Past/Present tense

[sobrique]

Most books I've encountered are third person and past tense.
Some are first person.
The odd few are second person (Fighting fantasy style books).

After reading a post by jonnynexus (and if you recognise that name, it'll be from Critical Miss.) I thought I'd pose the question.

In your opinion does present tense work for the writing of a story?

On one hand, we have the fact that present tense is more immediate eg.
James the mighty warrior walks into the darkened room. A shadow flits across before him. Out of the darkness comes a huge scorpion, its claws clattering on the cobblestones.

James calls out "Hold and face my mighty blade"

James the mighty warrior walked into the darkened room. He saw a shadow flit across before him. Suddenly, out of the darkness came a huge scorpion, its claws clattering on the cobblestones.

James called out "hold and face my mighty blade"

Now leaving aside the quality of my writing, do you think a book can work if written all in the present tense?

I can see brief shifts in tense to alter pace, but I don't think I could cope with a book written entirely in the present tense. (In fact I know I can't, there was one a while back, called hotwired or something, that I got as far as page 10 before the stream of conciousness style of 3rd person, present tense annoyed me enough to stop reading. One of the few)

Comments

[ryuumeiko.livejournal.com]

Actions at start of sentence, dialogue at start of paragraph is a 'convention' that irritates me... I try and mix stuff around to where it'd naturally be... If you'd notice the speech first, or the action's after the speech, then speech first, otherwise,
----
Maze smiled, "'pretty' is not a word I thought I'd ever hear you use!"
----
is fine in my book... Having speech then action gets incrediably boring to read...

Or have I misunderstood totally?

~Ryuu...

[mrph.livejournal.com]

It think if it's consistent throughout then yes, it gets boring. But as an (arguably lazy) trick for the bits where immediacy is a concern, it does see a lot of use... and works to some extent.