Friday, October 26, 2007

Celestine Accent

Niagara Falls is absolutely spectacular, and the millions of tourists who have flocked through here over the decades get their money's worth at the awesome spectacle of nature's raw power.

The tourists are a spectacle on their own! More on that later when I get home with some pictures.

On the flight here, I tried to read The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, a book which spent countless weeks on the bestseller list and has spawned a whole industry and armies of followers.

A friend gave it to me and insisted that I should read it and learn from it.

Count me in the disillusioned. The book is badly written, and in dire needs of good editing. On page 53, the main character is by himself in a garden in the Peruvian mountains. He sees a stranger approach down the path.

When he was within ten feet he saw me with a start, which made me flinch also.
"Oh, hello," he said in a rich Brooklyn accent."
Uh?

Can a "rich Brooklyn accent" be detected from "Oh, hello"?

Any accent? I can only think of Russian, maybe Japanese.

And the book's good news story just escapes me, while the "Romancing the Stone" plot is just not interesting enough.