It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems...
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Maybe this book is better read than listened to, because after I listened to the audiobook I came away marveling at how it could have gotten rave reviews. I had read that this book got the science, and the lab politics behind the science, right through its well-sketched out characters. Well, maybe by Dan Brown standards the characters are full, complex individuals, but by my standards they are little more than cardboard figures who are meant to stand for something (the Impetuous Genius who gets his comeuppance, the Charmless Schoolmarm who's vindicated). Too often the author told me what a character was like instead of letting me infer it from the his/her actions - usually in a long passage when a sentence or two would do. I gave this book a chance, listened all the way to the end, but couldn't muster up any genuine interest in the characters and hence their predicament. It reminded me of why I got out of the lab: it's a long, sometimes painful slog, with no real payoff at the end.
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Intuition by Allegra Goodman
Baby Djojonegoro, February 15, 2007
Maybe this book is better read than listened to, because after I listened to the audiobook I came away marveling at how it could have gotten rave reviews. I had read that this book got the science, and the lab politics behind the science, right through its well-sketched out characters. Well, maybe by Dan Brown standards the characters are full, complex individuals, but by my standards they are little more than cardboard figures who are meant to stand for something (the Impetuous Genius who gets his comeuppance, the Charmless Schoolmarm who's vindicated). Too often the author told me what a character was like instead of letting me infer it from the his/her actions - usually in a long passage when a sentence or two would do. I gave this book a chance, listened all the way to the end, but couldn't muster up any genuine interest in the characters and hence their predicament. It reminded me of why I got out of the lab: it's a long, sometimes painful slog, with no real payoff at the end.(4 of 7 readers found this comment helpful)