mrv3000: made by elismor (Default)
mrv3000 ([personal profile] mrv3000) wrote2008-09-22 08:11 am
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Tired. So tired. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So since someone didn't update their fic yesterday like -- counts on fingers -- they were supposed to, wouldn't it follow that they should release 2 parts today? By my logic, yes. Yes, they should.

I wound up mostly reading this weekend - the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries with Lord Peter/Harriet Vane. Very fun. A couple of things -
  • It's interesting to read from a historical perspective. The books were written in the 30s and are both forward and backward. The heroine -- Harriet Vane -- is a novelist who lived with someone for a while, something I'm guessing wasn't a very typical thing to write about in those days? If it was written about, it'd be a character of questionable morals. One of the books also heralds women's advanced education when Suffrage had just been achieved a couple years earlier. Harriet is determined to be her own person. But at the same time the writing has a very old way of thinking, including using derogatory terms that you would not use today. It's not something I'm completely focused on when reading, but it's just something I'm finding interesting.

  • One thing that's hard to get used to is her writing style. It's 3rd person omniscient, not limited. So POV is constantly flopping, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. It sometimes makes it a bit hard to follow. She'll also go on for pages with dueling dialog, but never put in a "he said" or something, and so you quickly lose track of who's saying what. It's especially hard when Peter and Harriet are talking since their voices are pretty much identical. I have the feeling Sayers created Harriet (who came later in the Lord Peter series of books) as a female counterpart to the hero she'd been writing about. Another thing is that she jams the book full of tiny details, even spending 10 pages detailing a cipher cracking. And I mean detailing. But I'm guessing this type of thing was probably more fashionable when mystery novels were all the rage back then. (Although I know Agatha Christie never got this detailed.)