I have tried some of Amazon's free novel downloads. I have enjoyed a few, but I'm getting a bit more discriminating as I go. Most of the new, free books offered are science fiction and romance. Now I like a little romance as much as the next girl, but I've found that the plots are all the same. I need more than handsome man meets beautiful woman; they disagree; they succumb to the inevitable and admit their undying love.
I also like good science fiction, but not all of it is good. I think it is easy to write because authors don't have to follow rules. My sixth grade creative writers always wanted to write science fiction so they could make stuff up. There has to be a compelling story under the weirdness.
There are authors who not only write a good story, but take you to school too. I have a decent vocabulary, but books by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston show me my inadequacies. I just finished a novel and paged back through it to gather some of the expressions that I needed to look up (thankfully, the Kindle has a built-in dictionary).
"...incipient panic..." "...vertiginous trail." "...pink alpenglow..."
"I'm a pedant and an obscuranist..." "...froth subsumed into an angry ocean."
"...the lingua franca of the service decks." "...the oenophilic ritual."
"...air so thick with schaden freude..."
Some of these are from other languages so even my MacBook dictionary doesn't recognize them. Make no mistake, I liked the novel. And I think that reading something that makes me think is good for me. I may even be a bit of a pedant.
8 comments:
The words and phrases you pulled from your reading are a hoot, if you ask me. I like a good vocabulary, and I think mine is fairly good, but really, some of those words and phrases???? I suspect the author was using a Thesaurus as he wrote, trying to wow his audience. I wonder how many of these words he remembered the meaning of after he'd finished his writing?
that kind of vocabulary words would really slow me down in reading and enjoying the book I was reading.
The Preston & Child books are among my favorites!
I haven't used my Kindle like I thought I would. I have joined an eBook challenge this year to encourage my use of it. I will be reading The Briar King soon and will let you know what I thought. This week I am starting Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck on it.
Science fiction: 35 years ago I read,"Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Glory Road" both by Heinlein. I enjoyed them back then...
I loved the Dune Trilogy. My husband is a huge Science Fiction fan. I guess I read all kinds of books. I've been wondering about the kindle but I thought it would be expensive to buy the book downloads. I didn't know there would be free stuff, too.
Jo, there is a Beverly Lewis book free at Kindle books today!
Great post, Jo. I too love a good vocabulary. Like Lin, I do not like a lot of hard to pronounce and even harder to understand words cluttering the story. I like your spirit about it though..."way-to-go-Jo!"
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