I always wanted a TV show or movie where dialogue is stunted and often takes random directions.
David Mamet's plays - of which
Glengarry Glen Ross, or
Death of a [Bloody] Salesman, was adapted into a film - feature a distinctive style of dialogue in which characters frequently talk over each other, finish each other's sentences, and generally break down the usual artificiality of speech on stage. They also swear quite a lot.
I would echo TF's judgement below on
Raising Steam, as well as quite a few of the more recent Discworld books -
Unseen Academicals being the prime offender. I think it's probably getting to the stage where he can't write easily write an original, funny and moving book any more by virtue of simply having used up all of the available material -
Snuff would be a notable exception, but I still have yet to read a Discworld book to compare with
Night Watch or
Wyrd Sisters.
I've read two rather intellectual books lately. The first was CR Whittaker's
Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study, which is quite technical and occasionally stretched my rusty Latin but was uniformly intelligent and extremely well-written - it was developed from a lecture series, and that shows through in the clarity. The main thesis of it was that Roman frontiers weren't defensive lines as we would understand something like the inter-Korean border, but rather quite permeable things with the soldiers there usually intended to monitor and tax people coming through rather than keep them out. This meant that there wasn't a defined line where 'Romans' stopped and 'barbarians' began, but rather a large area in which Roman and foreign ways of life coexisted. Indeed, it was frequently hard to tell exactly who was 'Roman' and who was a 'barbarian'!
The second was Michael Baxandall's
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, also informative and scholarly although occasionally the writing lapsed, meaning that I had to read over a few sentences a couple of times to understand them. The book's argument is that painting is a guide to the society that produces it, and Baxandall comes up with a large amount of contextual information about the relationships between artists and clients in Italy, as well as the general cultural background of artists, clients and viewers, to illustrate the point. For example, he found a manual advising preachers on the gestures to use to convey certain emotions, then showed how this information can be used to get a deeper understanding of certain paintings. I had almost no foreknowledge of Renaissance art, but it's sufficiently well illustrated to be manageable, although the flurry of names does get confusing.
)
