In Which I Question My Judgement

"Cruelest reading month" doesn't appear to be going so well, and I have no one to blame but myself.  I made the mistake of starting it with John Norman's Time Slave, and let me just say this: anything you may have heard about his writing is true.  (If you haven't, count yourself lucky and then go read the parody Houseplants of Gor.)

Rambling diatribes (almost an entire chapter could be summed up with "space/time doesn't make sense scientifically, therefore it may be different than how science perceives it"), awkward phrasings, terrible wordings, and repetition repetition repetition.  ("P was present. In the cubicle was P.").

When he's not busy making you want to reach through the pages and strangle characters until they finally stop speaking in circles and get to the point, the prose is at times unintentionally hilarious.  I nominate the following as the most pointless simile that I've read in ages:

"[…] the mind of Herjellsen was like the hand of a blind man reaching out in a dark room of incredible dimensions […]

Because there is such a difference between a blind man in a dark room compared to one in, say, a well-lit room, an overly bright room, or a room with subtle-yet-fitting mood-lighting.

…I knew I should have started with the Lindsay.  At least that would have been funnier.