On an idle Saturday afternoon, YouTube in its infinite wisdom showed me the Jack Lemon movie The Wackiest Ship in the Army, and I decided to watch it, seeing that it was set in the South Pacific in WWII. Not a classic, but enjoyable enough, that I went on to watch half of In Harm's Way staring John Wayne and Kurt Douglas, also set that time period, but is a more sweeping and a little more serious movie, but John Wayne sort a annoys me, so I've not returned to it yet. Now I read James A Michener's Tales of the South Seas years ago, which our library doesn't have as an ebook, but they did have his Return to Paradise, so I downloaded it.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Return to Paradise by James A Michener DNF 28%
James A Michener says in his introduction that he felt that "what happened in Asia was of sovereign importance to my country" and wanted to go back to study it. In that he was probably right. But he didn't want to "merely to grind out another batch of stories upon the old theme" and because it had been done before by Conrad, Melville Maugham and Hall, he simply refused to waste his time sailing after fresh Pacific yarns. What he did instead was to write ten essays on the islands, Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea and then write ten stories based on those essays.
If this sounds like an exercise in a creative writing class - here's a description of an island, write a story using the setting - it is, or at least reads like one. Nothing wrong with it, except that 1.) the places he describes are now seventy four years in the past, as this book was first published in 1951 and much has changed. If you are interested in the history of the islands and what they were like in 1950, then you will enjoy this book - for Mr Michener is a very good writer. The short stories might, or might not interest you as well.
Unfortunately, I found the essays that I read to be rather tedious, and hopelessly out of date. I also found his attitude a bit out of date as well. And the two short stories were perhaps a little too literary for my taste, i.e. pointless, without any characters to make them interesting to me, giving me little hope that just skipping the essays would improve the reading experience for me. As a result by the time I got to Fiji, I decided that the south sea of the book wasn't going captivate me, so I called it quits and sailed away.
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