h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This might upset some people..but then plenty here have upset me

Bill Bryson's 'Down Under'. What a lot of forced, heavy handed telegrammed funnies.

Luckily when I visited for myself..it wiped this thing from my mind.

I haven't read anything else by him...but his name comes up periodically.

I think that should be 'telegraphed'....

Effers check out his more scholarly works on the English language: fewer attempts to be funny and more actually educating.

@Pinniped:

...Voltaire. Given his time in exile and his anglophilic sentiments...


nnnnnn...Scotophilic, surely? Edinburgh was where it was at - and he was at - intellectually. Granted Hume, Smith et al liked to toady to the English wherever possible. Follow the money! They wrote of being ashamed of their poor command of English, for example.

Fun Vonnegut Fact:

He dropped out of his anthropology Masters at U of Chicago. Years later 'Cats Cradle' was accepted as his thesis. (keen readers will spot various references to Rastafar-I: Bokonon = Makonon)

As I say, it's not my favourite Vonnegut. Probably 'Slaughterhouse 5' is the best in literary terms, but I have a soft spot for 'Breakfast of Champions'. Especially for the scatological drawings. 'Mother Night' is sadly neglected, but a good entry point for anyone put off by science fiction.

Although to my mind, what's not to like about aliens who communicate by farting and tapdancing?

Is there a difference between a book that's got literary value and a book that easy to read?

I found the Lovely Bones easy to read, but it didn't change the way I thought about things.. ?

I'm not sure that's a full definition of 'literary' either. I like to talk about (and I'm not convinced this is the proper LitCrit term) the 'Formal' aspects of books. I like books that do interesting things with structure, plot and character arcs, thematic interplay, etc.

A good, highly readable example is 'I Capture The Castle' by Dodie Smith. The narrator is writing on various scraps and notebooks and there's a wonderful twist on this at the end.

Are we limiting this to 'classics' or am I allowed to complain about Dan Brown's tripe... Not only is his stuff badly written, but his research is lousy and he leaves ruddy great plot holes in his books...

Angels and Demons: The whole book revolves around trying to find a bomb in the vatican... The characters know the bomb is there because there's a CCTV camera trained on it, transmitting a radio signal to the control room... In real life you'd just get hold of a directional antenna and a receiver tuned to the frequency of the camera, get three bearings from three different spots around the vatican, draw the lines on a map and wander in to pick up the bomb... The whole thing would take 10 minutes and 25 pages of the book.

The Lost Symbol: I gave up half way through - a critical part of the plot is some enormous underground room without lights... It's never explained why they haven't bothered putting lights into the room, a plot hole I could just about swallow until I got half way through and the author tells you there's a ruddy great door in the room leading straight out to the outside world!

'English Passengers' is a recent example of great writing.
Every chapter is written in the different voices of its
many characters. A Manx smuggler and his crew carry a
Geologist/Preacher to Tasmania to find the Garden of Eden.
With him a doctor, a botanist and a hidden cargo of French
brandy. The aboriginals they encounter have their own
voices and a very startling perspective of the white men
who are conquering their land in the mid 1800s.

At worst it's Moby Dick meets Darwin and the Heart of Darkies
with a smattering of Hornblower on a Cook's Tour. But the
most amazing thing is the voices that bring the characters
to life as they observe the unfolding plot from their various
perspectives. Very well done!


~jwf~

Another author I'd avoid... Patrick O'Brian - author of a series of books based around the character of Jack Aubrey, a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars...

His books are _far_ too anal - he'll quite happily go into a 3 page description of the layout of the ropes holding up a mast...

If you want swashbuckling adventure from the 18th/19th century navy, you're far better off reading C.S Forrester's Hornblower series or Alexander Kent's Bolitho series.

You've missed the point of O'Brian, Whisky. It's C18th total immersion and you're meant to e (ahem) all at sea. The details are meant to pass you by - in much the way that Stephen Maturin doesn't know his lanyard from his rowlocks.

No - they're brilliant. Rich and multilayered and the nautical stuff isn't the point of them.

And he plays great tricks! Almost two books to get an ambassador to Java and then he dies before he gets there, Or suddenly a careless match makes the ship explode and they're in lifeboats off Brazil for three months.

Trouble is, when you're reading a book, it's difficult to let several pages of incomprehensible jargon pass you by - it's not like a film where you can just 'zone-out' for a few seconds, you've still got to plough through them.

Forrester and Kent tend to assume you have a knowledge of the subject - if you don't, you'll miss a few of the subtilities of the book, but it doesn't interrupt the 'flow' of the book.

Yes, but if we had to rule out O'Brian for being incomprehensible, we'd also have to rule out James Ellroy. I never know what's going on in his books, either - but it doesn't matter. You just go with it.

'The Cold Six Thousand' is unreadable, mind.