![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7It has been six hours and I have read two books.
First, I read The Hundred Days, by Patrick O'Brian.
Then, I read something God-awful and lavender-colored. Let's see... Seduction, by Amanda Quick.
These two books had something in common. What was it?
In The Hundred Days, Napoleon has just escaped from Elba and is mounting a resurgent military campaign. At the end of the novel, though peripheral to the novel (which has little to do with the land war and takes place almost entirely at sea), he is defeated by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. The campaign leading up to Waterloo was known as the Hundred Days' Campaign, hence the title of the book. The year is 1815.
In Seduction, the protagonist, our dark and enigmatic Julian, Earl of Ravenwood, is said to have fought in the wars on the Continent with Wellington.
So, improbably enough, the settings are identical.
That's as far as it goes, however. I will not bore you by rhapsodizing further about O'Brian's wonderful characters, and how they develop, unfolding, through each book. By this book, quite late in the series, Aubrey is quite a canny, even-tempered fellow, very wise in the world, and he never blusters as he did in the early books. Maturin is less cold and reptilian in his anger, and though he calls a man out to duel over whether a dog should be induced to vomit, he happily enough is placated by a forced letter of apology. The old, or should I say young, Stephen would never have been satisfied. The old Stephen has better things to do than uphold principle, though the difference is subtle.
I can't decide what offended me most about Seduction. I will grant that it was not poorly-written, and was mechanically quite competent. i was drawn into the story and seldom really truly wanted to put it down, though I did hurl it across the room once. No, I wanted to finish reading the story. I skipped pages now and then, but made myself go back and read them before I moved on. (Not in the eager, anticipatory way that I skipped lines in the O'Brian, wanting to know what happened next; No, i was skipping because I knew what was going to happen next and couldn't be bothered. But I did bother, and that's that.)
I suppose what really bothered me was the anachronism, which is probably inevitable. I mean, the heroine agitating for women's rights, in 1820's England? At least she was reading period literature on the subject. I could accept that; indeed the plot hung upon it. Fine.
But the language. Lord, the language.
Words that I wish had been struck from the writer's vocabulary:
And I will share with you two other things that thoroughly bothered me:
1) The hero. Had. Green. Eyes.
Like. Emeralds.
Yawn.
2) The heroine had "turquoise eyes with flecks of gold."
That. Doesn't. Happen. In. Real. Life.
WHY DON'T PEOPLE IN BOOKS EVER HAVE BROWN EYES? OR BLUE EYES?
I will here say, truthfully, that I have known many people with beautiful eyes. My first lover had eyes that were blue at the edges and greener towards the center, depending on the state of the pupil-- among the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. My second lover, if you can call him that, had very pale blue eyes which were probably the most attractive part of him, though they were more striking because his complexion was so florid than for any merit of their own. The next person I dated (the status keeps downgrading, but we won't get into the lower parts of my love life) had bright blue eyes that were really quite lovely and keen. The one after that had actually hazel eyes, which I hadn't really seen before.
And Dave's eyes are green, quite a beautiful green, a striking green.
But they are not like emeralds.*
Green eyes are not like emeralds.
They are beautiful, certainly. But they do not merit a place as the distinguishing feature in Every. God. Damned. Story.
I railed against this in one of my fiction workshops in college, my senior year, I recall. A young woman had submitted a story to us in which the heroine was blond, with green eyes "like sea plants." I was quite shockingly rude, I think, but my objection was, i think, justified. "Seaweed is black," I said. "That is the association this holds. Also, this is the sixth story I have read this semester with a green-eyed, blonde heroine. You may need some other distinguishing feature to set her apart from the hordes of apparently identical heroines in fiction. As it is, we could simply assume, when reading a story, that the heroine has green eyes and blond hair, and be astonished midway through to discover that she does not. Additionally, I have never actually met a person with green eyes, and wonder at their prevalence in fiction."
She was offended. But most conceded that it wasn't a very vivid description and one cannot waste words in a short story.
* Actually, there's another tie to the other book there. In Seduction, the Ravenwood (what a name) family has an heirloom necklace of emeralds. Additionally, the Ravenwood family has genetically dominant green eyes. (Sure.) One matches the other, and it's all wonderful. (Including a plot point that a newborn baby has the same green eyes, which is ludicrous, as babies of that sort of pigmentation are all born with blue eyes and one doesn't know until at least six months what the child's final eye color will be.)
But in the O'Brian series, Maturin's wife Diana has black hair and blue eyes, and has a priceless blue diamond pendant that she wears to match her eyes, the "Blue Peter". It is mentioned repeatedly when Maturin thinks of his wife, including one poignant scene in this book when he, deeply involved in intelligence work, is looking at a lapis brooch to be given as a bribe, and the recollection of her diamond quite flattens him emotionally.
Blue eyes, a blue diamond-- I can see that. Blue eyes can be quite dark but not sapphire-dark. Likewise, peridot eyes, yes. Emeralds, no. An image that must be vivid to sustain the plot point hinged on it needs to actually be vivid, and believable. Emeralds come in a range of colors, so it's imaginable, but the necklace of emeralds isn't even described.
So, there you have what I have absorbed so far. Now, the question: Go to sleep, or read some more? How addicted am I?
There is a Hillerman here, and I do dearly love him. Hmmm..... Perhaps I'll just hold it while i sleep. Ahhhh, paper, sweet paper.
First, I read The Hundred Days, by Patrick O'Brian.
Then, I read something God-awful and lavender-colored. Let's see... Seduction, by Amanda Quick.
These two books had something in common. What was it?
In The Hundred Days, Napoleon has just escaped from Elba and is mounting a resurgent military campaign. At the end of the novel, though peripheral to the novel (which has little to do with the land war and takes place almost entirely at sea), he is defeated by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. The campaign leading up to Waterloo was known as the Hundred Days' Campaign, hence the title of the book. The year is 1815.
In Seduction, the protagonist, our dark and enigmatic Julian, Earl of Ravenwood, is said to have fought in the wars on the Continent with Wellington.
So, improbably enough, the settings are identical.
That's as far as it goes, however. I will not bore you by rhapsodizing further about O'Brian's wonderful characters, and how they develop, unfolding, through each book. By this book, quite late in the series, Aubrey is quite a canny, even-tempered fellow, very wise in the world, and he never blusters as he did in the early books. Maturin is less cold and reptilian in his anger, and though he calls a man out to duel over whether a dog should be induced to vomit, he happily enough is placated by a forced letter of apology. The old, or should I say young, Stephen would never have been satisfied. The old Stephen has better things to do than uphold principle, though the difference is subtle.
I can't decide what offended me most about Seduction. I will grant that it was not poorly-written, and was mechanically quite competent. i was drawn into the story and seldom really truly wanted to put it down, though I did hurl it across the room once. No, I wanted to finish reading the story. I skipped pages now and then, but made myself go back and read them before I moved on. (Not in the eager, anticipatory way that I skipped lines in the O'Brian, wanting to know what happened next; No, i was skipping because I knew what was going to happen next and couldn't be bothered. But I did bother, and that's that.)
I suppose what really bothered me was the anachronism, which is probably inevitable. I mean, the heroine agitating for women's rights, in 1820's England? At least she was reading period literature on the subject. I could accept that; indeed the plot hung upon it. Fine.
But the language. Lord, the language.
Words that I wish had been struck from the writer's vocabulary:
- chit (used to refer to a difficult woman)
- bitch (used in the modern sense to refer to an unfeeling woman)
- masculine (Duh. I know he's masculine. You just told me he had a penis. Sorry, "hardness.")
- strong (come ON, think of something ELSE)
- honor (stoppit. Just. Stoppit.)
And I will share with you two other things that thoroughly bothered me:
1) The hero. Had. Green. Eyes.
Like. Emeralds.
Yawn.
2) The heroine had "turquoise eyes with flecks of gold."
That. Doesn't. Happen. In. Real. Life.
WHY DON'T PEOPLE IN BOOKS EVER HAVE BROWN EYES? OR BLUE EYES?
I will here say, truthfully, that I have known many people with beautiful eyes. My first lover had eyes that were blue at the edges and greener towards the center, depending on the state of the pupil-- among the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. My second lover, if you can call him that, had very pale blue eyes which were probably the most attractive part of him, though they were more striking because his complexion was so florid than for any merit of their own. The next person I dated (the status keeps downgrading, but we won't get into the lower parts of my love life) had bright blue eyes that were really quite lovely and keen. The one after that had actually hazel eyes, which I hadn't really seen before.
And Dave's eyes are green, quite a beautiful green, a striking green.
But they are not like emeralds.*
Green eyes are not like emeralds.
They are beautiful, certainly. But they do not merit a place as the distinguishing feature in Every. God. Damned. Story.
I railed against this in one of my fiction workshops in college, my senior year, I recall. A young woman had submitted a story to us in which the heroine was blond, with green eyes "like sea plants." I was quite shockingly rude, I think, but my objection was, i think, justified. "Seaweed is black," I said. "That is the association this holds. Also, this is the sixth story I have read this semester with a green-eyed, blonde heroine. You may need some other distinguishing feature to set her apart from the hordes of apparently identical heroines in fiction. As it is, we could simply assume, when reading a story, that the heroine has green eyes and blond hair, and be astonished midway through to discover that she does not. Additionally, I have never actually met a person with green eyes, and wonder at their prevalence in fiction."
She was offended. But most conceded that it wasn't a very vivid description and one cannot waste words in a short story.
* Actually, there's another tie to the other book there. In Seduction, the Ravenwood (what a name) family has an heirloom necklace of emeralds. Additionally, the Ravenwood family has genetically dominant green eyes. (Sure.) One matches the other, and it's all wonderful. (Including a plot point that a newborn baby has the same green eyes, which is ludicrous, as babies of that sort of pigmentation are all born with blue eyes and one doesn't know until at least six months what the child's final eye color will be.)
But in the O'Brian series, Maturin's wife Diana has black hair and blue eyes, and has a priceless blue diamond pendant that she wears to match her eyes, the "Blue Peter". It is mentioned repeatedly when Maturin thinks of his wife, including one poignant scene in this book when he, deeply involved in intelligence work, is looking at a lapis brooch to be given as a bribe, and the recollection of her diamond quite flattens him emotionally.
Blue eyes, a blue diamond-- I can see that. Blue eyes can be quite dark but not sapphire-dark. Likewise, peridot eyes, yes. Emeralds, no. An image that must be vivid to sustain the plot point hinged on it needs to actually be vivid, and believable. Emeralds come in a range of colors, so it's imaginable, but the necklace of emeralds isn't even described.
So, there you have what I have absorbed so far. Now, the question: Go to sleep, or read some more? How addicted am I?
There is a Hillerman here, and I do dearly love him. Hmmm..... Perhaps I'll just hold it while i sleep. Ahhhh, paper, sweet paper.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
this is from kat
Date: 2004-10-14 05:02 am (UTC)It's also difficult to see shades and changes and so on just by standing in the same room as the other person.
So it drives me CRAZY when I read that people are, say, having a conversation and somebody walks by, which means they're likely a couple feet away at least, and they don't stop or anything, just walk back, and the person sees their eyes and falls in love with a color that is actually fairly dark and thus difficult to see anyway.
Don't even get me started on the books in which people essentially read people's minds by looking at the changes in the person's eyes.
On a different note, you totally made my day when you wrote: "i was drawn into the story and seldom really truly wanted to put it down, though I did hurl it across the room once."
There's a back-handed compliment if I ever heard one. I really want to find some way to use that, now.
"Did you like the book?"
"Oh, yes, though I did hurl it across the room once. Other than that, it was decent."
hee hee :)
Re: this is from kat
Date: 2004-10-14 05:52 am (UTC)This is true.
The eye color examples I provided were all from lovers, with whom one tends to gaze at eyes.
I do remember noticing with a shock that one of my teachers had brown eyes, I think. He was blond: i had always assumed they were blue, but one day I wrote something on the board and he looked at me on my way back to my seat, and I met his eyes and they were brown.
Sometimes eyes are noticeable. Blue eyes are often noticeable-- pale ones because there is so little color and the lack of pigment is noticeable in shadow, and bright ones because they are liable to catch the light.
But Dave and I had dated for some time before I noticed his eye color enough to look closer, and my response was to ask what color they were. "Green," he said, "or so I've been told. My mother's and sister's are." And yes, indeed, they are green-eyed blondes, the lot of them.
But I had to ask, because I had automatically classed them as "blue" (or "light", instead of "dark" which means "brown"-- the two eye colors I routinely encounter, though honestly I know almost nobody with brown eyes nowadays: my social circle is quite small), and they kept catching the light oddly and I couldn't figure out what was different about his face.
You can tell a great deal about what someone is thinking by looking at their eyes, yes, but not the eyes themselves. It's the muscles surrounding them, the way they are held, indeed the entire cast of the face, posture of the head, direction of the gaze. This is well-documented. but it is not well-described in fiction, and is usually just used as a plot cliche.
I think I've come across the first point to be proud of in my novel-writing: I have a green-eyed hero, but his eye color is only mentioned by his lover, who notices during a well-lit intimate moment. And it is not simply tossed off as "emerald". Her eye color is not, i believe, mentioned at all. It is hardly the most important part of her. I think I might have made her blue-eyed, which sets her apart because her coloring is so different from the dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complected people among whom she lives. But I may not have written that part down yet.
i've also decided that her hair won't be "blonde", "tawny", or "raven" either....
>back-handed compliment
Yes, it is, isn't it? I'm quite proud of it. It's true, too.
Though really, I only threw it after I was done, and then I repented and picked it up immediately. It is, after all, not my book to abuse. Though it was dog-eared before I got it, and I already knew when they were going to have sex because the spine was creased in those spots.
Re: this is from kat
Date: 2004-10-14 03:25 pm (UTC)I guess it would be tough to write "they way he moved his head, etc. etc led me to realize that he was feeling..."
But I wish they wouldn't instead just say that they read it in his eyes."
I'm soooo sick of stuff like "so-and-son was shocked at the deep sadness in so-and-so's eyes."
no subject
Date: 2004-10-14 03:54 pm (UTC)Um, rant over. Sorry. :) (But I have to say, I love reading those purple historicals in the wee hours of the morning. Somehow the sappy overemotion and Mac-truck plot holes are less irritating and more sigh-worthy then.)