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Jun. 15th, 2009 02:14 pmBook 42: That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis. 382pp
Um...
Okay, so first of all this book took me months to read. I started it, was so bored by the beginning that I put it aside for several months, and I really only picked it up again because I was literally without Anything Else to Do.
I will grant that it did start picking up the pace a little after I started re-reading. However, in the end I found it a very unsatisfactory piece of work, especially following the brilliance of "Perelandra".
Let's just say I didn't care for either of the main characters at all, and although they DID grow and change to some extent over the course of the book, I wasn't really much more impressed with them in the end than in the beginning.
There was also too much talking by too many people who were too scholarly for my level of intelligence; too much fuzzing of Christianity with mythology]; too many pages.
*sigh* At least I made it all the way through. But I really doubt I'll be coming back to it very often.
What I think could, possibly, have made it more palatable?
First of all, not having Ransom as the main character threw me for a loop, considering that he SHOULD be the main character, regardless of who else is necessary to drive the story along. Second, it needs to preserve more of the style of the two previous books: a lot of observation of what is going on, perhaps, seen in a new light through Ransom's eyes?
I'm not even 100% sure what could have helped, but it needed something.
Um...
Okay, so first of all this book took me months to read. I started it, was so bored by the beginning that I put it aside for several months, and I really only picked it up again because I was literally without Anything Else to Do.
I will grant that it did start picking up the pace a little after I started re-reading. However, in the end I found it a very unsatisfactory piece of work, especially following the brilliance of "Perelandra".
Let's just say I didn't care for either of the main characters at all, and although they DID grow and change to some extent over the course of the book, I wasn't really much more impressed with them in the end than in the beginning.
There was also too much talking by too many people who were too scholarly for my level of intelligence; too much fuzzing of Christianity with mythology]; too many pages.
*sigh* At least I made it all the way through. But I really doubt I'll be coming back to it very often.
What I think could, possibly, have made it more palatable?
First of all, not having Ransom as the main character threw me for a loop, considering that he SHOULD be the main character, regardless of who else is necessary to drive the story along. Second, it needs to preserve more of the style of the two previous books: a lot of observation of what is going on, perhaps, seen in a new light through Ransom's eyes?
I'm not even 100% sure what could have helped, but it needed something.
