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Friday, July 26, 2013

Why No One Asks Me To Review Books

I finished the novel The Help some time ago. I may have already said I thought it was not too hot. Please note that Family Guy in around 2002 had an episode wherein Nate Griffin, Peter Griffin's black slave ancestor, was having an in-the-mirror-sort-of-dream-sequence talk with Peter, and stated that he used to pee into the master's cereal every morning.
I assume this pre-empts the chocolate pie in The Help, a supposedly funny or ironic or something bit of punchy writing that was telegraphed 150 pages ahead of time.

An Editor was needed.

My wife has been reading Jeannette Walls. She is reading The Glass Castle, a book which I was going to try, because I had not liked the Walls book with some sort of horses in the name  - Half Broke Horses - and thought I give Ms. Walls another try. She seems to be highly recommended.
Well, my wife was just reading a selection of The Glass Castle aloud to me. It was the section on Christmas, and it was for all the world just like The Simpson's... only the Simpson's are funnier and better scripted.
This selection also started out by stating it was Christmas Day morning, and then ended with a jump back in time somehow to Midnight Mass at least 6 hours before... no transition. An editor again was needed. Perhaps all the editors are as goofy as the writers.

The New York Times Book Review blurb said that Castle was a modern fairy tale, and mentioned how we learn about and try to understand the witch - apparently a reference to Ms. Walls mother. Well, I do not remember any fairy tales where we wanted to "get into the mind" of the witch; we wanted to escape from the witch, not to understand her.

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