Authors most in need of editing or abridgement

[Texas Star]

Two of my favorite authors have been Robert C. Ruark and David Lindsey. I think Ruark was the sole American journalist who understood the reality of African politics and the grimness of Mau-Mau terrorism. The rest were mainly liberal apologists.

Both Ruark and Lindsey make the reader feel present in their scenes. You can almost see the characters and settings.

Now, if you want to read a man who really seems to be paid by the word, try Prof. John Norman's later books set on the fictional planet of Gor. I've never seen anyone else
so wordy and repetitious!

I've read a couple of other things by him, and he likes to type, or dictate! I'd like to see his Ph. D dissertation at Princeton. I bet it's wordy!

It is sort of fun to decipher which real ancient cities inspired those in his books. Was Ar based on Rome? Maybe on Athens?

 

[Ed Fowler]

Every time I read one of these threads about books on this forum I end up ordering another, thank you gentlemen.

 

[Inusuit]

hermn melvil.
moby dick could be great novel if you chopped 100 pages out of it.

I think it's a great novel as is. Wouldn't change a word. Of course I had the pleasure of reading it under the guidance of the professor who was acknowledged as the universal expert scholar on Melville.

 

[Tom S.]

Too bad I can't use emoji's in briefs.

Says who?

 

[cmort666]

Ian Fleming

I've read several of the James Bond books, and they're bad, not Willi Heinrich or Perry Rhodan bad, but bad.

His prose hits the floor like a lead ingot.

 

[Bill Raby]

JULIETTE by Marquis de Sade takes the prize for long winded rambling in serious need of editing. The guy wrote it while he was locked up in the nut house and had absolutely nothing else to do for a few years. You don't have to get too far into to see why they kept the author locked up! That book could make Jeffrey Dahmer cringe.

 

[Muss Muggins]

Ayn Rand . . .

 

[GB]

Those of us born in the mid to late 20th century have discussions about which books are best or which books to read.

Those people born at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st ask: "What is a book?"

"You have much to learn, Grasshopper! And have not the ability to use all of the tools provided to obtain that knowledge."

I would like to tell you that the quote comes from some great sage but it doesn't.

 

[mtgianni]

I tend to follow authors. Some I like that put me in the scene. Others I want it as a friend says " Put it in crayon".

 

[rwsmith]

The Stand...I thought most of the book......

Steven King

The Stand

It

Under The Dome

I thought most of The Stand was superfluous. I felt like I had read a long book of mostly nothing. Give me Pet Sematary.

Did anybody get more out of The Stand than I did????

 

[Absalom]

......
Did anybody get more out of The Stand than I did????

A pervasive fear of freeway tunnels ...

 

[rwsmith]

A book FULL of nothing.....

I hate to badmouth classics because apparently somebody likes them to put them on the 'best' lists. But in this case I'll make an exception.

The Sound And The Fury - tale of a somewhat complex and dysfunctional family over time when you never know what they are talking about, who is being talked about, WHEN whoever in the book is referring too and their actions are implied.

This was touted as being in the great vein of James Joyce and Virginia Wolf because it's so hard to comprehend. I believe that is it's only attribute. I can comprehend James Joyce pretty easily but it seems like Somerset Maugham wrote a book, and in order to make it 'profound' went back and made it as vague and confusing as possible to join the ranks of the great 'stream of consciousness' writers.

There were about two interesting pages for each of the main characters. So many words. So little to show for it.

 

[Muss Muggins]

Those three pale in comparison to his Tower (Gunslinger) collection. It's an 8 book collection (IIRC) that could have been done in far fewer volumes, and the longer it went on, the weirder and more verbose it became.

The issue with King is that he really only has one story, which he has managed to tell in about 50 books and hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of words. Admittedly, he has fooled me into buying and reading all of them. The Dark Tower series really seals it, as nearly every book he has written is related to the Gunslinger's tale. And at the end of the Dark Tower story, we find out that it was all just a . . .

 

[rwsmith]

Hmmmm....

John Steinbeck. He never used one word when ten would suffice. Even so, he wrote what continues to be my all time favorite quote from a book:

"In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, "yes, I guess that's how it was."

― John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down

I've only read a little Steinbeck, a few novels and short stories, but didn't see much of this in the ones I read. The Grapes of Wrath had me captivated all the way through. Tell me the title of the one you quoted so I can avoid it.

 

[Protocall_Design]

A high school English teacher said it best. "A book report should be like a woman's dress. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting." I'm thinking the same thing goes for the book.

 

[rwsmith]

Wow....

Verbosity can be a plague in a journalist or a lawyer, but I would be slow to criticize it in a novelist. Cormac McCarthy, for example, has been accused of overwriting, but consider this:


"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."

What would you cut?

Not a single word.

Side note: Surely everybody remembers 'Classic Comics'. They were cool.

 

[WR Moore]

I read big chunks of Kings thesis, published as Danse Macabre while waiting in a checkout line. It was about the theory and practice of myth composition, myth history and how to write good horror. Wish I'd bought it.

Some of his stuff is very good, but he could manage to trim some of the internal ruminations of his characters and detailed examination of what drives them. I guess that's the difference between literature and just plain books. If you're gonna be a Lit Prof, ya gotta write the genre.

 

[Marshwheeling]

Not a single word.

Side note: Surely everybody remembers 'Classic Comics'. They were cool.

Classics Illustrated. Without them, I wouldn't know a thing about Moby Dick, although I did go on to read Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Christo in full.

 

[Texas Star]

Classics Illustrated. Without them, I wouldn't know a thing about Moby Dick, although I did go on to read Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Christo in full.

Their version of, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was good, and I think I read about Alexander the Great and Rob Roy in those comics.

Add, The Last of the Mohicans. But I read the whole book,too.

 

[ExcitableBoy]

Having to read An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, for a Jr. High English class, was pure torture. The prose is so dry and boring that the book should be illegal. "Classic", my Granny's old fiddle!

I tried reading Stephen King... once! I forget which book, but it was way too sophomoric for my tastes.