Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The bad bad books that read so well

Orwell wrote about "eagerly's good and bad books", especially "escape literature" provides "quiet corner, where the mind can browse in strange moment". He including Sherlock Holmes and treasure people in this classification (although the latter, to my mind, is a very good book). Now, I all the good and bad books - in fact I can think of nothing more than idyllic make a long journey, best though - propelled and have got such a volume, and perhaps G and t. but I also vulnerable to ocean books - literary equivalent double cheeseburger and fries. They provide a temporary nothing beyond through their eager joy, not quit page by page rereader although I usually is, I always cannot stomach any one of them more than once. But I insist on buying, reading them and lead them under cover of darkness charity shops. Why?
Catnip effect of a person the most shameful reading secret different authors. I have already expressed myself to my disapprobation detail, however, twilight I read all four books, because I have to know whether the decision eventually Bella, become a vampire. "she will? Be?" Questions made me stubbornly reading myself into inferiority. Pure of the prose leadenness his hypnotic effects. Bludgeoned into submission, so-called "black fire in his eyes is impossible," I trotted suspicion, and speechless, resigned.
On the other hand, Agatha Christie's catnip ingredient is the paper-doll predictability of her casting. Each milieu must feature at least one girl with expensively outré clothing, who, notwithstanding her blasé woman-of-the-world demeanour, will anxiously hearken to the wise words of Papa Poirot, and frequently marry the reliably close-at-hand doctor if she doesn't turn out to be the murderess. Hastings will be an ass, Tuppence will bite off more than she can chew, and apparent paragons of respectability will have inherited murderous predilections from their notorious and long-lost parents. It's all deeply comforting, like jam roly-poly, especially when the reader's own world isn't obeying any of the rules.
I feel slightly guilty for including Jonathan Kellerman in my cohort of bad bad book merchants, because his prose is well-crafted, and every so often a phrase will make me purr ("oddly comforting, like the stale breath of a favourite uncle"). Also, I feel as though I'm gradually gaining an education in psychology from his useful clinical snippets. Perhaps he can be upgraded to purveyor of good bad books. His catnip factor, though, isn't his elegant mastery of the simile or masterful deployment of the crucial symptom. It's his clothes. He writes about women's clothing with a gorgeous exactness, lingering lovingly on the silk knits and the Jimmy Choos, and his gentlemen sport tailored slacks that break perfectly over oxblood loafers, colour-coded pocket squares, and all manner of LA flamboyance. It's a world away from monochrome suits in rush hour.

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