The many reasons I dropped this: -Excessive purple prose at times that detracted form what was actually happening in the storDropped this at around 30%
The many reasons I dropped this: -Excessive purple prose at times that detracted form what was actually happening in the story and did little to enhance the reading experience. -Characters that I found uninteresting even as the writer tried extra hard to make them seem interesting. -A story that just sort of limped along and was not captivating in any way. -A world that the writer tried to inject interesting things into (like a black market for biological abnormalities, which are also much more common in this world) that I found as unengaging as the characters.
Basically nothing about this book worked for me and if it ain't working on any front through 30% I see no reason to waste my time on the last 70%....more
Sometimes prose just doesn't age well. Maybe in his day the yarns of Henry James were compelling and worthwhile, but from the DNFed after 2.5 stories.
Sometimes prose just doesn't age well. Maybe in his day the yarns of Henry James were compelling and worthwhile, but from the two and a half I read in this collection I just don't see the attraction. The majority of characters struck me as vapid, layabout upper-class twits that went about doing nothing particularly important. I just didn't care about any of them and James did little to try to make me care about them. They did nothing interesting and very little interesting happened to them. Even the flagship story of the collection, The Turn of the Screw, which had so much potential, failed, not just because the writing was slow, the story was boring, the characters unremarkable, and there were SO. MANY. COMMAS. (just like that preceding sentence, only written over and over, and over again).
All in all a slog of a read, but a reminder of how much literary conventions and taste change over the decades....more
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