tavie.com

I'm 40 pages from being done with this book, but I'm done. Maybe I'll give the last chapter a glance tomorrow, but I can't stand it anymore.

It's too bad, because hillbillies* are fun to read about when you're not slogging through the prosaic mire of someone who's so obviously impressed with her own vocabulary.** Every paragraph begins with "imagine" or "picture"; I can't NOT hear the narrator of The Living Seas ("Try to imagine, just for a moment...") And you can't go more than a few lines without encountering run-on sentences from hell, stuffed with jargon until your eyes cross, or else lists upon lists of what I make out to be freakin' synonyms. Just use one word. Say it once.

Also, the author expects all of her readers to be practiced semioticians? That I ain't. I have a vague recollection of the most basic premises of semiotics from Val Daniels' class (FIVE years ago?!) but she doesn't bother to offer any background, just plunges into this whole gap-between-signifier-and-signified thing. Which is the crux of her entire thesis, may I add, so it makes things a little sticky for us dullards.

None of this is going into my paper, of course, which is why I had to vent. Other than that, the book isn't entirely painful to read. I'm just plumb tired of it is all.

But, on the upside, if I skip the last two chapters, I think I can get that paper started tomorrow.

*NOT the proper ethnological term.
**Who can spot the irony in this sentence?

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:45 PM | shower me with attention