Dragonfly in Amber comes across as an assortment of 'episodes' more or less bound together in a (failed) effort to create a cohesive plot and storyline. The strange little paragraphs really testify to this scattershot effort to make it all fit together. The characters are becoming more two-dimensional over time, ie. you can sum up Jaime in three words: anger, rage and eroticism.Diana clearly loves the sound of her own voice (or the sound of those she has written). I believe that this accounts to the finely grained but largely static descriptive passages. She also likes to impress her reader with her vocabulary range; words are usually correctly used but to what purpose? For example, in Chapter 46 (Timor Mortis Conturbat Me) Claire separates the forces accompanying her in order to take a 'shortcut' through a forest, permitting better footing for her mount. In her passage she comes upon a corpse with an amazing blue fungus growing his body. This gives way to a discursive account of how Claire has heard about this in her WWII experience, how ancestors had painted themselves bright blue going into battle (a nod to Braveheart???) As she is contemplating all this, Jamie reappears (I though he was going around the forest). Jamie takes her arm and guides her away 'leaving the dead man behind, clothed in the saprophytic hues of war and sacrifice.' (880) This episode did not advance the storyline nor did it develop the characters. It seemed to me that Diana crafted 15 or so sometimes choppy paragraphs in order to demonstrate that she could use the word 'saprophytic' in a sentence. This was not the only instance where the author sacrifices narrative pattern/pace in order to show her ability to incorporate obscure words and phrases into the text.I found this annoying. Diana could surely have said everything she had to say in this volume in far less that 900 pages. It might have had a better pace, a more cohesive storyline and improved focus on character development. As it was, I felt that the plot dripped like amber sap encasing the dragonfly -- I began to identify with that dragonfly.The next books in the series are even longer. I rather dread the lengthy discursive asides therein. Diana loves to hear herself talk (hear herself write?). But a lot of what she says amounts to no great purpose.