My understanding and
appreciation suffered from a complete ignorance of South American geography,
and now decent maps were provided. It was difficult to imagine the feats of
Bolivar without understanding the terrain. The story of the Revolutionary Wars
is told through concentrating on 7 liberators, all of whom appear to have
shagged and duelled their way round Europe and South America, breaking off from
liberating Venezuela to seduce the Spanish Viceroy's daughter and win a horse
race before returning to the fray. Read like a Sabatini novel at times. Those
bits I liked. I'm just about to finish Camilla Lackberg's 'The Hidden Child',
so there should be a further update soon. I was tempted to skive off work for
half an hour this morning to finish it, but I'm a conscientious sort and
instead am writing this. . .
In the meantime,
every woman I know that doesn't normally read books is reading the awful,
awful, Fifty Shades of Grey, a mildly pornographic wish-fulfillment fantasy for
a woman who wants to be submissive and controlled. It started as fan fiction. I
pledged to read it in return for a colleague reading 'The Awakening', a decent
feminist novel exploring sexuality. Fifty Shades really is terrible though, the
lack of decent editing as it was initially published online shows through. In
the first few pages such dull cliches as 'pedal to the metal', 'the elevator
reached terminal velocity' and 'I'm a monkey's uncle' are used, and one
character has been described as 'tenacious' three times despite showing no
evidence of this characteristic. It reads like Jean Teasdale from The Onion has
written fan fiction on the characters from Sweet Valley High and Herr Flick of
the Gestapo starring in an episode of Howard's Way. I don't know if I can
continue.
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