The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[maddz]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I wonder how long it'll take the Kobo recommendations to recover from buying two books from the same universe.

Spoiler:

Attachment 204269

Kobo recommendations...

What part of 'not interested' or 'already read' do you not understand?

I'm sick and tired of seeing the same recommendations I've dismissed a dozen times already. With all it's faults, Amazon is far better - at least I only have to dismiss a couple of times before it stays dismissed.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I wonder how long it'll take the Kobo recommendations to recover from buying two books from the same universe.

Spoiler:

Attachment 204269

Looks like Megan O'Keefe needs to write a Halo novel

[ownedbycats]

Romantic plot tumours. Good lord. Especially when book turns out to be just romance novel in disguise.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Romantic plot tumours. Good lord. Especially when book turns out to be just romance novel in disguise.

I hope it isn't cancerous.
Apache

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Romantic plot tumours. Good lord. Especially when book turns out to be just romance novel in disguise.

Hmm. I actually liked Bram Stoker's Dracula (the movie, mentioned on the above site as an example) far better than the original book (which I found boring). And I'm not a passionate romance aficionado.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Hmm. I actually liked Bram Stoker's Dracula (the movie, mentioned on the above site as an example) far better than the original book (which I found boring). And I'm not a passionate romance aficionado.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a brilliant movie. But the idea of someone generations later and unrelated being a duplicate of the woman he loved, man, that is hokey.

And the romance was insulting. He fed a baby to his 'brides'. He raped and murdered her best friend. But now we feel sympathy because Drac's heart is going pitter pat? That bugged me the first time I saw the movie.

I understand that without it, maybe the movie would have felt hollow. But ick.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a brilliant movie. But the idea of someone generations later and unrelated being a duplicate of the woman he loved, man, that is hokey.

And the romance was insulting. He fed a baby to his 'brides'. He raped and murdered her best friend. But now we feel sympathy because Drac's heart is going pitter pat? That bugged me the first time I saw the movie.

I understand that without it, maybe the movie would have felt hollow. But ick.

Oh, it had its faults, for sure. But without the romance it would just have been boring, because there have been countless Dracula movies before it we've already seen. This was also the reason I found the book boring - I already knew the plot. And, in the book Dracula is just your usual moustache-twirling villain. Fine perhaps for the readers more than 100 years ago, but for the jaded audience these days... yawn.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Oh, it had its faults, for sure. But without the romance it would just have been boring, because there have been countless Dracula movies before it we've already seen. This was also the reason I found the book boring - I already knew the plot. And, in the book Dracula is just your usual moustache-twirling villain. Fine perhaps for the readers more than 100 years ago, but for the jaded audience these days... yawn.

I'd say drop the opening with the 'there's always been a Wynona Ryder' bit. Dracula is just super horny for Mina works just as well without the Patty Duke identical twin cousins silliness. Also, Mina is hypnotized by Drac works better than 'she loves a bad boy.'

Even so, that movie is fantastic. Just you can see that Anne Rice had almost as much influence as Bram Stoker.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'd say drop the opening with the 'there's always been a Wynona Ryder' bit. Dracula is just super horny for Mina works just as well without the Patty Duke identical twin cousins silliness. Also, Mina is hypnotized by Drac works better than 'she loves a bad boy.'

Even so, that movie is fantastic. Just you can see that Anne Rice had almost as much influence as Bram Stoker.

Yeah, I agree with you on all these counts.

BTW, I loved the Interview with the Vampire movie with Cruise and Pitt (I'm not a particular fan of either of them, but they were exactly right for their roles there), while I found the book pretty meh and depressing (the sequels were better). Still, after the 4th book or so I had had enough of Anne Rice's vamps. There's no denying her huge influence over the vamp genre, of course.

[ownedbycats]

Trying to read dialogue where the author goes all 'funetik aksent' hurts my brain sometimes.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Trying to read dialogue where the author goes all 'funetik aksent' hurts my brain sometimes.

Never heard it named that.
But that (and I stress that) is the reason I had trouble reading The Expanse series. Trying to read pages and pages of that Belter patoise was just so difficult and frustrating. I ended up skipping over a lot of it.

Don't know how bad it can be? Then watch Dominique Tipper in the last two seasons of Expanse tv show, when she decided to go full swing with the accent. It was cringe-worthy, bordering on baby talk.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by Karellen

But that (and I stress that) is the reason I had trouble reading The Expanse series. Trying to read pages and pages of that Belter patoise was just so difficult and frustrating. I ended up skipping over a lot of it.

Thanks for the warning. I was planning to read the series, but that alone may be a good reason to spend my time and money elsewhere.

[DNSB]

A couple of years back, an author my XYL loves who writes mostly Regency era romances and has a monthly or so email newsletter, answered a question by a one reader about why her characters spoke mostly modern English. Her answer was to publish a snippet from one of her books where dialog had been rewritten so the characters used 1800's local accents/word choices and phonetic spelling.

This was done courtesy of some help from a couple of people who study that era and language pronunciation guides and dictionaries. My XYL got a laugh out of it but it was pretty unreadable though in many ways oddly similar to a Boston accent (R? you pronounce a terminal r?) for the elite class. OTOH, the servants were given the accents appropriate to their origin which made me wonder if the butler and/or housekeeper were chosen for their ability to translate as much as any other talent.

[Quoth]

That's the reason too why most historical fiction set before 18th C reads like a mix of 18th C and 19th C.
Actual 18th C authors are pretty readable. 17th & 16th progressively harder and 15th C authors in "English" very hard or impossible for modern readers.
The 17th C. King James and Douay Bibles currently in print are not the original versions. Shakespeare is more Jacobean (17th C.) than Elizabethan (16th C); Elizabeth had been ruling for about 25 years when Shakespeare started. Also neither KJV nor Shakespeare used language as anyone used it day-to-day in speech or writing.

You could write a readable Regency novel using the sort of English in Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, or Jane Austen (who makes fun of other 18th C authors in Nothanger Abbey, or Ann Radcliffe. But those writers included little local dialect. It's also the language of the educated.

I've more objection to 19th C and pre 1930s settings written today (or in last 30-40 years) that get it wrong.
P.G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) seems trapped in the 1920s or even before WWI and practically in his schooldays. He wrote about 30 books from 1940.

It's not hard to get a wide variety of 18th C to early 19thC books for free and absorb the style and language. Recreating that doesn't need the excessive Macaroni Cant of Georgette Heyer (though not all he books use it excessively). The resultant readability would depend on the skill of the author and education of the reader as current dictionaries in ereaders are lacking many of the words that have become disused.

[JSWolf]

The best Dracula movie ever is Love at First Bite.