Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 17
September 22, 2015
Review: Streets of Laredo
Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I couldn’t wait for this book to end. It shouldn’t have been this way, but there it was. McMurtry was more frustrating than ever with his head-hopping and back stories about minor characters who just didn’t warrant all that info dumped on the reader.
Why, why, why would the man pause in an action scene, the final confrontation with the killer we’ve been hunting all along, to give us back story on a freakin’ butcher? Or to go deep i...
September 20, 2015
Guest Post on the Teacher Shortage from a POed Parent
Good stuff here!
Originally posted on okeducationtruths:
I received the following this week from UCO professor and #oklaed advocate, Dr. Dan Vincent. I present it to you, unedited.
I’m a public school parent and I’m pissed off. I keep hearing that our state has a teacher shortage but I don’t see it this way anymore. I see an unusually high causality rate from the WAR ON TEACHERS.
Let me explain….
As a parent with two kids in public school I try to keep informed on issues related...
September 5, 2015
Review: Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My original review is posted on the paperback, I guess. So, what the heck, I’ll write another one.
I didn’t plan to re-read Lonesome Dove as I explored the rest of the adventures of Gus and Call. After reading Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon I figured I’d just watch the TV mini-series of Lonesome Dove and move on to The Streets of Laredo. Buuuut … I decided to go ahead and do this one again, after all. I don’t regret it, but much of...
August 14, 2015
Review: Go Set a Watchman
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
With Go Set a Watchman Harper Lee not only tarnishes her legacy, she commits the worst sin an author can commit.
No, I’m not talking about making Atticus Finch a racist. Nor am I talking about making lovable little Scout a raving, closed-minded liberal bitch. It’s worse.
She’s freaking boring.
I should have finished this book in a couple of settings. Instead, I had to make myself pick it up. Nothing happens in the book. Where To Kill a...
August 2, 2015
Review: Comanche Moon
Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Larry McMurtry is probably the most frustrating writer I keep coming back to. It irritates me that he slips from head to head to head in the narrative flow. It vexes me that we have to read about the same thing from multiple perspectives sometimes. And it makes me want to pull my hair out that there are pages and pages of back story that, while it may serve to deepen characterization, otherwise serve absolutely no purpose. Do we really...
July 28, 2015
Therapy in 88,404 words
So, yesterday was a good day. I finished the first draft of a novel tentatively titledThe Teacher. This is the first new novel I’ve completed in three years. Needless to say, finally getting over some issues that kept me from writing and actually finishing a new book felt really, really good.
Back whenAfter Obsession was published in 2011 I thought I was finally going to get the break I’d been working toward for so many years. Yeah, Carrie had already made the NY Times bestseller list and was...
July 19, 2015
Review: Dead Man’s Walk
Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It was with quite a bit of trepidation that I gave McMurtry and his Lonesome Dove crew another shot. If you read my review of Lonesome Dove you know how furious I was with the poor ending of that very, very long novel. Also, I find McMurtry’s head-hopping narrative style rather annoying.
However, McMurtry does such an amazing job of creating characters, and I was (and still am) in the mood for good Western reading that I gave Dead Ma...
July 17, 2015
Review: Herland
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m gonna make a public promise right here: I will never, ever, ever assign to students another novel I haven’t read ahead of time.
I assigned this book as summer reading for my incoming senior AP Literature students. (Previous classes lost too many copies of Fahrenheit 451.) I know their AP Language teacher makes them read Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and most of them seemed to like that, and Herland sounds like it should be in...
July 15, 2015
More Werewolves?
Since my oldest daughter moved back home and I moved from the office I’d made in her room to my original space in this house, I’ve had a stack of old milk cartons beside my desk. On the top of that stack is a manuscript that has been calledBold Bounty since it was first written way back in about 1993. Cute title, huh? It began life just like what it sounds like … a formulaic historical romance novel.
Someyears later, when I was still attending Oklahoma Writers Federation Inc. conferences, I s...
July 3, 2015
Amazon… A virtual marketplace, or Big Brother?
I typically only post reviews on GoodReads and repost here, but this is good to know.
Originally posted on imy santiago:
A couple of weeks ago I read the third installment of a series I really loved. I will refrain from sharing the name of the novel and its author.
Like any reader, as soon as I finished reading, I wrote my review. When I tried posting it on Amazon (I did buy the eBook, just like any normal and decent human being would), I received a ratherconcerning email.
I will...
