Suddenly I Hate Ian McEwan

[queerbychoice]

Sometimes I hate books. Don't ever read Ian McEwan's Atonement. I'm serious. I loved every other book I ever read by him and believed he was incapable of writing one I wouldn't love - and it's not that this one is at all lacking in writing skills either. But it's torture and horrifyingness nonstop from start to finish! It's 175 pages of watching a train wreck about to happen in excruciatingly slow motion knowing the whole time that it's going to be horrific yet being helpless to save any of the people, and the next 176 pages after the train wreck has already happened don't get any less miserable! I hate this book! I think I should burn it just to make sure I never accidentally read it again! This book attacked me violently and beat me up and it is a danger to society and I do not want it in my home!

Comments

[rhekarid.livejournal.com]

....can I have it?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Yes. You can have it. You, however, will undoubtedly find it to be a happier story than any you could ever have imagined, and will in fact mock it for its unrealistic optimism, and gape uncomprehendingly at me for how I could possibly have managed to be traumatized by it.

[frankepi.livejournal.com]

what's funny is that i think your post just made me more convinced that i need to read it :-)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

here's one more reason not to read it: the main characters are named Briony and Cecilia.

anytime a book's characters have names like that, you know from the very first page that the entire atmosphere of the book is just going to be nonstop suffocation.

you must be a masochist.

[sankta.livejournal.com]

Briony I get, but Cecilia? Cecilia is a perfectly reasonable, if somewhat old-fashoned, name. It lacks an air of overpowering evil.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that either of them exude an air of overpowering evil, actually. I'm saying that they both exude an air of "this will be a deadly dull book set in some totally uninteresting era of history and it will be about a bunch of annoying rich people with servants who do everything for them." Which is precisely correct.

[iadork4life.livejournal.com]

lol i agree with people up there ^-^...i want to read it now!! it sounds good to me.

--m.

[charliegrrrl.livejournal.com]

I hated that book too. I think it's the only novel of his I've read, although I saw the movie of The Comfort of Strangers. Good to know it's not typical of his work. I might give him another try.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Yay, I'm not the only one who hates it! I had this feeling that everyone else who read it would somehow manage to like it and not understand at all why I hated it.

The best Ian McEwan book I read was probably The Cement Garden. Read that one.

books

[brighton74.livejournal.com]

It's a little off-topic, but while you're on the subject of books... Have you read "Global Sex" by Dennis Altman. It's all about the globalisation of sex, roles and models, there's a chapter on homosexuality which I find interesting from a QBC point of view.

Re: books

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, but I've heard of it and I heard some people saying it was very QBC and then I heard other people saying it was very anti-QBC, so between the two differing opinions I ended up not knowing what to think. What do you think?

Re: books

[brighton74.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you when I've read the whole book... Anti-QBC?