PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

darkwasthenight · # ¿ Nov 10, 2015 21:13

I was hoping to do a writeup about this thriller which I found in a charity sale a few months ago and never got round to reading. Unfortunately it's proved too boring even for comedy as it's mostly just long screeds of missionary material. Excellent blurb caught my eye:

It is terrible though! Apparently Israelis are all just waiting for a good Hebrew Christian to come and convert them to the real Jewish faith. I'll limit myself to pointing out that it starts with them killing a 12 year old Palestinian with a grenade and ends with a Hebrew Christian missionary kidnapping a character in her hotel room on the night of her wedding and refusing to let her out until she converts to Christ; both events presented totally uncritically of course. Apart from the first section it's remarkably even-handed towards Arabs and Palestinians, as long as they are vocal in their approval of Israel.

Zola Levitt's other books include 'The Coming Russian Invasion' which sounds a lot more fun, but I'm not going out of my way to track that one down.

Adbot · # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:51

darkwasthenight · # ¿ Aug 29, 2016 12:34

divabot posted:

Readily contactable at dgerard at gmail :-)

I'm still picking at Loki's Child. (1100 words so far reading the first chapter in Amazon preview. I may have issues.) So, literary abyss-divers: have you ever read a novel about pop music that actually worked and wasn't a complete piece of poo poo?

All the least-unreadable examples of this species of folly, that don’t make you shout “WRONG! WRONG! BULLSHIT!” twice a page, tend to be thin fictionalisations of real events; plenty of hosed-up poo poo happens in music that makes people go “someone should write a book about this.” e.g. Platinum Logic by Tony Parsons fails as an even slightly coherent novel, but every lurid and tawdry incident in that book is a version of something that happened, and spotting the players is the fun bit.

Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music is the only example I can think of of a pop music novel that works, and that’s primarily as a Discworld novel where the pop music is that volume’s decoration, if a clearly fact-checked one.

There's a reason pop music novels aren't a genre, just a pile of cautionary examples as to why this trick never works.

High Fidelity and Kill Your Friends, and that's about it. Like Soul Music they're both more about music as a setting though, and that's why they work. I make my money from music, and I'm a lifelong believer in the power and rock and roll and other such stupidity, but I'll be the first to admit that the actual process of making music is incredibly loving boring to read about unless you're personally involved.

Who wants to read 200 pages of some dude describing music you can't hear anyway? It just turns into a long form version of that Tenacious D joke about writing a song about the best song in the world that they can't actually play you.

darkwasthenight · # ¿ Aug 30, 2016 00:43

pookel posted:

Well, this is interesting. Since I have the attention span of a squirrel, I saw "Gillian Hitler" mentioned in the above passage and popped off to google it in case it was a real reference to something, before I got to this bit. In the search results was this post in an audio engineering forum thread about most offensive band names:
http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=956&start=60

This Fenris dude clearly spent way, way too long planning this book.

I think I love you.

This is mildly interesting in that Electrical Audio is the studio run by Steve Albini, AKA Steve d'Aubigny as he appears in the book. Like divabot pointed out, he would quite happily rip the guys head off and poo poo down the hole, or at least make a cutting remark for the benefit of the many fanboys who clutter the forums begging for senpai's attention.

darkwasthenight · # ¿ Mar 5, 2024 01:43

It was certainly better than Mostly Harmless which is at best pretty bleak and at worst entirely mean-spirited towards the entire series.