Gratuitous Shameful Vacation Reading Book Review

I set out on my two week jaunt to Maine with a couple of biographies with which I intended to amuse myself while sitting on the porch overlooking the bay.

The first of them, which I was already about halfway through, is Georgiana: Dutches of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman. Georgiana was a prominant late-18th Century political hostess and like her Spencer descendant, the late, unlamented Princess Di, lived a glamorous high life but lacked both emotional stability and common sense.

The second was Elizabeth Longford's masterful study Wellington: The Years of the Sword.

So what did I wind up reading instead? Well, you know what summer cottages are like - various bits of flotsam and jetsom washing in and out, left there by previous tenants. For reasons which I still don't comprehend, my hand fell on a scifi murder mystery called Spider Play by one Lee Killough.

My opinion? I've finally found a book I had no hesitancy in throwing away once I'd finished it. Who reads this stuff? (Evidently not the publishers - I've never seen so many typos.) The plot was tedious and, in the end, anti-climactic. The style was clunky enough to make Tom Clancy read like Trollope. The "futuristic" language was laughable. (Apparently, in the late 21st Century a coffee pot will be called - are you sitting down? - a "caff urn".) And not even a decent snogging scene or two to liven things up!

My only excuse for finishing once I'd realized what I'd got into was that my brain was on vacation.

Posted by Robert at August 21, 2006 12:35 PM | TrackBack