"But on a more subtle level Dickens is not repeating. He is deepening, rapidly taking you through layers of images and movement that develop your sense of the character and his world almost nonverbally -- an extraordinary thing to do in a verbal medium. Dickens accomplishes this by using words to make concepts into visceral pictures, as eloquent and fluid as dream images...The images made of words transcend words to become something more primal in their affect and the apparently simple characters become conduits for essential forces that we can just glimpse in these rushing images."

I'm not feeling it. For one thing, anything liable to transcending needs to be grabbed back down to earth toot sweet, as transcendence in literary discussion tends to turn out to mean "stuff I think is cool and can't explain why". For another, using words to push primal buttons is considered bad writing as often as it is considered good.

For a third, that last sentence is a crime against punctuation, to say nothing of the nested clause.

I figure I can read them now, though, since the first season was book 1, and they say they'll diverge from the book canon with season 2 (and people who've read it say they're not sure how it could be done anyway).

Oh, yeah, I know about most of the major changes from the book, so I know that season 2 != book 2 at all, but it's still the same characters, and there's always the chance they could pull things from the books in other ways.

It'd make perfect beach reading

Buffistas are different from other people.

For another, using words to push primal buttons is considered bad writing as often as it is considered good.

Since when? I think primal button pushing is an entirely legitimate aesthetic function.

Obviously, David, you do not read fanfic.

Obviously, David, you do not read fanfic.

It is true that I have yet to make the proper critical appreciation of Dickens through the lens of SGA wingfic.

However, much art has been designed to fuck with those buttons either through a clever manipulation of them (like say...Hitchcock) or by total sensory overwhelm (like say...the Velvet Underground live in 1967).

"Transcendent" is suspect but I do think she's correct in diagnosing the weird vitality in Dickens language and his imagery which is larded on and on and on until I do think it works on you in an atypical fashion.

Buffistas are different from other people.

My last beach vacation involved watching Dexter on my video iPod, so I'm gonna low-tech it a bit this time.

IT HAZ WURDZ? I READZ IT.

OK, so sometimes I don't always like it, and sometimes it is baaaad, but for the most part, I do get some entertainment value from it, if not intellectual stimulus. Be it modern novels, romance, scifi, spythriller, mystery, bio, nonfic, analysis, whodunnit, history, althistory, whatever. Basically, I'm a reading whore. If it's well written (and ofttimes even not, but has some other hook) I'm going to read it.

eta: I do have a hardtime with fanfic. Not sure what the block is there. Isn't the writing.

Though I can't read Cormac McCarthy. I tried, I really did. But I couldn't. My mother can't figure this out. We usually overlap, and she thought we would here.

Isn't the writing.

Probably the self-indulgence. Not all fic is overtly self-indulgent, but a lot of it is, so much that the indulgence and the explicit emo-porn are what has come to define the genre for me.

Susan's co-irker is an idiot, but we knew that.

There are few genres I won't read at least something of. Though lately I've been re-reading teh books I've accumulated over the last mumblety-plus years. I'm trying to remember what I saw in James Michener (probably my favorite writer during my high school years). Maybe it's just that, even though I like epic sweep, The Covenant probably isn't the best example of it.

For me, truly great novels have plot, human insight and inspired language. Stuff not only happens, so do words and flashes of truth. However, I am happy to get any two of those done well in a book--books with all three, whether genre or straight fiction, are rare and to be treasured. Kavalier and Klay, IMO, has all three. So does Charlotte's Web, for that matter.