Sideways: the book

I haven't yet managed to see the movie, but I got the book at the library. What lame writing--scarcely a noun appears that is not shackled to an adjective, like a convict handcuffed to a policeman. An occasional verb is unaccompanied by the chaperone of an adverb, but not many. A sample:

Something caught his attention and he slowly lifted his head over the menu. ...a tall , strikingly beautiful woman with brunette

hair cascading over broad shoulders, in an eye-catching black cocktail dress...

A little more:

Their tiny tasting room was a ramshackleroadside barn, broken at both ends by enormous sliding doors....It was a refreshing change from the sterility of most tasting rooms, and an unpreprossessing rebuke to the tawdry excesses of Fess Parker's vulgar estate

....

And yet again:

"The sun poured bright parallelograms of mote-swirling light through the venetian blinds of my rundown, rent-controlled house in Santa Monica..."

The net effect is that of a wagon clumping along on four square wheels. I suspect that they turned the movie script into a book, which never works for me. The dialogue is okay, but you just know it needs actors to flesh it out.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the pretentious wine talk.

Back to the library. Thank God I didn't shell out for this!