{"id":11841,"date":"2019-09-18T21:50:42","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T20:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=11841"},"modified":"2019-09-27T20:33:45","modified_gmt":"2019-09-27T19:33:45","slug":"two_lousy_books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2019\/09\/18\/two_lousy_books\/","title":{"rendered":"Two lousy books"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s rare that I buy and read a book that I really don’t like. I usually do my research before buying books. I read reviews and skim the book. In the past half year I’ve read two books that are very popular and highly recommended, that I was really, really disappointed in.<\/p>\n

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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine<\/i> by Gail Honeyman gets rave reviews by all sorts of reputable sources like The Guardian<\/i>. It’s supposed to be this warm and joyful story of a traumatized, isolated, socially awkward woman, who finds a friend and comes out of her shell and lives happily ever after.<\/p>\n

The big problem I have with this book is that – even though mental health is at the core of the story – it is apparently written with zero insight or understanding of mental health problems. Eleanor is a random jumble of symptoms, picked not because they make sense but because they fit the author’s romantic ideas of what a person with mental health problems should be like. She’s like a collage of one part autistic spectrum, one part PTSD, one part schizophrenia or something like that.<\/p>\n

Her thoughts and behaviour and speech likewise are inconsistent, and the author jumps from one quirky thing to another dependent on where her mood takes her. Not Eleanor’s mood, that is, but the author’s. She turns Eleanor’s life into a comedy.<\/p>\n

For no apparent reason, Eleanor sometimes speaks like an eighty-year-old lady who’s learned English from antique books – and other times she’s eloquently funny. She clearly has problems relating to people and interpreting emotions, and yet at other times she has deep, poetic insights into human emotions. She’s been to university and worked in an office for years and gets promoted to manager – but cannot use a phone and is clueless when trying to buy a computer… There is no consistent self, and it just doesn’t make sense.<\/p>\n

And then Eleanor gets a nice haircut and finds a friend and has a couple of sessions of therapy, and suddenly she’s cured of all her problems! Tada, problem solved, now we can all go home and be happy!<\/p>\n

This is a book where mental health plays such an important role, and yet it trivializes mental health problems to such an extent that I find it insulting. I guess the book’s message is supposed to be that we shouldn’t look down at “odd” people because we can’t know what’s going on in their heads. But that message could be delivered with respect, without made-up mental conditions and silly “oh she just needed a haircut” “fixes”.<\/p>\n

There are people close to me who struggle with actual, real mental health problems. Therefore seeing this topic treated with such lack of respect and, frankly, ridicule really annoys me. This book deserves none of the attention it has gotten and I wish I had never come across it.<\/p>\n

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Theft of Swords<\/i> by Michael Sullivan is a very different book and disappointing in a rather different way. This is a fantasy story about Hadrian and Royce, a pair of thieves for hire, who just can’t help taking on good causes. It is one of the most recommended books on r\/Fantasy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I read somewhere that the author wanted to write a book somewhat like Harry Potter<\/i> – easily flowing and straightforward, fun and yet with darker elements. And funnily enough many of the problems I have with this book are exactly the same things that I really disliked about about the Harry Potter books, and why I stopped reading them after the first few.<\/p>\n

This book is a part of a series, and the author’s main focus is clearly on the big picture and a long story arc. Everything leads toward an ultimate resolution somewhere on the horizon in book six or whatever. The problem is that the author is no good at keeping us entertained on our way to that resolution.<\/p>\n

The writing is pretty dull and clunky, interrupted by info dumps. Occasionally Sullivan seems to have felt (or maybe been told by his editors) that he needs to get some more evocative detail in there, so he suddenly stops to describe the coat of arms of some warrior, but he doesn’t do this for any other lord’s or warrior’s coats of arms, so it just feels like he needed to show off the heraldic terms he had looked up on the internet. Or he stops to describe the clothing of one particular person in a lot of detail, in a way that feels technical rather than full of life.<\/p>\n

Adversaries stop in their tracks to make long speeches to give us more backstory on Hadrian and Royce. Poor, uneducated peasants stop to make poetic speeches full of wisdom. The pacing is awkward. At times we leave the main story and get long expositions about politicians and their machinations.<\/p>\n

The language is often awkward, which I find really jarring. Sullivan has no feeling for the feeling of words; I think he’s sometimes just picked words from a dictionary without understanding their connotations. He can describe a senior barmaid as “a bright and cheery waif”. The woman is bright and cheery and yet looks homeless and neglected? He describes a magical wall of flame as “monolithic” – the fire is a block of stone? Heavy and immovable? The man makes no sense!<\/p>\n

He can’t make up his mind about what kind of society this is, and what kind of language the people speak. Is this a formal society with a large social distance between the ordinary people and the high lords? Or an informal one where class doesn’t matter much, and rogues and princes quickly move to addressing each other by first name? Do the people speak modern colloquial English, or is it all “woulda been giv’n” and “I wouldna care ’bout that, no sir”? Both are equally cheesy, but jumping between the two is even worse.<\/p>\n

The characters are one-dimensional and utterly predictable. Royce is moody and glum; Hadrian is eternally upbeat. Their supposedly strong relationship is just there without anything to keep it alive. They rarely say anything to each other apart from everyday things like “we should turn left here”, so I really have no idea why they stay together and why they’re supposedly so close to each other. After hundreds of pages, I still know nearly nothing about them as persons.<\/p>\n

I’m also really annoyed by Sullivan’s seeming lack of common sense and general knowledge. He describes a dirt poor village where people wear nothing but shirts (and for some reason can’t be bothered to build doors for their houses so they hang canvas in their doorways instead). And yet they cook a hearty stew for our heroes, with leeks and celery and onions and potatoes. Where the heck would poor, nearly starving villagers get celery (which requires frequent watering and rich soil), especially in the spring? Did they find it in their fridge?<\/p>\n

The hero walks around wearing three swords, one of them on his back. What on Earth does he need three for? He can only use one at a time. Does he need the sword to match his mood, or the colour of the light? How does he swap them around to make sure the right one is accessible? Because the large sword he has on his back he won’t be able to actually use because there’s no way he can pull it out while it’s there.<\/p>\n

This is a book for people who don’t normally read many books and have nothing better to compare it to. Sort of like Harry Potter, then, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s rare that I buy and read a book that I really don’t like. I usually do my research before buying books. I read reviews and skim the book. In the past half year I’ve read two books that are very popular and highly recommended, that I was really, really disappointed in. Eleanor Oliphant is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11841"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11844,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11841\/revisions\/11844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}