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Full armour and a hot fudge sundae

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
— Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, all right, I admit I’ve laughed along with the best of ’em at Dan Brown’s prose (the famous silhouette with the pink eyes is my favourite), but I do have to wonder: where in heck was the EDITOR in all of this? Could you GET another editing gig after that?

“Hi, I’m looking for a job, my previous experience was as editor of Dan Brown’s –” *click* “… hello?”

Yer have to hand it to Brown: he’s found something that millions of people can enjoy. More than one commenter over at this column even states it specifically: Brown gives good story (even if he doesn’t give good prose).

(Yes, yes, I know, story is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, what? Oh, well, I’ve not really read any … or, okay, I read one, but I skim-read it, & I don’t know if I really thought it was a good story. I’m just a Knights Templar-obsessive. It seemed to roll along, though. What’s that you say? Characters? Oh, well, I’m not sure there were any…)

Still and all, Brown would find a lot to laugh about with MY thwarted novel attempts. And I couldn’t blame him for that. Hats off to him for his runaway success, after all. Not many authors get that level of buzz around their next novel, that many people excited by & looking forward to their next work. Good on him, I say! And I actually mean that, though the flippant nature of the rest of this post is probably undermining my attempts to be sincere on that front. Good on him, so few of us break through, how can we begrudge the ones that do?

But if you ARE looking for a rollicking good story where the prose may not pain you so much, there’s an excellent-looking list here. Onto the wishlist with these!