1170 Followers
32 Following
WilliamCampbellPowell

William's Book Blog

Mostly book reviews.  Very rarely I'll allow William Campbell Powell (author) to write a blog entry on publishing activity, but he's under orders to keep that stuff over on his Facebook page and on http://williamcampbellpowell.com

Currently reading

Zeroboxer
Fonda Lee
Zeroboxer
Fonda Lee
Anansi Boys
Neil Gaiman
Zombie Elementary: The Real Story
Howard Whitehouse
Progress: 99 %
The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Progress: 6/504 pages
The Longest Week: What Really Happened During Jesus' Final Days
Nick Page
Progress: 43/310 pages

Two DNFs to report

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain, Guy Cardwell, John Seelye The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
— feeling sad

Having re-listened to Neil Gaiman's Stardust on audiobook, and the author's postscript, in which he extolled the pleasure of listening to Huckleberry Finn on audiobook, I took a punt on that as my next audiobook.

 

It's supposed to be a classic, but it didn't work for me.  Huck Finn is a child of his time, complete with prejudices.  So a first person narrative puts you right inside his head.  For me, that was at best uninteresting, occasionally veering into repellent.

 

For books in that vein, Richmal Crompton's 'William' books work far better - the third person narrative voice shows both the good and the bad of each character less filtered.  But nothing has yet displaced Ray Bradbury's 'Dandelion Wine' from the top of that somewhat ill-defined pile.

 

So it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that immediately following that, I also abandoned Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory.  A first person narrative of a repellent individual.  I didn't want to spend my morning commute in that head either, so it, too, has been returned to Audible for a refund.  The same fate, and for exactly the same reasons, as Nathan Filer's The Shock of the Fall, a year or so back.
http://williamcampbellpowell.booklikes.com/post/1299711/two-dnfs-to-report
williamcampbellpowell.booklikes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-04
36177
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JPWRIQO7M3NOJEOQWJZLQYKEGGMA7COL
<urn:uuid:994650ec-c1ca-453c-a768-47acc46c4c74>
2019-01-21T12:18:52Z
192.99.40.218
text/html
sha1:YWWKBMJP736EDUFXQA64VLJAGBON77AR
<urn:uuid:09e9d32c-a8fa-4a2d-a619-bcdb8ee7cd1e>
http://williamcampbellpowell.booklikes.com/post/1299711/two-dnfs-to-report
response
<urn:uuid:68046efe-29ef-4b0d-9ce8-fe4224ea16e5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-04
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-141-91-55.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/