[ SECRET POST #2619 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2619 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes]


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03.
[Pushing Daisies]


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04.
[Dallas Buyers Club]


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05.
[Bravely Default]


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06.
[Fake & Kuroko no Basuke]


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07.
[Warehouse 13]


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08.
[Willem Dafoe]


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09.
[Dexter]


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10.
[Rooster Teeth]


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11.
[Lost Girl]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 028 secrets from Secret Submission Post #374.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I agree. I'm also confused by the complaints about J.R.R.T. Yes, they do write differently that pop fiction today, but they are hardly inscrutable.

[(Anonymous)]

I love reading. I read a ton. I read all of the Sherlock Holmes books when I was in junior high. I read fantasy all the time. And I can't stand JRRT. His writing is definitely a different (possibly acquired taste.) I tried three times to read his books. I own the trilogy and the Hobbit. But it just... What killed it for me the last time I tried was the battle in I want to say The Two Towers? Where the entire battle is basically just Gimli and Legolas shouting out their kill tallies. WTF is interesting about that? And there was a lot of description and the like that just didn't pull me in at all.

I'm not saying he is a horrid writer or people shouldn't look at his works as classics. I'm just saying that there is a definite style to it and not everyone will be able to read it/enjoy it and I can understand the complaints as I share them.

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough, and I agree that they're not everyone's style (nor should they be). Style is understandable. I, personally, cannot stand Dan Brown or Stieg Larsson's trilogy. But they're comprehensible to me, you know? I could read them without being confused. And I think the same holds true of Holmes and LotRs.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. I actually can't stand tons of verbiage, but I find ACD's descriptions to be very vivid and not excessive. He doesn't go on as many tangents as Dickens, for sure.

[(Anonymous)]

Dickens was a serial writer being paid by the inch, and sometimes it really, really shows.

[(Anonymous)]

Citation needed.

[(Anonymous)]

Apparently he was really paid per installment: http://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/by-the-word.html

[(Anonymous)]

It certainly explains why occasionally you get a chapter that's just a random conversation between background characters.

[(Anonymous)]

The chapter that concerns the battle is about 7600 words long. Legolas and Gimli's contest takes up about 135 words (plus around 50 more at the beginning of the next chapter). I don't care if people don't like Tolkien or find him hard to read - I love him now, but it took at least five tries before I even managed to get out of the Shire, so I do get it - but to say that the battle is largely concerned with their kill tallies is just so incorrect. Maybe it felt that way reading it though!

(Sorry, I just see people slam Tolkien a lot for things that aren't even present in his work. There are valid criticisms of him and his writing style to be made, and I don't expect him to be to everyone's taste, but far too often it's this kind of thing. It gets frustrating!)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm like you, but it's not that LRRT is hard to read, it's just deathly boring. Especially the stupid songs.

[(Anonymous)]

I like Tolkien but I think the complaints about him revolve around his run on sentences and really long geographical descriptions.

[sarillia]

I will never understand the complaints about Tolkien. I've said this several times by now but those complaints had me worried that I had accidentally gotten an abridged edition when I finally read LotR because the descriptions didn't seem to go on very long at all to me. And there weren't nearly as many songs as I'd heard and the descriptions were mostly of things that had to do with the plot and not paragraphs about a random mountain in the distance or something. I just don't get it. He's not exactly Hemingway but he's not on the list of people I'd bring up if asked to give an example of a longwinded writer who spends too much time on description.

[(Anonymous)]

If anything, I've always felt Tolkien doesn't describe things enough.

[(Anonymous)]

And he really skimped on the linguistics.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe you're just not a very good judge about that kind of thing. It's great that his writing works so well for you and that you don't think he's longwinded, but that doesn't mean he isn't. He's exceptionally longwinded and that works very well for The Hobbit and LotR because those books are about the world he created, not the characters or their story. But in general it's a terrible writing style precisely because it sacrifices the elements of storytelling and belabors insignicfant details.

[sarillia]

I didn't say anything about how much I like his writing. I'm not generally one to mix up subjective reactions to objective observations. I don't conflate "I like this" with "this is good" like a lot of other people do.

But I will admit that I may have different points of reference for what "longwinded" looks like. If that's significantly different than what the majority of other readers think then maybe I'll just have to accept that I'm an outlier and he fits into the usual idea of longwinded.

It's just that I'm not sitting here going "I like the writing so it couldn't possibly be bad!". I'm thinking of all the other books I've read that are so much more longwinded than his books.

[(Anonymous)]

What confused me about Tolkien was that he had like 7 different names for each character so it was hard to keep who was who straight and how everyone was related to each other. Of course I read the books when I was in 9th grade so my reading comprehension then wasn't what it is now.