“Arrangements had been made by his PR man and aide. At his house a chauffeured car was waiting, a rented car. In it were the PR man and another member of his entourage. Johnny parked his car and hopped in and they were on their way to their airport. He waited inside the car while the PR man went out to meet Tom Hagen’s plane. When Tom got into the car they shook hands and drove back to his house.”
Is it just me, or is that not incredibly passive and dull? It sounds more like an instruction manual or a list of events. I wish I could say the rest of the book is any better, but it’s not. I would stop reading but it’s required for my course. The sex scenes are even worse, like a mechanical description of horse sex for perverse scientists.
Do you know who wrote that or where it’s from? The Godfather by Mario Puzio. I get the feeling the film adaption is 100 times better. I’m not impressed by the book, even 218 pages in.
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Willow H. Wood 
The sex scenes in The Godfather are awful. Just. Just awful.
And yes…that passage is worse than anything we’d write in our classes – the repetition and everything. Why he can’t just skip to the airport straight away is just beyond me…
Probably a good example of how ‘famous’ writer does not always mean ‘good’ writer.
Is the story good, though? For it to have been picked up for adaptation?
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A comment from Mitch Allan, my favourite kind!
There are many more passages like it. A whole book full. I thought it was a good example of such a thing, too. I really had expected better from such a famous story.
Aside from the poor writing, the story itself /is/ good. There are strong characters and I ended up hating characters I liked at the beginning. Admittedly, I liked Book VII – X (the story is divided into many books) but I seriously wished the book finished sooner than it did. It tied up everything, but I didn’t care to know it all and I think that’s down to the writing style, not the story. So, as a story, yes. It’s a good story.
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