Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 18:27:10 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
From: Candy Madigan <candymadigan at mindspring.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: What I can't read
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

I found Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination to be pathetic.  So
pathetic that I had to memorize the author's name and the book's title in
order to keep from, once again, picking it up and starting to read it.  I'd
get about halfway into it and go, "Oh.  This is *that* book." and put it
down again.

At 03:43 PM 03/20/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>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