HarperPerennial ePub edition, 358 pages, 1978
Dang I need to catch up. I especially want to post more about Japan, but I have 4 book posts to get through too!
After reading this whole book I still can't decide if I liked it or not. It was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, and it is traaaash. It's very dated, I didn't like any of the characters, and it does this thing I hate where it pretends no one is born in San Francisco and everyone moved there to escape a stifling Midwestern upbringing. (Get out of my city, yo.) But it has its moments--the conversation between Anna Madrigal and Edgar Halcyon about how San Franciscans are reincarnations of the people of Atlantis got me right in the chest. And I still kind of love it in the way I love any book (movie, article) that lets me walk the streets of my beloved city and pass all the landmarks in my memory, not the touristy stuff that everyone knows but Mt. Davidson, Seal Rocks, Colma, the Marina Safeway.
This was also the first ebook I read on my new Kindle (more on that later), and while I absolutely love Kindle reading, my caveat for this particular ebook is that the text quality is HORRIBLE. Stray words at the end of paragraphs (widows and orphans for those knowledgeable about typesetting), weird spacing, question marks sprinkled throughout the text in place of various symbols, and at least one or two typos per chapter (and the chapters are like a page long). We're talking really bad typos here. The worst one was at the beginning of a chapter--a character's name, Beauchamp, was supposed to be the first word of the chapter but instead they wrote "eauchamp." With the lowercase "e" as a drop cap. I know I'm a copy editor but this goes beyond the kind of nitpicking I normally do; I think it would be distracting to the average person. I am actually embarrassed for the people who put this ebook together and I would not pay money for it again.
Next up: Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell
No comments:
Post a Comment