dandelionfiles

I've been stepping out of my nonfiction niche quite a bit lately. This is mostly thanks to Lynx (although she would probably rather be reading social psychology studies, as she would be the first to tell you); she has excellent taste in fiction and has recently shared gems like Anansi Boys, Shadows Over Baker Street and the pretty fricken funny oeuvre of Jasper Fforde. I'll have a ways to go before having her ability to sort chocolate from s**t without actually having to taste, er, read it. However, since she is busy with her brilliant career in social psych, I've been forced to strike out on my own lately, and this is the conclusion I've been forced to come to:

Book dust jacket blurbs are ridiculous pieces of crap.

OK, not so much with the elegant phrasing, but I speak as I find. Certainly the last book I just read, The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist, was not at all well-served by the individual who wrote the summary on its dust jacket. And before I go on, I do want to reassure those who did read this book and think that it's the greatest thing they've ever experienced (I know you're out there, this is the Internet) that I'm not just picking on this book to pick on it. But I reserved the book from the library, opened the dust jacket and read such hypetastic statements on its dust jacket as, ahem, "a bold and brilliant work of the imagination" that "shatters conventions" and "seethes" with "eroticism": in short, "a novel for the ages." And I'm done with dust jackets hyping the living crap out of every book, ever. So I'm calling this particular book out purely as an example. I also apologize for the lack of concrete examples in the following, but the book has now been returned to the library and is therefore out of easy reach.

Glass Books (may I use that abbreviation? I really hate those acronym-style abbreviations. Thank you) is a great read. Awesome heroes who you are rooting for throughout the book? Check. (Especially Miss Temple, who the author refers to throughout the book, rather cheekily, as "Miss Temple," even though we know her first name about a hundred or so pages in.) Villains who are completely hissable? Check. A pace so fast that 700+ pages go by in what seems like two hours? Absolutely. Cool science fiction elements? Check. (I love anachronistic technology in a nineteenth-century setting, so I have a bias there.) On the debit side, it also has the following: about three or four too many bad guys, some of whom spend way too much time twirling their metaphorical moustaches; some plot conventions that The Bold and the Beautiful rejected as too much like a soap opera, including the old "listening on the other side of the door as the evildoers discuss their plans at length" chestnut; and at least one female hero (I also hate the term "heroine") that has probably made my dentist a very happy man, since my teeth ground together every time she showed up to blunder her way into danger and require rescue. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, she doesn't show up until about halfway through the book... not a sign of great plotting in my opinion.

At any rate, this book isn't "brilliant." It may put some elements together in a way I haven't seen before, but those elements don't seem particularly original in and of themselves, at least to me, and I'm not a voracious reader of fiction (see first paragraph above). And the book itself is pretty competently but not masterfully written. (On a side note: I've found some of BUST Magazine's three-page One-Handed Reads more erotic than anything I found in this book. Perhaps someone else would be more jazzed by the supposed erotic content, but I'm not, perhaps because much of it involves various scenarios of people, mostly women, being coerced into sexual experiences.) But none of these things mean this book is a waste of mine or anyone's time. Reading it entertained the hell out of me. I even went so far as to mentally cast the movie in my head. (No, I'll never tell... not like any of them would actually get cast. Please, y'all.)

Overall, the book reminded me of a really good gaming campaign. Let's see: lots of action, multiple (and sometimes confusing) points of view, an eeeeeeeeeeeevil conspiracy at the heart of the story with thoroughly sinister and powerful bad guys. Not to mention that most of the action is episodic and bears a strong resemblance to hack and slash: enter chamber, find villain & treasure, defeat villain (or get ass kicked), take treasure/info (or not: see "get ass kicked"). That, played around a table or enacted in the open air with good friends, is a great time, but it ain't brilliant, or convention-shattering, or for the ages. (I did find myself wondering at several points in the book how the Order of the Stick would have handled the situation. I would imagine that number one on their agenda would have been to dispose of the annoying female hero at the first opportunity.)

In other words, the dust jacket hype actually did the text itself no favors. After having read The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters, I'm pretty sure that Mr. Dahlquist is going to write more and better books, and that I'm going to read them. But if I hadn't actually decided to read the book before seeing a physical copy and reading the nonsense spouted on the jacket, I probably a) would have put the book back down in disgust, if I were a cynic, or b) been horribly disappointed in the book, if I were gullible. So the hyperbole served no purpose whatsoever, other than to take one more step towards making the words "brilliance," "convention-shattering," and "for the ages" (and, in my opinion, "eroticism," although that's more a personal taste thing) absolutely meaningless. Pfui, as Nero Wolfe would say.