Recent comments in /f/books

emmylouanne t1_jeeghll wrote

I still have to read Villette and the Professor. Wuthering Heights is my favourite book of all time (joint with the Bell Jar). The first time I read it I didn’t like it - didn’t understand why people thought it was such a good love story. Then I read it again with the knowledge that it’s not a positive example of what love looks like - it’s passion, jealousy, selfishness. Now I love it and reread it every few years.

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TheSSChallenger t1_jeeelb5 wrote

Sure, a certain author's writing can be too difficult for some readers.
But that's why we have the concept of reading levels, which measures an individual's ability to handle complex writing.
But reading skill is kind of weird because the speed and ease with which we read is very much determined by our ability to recognize patterns--a good reader doesn't even have to look at every word in a sentence before their brain has picked out the important words and anticipated what is being said based on comprehension and convention. That's why, for example, we don't even notice most small typos.

So, if a writer's prose doesn't follow language conventions--if their sentence structure is weird or they go way too heavy on the euphemisms--then even a very skilled reader is going to have to grind to a halt and start unpacking each sentence piece-by piece, which is exactly what you don't want good readers to have to do.

Of course there is also variation in language convention. It's going to be easier to read a Regency-era novel if you're familiar with how English was spoken in the Regency Era... but those are still conventions, which a skilled reader can learn and adapt to.

Whereas "purple prose" (this term showed up in dictionaries in 1598, by the way) doesn't quite follow any particular linguistic population's language conventions--it's just that author ignoring the rules and writing whatever sounds good to them.

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GraniteGeekNH OP t1_jeee5yq wrote

Yes, you may be right about the wording. I was trying to convey my belief, built up over decades of reading and talking to other people, that folks who think it's "wrong" in some sense to ever skim or skip, and thus who haven't built up any experience at judging when and how to do it, enjoy reading a lot less and do less of it.

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ramriot t1_jeedxyv wrote

Definately read the book, also the audible audiobook narrated by R.C.Bray is totally worth a listen too.

Something to note is that there is a ton of stuff that the screenwriter missed that created plot holes & scientific absurdities in the screenplay, that if I had not read the book 1st would have made the movie unwatchable.

Marks story in the book is also way more thrilling as the author throws a ton more things at him which need the shit scienced out of them.

BTW IMO there is only one humorous point in the written word that does not come through in the audiobook or movie. When Mark is told that he should watch his language as the world is trading his words he types I think:

>![12:15] WATNEY: Look! A pair of boobs! -> ( . Y . )!<

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