Reading Comprehension Quiz -- What does this MEAN?

[sekiharatae]

[Poll #1784008]

I was reading reviews on Amazon, and someone quoted this sentence from Gardens of the Moon, the first book in a ten book series by Steven Erickson. Now, I love fantasy, but ten books sounded a bit much... and the more reviews I read, the more it sounded like it would not be my thing. Main characters introduced in one book only to disappear for a few more before resurfacing? Plotlines introduced, abandoned, then picked up again volumes later? That sounds frustrating to me. Add in that it sounds like it has twenty or so 'lead' characters, and I think not.

But what really really killed it for me was this quote. I hate sentences like this. They may sound great, but when you take it apart, it makes no sense. I hate that people get applauded for it -- where has reading comprehension gone?  These books are apparently chock full of sentences like this one, and that would drive me bonkers.

Comments

[lrdrandallslady.livejournal.com]

Legal-ease makes more sense to me than this garbage. It's like he took as many big, fancy words as he could and strung them together to make it look like he's some well-educated, well-read god of the English language but instead, he ends up looking like a fool to those of the rest of us with a bit of common sense. I went with option #4 and that was after too many read throughs and looking at my choice of answers.

I do wonder... in the review in which this was quoted, was the reviewer using it as an example of good or bad writing? Just curious :)

[sekiharatae.livejournal.com]

Well, the question's answer are somewhat biased as they are the meanings I could come up with after staring at it for some time. ^^; I am enjoying the fact that there's no consensus of what it means.

In the review, the reviewer was saying that he'd made it 250 pages and gave up because the whole thing was filled with sentences like this. And then after quoting it he asked 'what does that even mean?' ;)

On the other hand, in the comments on his review there was a lady saying (rather snottily) that she could understand the sentence just fine, and that it only sounded strange out of context because we didn't know what 'the tower' and 'Majesty Hall' were. She then went on to say that she found it quite elegant and sophisticated, but that she was a reader of the classics.

So of course I had to reply and explain that making sense out of it doesn't make it elegant, and the problem with it was that (a) it was too long and should be either truncated or restructured and (b) it includes words that have meaning that contradict other words in the same sentence and (c) the narrator's voice seems to change halfway through.