Monday, July 31, 2006

A Crack in the Edge of the World

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Category: Natural History Grade: D

Well, we have our second "lay-down" of the summer. I only made it about thirty pages in to this one. Its about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and I had high hopes for it since I enjoyed the author's previous book Krakatoa. Not sure what happened with this one. Based on the style, I'd almost guest that Winchester's contract called for a per word or an average-sentence-length payment. Note to budding authors -- great writing should have the reader thinking about personalities, events, imagery, etc. If you get the reader thinking about, sentence structure and synonyms, forget it.

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