So
I've been reading P.D. James' Children of Men, partly b/c I loved the movie, all dark and nightmarish and stunningly filmed, but I hated the ending, what with it's forced optimism and whatnot. I'm hoping the book will prove my theory that Hollywood execs mandated that the ending be changed to give the audience some semblance of redemption from two plus hours of prophetic visions and pedagogical life lessons. But the book is giving me a complex, as I am forced to look up a word, oh, every four pages or so. This hasn't happened to me since high school ( thank you Umberto Eco) and now I'm wondering if I've just been cruising for the last ten years and now I have a sudden obligatory stance when it comes to reading words I don't know or is this book actually that cerebral. It's P.D. James for god's sake, not Pynchon or McCarthy or a dozen other writers I can think of who are known language snobs. It's frustrating in that it is interrupting my natural flow as a reader but I also feel Really. Fucking. Dumb. So I thought I would share with you a list of words I've encountered in the first thirty pages and see whether I am alone in this or not.
accidie
apostasy
suzerainty
concatenation
pilasters
parapet
campanile
Seriously?
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1 comment:
ok, I think apostasy means something like blasphemous and parapet is something architectural but seeing as how spell check is telling me I spelled architectural wrong (I'm fixing it) I realize that those words are ridiculous and have no place in modern fiction and you are completely justified in your annoyance. If I were slightly less annoyed I would look them up out of curiosity but now I won't, so f-you Mr. James.
um, can I borrow the book when you're done?
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