Book Report
Nov. 9th, 2004 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stillsostrangeStarfish, by Peter Watts
Oh the Shiny, oh the good.
I cannot remember the last time I read a book and never once felt the urge to grab a red pen. Never once thought that's clunky. Never once wanted to underline or mark through or generally destroy at least one sentence. This Golden Age of reading fell before I started workshopping, critting, writing and rewriting and picking through everything I read like a vulture (or a lit student, but is there really a difference?).
I'm not sure I've ever seen prose as clean as Watts'. Nothing wasted, no scaffolding, nothing cluttering up the flow of words, sentences, story. But the economy loses nothing of description or characterization. I hear metal groan under atmospheres of pressure, feel the cold and the heat, the weight and buoyancy of the water. I feel that chemical rush when a light cuts through the dark and you see teeth. The characters make me hurt in all the right places.
So, um, yeah--I like it lots. A report on Maelstrom will hopefully follow soon.
Oh the Shiny, oh the good.
I cannot remember the last time I read a book and never once felt the urge to grab a red pen. Never once thought that's clunky. Never once wanted to underline or mark through or generally destroy at least one sentence. This Golden Age of reading fell before I started workshopping, critting, writing and rewriting and picking through everything I read like a vulture (or a lit student, but is there really a difference?).
I'm not sure I've ever seen prose as clean as Watts'. Nothing wasted, no scaffolding, nothing cluttering up the flow of words, sentences, story. But the economy loses nothing of description or characterization. I hear metal groan under atmospheres of pressure, feel the cold and the heat, the weight and buoyancy of the water. I feel that chemical rush when a light cuts through the dark and you see teeth. The characters make me hurt in all the right places.
So, um, yeah--I like it lots. A report on Maelstrom will hopefully follow soon.
