Jatopian wrote:
Snacko wrote:
I never got around to reading the seventh: the Victorian novel should have died with Victoria.
The seventh was the worst in my opinion, but I'm not entirely sure what you're criticizing about it here.
It's less a criticism than a preference. The series' style is incredibly similar to that of a Victorian serial novel: individual chapters exist to facilitate rising tension and as a result the book is very episodic. Even the length is that of the era.
When I was raised chapter breaks, if they existed at all, were used to indicate that the main point of the chapter had been made. Some of the less skilled writers who are considered part of the modern literary canon did this to a fault (Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which is admittedly a lot of fun, and is undoubtedly a great book is impossible to read as a normal novel as its chapters rarely last more than a few paragraphs), while others like Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, probably the two most accomplished most accomplished novelists of the 20th century used them to change which experiment they were going to conduct on the English language.
There's nothing wrong with the Victorian style, it's just that I've always felt them to be bloated crowd-pleasers.
Insane: I thought that both the books and movies reached a peak with the third, and the fourth wasn't bad either. I remember hating the first movie but loving the second, but that WAS a while ago.
minimike98, this spoiler is so common that it has become an internet meme, but we are civil on this board, and there are some that might not have read the book.
It's "
Harry Potter"
by the way.
____________________________
Director of the Department of Orderly Disruptions
[Last edited by Snacko at 07-10-2009 01:46 AM]
/dy
