Reading With a Critical Eye

I need to read. Since we moved four years ago, I’ve met that need by reading articles online, borrowing books, and occasionally buying a new one. A couple of weeks ago, I finally went to the local public library and asked for a card.

The first book I read was a David Baldacci novel. I found a sentence with a missing period. This didn’t bother me; I can understand not catching every mistake, especially punctuation.

The next book I read was Patricia Cornwell’s novel, The Bone Bed (2012). I’ve read and enjoyed several of Cornwell’s books that feature Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner.

Because I have read Cornwell previously, I was surprised to find that in this book, she frequently linked clauses that have nothing to do with each other. See the example in bold below:

I want it. There's not a chance I'm going to let it settle out of sight to the bottom of the bay. I will recover every damn thing in this case, whether it is a barnacle or a pot, cage, container, or cinder blocks. I ask how deep the water is, and Labelka tells me forty-two feet, and I'm aware of the helicopter beating overhead. Someone is watching our every move and probably filming it, dammit.

What in the heck does the sound of the helicopter have to do with the depth of the water? Nothing.

Here’s another example highlighted in bold font.

I grab the buoy line in a gloved hand, the life vest keeping me afloat and balanced, and I submerge my masked face into the cold salty water and am startled by the body just below my feet. The dead woman is fully clothed and vertical, her arms and long white hair floating up, fanning and moving like something alive as she slowly tilts and turns in the current. I surface for air and dive again, and the way she's rigged is grotesque and sinister.

The way the dead woman is rigged has nothing to do with the action of diving underwater. Cornwell could have connected the two clauses, for example, by writing, “I surface for air and dive again, and I see that the way she’s rigged is grotesque…” Or she could have simply separated the two clauses with a period and moved the second unrelated clause to a new paragraph.

Although not logically connected to the first part of the sentence, the second clause was related to the subsequent paragraph, in which Cornwell described how the woman’s body was tied. It was an unnecessarily awkward segue.

At first, I made excuses for Cornwell. Maybe she was attempting to write the way Kay Scarpetta thinks, jumping from one train of thought to another.

I wondered why I hadn’t noticed this “writing technique” in previous Cornwell books. Has it been so long since I read one that I simply forgot? Or has Cornwell’s writing changed over the years?

I grabbed one of my Cornwell paperbacks – The Last Precinct (2000). Skimming through, it didn’t appear that she was in the habit of writing sentences with unrelated clauses.

I read that after writing the Scarpetta series in the first person, Cornwell switched to writing in the third person and later switched back to the first person point of view.

I am not the only one who finds sloppy writing annoying. I found a book review in which the blogger pointed out Cornwell’s “tendency to write a kind of run on sentences where unrelated clauses are interconnected.”

Cornwell is a talented storyteller, and even with the lack of editing, I liked the book okay. My guess is that as a best-selling author, Cornwell’s publisher gives her a pass on editing. They know her books will sell, so why bother? She’s too big to be corrected.

Now I’m reading Pat Conroy’s novel, South of Broad. He writes beautifully every time.