Sunday, August 28, 2005

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Mearns classic lifts book honour

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Mearns classic lifts book honour

Sunset Song has been voted "Best Scottish Book of All Time"! It's one of my favourite books ever. It's written in a fairly unusual style, being largely in the second person (breaking one of the major rules of novel-writing according to No Plot? No Problem! ).

It also gives the impression of being in dialect, which is something I absolutely cannot stand in books, but is done in such a way (mainly by altering sentence structure and rhythms and including a few dialect words) that after a couple of chapters is seems completely natural.

Normally a couple of chapters of conventionally done dialect leads to me throwing the book across the room in a rage. Indeed the only Dorothy L. Sayers book I haven't read and thoroughly enjoyed was rejected for exactly this reason (and also the plot involves a lot of railway timetables which is never good).

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