{"id":435,"date":"2007-07-26T21:47:36","date_gmt":"2007-07-27T01:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/07\/26\/orwell-wrote-other-books\/"},"modified":"2007-07-26T21:47:36","modified_gmt":"2007-07-27T01:47:36","slug":"orwell-wrote-other-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/07\/26\/orwell-wrote-other-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Orwell Wrote Other Books Besides 1984<\/i>, You Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

We haven’t had a “Maslin Watch” here in ages, because life is too short to put myself through that kind of torture on a regular basis, but her review of the new John Twelve Hawks novel<\/a> snuck up on my RSS reader with its craziness:<\/p>\n

“When a series starts off as excitingly as John Twelve Hawks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fourth Realm Trilogy did, readers are apt to cut the author\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s next installments a little slack. After all, once an imaginary world springs full-blown from a writer, follow-up fatigue is to be expected. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s natural to find an author ensnared by his own fanciful creations. Having leapt so high in the first place, the writer is left facing a steep climb.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m like, hello? We’re talking about the same John Twelve Hawks, right? The one with the debut novel that most critics agreed was pretty god-awful? But then I realized, Janet Maslin isn’t most critics<\/a>. Although she’s not working particularly hard at it, either: The Traveler<\/i> was described as “a true Orwellian synthesis of the world’s ills,” and for her review of The Dark River<\/i>, she goes on about the “red-hot Orwellian paranoid fantasies” Twelve Hawks crafts. Here’s a tip for the copyeditor at the Times<\/i> desk: if a book reviewer calls something “Orwellian,” you don’t need to clarify that with “paranoid.” And a tip for Maslin: There are<\/i> other authors in the world who deal with the oppressive condition of modern existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We haven’t had a “Maslin Watch” here in ages, because life is too short to put myself through that kind of torture on a regular basis, but her review of the new John Twelve Hawks novel snuck up on my RSS reader with its craziness: “When a series starts off as excitingly as John Twelve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}