The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[mrscoach]

Please don't spoil the movie "Titanic" for anyone who doesn't know history or heard about the movie in the past 25 years. I mean, how would they know the boat sank? Oh, oops?

[Sirtel]

And all the movies about World War II and Hitler. Please don't spoil them by telling how the war ended.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I have to wonder about anyone who managed to get out of high school without having noticed that Romeo & Juliet was a tragedy.

It was a tragedy that we were made to read Romeo & Juliet and anything else Shakespeare wrote. They are not suitable for school. They are not relevant. The language used is obsolete. It's not a good idea to make students have to suffer though trying to read the obsolete language. I hated reading Shakespeare because of school.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by issybird

Using "high tea" to describe afternoon tea.

Even if it's set in the psychedelic 60s?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It was a tragedy that we were made to read Romeo & Juliet and anything else Shakespeare wrote. They are not suitable for school. They are not relevant. The language used is obsolete. It's not a good idea to make students have to suffer though trying to read the obsolete language. I hated reading Shakespeare because of school.

Sidestep to another pet rant complete.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by Quoth

OK, so High Teas and Afternoon Teas were real things in 1940 and still was very much when the author was a teenager. Weird. Is the Author trying to troll the Reader? Or grew up in some strange rural hamlet (maybe in Norfolk )

Still a thing into the 1970s (at least where I grew up on the South Coast). Afternoon tea was a light meal - tea, sandwiches and cakes usually taken around 3:30 - 4 pm. High tea was more substantial and taken later - around 6 pm and was a light supper followed by bread & butter and cakes, usually washed down with tea.

I think there's also a class element - the leisured classes would take afternoon tea followed by dinner (or supper) in the evening. People who worked would be more likely to have high tea when they got home in the evening; this would be their main evening meal.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It's not a good idea to make students have to suffer though trying to read the obsolete language. I hated reading Shakespeare because of school.

I really enjoyed when my class went through Romeo and Juliet. And my friend enjoyed when his class went through Julius Caesar.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by maddz

Still a thing into the 1970s (at least where I grew up on the South Coast).

...

I think there's also a class element - the leisured classes would take afternoon tea followed by dinner (or supper) in the evening.

I suspected both of these regarding southern England. Thanks for confirmation. Certainly an author born in 1952 would remember the 1970s very well.

[ownedbycats]

"Blah blah blah," she smirked.

that... does not make sense fora dialogue tag.

Thankfully I've not seen this in a published novel so far. Just fanfic.

[JSWolf]

One vent is embedded fonts in a Kindle eBook when you know they won't be used because the Kindle user isn't going to set the font to Publisher so why bother?

Another vent is usless embedded fonts in an ePub eBook that don't work well on an eInk screen.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

"Blah blah blah," she smirked.

that... does not make sense fora dialogue tag.

Thankfully I've not seen this in a published novel so far. Just fanfic.

"Blah blah blah." She smirked.
or
"Blah blah blah." Then she smirked.

I think smirk, grin, laugh, smile are for actions that can be before or after dialog, but need to be not simply in place of said. You can't talk while grinning or laughing.

I find it distracting.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One vent is embedded fonts in a Kindle eBook when you know they won't be used because the Kindle user isn't going to set the font to Publisher so why bother?

Embedded fonts work fine when reading on Kindle, even without choosing "Publisher".

The user only needs to use the "Publisher" option if the eBook explicitly tries to set the "normal paragraph text font". I put that into quotes because Kindle makes a guess based on the structure of the eBook about what are "normal paragraphs".

[Quoth]

Then every time I've read an azw3 ebook on the Kindle PW3 or K3 the Kindle has guessed wrong. You need to select Publisher. Unless they've changed it recently?
Also there is a secret limit on the number and usage of embedded fonts on the Amazon publishing that doesn't exist on epub readers, though some epub apps totally ignore embedded fonts.

[Quizlit]

It annoys me in paper books but more so in epub, footnotes that are pages for each chapter. I read a book recently that the footnotes were longer than the chapter itself. Breaks up the flow, often doesn't add much.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quizlit

It annoys me in paper books but more so in epub, footnotes that are pages for each chapter. I read a book recently that the footnotes were longer than the chapter itself. Breaks up the flow, often doesn't add much.

The first volume of Marc Lewisohn's biography of the Beatles, around 20% of the text (which was some 2,500 pages when I ran it through the Calibre Count Pages plugin) is just footnotes. Half of them were various ibids, the other half various details.

Oh, and it's the first of a trilogy. Well, a planned trilogy.