My Journal #2

Best Book?

Prompt: Write about a book that you recently read that stayed with you after you closed the last page.

This is a question that had me thinking. What book have I read recently? There have been a few. I found I'm not as interested in reading as I am in writing so reading has fallen to the side.
I joined a book club hoping to increase my reading to at least half of what it used to be. That didn't happen. I found the books published are boring to me. They lack a good plot or aren't written well.

I've decided to answer this question in a negative manner. I'm sure there will be lots of posts about wonderful books. I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to tell you the impressions that have stayed with me since I've read some not-so-great books.
The first is a book, and I can't remember the name, that I bought at Wordstock Festival. Here is a place where you can listen to great authors expound or inflict in some cases, their thoughts about writing and research to other writers or readers.
Along the front wall, tables were arranged for authors to sell their books. I perused the selection and came to a mother and I assume daughter collaboration. They wrote a book about searching for the truth in their family. It was along the same genre of book I am writing, so I bought it.  I began reading it on the MAX train back to my part of the city and hadn't gone more than a few stops when I began shaking my head and making disgusting noises from my mouth.  I found the word "was" written five times in one short paragraph. This writer broke every rule that I have learned about proper writing. If you write in WORD it will throw squiggly lines under sentences that are "passive" and tells you to rewrite them.  This book was fill with passive sentences.  Besides the passive sentences, I found the words. "Well,..." started almost every conversation in the book. The conversations ended with the common "said," tag. This bugged me because there was very little action mostly telling the story between the mother and daughter. I think I got to the last chapter and never picked it up again.

The next book, I forced myself to finish is "Titanic The Lost Child" by Bonnie Dune. In this book the plot could have been written very interesting. It wasn't. The story had too much going on. It might have worked if the plotting had been done a little better. I still didn't get it when I was finished. I had to guess at what happened. It might have been buried in the pages but by that time I had lost interest in everything but getting to the end.
Her characters constantly interrupted each other. Not once or twice, but every conversation the characters abruptly ended a sentence with -- or ....  They might say two words and the other character interrupted that character. It was distracting and hard to follow what was going on.
The other thing she did that slowed the reading momentum, was dialect. My story is written about people in the back woods of the Appalachian Mountains. We know their talk is very pronounced. I didn't write the whole book in their dialect. I threw in a few "yews" and "yore" but only by one or two people. The rest is implied. If you aren't from the USA it didn't matter. 
This author wrote the entire conversation by the maid in broken French. It was difficult to read let alone understand. When the MC met this Italian man who had been born in the USA, he spoke with an Italian accent. Believe me it was "a verrrry poorly-a written."  Difficult to read and understand. I'm glad I didn't do that in my book. I debated to give more local flavor and I could have added more to some of the characters, but I realize what that does to a person trying to read it. 
As I said, the plot intrigued me and the idea was well thought out. It just wasn't well written. I was interested in the Titanic story more than the present day portion. It might have worked better if she would have written each story in its entirety then merged the two.

I guess you can tell these books stayed with me long after I wanted to chuck them. The first is a paperback that is buried at the bottom of my nightstand. The other, thank goodness, was a cheap e-book. It was less than the cost of a Latte, so I don't feel bad that it was a waste of money.

Never Marry your manuscript, it will lead to divorce.