Failing my Diet

But doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

--Much Ado About Nothing

So...I started trying to eat healthier at the beginning of this year:

1) No more cokes
2) Keep candy to a minimum
3) Eat healthier (won't bore you with the specifics here, but I need to eat more fruit)
4) Exercise more

I stuck with it for 2 full months, even getting compliments from people noticing I was losing weight. Somehow, I got off track--this week I committed to getting back on the program.

But the diet I'm thinking about is my reading diet. Sometimes I think I'm more particular about what I'm reading than what I eat--I really like literature and can't take a poorly-written book. And since I started stepping up my writing a little over a year ago, I have become even more critical.

There are some popular authors which I can't read, just because the dialog is insipid, or the plot unrealistic, or the plot development distracting--Tom Clancy is one of these. The dialog is exactly what I expect from a spaced-out military buff--wooden and unsubstantial--people are mere place-holders--set pieces who fill a role. It's a shame, too, because his plots are fantastic.

Contrast this with Jane Austen (yes, I know that's not fair), who has such a witty style and very introspective character development that it promises to the reader that you are getting a true glimpse at the author's mind.

I was trying to find this quotation by Mark Twain:

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

but this one was too juicy to exclude here even though it contradicts my point:

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Ha! What a cranky old codger he was.

Other favorites are: Faulkner, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, even Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Orwell, guys like that--witty (I would have put Pete Dexter but I can't get into Paris Trout--at this point I have him listed as "hit and miss").

So I became a little dubious when a co-worker suggested a novel to me about a group of marines fighting a covert war in Antarctica. The premise sounded kinda interesting, because I don't know anything about Antarctica except that's where the stick-thingy is inserted in my globe (reminded me of my grandfather talking about a place where he was stationed in the Navy: "If you were going to give the earth an enema, this is where you would insert it") , so I figured this would be cool. It was cool--for the first 400 pages (out of 530). I ripped through them in 3 days, soaking it in and really enjoying it, as implausible as the plot was. The author employed the "redshirt effect" from Star Trek, too--conveniently putting in characters with minimal development just for the purpose of getting killed in a spectacularly grisly way to make a point. You could see it coming from a mile away--it made me feel like I could skip ahead 10 pages at times.

The author also used the same phrases over and over again. A big offender was "snap": "His head snapped left", "She snapped her head up", etc...This came to my attention because of the volkswagon commercial that's going around "Time to unpimp ze auto!" where he later says "Oh, snap!" when the car gets flung by a trebuchet--this goofy guy in the lab coat kept looking up at me from the book...not a pretty sight.

I kept looking up from the book and wondering "Did they edit this story at all?" and "I really need to get into this writing business..."(no comment required from the peanut gallery).

It was a nauseating chore to finish this book as the loose ends got wrapped up in a very lazy manner. I really wanted to take a shower after finishing that monstrous thing--I almost ditched it completely with 20 pages to go. I have to cleanse my palate. I'm going to give this book away to someone I don't like.

So my diet is back on: yesterday I picked up an apple and began reading "Emma".