Fuh’ ford) was hysterical. I’m planning on reading them all.