Michael’s Comments (group member since Nov 02, 2015)

Michael’s comments from the Return of the Rogue Readers group.

Hey guys, sorry for the delay in replying, I was out of digital reach this weekend.

I vote for "On stranger Tides"

I haven't read any of these, so I'm adding them to my "Want to read" list anyway. I gotta finish the Foundation series first...

This book annoyed me.

The prose seemed self-absorbed, with a verbosity that detracted from descriptions instead of defining them; a language style that couldn't make up its mind, with the uneducated and the erudite equally well-spoken, or not, based merely on page numbers apparently.

The violence seemed equally relevant. Let's kill, scalp, and rape some people, in whichever order seems to fit at the moment.
I understand that these atrocities happen, and that this book is somewhere between a western fantasy and historical novel, but the writer seems to enjoy finding fun ways to kill people, or to have his characters torture and maim, just so he can write about it.

The protagonist is barely mentioned, little more than a device to carry the narrator around behind The Judge and his band of sadistic monsters.

I don't know, is The Kid the main character? Hell, the Ex-priest has more lines of dialogue then The Kid...

Please, change my mind. Since I finished it, I've been looking at professional critiques and reviews, and I understand this is the authors style, and that he is critically acclaimed, and is amazing, and might be the best author of the 20th century, but maybe it just isn't in line with my tastes.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that the author, a wildly successful one, believed he was an amazing artist, internalized all the praise and adulation, and succumbed to the trap of praising his own art while he's creating it, saying to himself that he is great enough to subvert the usual literary tropes, to subjugate violence as a metaphor for modernity, and bring to sharp relief the inherent racism and imperialism in capitalistic America, that still "scalps" anything that isn't an obvious Euro-Caucasian, socially and economically.

Oh, and has no hair, murder-rapes children, likes to be naked, and sweats a lot.

Or he is an amazing troll.
Still on the fence.
Maybe I missed the whole point of the book?