Re: RARA-AVIS: black cherry blues

From: Pat Zeitoun ( pwz@tca.net)
Date: 03 Feb 2002


You obviously shouldn't even try Burke or any number of other my hard boiled or noire favorite authors.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrie Pruett" < pruettc@hotmail.com> To: < rara-avis@icomm.ca> Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 11:54 PM Subject: RARA-AVIS: black cherry blues

I took a brief run at this one a few years ago, because I had heard it was one of Burke's best, but I couldn't get anywhere with it. I thought it might be a too-much-backstory thing and resolved to try again with the first in the series ("Heaven's Prisoners" I think?) but haven't gotten back to it. I'm not a big fan of the overdescription thing, especially when it's of nature and not, say, a neighborhood in a city where the landscape says something important about the inhabitants; I mean, OK, I can kind of dig those wheat-threshing chapters in "Anna Karenina" but most writers aren't Tolstoy. A poet friend of mine calls this kind of stuff "gratuitous scenery" and tends to make big X's through it in her paperbacks - I don't go that far but I don't often find these passages interesting. Probably one of the things that slowed the Burke book down for me.

Carrie

_________________________________________________________________ Join the world's largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .


-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Feb 2002 EST