#GallowglasArmy Hangout discussion

oooohhhhh man!!!!

Again, I found myself struggling through this. The first time I went through it, if read it on my Kindle. Now, I'm reading it in trade paperback, with a mechanical pencil in hand. While reading, I'm underlining sections, taking notes and asking questions in the margins, and just generally wondering why I'm having trouble getting into this story that so many other people find so brilliant. The use of parentheses is one example of something that's really getting at me, where I'm trying to figure out why, what's the function of them. Same with all the sentence fragments.

Then, on page 17 in the trade paperback, I get to, "Oops, thinking. Carefully, you stop." in the margin, I made the note: "Almost poetic. Slam poetic." This realization blasted my mind. I started reading it out loud, using different types of cadences and rhythms I've heard in slam poetry reads. Man, that blasted my mind all open. I feel that the use of language is odd in reading because it feels, at least to me, as if it would be better consumed as a performance performed for a group of people. Sort of a stylistic storytelling. This works especially for the prologue.

Now that I put that together, and started reading certain sections out loud, it makes more sense. I'm on board. What's more, now that I've got a handle on how I'm processing the oddity of the narration, now I can really focus on the finer details of the story, characters, and world.

Yeah, I'm doing the audiobook version and so the poetry of it all is pretty apparent right away. The 2nd person voice was the hardest part to get used to, but that was only for a chapter or two and then it's pretty interesting.