Angel Time--Anne Rice
Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were sp...
Good advice: Read and write.
ReplyDeleteThe Coincidence Room: I just started reading Conrad's _Nostromo_ yesterday. It's a re-read, so I'm looking forward to it, not with the excitement of something new but with the familiarity of meeting an old friend, one I haven't seen in years.
It's good advice, but I'd take it one step beyond: Read far outside your comfort zone. Many young, aspiring writers believe they'll find all the tools they'll ever need within a narrow humanities education, but exciting things happen in their minds when they encounter science, math, computer programming, business, etc., even if those encounters are frustrating and unsuccessful. Good writing, I think, is a whole-brain activity.
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