I don't know how much I can really add to this, but given the overwhelming number of negative opinions re Mr. Donaldson's oeuvre, I feel compelled to say that, although LFB didn't do much for me, I liked Mirror Of Her Dreams / A Man Rides Through, and I adored the Gap Cycle, to the point of waiting for the next tome with bated breath. What worked really well for me was the tension: he just keeps ratcheting it up, chapter after chapter. Especially in the Gap Cycle the stakes keep getting higher - it is as if Donaldson invented the setting just so he could make the potential ruin more... well... ruinous. It can make for tough reading (emotionally - not, as I recall, because of the style), and the climax never quite matches the build-up, but boy, did I enjoy reading those books.
(OK, so whatever I did there obviously did not work first time around.)
"One of my new rules is: if it's a book on writing and it's not written by someone whose name I instantly recognize, and it's not a market book, then I won't buy it."
I've had the good fortune of having a writer friend, and that has kept me from buying too many books on writing. Two that I do have, and which were specifically recommended, do not seem to fit these criteria at all: L. Rust Hills' Writing In General And The Short Story In Particular and Thomas McCormack's The Fiction Editor, The Novel and The Novelist.
Both are written by editors, not by writers. See the pattern? Editors are not all emotionally tangled up with their books like writers are. They just care about making writing work.
>>One of my new rules is: if it's a book on writing and it's not written by someone whose name I instantly recognize, and it's not a market book, then I won't buy it.
If you're in Austria and want to know how you can spend, go here:
http://fm4.orf.at/connected/189494/main (towards the bottom)
Hmmm.... Using Safari 1.2.4. I now see the "Commercial airspace" much broader than the images in the left column. And I see no right column at all. That's on this page.
So today I read my daily blogs. First I read Neil Gaiman's, who points to William Gibson's, who tells the EXACT SAME joke about Bush and Billy. I laugh. Then I come here.
Weird.
For what it's worth, Gibson claims it's an old Soviet joke. How they figured Bush would be US president now I'll never know.
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