Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 15:43:17 -0500
From: Kit Mason <kit at hers.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: What I can't read
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Erica VD Ginter wrote:
> On a less livid note, I've tried in vain to read Gene Wolfe; I think I'm
> missing a critical lit'ry allele. I also can't read anything longer than a
> short story in present tense; it irritates me. The only use I can see for
> present tense would be a stiry in which the protagonist has no memory and
> therefore no concept of past and future, or as a device to avoid letting the
> reader know that the viewpoint character dies at the end.

I read Wolfe's "Soldier of Arete" somewhere around the time when I was
studying Greek, and what I recall thinking at the time was that I liked
Mary Renault's "The Last of the Wine" far better.  (I'd still recommend
her over  any other author of stories taking place in classical Greece.)

As for Donaldson, I read the first three of his on a bet once.  There
were some interesting subsidiary characters, once you got past all the
literary borrowing, but there wasn't enough there to make me want to see
more -- and I agree completely re the cop-out of "it was a dream."

I have to be in a certain frame of mind to read present-tense stories;
sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  However, if present tense is
mixed with second-person viewpoint, I just close the book; as someone
said sometime, "too much like work."

Kit
--

kit at hers.com
Kit's Concatenation:  http://concatenation.blogspot.com/
A Twist of Wry --  http://www.mrks.org/~kit/index.html
Kit's Works -- http://www.kitsworks.com/stories/index.htm