getting close to the end of the year...

33. For some reason, I got sucked into re-reading The Eye of the World, the first of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I'm still exasperated with his writing (if I had a braid, I'd be tugging on it). I really do enjoy the pace, the description, and the places where he just lets his own storytelling talent show through. But his compulsive need to take pieces from other writers' books and insert them into his own, covered with a shallow veneer, is just as annoying, if not more, than the first time I read him. And his inability to drop something, to say or describe or depict something and then leave it alone, instead of constantly repeating it--as if he either thinks his readers are idiots or as if he's so pleased with his own little joke that he can't stop telling it over and over again--it's amazingly tiresome and childish.

He was tremendously successful. It's a pity he never had an editor who he would allow to really work with him. He could have been a very good writer as well.

Romanes eunt ad Scotiam!

Another Romano-Scottish dinner. A simple lamb chop cooked with red wine, sage, and rosemary, and another of Clarissa Dickson Wright's borrowings from the Romans. In this case leeks and beets cooked ion vegetable broth with raisins, cumin, coriander, and a little white wine vinegar. Mwah! The remainder of the spotted dick with cream for dessert,a nice cup of tea, and plenty of time for a thimbleful of The Good Stuff before my midnight food and drink curfew (annual physical tomorrow).