Reading verbose authors.

[Astro Pen]

I set out, with good intention, to read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. I thought that Jorge Luis Borges was good practice for that style of writing but I think that even he could have written it in half the pages.
On reflection The novella length 'introduction' should have prepared me for the verbal Everest awaiting. Whilst the basic idea is good (Nobel prize good apparently) I'm not sure I have the patience. By my age time is increasingly precious. Since I cannot speed read and have an aversion to skimming (because you always end up having to go back to clarify some point.) I think this might be one of those where the bookmark ends up permanently residing between pages 158 and 159.
How do you deal with verbose books? Do you persevere with a feeling of smug intellectuality or do you say "soddit" and move on to something more concise?

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

It depends. If I am getting pleasure out of the author's style, I keep on. If I'm not, I tend to give up early. Translations can be rather clunky, so unless the translator is a fine writer in their own right (someone on a level with Lucia Graves who translated Carlos Ruis Záfon's books), I find it especially hard to wade through pages and pages of verbose writing when I can't even savor whatever virtues there might have been in the original prose.

No doubt I miss out on much that is profound and of value this way. But I figure one advantage of my advanced age (and of not being enrolled in any courses) is that nothing is assigned reading. I read what I want to read.

 

[Extollager]

As a related but new facet of this topic -- what are some works that we think are verbose?

My experience is that authors like Dickens and Scott who are accounted verbose by some often are not really verbose. (Scott can take a while to get the story going, but he was working within a literary convention that eased readers into a story.) At least, I know that when I first read a Dickens novel -- it was Oliver Twist -- I set myself to write a symbol in the margin when the book was getting wordy. I looked at that copy a few weeks ago and didn't see any passages thus marked, though I had thought there were one or two.

But where I do encounter verbosity is in the way, it seems, many modern thrillers are written, with pages and pages of unnecessary dialogue and unnecessary characters. The most recent example was Christopher Bryan's Siding Star (that is the title). I gave up on it and returned it to the library. The thing of it is that it's, as I understand, a new version of his first novel, Night of the Wolf, which Harper published around 1983 as a novel of about 135 pages. But the new version is about 400. And you guessed it -- pages of people talking on phones and whatnot. Thus, though the novel didn't have long stretches of description (which sometimes may get a book labeled "verbose"), but featured lots of one-sentence paragraphs and so on, the effect on me was of ... verbosity. Fooey!

 

[KGeo777]

I read a Dennis Wheatley book and it was a pain to get through-so many digressions. I forced myself to stay with it but it was no Conjure Wife (which I had read before it and was a smooth running book).

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I remember attending a lecture by Brian Stableford in which he gently suggested that the drive to "prune" verbosity was dogma and little else. "There's nothing wrong with a bit of purple prose every now and again," he said.

 

[Foxbat]

What I find surprising is if you go back to authors like Chekov and the like, even short stories were verbose. I think each to their own but I do wonder what would have happened if we had not discovered electricity. By that, I mean, stories were probably bloated way back then to fill a night reading by gaslight and no X Factor or Strictly on the telly. Perhaps this move away from verbose literature is as much about our conditioning to the faster paced modern world as it is about writing.

 

[The Big Peat]

On the one hand, I admire a nice bit of purple prose every now and again.

On the other hand, my brain currently doesn't particularly enjoy books that I can't read at my preferred speed (i.e. fast) which does make overly unconventional styles a bit of a non-go. It's a pickle for me.

 

[CTRandall]

I think 'verbose' is a relative term defined by taste and quality.

I barely made it through most of George R. R. Martin, and that was done by skipping paragraph after paragraph (sometimes page after page) of description, mostly of food.

On the other hand, I'm reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver at the moment, which has a long, slow introduction to the story and characters. It doesn't really get going until about a third of the way into the book. I actually enjoyed that long introduction more than the main part of the story (so far--I haven't finished it yet). Funny thing is, I actually thought to myself that, if I posted a couple of paragraphs in the 'Critiques' section of the Chrons, comments would almost universally be 'cut, cut, cut'. The quality of her characters is such, however, that I'm happy reading more about them.

 

[BigBadBob141]

Anything too verbose then my eyes glaze over and I slip into a mild coma!
Which is probably why I tend to read lately mainly short stories.

 

[Randy M.]

I think 'verbose' is a relative term defined by taste and quality.

Yes. That. Many claims of authorial verbosity stem from subjective reasons. (Not all, of course; some writers are verbose and most readers can agree on the point.) Some readers can't read Dickens because he's verbose. While I sympathize somewhat, his verbosity as I've experienced it stems from the legitimate choice of an expansive narrator voice. Some complain Faulkner is wordy, but I've never found it so; he's a story-teller playing with different ways of presenting his story in writing while maintaining some oral traditions. Younger readers find Tolkein verbose -- all that description and the going on about the good old days! Oy! -- and yet I've rarely been as immersed in a world and its cultures and traditions.

One of the more amusing things I recall hearing in a rhetoric class I took was a journalism major claiming Hemingway was wordy. What I think he was objecting to was Hemingway's use of repetition as a way of stating, reinforcing, and driving a point home, and I wondered if his journalistic heart wasn't put off by the poetic rhythms of Hemingway's best prose.

 

[Bagpuss]

The thing with some writers is that they can be verbose but they're not necessarily difficult to read. Peter F Hamilton, for example, goes on forever with some of his descriptions but I don't think his books are that difficult to read or understand. Compared to, for example, Janny Wurts whose books (and paragraphs) aren't anywhere near the length of Hamilton's but whose prose style is very convoluted.

Personally I quite like the occasionally complicated story, but I have to get in the right frame of mind for it.

 

[Montero]

What Bagpuss said.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I set out, with good intention, to read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

The English version is frustratingly dense:

Herman Hesse - The Glass Bead Game

No, not a Nazi, just an common German surname for a Nobel prize winning author who also penned "Steppenwolf". This novel is long-winded and the translation from German is atrocious - you really do need a dictionary for this. But the content is quality, as you follow the protagonist - the...

www.sffchronicles.com

Big Intellectual Books You Own and Would Really Like to Have Read

This might fetch some interesting comments... Do you have a big (I'll leave that up to you) intellectual book that you do own, and would like to have read, but haven't -- at least not most of it? We're talking here about some book that has a real reputation for intellectual depth and deep...

www.sffchronicles.com

 

[Rodders]

I think verbose is a subjective term.

I thought Hugh Howey's Wool and Shift books were wordier than they needed to be and he could have trimmed 200 pages off of both novels. I have read people on here that feel the same way about Alistair Reynolds or Iain M. Banks, but i can't get enough of both authors.

 

[The Scribbling Man]

Good writing is good writing. Bad writing is bad writing. It will either add or it will take away. The justification of descriptive prose depends on both the story and the author.

I wouldn't have Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan any other way. Neither would I have Orwell flower up 1984.

 

[Bick]

I remember attending a lecture by Brian Stableford in which he gently suggested that the drive to "prune" verbosity was dogma and little else.

Inspired by Hemingway, perhaps.

 

[Randy M.]

Maybe, Bick, but that movement was already underway via Ring Larder, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain. Other than Henry James, American fiction moved toward more paired, direct prose from if not from Irving and Cooper on, then from Poe, Melville and Hawthorne on.

 

[Rodders]

No disrespect meant, but I always found J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a bit too verbose. Mostly because everything seemed to be described with so much detail. Same with L. Ron Hubbard. How he turned his Mission Earth series a ten volume series is beyond me.

 

[Bick]

No disrespect meant, but I always found J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a bit too verbose. Mostly because everything seemed to be described with so much detail. Same with L. Ron Hubbard. How he turned his Mission Earth series a ten volume series is beyond me.

It’s not disrespectful, Rodders, it’s fine, but I happen to disagree - this came up in another thread lately, and I noted there that I don’t actually think Tolkien was at all verbose. His language was rich and powerful, but he’d never use many flowery words, when one word was perfect. I recall Gandalf telling Frodo that the dark lord didn’t die - he doesn’t wax lyrical about it, but tells him simply that ‘he endured’. The perfect language: spare, rich, with an old flavour to it, but with hidden power behind the words. I see very little verbosity in Tolkien.

And Hubbard was a fast artisan at a typewriter I think, and not a true wordsmith- he cranked out 10 Mission Earth books for the money, but is the prose overly florid?

I can’t think of modern authors who are verbose really - I suspect editors have killed the style off over the last century. I think Dickens can be verbose in some passages I have to say, and agree about Hesse.

 

[Randy M.]

I suspect a lot of verbosity today would come less from word count than from repetitious scenes, extended plots that didn't really need the length, and so forth. One of the things I noticed when trying to write fiction was how often I created three scenes that could be condensed to one or two with a bit of work and imagination. Seeing so many sprawling series and multi-volume works, I tend to shy away, wondering if that kind of work and imagination was skimped.