Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Bailing out on a Crusie, and a giveaway
Yes, I know I should have consulted with Candy before buying Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It. Can I say anything good about this book? No. Fifty pages into it and I’m bailing.
Here’s why, in ascending order of importance.
1. Poorly written, poorly edited. If my internal editor is having more fun with a novel than I am, something is wrong.
2. Rush job. Close cousin to #1, I know, but here’s the thing: so many of the conversations leave me wondering, “Huh?” that I suspect Crusie zipped through this without re-reading. Or perhaps I’m just that thick.
3. An implausible story line which relies too much on coincidence. ‘Nuff said.
4. Forced humor. I loved Bet Me and What the Lady Wants mostly for Crusie’s sense of humor. I know she can do better than this.
But the most important reason I’m dumping Faking It:
5. I don’t give a damn about the H or the H, I don’t like them, and whether they hate each other forever’n’ever or screw like minks for the last 100 pages of the book, I don’t care. What’s missing is believability — they don’t feel like real people to me.
***
You want a book recommendation? Here’s a book recommendation: buy Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case. Read it for pleasure or study the man’s technique; he’s a master.
I really ought to write a full review on Basket Case, and perhaps I will some day soon. For now, though, I’m spent. I slept poorly last night, then worked until 5 PM in the OR. (More tonsils. And more tonsils. And more tonsils.) I squeezed in 45 minutes in the gym, then popped back over to the hospital for Surgery Committee Meeting. Oh, the horror: it lasted until just past 8:30. Forgive me if my muse is chattering like a Hellraiser cenobite.
I’m torn over whether to write a crappy Thursday Thirteen or bag it altogether. I think I’ll leave the decision until tomorrow, which means I’ll probably bag it altogether. Ah, well. You’ll live. I have a terrific idea for a TT, but I don’t want to ruin it by writing a tired rush job tonight. (Here’s the idea: Thirteen Horrible Diseases. One of my top picks would be PAM. I’ll let you puzzle over that one.)
But back to Basket Case, and the giveaway: I’ll send a copy of Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case to one randomly chosen commenter. Lurkers, this is your time to come out of the woodwork.
Suggested topic for comments (if you’re a lurker who doesn’t comment “because I never know what to say”):
Think about a book that you stuck with for a short while (say, less than 100 pages) then gave up on. Why did you stick with it for as long as you did, and why did you finally give up?
Wish me luck getting sleep tonight. Insomnia can be a real bitch sometimes.
D.
Faking It is the only Crusie book that I have started and not been able to finish. FI’s hero was a small character in Welcome to Temptation and he seemed so intriguing there, but he turned out to be (for me) one of those secondary characters who should have remained a secondary character. Plus, it wasn’t funny. The other JC book that I don’t think was funny: Fast Women.
I haven’t read What the Lady Wants or most of Crusie’s early books. Would you recommend it?
My wife liked What the Lady Wants better than Bet Me — she thought it the funnier of the two. I suspect you’ll find it less polished than Bet Me, but still a lot of fun.
I’m really bad about putting down bad books. I will usually read all the way through. I read Painted House by John Grisham hating it all the way to the end. It went nowhere. Someone gave me Catcher In the Rye and I was excited to read it because I never read it in school. There was no way I was going to be able to finish that book. I hated the way the character thought, talked and acted. I didn’t care about him at all.
It’s okay to put a book down. I know that now. ;o)
I’m American, and I live in America, so I’m sure I’ll get burned in effigy for this heretical view or something, but…Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Zzzzzzz. Ducking out now.
Anduin: I’m with you on Catcher. I disliked it as a teenager and I’ve never been tempted to look at it again. Where do the effing ducks go, really.
Robyn: I’m fond of Tom Sawyer because of the chapter where Tom valiantly takes a whipping in school to keep Becky from taking it. I think it appealed to the BDSM fan in me 😉 Otherwise, I agree, it’s rambling, boring, aimless.
The last book I dropped like a bad boyfriend was Tree Bride by Bharati Mukherjee. It was a promo copy (free), she was becoming popular, I thought I had to read it for work. Ugh. No continuity at all.
Thanks for coming over to my blog on Blue Gal’s recommendation. I do appreciate
your comments a great deal.
Doug: I still think you are great, but we have exact opposite literary tastes. I have enjoyed every Crusie novel I have ever read, and I am pretty sure I have read all of them. “Faking It” was not my favorite, but I still found it very readable. “Basket Case” has been sitting on my bookcase for months. I got about 60 pages in and just quit. Not a deliberate decision not to finish it, but a preference to do anything else instead. It just didn’t hold my interest and I can’t seem to find the desire to pick it back up. I can’t even remember exactly why. I just don’t want to read it any more. I do like Hiaasen. I loved “Skinny Dip”
Robyn: I can do even worse than that. I have a BA in Literature and I Hell hate, with all my heart, to the souls of my feet and the marrow of my bones, Charles Dickens! I hate every word and every character (half of whom are entirely pointless) he has ever written. I even hate that punk, little Timmy Cratchett or whatever his name is with his little crutch and his smarmy little “God, bless us, everyone.” Don’t even get me started on Sydney Carton! Can you tell Dickens was crammed down my throat by a very overzealous college professor, who also happened to be my advisor AND who for some insane reason I had EVERY semester?
Gotta go. Someone is at the door. It is probably minions from the University of North Carolina, here to confiscate my degree.
KariBelle, yes, we are on opposite sides of the road! I have fond feelings for Great Expectations, love the whole Pip and Estella thing.
Here’s what I liked about Basket Case: since Hiaasen has a strong background in print journalism, he writes with confidence about the newsroom. I thought that was cool. I loved his down-on-his-luck protag, empathized with him quite a bit, and I thought the romance angle worked incredibly well. I would have liked more physical description of the heroine, but ya can’t have everything.
Take another look at Faking It some time and see if you still like it. It confused the hell out of me. Who are all these people, and why should I give a damn about any of them? They all seemed like cardboard cutouts — not a single real person in the group. Oh, well.
Welcome, Cygknit! Good to have you here.
I hated hated HATED Wuthering Heights. I finished it, but just barely. I kept wanting to throw it to the far side of the room every time I read it. Mainly because I couldn’t dredge up even the smallest amount of sympathy for Heathcliff and Cathy – I kept wanting to smack both of them.
::GASP!!::
Wuthering Heights!
OMG, I had like, such the crush, on, you know, the teacher who taught us, like, Wuthering Heights?
Course he also had us perform a sceance for Heathcliff’s ghost, which was memorable. And he turned up as the ghost of Marlow for an exam prep for The Heart of Darkness. He could have made anything cool.
The one book I HATE and have been forced to read way too many times is The Old Man and The Sea. Catch the fish, don’t catch the fish, I so do not care!
PS, I Love You, by Cecelia Ahern. Big book, great story idea, worst writing I’ve ever encountered. Tried and tried to finish it, but just couldn’t force myself back to it (and I was less than halfway through). She broke all the simple rules that I would think even beginner writers would know (like only use “said,” no adverbs, no cliches). Blegh! I wonder if the fact that she is the daughter of the Irish prime minister has anything to do with her being published. Cruel, I know….
I’ve always finished every book I’ve ever started – except one (but I daren’t name it as it’s by a friend who managed to get a trilogy published and he might google!) I gave up because I couldn’t follow the politics and history, not to mention a cast of hundreds all with double-barrelled names and titles.
It could just be it was too high-brow for me, and maybe I should send it to you, to see what you think ;o)
And I’m so glad you didn’t like Catcher in the Rye, as I’ve often wondered if I simply didn’t ‘get’ it!
Sent ye an email with me guess for what PAM might be…
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. Rave reviews all over for this sorta timeslip story, and it’s set where we were on holiday last year, and its got Cathars and secrets and all that good stuff.
But
The modern heroine is too stupid to live and the mediaeval scenes are just too cliched. Nobleman haranguing his followers in the Great Hall while somebody stands there doubting. Early morning ride down to a clearing in the forest with a river running through it. Nothing felt new or original.
A pity, because Mosse is a really nice person, and had her head screwed on right in her approach to the story. It just didn’t get going for me.
There are very few books I don’t finish… but Moby Dick was one of those. The class was Great American Books, the professor was brilliant (his office doorplate said “Angry Bear”), and I slogged through some tedious stuff, but COULD NOT force myself to keep reading Moby Dick. Had to write a paper on it, though, and I chose “The Symbolism of The Doubloon in Chapter 99”, (which was much further than I had actually read) and read that chapter, and a few Cliff’s notes type synopses. The upside was, I got a lot of positive cred for that paper, for noticing details that my professor (who wrote his Master’s Thesis on that chapter?!?!?) had never noticed. All I can say is, serendipity is an amazing thing.
Also HATED The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, but had to finish reading it to pass yet another class.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who couldn’t get through Moby Dick. Ugh. Never got past the first chapter. Did the Cliff notes instead and got an A in the class.
You know, one of my ‘how to edit your novel’ books uses Melville’s work as an example of voice and editing or something and I throw up in my mouth a little every time I see him used as a paragon of some tenet of Good Fiction.
Gods save me from writing that well.
M
Late to the party, but hey, at least I showed up.
The unreadable novel:
The Butlerian Jihad, by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert. I’ve read the entire Dune series (by which I mean the novels by Frank Herbert, not the prequels), and I’d flipped through the first few pages of the first prequel — House Harkonnen, I think — in the store. I wasn’t impressed with the writing style in House Quelconque, so I was a little leery of TBJ, but the Butlerian Jihad was one part of the Dune universe’s backdrop that I had always wanted to know about, so I decided to give it a shot.
Well.
When I hit the fourth “ragged cheer” in less than 100 pages, I realized that this was not a book I could finish. I also clued in that this was not going to be a stand-alone book, but a trilogy, and I knew I couldn’t take that much amateurish, cliché-riddled writing.
So I set it aside (rather than hurling it into a wood-chipper, since it was, after all, a library book), and picked up something else, something better.
Talking about it later with a friend of mine, who has also read the entire six-novel Dune series, I was busy complaining about the book and how disappointed I was. His response clarified the whole thing for me.
“Pat,” he said, “what you’ve got to remember is that Frank Herbert wrote literature. These guys are writing kids’ books.”
Ah yes. The light went on.
#
Another novel I gave up on was The Da Vinci Code, but that’s a story for another day.
But Michelle, does that mean you missed all the great homoerotic stuff between Queequeg and Ishmael in the beginning? That stuff was freaking hilarious!
Pat, I commend you for staying with Dune even that far. As you know (i think we’ve had this conversation before) I liked the first book but I couldn’t even wade through the first Herbert sequel. Big blech from moi. I refuse to call even Dune literature. Sorry to be disagreeable.
can I comment? I love Hiaasen. Lucky you & Sick Puppy had me howling.
James Hall is a fave too, and I just discovered a superb thriller called the Devil of Nanking. SUPERB.