{"id":2711,"date":"2016-02-10T11:06:11","date_gmt":"2016-02-10T16:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=2711"},"modified":"2016-02-10T11:06:11","modified_gmt":"2016-02-10T16:06:11","slug":"wednesday-10-february-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2016\/02\/10\/wednesday-10-february-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 10 February 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #000099; font-family: Arial;\">11:06 &#8211;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> Last night, I read the first 400 pages or so of Walter Jon Williams&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/smile.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B00G8VNFZC\">The Rift<\/a>, a 950 page doorstop of a book about a catastrophic earthquake on the New Madrid seismic zone.  Most readers would have given up on this book long before anything happened in the narrative. I kept going, hoping it would all come together, but it never did. And 400 pages is about all the time I was willing to give it. Williams writes competent English sentences and paragraphs, but that&#8217;s about the best I can say for this book. A novelist should be, first and foremost, a storyteller but there&#8217;s not much story here. Just endless details about the travails of people that few readers would care about. The Amazon ratings tell the tale. Only 71% of reviewers gave this book 4 or 5 stars, and 16% gave it only 1 or 2 stars. That&#8217;s a pretty good sign of a bad book.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">More work today on organizing the downstairs finished area. Barbara is heading down to Winston tomorrow to have lunch with a friend, so Colin and I will be on our own most of the day.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 65%; height: 3px; font-family: Arial;\" \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>11:06 &#8211; Last night, I read the first 400 pages or so of Walter Jon Williams&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/smile.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B00G8VNFZC\">The Rift<\/a>, a 950 page doorstop of a book about a catastrophic earthquake on the New Madrid seismic zone.  Most readers would have given up on this book long before anything happened in the narrative. I kept going, hoping it would all come together, but it never did. And 400 pages is about all the time I was willing to give it.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2016\/02\/10\/wednesday-10-february-2016\/\">&nbsp;&raquo;&nbsp;Read more about: Wednesday, 10 February 2016 &nbsp;&raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}