Sunday, March 22, 2009

My Breif Taste of Freedom Comes to an End





Tomorrow morning I go back to the pharmacy school salt mine. The break seemed to fly by, but it is probably a good thing it was not any longer or it would be even harder to go back.
I've made good use of my time though. I located the hard-to-find bushing for my tiller after stopping at four different places. Pam has been talking about getting her pea's in the ground soon so I gave our garden spot a first tilling.
The bathroom project moved along a bit more, and I finished off another of the books on my list. This one however was a sorry disappointment.
I have been a Louis L'Amour fan since I was a kid, and often people have suggested that I might like Zane Grey's westerns as well. So I decided to try these suggestions and found the ZG novel "Riders of the Purple Sage". It intrigued me because it was set in a small southern Utah border town around 1870. Without wasting too much time let me just make the issue very clear: this was not a 'western', it was a romance novel and an exposition for poorly researched and seditiously indulged rumors of the 'vile creed' that is 'mormonism'. The characters were inconsistent and many poorly developed. The landscape and relative positions of landmarks like canyons, homes, hideouts, etc would constantly shift and change in proximity and direction. And while Zane Grey exhibited a good vocabulary, he used it poorly and the writing was often choppy and of irregular flow. There were certainly promising elements of the story like horse races, indian hideouts, and daring escapes (conspicuously lacking in good gun fights though), but these were all wasted in poor portrayal and a story that constantly devoloved back into either the sputtering emotion of the female characters (and some of the men) or the blistering calumnization of those vile mormins. I give the book 1.5 out of 5 stars overall. The short version is, unless you're a simpering pansy, don't read it.

1 comment:

Sarah Bogh said...

ok so i liked the first part of your post, i felt like it was albert talking and then you went into this book thing and it was more entertaing thinking about the fact that you know all those big words and how to use them! you and pam should really link a dictionary to some of your posts.

good job on the shower! it looks better in there! and the garden getting tilled, nice job!! did you get your neg browning points built back up?