Monday, June 13, 2005

Reading a book is not an accomplishment

I finally finished reading A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe. I say finally because I started reading it at Christmas, lost interest for a while, then regained interest and finished it off an hour or so at a time before bed. Good book, but the beginning doesn't quite flow into the end as naturally as I'd have expected. I'm not sure how it could have been done better, if at all, so I'll stand by my good book judgement.

One thing that bugged me was the constant writing in accents. I can understand occassionally using one to show that a character has one, but if you have to write each line twice (once in the accent, again translated, such as pretty much anything Five-O says), then maybe there's something wrong. Perhaps use a descriptive line to tell us how a certain word sounded and provide sound descriptions when needed (which is done sometimes), or give a general guide the first time that character says something and let us puzzle it out, or have another character translate.

I'm sure it was written the way it was for a reason, and I've probably just missed it. Regardless, it's worth a read.

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