Book stuff

I tried to finish Bones of the Earth last night, but kept falling asleep. I just had a few pages to go and really wanted to finish it, not because it was spellbinding, but just to get it over with. But I finally gave up and went to bed, then flipped through the last few pages this morning. I almost didn't even read the ending, because by that time I really didn't care.

It wasn't a horrible book, there were parts of it that I liked a lot, but there were also a couple of places that I wanted to throw it across the room.

As I mentioned before, it's a time travel book about a paleontologist who is offered the opportunity to go back in time to study the dinosaurs in their natural habitat. It's hard to talk about a book like this in detail without giving away too much of it, but there were a lot of things about it that just didn't ring true to me, that made no sense at all. And while I know we're talking about fiction, and science fiction at that, there are things that just seem to be understood about time travel, like the avoidance of creating paradoxes, or the fact that you can't go back (or forward) in time and have a conversation with yourself.

I didn't understand a lot of the theory, and I didn't care enough to try to figure it out, but that wasn't what made me want to throw the book across the room, it was a couple of very gratuitous sex scenes that I thought were very poorly written and seemed to have been thrown in at random to spice up the action.

I did love parts of the book, mainly the obligatory "stranded in time" sequences, where the paleontologists have to learn how to build shelters, conserve what technology they have, and learn to live as a "tribe." I thought those parts were pretty interesting, but I read through a lot of the rest of the book without really absorbing it. By the time I was about halfway through the book, I didn't really want to read it anymore, but I persevered.

Speaking of books, Barb has been recommending The Lovely Bones to me, so I went to Amazon.com and read some of the reviews. Some were extremely positive and some were extremely negative, and some were in-between, but the one that made an impression on me was the one that said that even though they (the reviewer) hadn't read the book, they wanted to make the point that writers shouldn't be allowed to write about Heaven because no one had been there and thus no one could describe it, however (continuing on, in a seemingly contradictory manner), everyone knows that Heaven is nothing like described in this book. Even though, presumably, the reviewer hadn't been there either . . .

I had wondered if I would get those kinds of comments while I was writing Fallen Angel, but I don't remember any, although I purposely didn't pay much attention to emails about the book while I was writing it. It does make you feel kind of weird to describe things that people probably already have a fixed idea of in their minds, and my angels were somewhat different than the stereotypical angel, as was my vision of Heaven and God.

I think I'm going to start editing and re-writing the book in March. I haven't looked at it since I finished it, but I think enough time has passed now that I can work on it again.