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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date
|
date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0747562733
| 9780747562733
| 4.07
| 3,390
| May 19, 1992
| Apr 21, 2003
|
Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli are discussing the suspect they've just brought in. He's an author who's accused of recklessly wasting readers'...more
Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli are discussing the suspect they've just brought in. He's an author who's accused of recklessly wasting readers' time. That's something that'll get you 3 to 5 in New Jersey and up to 10 in New York where they take reading more seriously. The suspect is an oldish Jewish guy who's currently in the interrogation room looking bored. The charges relate to three long novels published between 1992 and 2008, Clockers, Freedomland, and Lush Life. Together these add up to 1732 pages. Small print pages. They can hurt your eyes. The detectives are perplexed. - I'm telling you this is the guy. - This is the guy? This skinny white mope? - What's the problem, he even says he's Richard Price. He admits it. We got his driver's licence, we got that woman who ID'd him – - That one who says she's some kind of fan? - She got a book signed by this guy. She waited in line for him to sign it. This is big in some people's world. A guy writes his name in a book. It's big. - I could write Richard Price on any damn book you want. Here, give me one, I show you. This is just some sad fuck who has the same name, you know it, I know it. You seriously telling me an old Jewish guy can write thousands a pages a authentic black dialogue not to mention taking the reader on a tour of the whole inner city experience, the crack trade, the slingers, their apartments, their families, their mothers, how you step on an ounce, I mean exactly how, what these gangbangers wear, what they spend their dough on, who they wake up with, colour of their damn mother's underpants, a whole tour of black spaces – fast food joints, churches, jail visiting rooms, - and people – stone killers, outsize wheelerdealers, oily preachers, angsty thin wore down mothers, this white Jewish guy does all that? Nah. Toss him. - Mazilli, you're going on appearances. In fact I now perceive, the scales have fallen from my fucking eyes, that you're one of those racist cops I have heard of. You think the perp who did Clockers has had to be black himself. You gonna tell me next that white boys can't sing the blues. You never heard of Dusty Springfield, the Righteous Brothers, never heard of Eric Clapton… - I got no idea who those people are. But okay, it'll make you happy, let's do this Richard Price, see if it's our Richard Price. He shrugs. They open the door to the interview room. EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD PRICE, 10 AUGUST 2012 Klein : Way I see it, Richard, we're about the only friends you got right now. Price : Yeah, with respect, it's my constitutional right to doubt that. Look, I'll make it simple - I wrote all those novels, all of them. Sure I did. And there's more you don't even know about. I could show you where to find em. I could take you there. But I never wasted any damn reader's time. That's God damned defamation. Who's sayin this shit? Klein : Okay Richard, I'll make it simple for you. What you have here in each of these long novels are slight tales cranked up to elephantine proportions like, you know, supersize me. Each one concerns a simple plotline – who shot Darryl Adams? why is this guy confessing to it when he didn't do it? Or what happened when this lady's car got carjacked and her baby was in it? And in the end, after 700 pages, the solution, resolution, what have you, comes down to a banal twist of circumstance, a common misapprehension, oh I shoulda realised back on page 120 that this actually meant that and not that, blah blah, and certainly nothing which warrants slogging the reader through these interminable pages. Your damn long novels are monstrous sledgehammers cracking itty tiny nuts. You're wasting readers' time. Mazilli : And you're a one trick pony, Price. These three books? They're essentially the same thing. Read one, why read another one? Price : I want to call my lawyer. Klein : Now why'd you wanna do that, we were getting along like a house on fire. Price : Lawyer. Now! *** Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli continue their conversation outside the interview room. - Now do you believe me? - Okay, he's our Richard Price. What do I know from modern crime literature anyways. - We lost him. - Yeah. We did. But he wasn't gonna cop for it. He really doesn't think he's wasted anbody's time. 1700 pages… - Although, to be fair, he is very good on the power certain individuals hold over others in the drug underworld. - True that, but not just there, your Rodney Little figure in Clockers could be encountered in any school playground, any local political party, he's the bully we all fear. And yet how hard is that fear to explain to outsiders? They'll say – why didn't you just walk away and keep walking? He is excellent on showing all of that. Do you remember how he has Rodney Little explain to Strike how if he, Rodney, takes a hundred dollar bill and nails it onto a tree on JFK and leaves it there, after a year it'll still be there, whereas if Strike did the same, what do you think would happen? That's cause people know who Rodney Little is. - Also, he's brilliant in showing throughout Clockers the vapourous risings and fallings of all these visions of a life outside the clocker ghetto that Strike keeps imagining for himself – all these alternatives, they rise up like chimera and fade away when the next cruel ineluctability crashes into his life and they leave but not one trace. - So what ya think – four stars? - No, three. I coulda watched six ball games, time it took me to get through this damn Clockers. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Aug 10, 2012
|
Jul 16, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1935639137
| 9781935639138
| 4.34
| 117
| Oct 04, 2011
| Oct 11, 2011
|
Now I have a reason to enter the Euromillions lottery and win a cool 100 million smackers. Because I now want to commission a book just like this wild...more
Now I have a reason to enter the Euromillions lottery and win a cool 100 million smackers. Because I now want to commission a book just like this wild, obsessive compulsive disorder of a book only for James Joyce's Ulysses. What I will do (when I win) is hire 782 artists, one for every page of Ulysses, and their contract will stipulate that they all sit down on Bloomsday (16th June) and made a lovely picture inspired by a specific given page of JJ's insane novel. So, copying Matt Kish's idea, but doing it slightly differently. It woould be magnificent. It would win prizes. I would establish a prize myself, and award it to it. As for Moby Dick in Pictures, well, Moby is one of my four favourite dicks, the others being Phillip K, Nixon, and Philip Marlowe, who was a private one, and if ever a book deserved some lunatic to sit down EVERY DAY for a year and a half and NO TIME OFF and do a picture based on a random quote for each and every page, then it's bold Moby. Ahab said to Starbuck When that whale is caught and canned Would you make me a double-tall-decaf-skinny In your little old latte stand Moby Dick was a great white whale And a low down dirty rat You ate up all my shipmates And my John B. Stetson hat (non-traditional folk song) (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Mar 02, 2012
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Feb 18, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0857861220
| 9780857861221
| 4.02
| 179
| Sep 30, 2011
| Nov 01, 2011
|
This book isn't in the best possible taste. Like one of those countdown programmes on cheesy tv - 2011's 100 Most Shocking Celebrity Moments it ranks...more
This book isn't in the best possible taste. Like one of those countdown programmes on cheesy tv - 2011's 100 Most Shocking Celebrity Moments it ranks massacres, wars and man-made catastrophes of limitless human suffering and discusses them all in a slightly unnerving jokey chatty unhistorianlike manner : The Germans had come so close to winning the First World War they couldn't believe they didn't. Communism lasted longer than fascism, jazz, John Wayne, Bonanza and the American Motor Corporation. Believe me, I don't want to discuss Shaka's penis any more than you want to read about it It's not all like this, the rest of it is breathlessly potted history - there's more history in this book than 20 others put together, and often very obscure history too - and naturally the poor reader is going to suffer from factual brain overload if he reads this from page 1 to page 565, so this is for dipping into. But who wants to dip in and read about an event which caused the death of 2 million people and rates 18 on Matthew White's list? Er, so what's this book for? To settle really morbid pub arguments? "Derek, I think you will find that the Haitian Slave Revolt killed far more people than the Albigensian Crusade." "Marjorie, Marjorie - before we go any further I think we should consult our well-thumbed copy of Atrocitology, don't you?" The best parts of this odd book are the essays thrown into the mix. Here are some interesting conclusions from Mr White, who has thought about men, women and children dying in huge numbers more than is surely healthy for anyone - 1. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. 2. The world is very disorganised - soldiers and nations change sides in the middle of wars, it's often hard to tell where one nation stops and another starts, and same goes with actual wars. 3. War kills more civilians than soldiers and more people than oppressive governments do. This last point will not please libertarians. 4. If you are a tyrant who has killed millions (you know who you are out there in Goodreadsland), you have a 49% chance of dying peacefully whilst still in power and an 11% chance of retiring from office and dying peacefully in retirement. The rest of you will be shot. That's not bad odds. 5. Let's hear it for India and Hinduism - the most peaceful nation & religion, based on its nearly complete absence in these pages. The only atrocities inflicted in India have been by non-Hindus. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jan 20, 2012
| Jan 30, 2012
|
Dec 30, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0571228615
| 9780571228614
| 4.32
| 37
| Sep 01, 2011
| Sep 01, 2011
|
I remember it all – and the processions –and the trombones – and the ancient singing – more beautiful than anything I had ever heard and I think I hav...more
I remember it all – and the processions –and the trombones – and the ancient singing – more beautiful than anything I had ever heard and I think I have never heard the like since. And the great organ that made the air tremble – and the greater organ that pealed out suddenly, and I thought the Day of Judgement had come – and the roof, and the long lights that are the most graceful things man has ever made. What a day it was, and how alive I was, and how young – and a blue dragonfly stood still in the air so long that I could have painted him. That's Edward Burne-Jones writing about his visit to Beauvais Cathedral in France in 1855. In those days if you wanted to see French or Italian art you had to go there. No youtube documentaries, not even any colour reproductions, nothing. Burne-Jones, like a lot of young Victorians, lost his Christian faith quite young, and invented a substitute faith, which in his case was an extremely sensuous and sentimental re-imagining of the legend of King Arthur, along with a generalised adoration of anything medieval and gothick. His art was sumptuous and morbid, chilly and erotic, almost always erotic. Quite a lot of it looks it was born to be on a box of 15th century chocolates. He was a very sweet-natured man with a genius for fusing colour and prettiness with gorgeously atmospheric morbidly mythological medieval maundering involving swoony moony maidens and shiny metallic knights, middlesexy angels and lashings of yellowy-greenery. He would summon up visions of an Arthurian England which never existed but he would get the briars on the briar rose botanically perfect.  Burne-Jones came from a working class family and was so remarkably upwardly mobile that in his 60s he nobbed around with prime ministers and was knighted and was buried in West bloody minster Abbey. He did this through being recognised by several people who got him work and patrons and for being a total whizz at designing stained glass windows which aren't much called for these days but were the business in the High Victorian period. A good stained glass window was like sex for them. The important people for the young EBJ were William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin. This biography is like a river starting from a twinkly spring in the unnoticed hills and turning into a whitewater stream and eventually into a languorous mighty river on which many famous names can be seen skiffing about. By the end we have spent time with George Eliot, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Beardsley and many other movers and shakers. EBJ became so famous he was satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan. He married into a very remarkable family – they were likewise of modest means, the father was a minister, but look at this – one daughter married EBJ who became the most famous late-Victorian painter and died rich; another daughter married a guy and had a son who became prime minister (Stanley Baldwin) and a third sister married a guy and had a son whose name was Rudyard Kipling of whom you may have heard. That's not bad for one family. EBJ was engaged to Georgiana MacDonald when she was 15 and he was 20. Is that creepy? The engagement lasted four years, his prospects were too dubious to marry before that. But Fiona MacCarthy does not think he joined his fellow student roister-doisters in their carnal explorations of the Victorian sexual underworld. He remained throughout his life a man who loved to be besotted with a whole parade of women and young girls, but intensely enjoyed the besottedness and the intense tete-a-tetes, and that was all. His wife had to put up with that. Many of his entanglements lasted years. She just had to look the other way when he swanned about in Europe with the wife of this guy or the widow of that guy. However - what about the very young girls. They were called "pets" and this was a thing a few of EBJ's friends also did – they would have intense crushes on their friends' or acquaintances' female children. They would take them out for trips, and have unchaperoned visits, they would paint them, they would write a lot of letters to them, these girls of, say, 6 to 15. And that would be okay. No problem. Fiona says : What are we to make of Burne-Jones' adoration of little girls? The first thing to be said is that conventions in adult behaviour towards children were very different in the middle of the 19th century from the wariness to which we have been accustomed today. The worship of the young girl, the innocent, had become almost a given in Pre-Raphaelite circles, the depiction of pre-pubescent beauty made more poignant by the sense that this was by its nature a temporary stage. Extract from the diary of Constance Hilliard, aged 14 – dated 12 July 1865 Drive into London to see Mr Jones. A nice petting and grave talks. Sweet run in the garden, tea and talks, and another nice petting before I went to bed. Fiona says : What did she mean by "petting"? Caresses? Sweet-talking? A degree of innuendo? …These things are mysterious to later generations. I think these relationships were of the same type that Lewis Carroll had with Alice and the rest. They have paedophilic aspects to them, undoubtedly, but we have to struggle against our hair-trigger cynicism and accept that yes, the past is a different country and yes, they do things differently there. When two of the girls he had crushes on got engaged, he was miserable, and painted them into a picture where they are to be seen "posed together at the base of a frozen fountain". (!) People have loved and sneered at and disregarded and rediscovered and venerated and loathed Burne-Jones' stuff. In 1898 one painting was bought for £5775 (= approx £2 million). The same painting fetched £21 in auction in 1941 (= £2500). When the impressionists came along he didn't like them and they didn't like him. By the end of his life he knew he'd been a fad and that he was passe. Although his book doesn't have too many moments of pure comedy in it, one came unexpectedly for me when Fiona was discussing EBJ's recent rehabilitation – she mentions two prominent collectors – Andrew Lloyd Webber and – can it be – Jimmy Page. Kerrang! I was not expecting the groupie-munching axeman to be making an entrance into these pages. For a moment I was dazed and confused. For anyone who loves the Pre-Raffs or Victorian painters or Victorian people in general or just a long leisurely biography this is a bit of a treat.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Aug 05, 2012
|
Dec 28, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0241141826
| 9780241141823
| 3.70
| 9,375
| Feb 01, 2010
| unknown
|
Q: Oh, what's this? I don't quite understand. As I recall you said a few derogatory things about Skippy Dies when you were on p 120 and even by p 250...more
Q: Oh, what's this? I don't quite understand. As I recall you said a few derogatory things about Skippy Dies when you were on p 120 and even by p 250 you weren't dancing in the streets and giving out free copies, and yet, here we see five fat stars sitting there, I counted them, and as I understand it that's the maximum number you can award, so what accounts for this seeming change of heart and are you a little ashamed of your original remarks? Would you wish to do a little public recanting? A : Yes, well, thank you for reminding me, but may I say that this brilliant novel is a very slow burner which gradually changes its character from – may I say? – relentless, verging on annoying, schoolboy humour (it's set in a posh school) into horror, terror, cruelty, you know, the whole nine yards of human experience, it's right here. Did I say it's brilliant? But you do need a little patience. And I would like to thank all of the people on this site who wrote great reviews (Paquita, Krok Zero and David Giltinan for instance) and those who told me to carry on. Thank you. Q: So what was that thing you were telling me about Romeo and Juliet and Truman Capote? I wasn't really listening – you can go on at times you know. A: Oh well, the title, you see, Skippy Dies, plus the very first couple of pages, in which Skippy actually dies, gives the central event of the book – 661 pages long – completely away. So it's like Romeo & Juliet where the prologue tells you A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife See? it gives away the whole plot immediately. Also, in Truman Capote's best story Children on Their Birthdays he tells you that the amazing Miss Lily Jane Bobbitt will be run over by a bus in the first paragraph. First you think – how can this device work? But it does. Q: What were you saying about how long it was? I mean it's actually really bloody long isn't it. A: I was saying that it's 661 pages and not a page too long! Because it's like the way Jonathan Franzen makes his last two novels work. He gets his family and he starts filling in all the details, and one thing leads on very naturally to the next, so that there's kind of a plot but it's more like the plot in your own life, i.e. doesn't feel like a plot, and in Skippy, Paul Murray fills in the school and a few of the the foul-mouthed boys and their teachers and it's like a giant canvas, which bit shall I add in today, how about some trees here and a car crash there, and lots of drugs over here, and some horrible sex behind that car park. Not that there's any other resemblance between Mr Franzen and Mr Murray, it's just a kind of technique thing which for me works magnificently. Q: I heard you ranting on about the Booker as usual. What's that got to do with the price of a pound of artichokes? A: Skippy made the 2010 Booker long list – that's all. Not even the short list. I mean, what? What's that all about? Also, it made the Costa Prize shortlist but didn't win. Maggie O'Farrell won both damned prizes for The Hand that First held Mine. So now I can't read that one because I'd be reading through the clenched teeth of resentment. Q: If you could pick one reason why you thought this was so fivestarry, what would...that...reason...beeeee...? Mmmm? And can I have the last piece of carrot cake? A: This is a book about youth culture which in Britain is a phrase often pronounced sardonically in Estuary English like this : Yoof cowcha You could add an equally sardonic "innit" for extra effect, as in : "It's yoof cowcha, innit" I've complained in other reviews that often when there are actual young characters in novels the dialogue sounds like the author is one of those elderly uncles still trying to crack on that he's down with the kids and hip to the beat on the street, with toe curling results. Skippy Dies gets everything note perfect. Paul Murray knows what boys talk like. It's almost like he was one not very long ago. I enjoyed the total beyond-fetishising beyond-obsession centrality of the mobile phone. I enjoyed the mad disjunction between all the stuff in the boys' heads (love! Sex! Science!) and the actual reality they inhabit (being jerked around! Bad blowjobs! Stupid experiments which fail!). I enjoyed the vitality and boundless fizzing onrushing prose which Paul Morris brings to the subject of wretchedness and bleak betrayal. Q: One last thing – who was your favourite character? A: Mario, the 14 Year old Italian-Irish would-be stallion, who is consistently good value. Regarding the upcoming Hallowe'en Hop, for instance, he says: "I don't know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome." To summarise : Skippy Dies - believe the hype. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Sep 12, 2011
| Sep 24, 2011
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Sep 12, 2011
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 031213486X
| 9780312134860
| 4.31
| 250
| Jan 01, 1993
| Nov 01, 1995
|
How could I have forgotten this mighty work? John Clute appears to have read every sf short story, novelette, novella and novel, and then judiciously...more
How could I have forgotten this mighty work? John Clute appears to have read every sf short story, novelette, novella and novel, and then judiciously summarised each and every writer's work with honesty and compassion, and diamond bright glints of wit too. This great fat book is wonderful for reading about stuff you just know you'll never get round to because you keep reading stuff about the stuff instead of the stuff itself. It's a book geek thing. Some people don't read books and some people don't read books about books. The first lot are idiots but the second lot are probably a whole lot more sensible than me.(less)
| Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| May 2003
|
May 14, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1582346038
| 9781582346038
| 3.74
| 70,605
| 2004
| Aug 30, 2005
|
If a novel of nearly 900 pages can be summarised in one phrase then Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may, I think, be described as a stately, sly, wi...more
If a novel of nearly 900 pages can be summarised in one phrase then Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may, I think, be described as a stately, sly, witty, intricate, comic retelling of Dracula, with digressions and very little blood. Count Dracula takes life from beautiful young ladies, enslaves them, enchants them, enraptures them, steals them away, into his own twilight (oops, sorry) vampire world – they become something other than what they were, undead, not alive yet not dead, creatures which do his bidding (the company I work for does something quite similar so it appears to be legal). In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a fairy does exactly the same thing, but there's no blood involved, just a little magic. In Dracula it takes quite a while before the heroes realise what’s happening to their gorgeous young women (in both books the gorgeousness is emphasised, I do like that, you know, since they're imaginary why can't they be drop dead too? hmm, probably the wrong phrase). But compared with Mr Strange and Mr Norrell, the Dracula boys are quick on the uptake. Because we’re past page 600 before the penny drops in this one. THE ARBITRARINESS OF MAGIC One of my problems with this giant enfolding fog of a book is the nature of magic itself. In Dracula Van Helsing lays out the rules about vampires for the readers – they can do this but they can’t do that; sunlight, shape-shifting; silver; crosses; all of that. He later wrote the Observer Book of Vampires (Heinemann, 1911) and it's all in there. The rules are the rules. Many young leary vampires have been struck off for thinking that they were too cool for rules. Governing committee : You were seen buying maximum factor sunblock in Superdrug three Saturdays in a row. Young cool vampire : Yeah well, my girlfriend wants me to go camping with her family next week. Governing committee : Under section 3 subsection 2 paragraph B I hereby strike you off the official list of vampires. YCV : But but GC : Beat it, kid, don't waste our time. This is a serious business. But there are no rules for magic - at least, none discernable. The rule seems to be - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Mr Strange goes to war to help the English fight Napoleon Boney. In Portugal he is able to create good roads where only mud tracks exist for the English Army to march down. Later he is able to make magical hands arise from the earth and entangle the French troops; but he doesn’t do any magic to prevent the English troops being massacred by cannonballs and artillery – what, no magical winds available to blow the cannonballs off course? But pardon, Mr Strange, elsewhere don’t you say that weather magic is the easiest sort to do? So whyever not? Well, we are not told. He never thinks of doing it, never thinks of alleviating the English troops’ suffering. Susanna Clark says in an interview that she wished to show that people’s romantic or over-optimistic notions of magic were to be disappointed by the unsatisfactoriness of her version of magic. I take that argument, it’s a good one, but it does not solve the difficulty of arbitrariness and the lack of any rules or boundaries. When anything can happen, and then at some other point, for unknown reasons, the same thing can’t happen, the element of tension simply disappears in a cloud of smoke – poof! As if by magic. BIPOLARITY I thought that the villain in this novel was certainly suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Alas that the story took place in the 1810s, when mood stabilising medication had not yet been developed. If the gentleman with the thistledown hair had been prescribed Carbamazepine, Lamotrigine or Lithium I am quite sure the whole thing with the ladies would have never happened and the misunderstanding and antagonisms between him and the two magicians would never have arisen in the first place. STYLE It has been said this novel is like Dickens. It is not. Those who say that have not read Dickens. Do not believe them. It is said that this novel is like Jane Austen. Okay, with your left eye closed and your right eye squinched up and tilting the novel at a slight angle, then yes, it is. But don’t say it too loudly or Jane Austen fans might beat you lightly with their lace doileys. PACING The good news : the story definitely picks up around page 650. That is the good news. SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? For readers thinking about giving this one a go , you should know a few things. Half of this novel is quite a bit longer than most other novels, so unless you like slow, laborious build-ups (this is not the magical equivalent of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill), intricate fake-scholarly footnotes recounting mad details about non-existent books, people, folk-tales, all pseudo-erudite tomfoolery calculated to flesh out the magical world whilst at the same time giving the reader many large winks along the lines “aren’t we having some scholarly fun? Isn’t this a thinking person’s hoot?”; unless you like many pages spent fretting about whether Mr Norrell will lend Mr Strange a particular book (this will-he won’t-he theme gets a little tiresome, so I’ll let you know – big plot spoiler - he doesn’t – now you can skip those bits); unless you like your reading to be languid, leisurely, luxurious, learned, leavened with loopy legerdemain and long, long, long, this may not be the one for you. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| May 2011
|
Apr 24, 2011
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0374158460
| 9780374158460
| 3.65
| 74,968
| 2010
| Aug 31, 2010
|
This book hoovers you into its world from the first page and before you know what's what you've missed your bus stop and you are into it. But there ar...more
This book hoovers you into its world from the first page and before you know what's what you've missed your bus stop and you are into it. But there are problems. Yes. I will tell you about some of them. You would expect no less of me. I was reading along with the main character Patty Berglund’s autobiographical statement “Mistakes Were Made” (p 27 – 187) and was lapping it up until soap bubbles began appearing between me and the page. The bubbles became suds – undeniable suds. I could not divest myself of the realisation that things were getting soapier by the minute – no, I said, to any passing stranger who I could get to take an interest in the current state of literature, this is Jonathan Franzen messing with our heads, taunting us with the cardboardy and the cutouty. This is not to be taken completely seriously. E.g., hoving into view, with his axe in his hand, comes a character called Richard Katz, indie rock god, Mr Moody Bohemia and all purpose babe magnet. Richard Kats Wears cool hats Has eyes for Patty (Whose friend is batty) His room-mate Walter Will never fault her Her heart may wander But his gets fonder Long and lean is Richard’s penis Walter’s trusting But Patty’s lusting Wait - is this Franzen Or marzipanzen? As Mr Katz’s pecker rose, so did my heart sink, for he is indeed a creature from Romanceland (that place of untrammelled pecs and mesmerising vaginas). His sultry pouting unshaven lips launch a thousand bustling teenage hips and one glance from his stubbly unshaven pouting guitar causes the female heart to bound about like an escaping baboon, and indeed such is his popularity that he can hardly write his tuneful songs of ten minute angst for having to shoo flocks of sweet 18 year olds gently away from his private parts. This character is played straight. We are to take this character seriously and we are not to laugh. I gradually became aware of this as the character Richard Katz did not go away. And oh my goodness gracious me, there is some horrible writing that bubbles up whenever he is centre stage. Richard is – yes, you get the picture! - the cool but morally bankrupt friend of Walter, the entirely uncool but totally bicycling and planet-befriending morally good guy. Here’s Richard meditating on his friendship with Walter : No other man had warmed Katz’s loins the way the sight of Walter did after long absence. These groinal heatings were no more about literal sex, no more homo, than the hard-ons he got from a long-anticipated first snort of blow. Ewww! Richard Katz describing a woman : A solid B-plus that could be an A-minus if she would work for extra credit. Again : Ewww! By page 200 I was thinking that I’d be having more fun watching Desperate Housewives because the dialogue is wittier. It got so I was playing the game of spotting titles of old songs amidst the soap. I got “I only want to be with you” (Dusty Springfield, page 235), and “What are you going to do when I’m gone?” (Barbara Lewis, p 452). Okay, what's good about Freedom? Ha ha, what an ironical question. This book gets most of its points for trying really really hard. For vein-throbbing brain-melding attempts to encompass the economics of Iraqi reconstruction contracts, mountaintop removal mining, songbird conservation and sundry other realities of the world's most modern country, and embed all of this into sketches of how two or three complicated families live from day to day and year to year, to pull all this together – well actually, a lot of the time it’s like JF is flailing away at his material, not the assured mover of chess pieces on the board but the frantically photographing & camcording and ambulance-chasing kind of novelist who rushes around after his many characters & can’t quite keep up with them all. That part of the whole thing I liked. But oh – phrases like His thing with Connie was too intense and strange – too sincere, too muddled with love- to be fungible as coin of bragging. and Connie had a wry compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity and Katz’s blood was up, he was all jittery-jangly. It was like coke cut heavily with nasty meth. (Is this a simile JF thinks will ring bells with his readers? No, so it’s something his character the egregious Katz would think. But then how does this translate its meaning to the non coke-cut-heavily-with-nasty-meth-hoovering reader? It translates as : It was really quite unpleasant or I assume so. Maybe if the meth was nice he’d be just jangly and not jittery too. Oh I don’t know. ) Anyway - pretty ghastly. And - oh well, while I’m moaning and griping, here’s some more. On occasion Franzen goes into page long riffs on such things as road rage or the stupid things that teenagers do - these are exactly like riffs in a stand up comedian's routine. They’re quite fun in a sneery sort of way but they do seem like JF is getting a bit of humour in there in case he gets accused of having written another Big Depressing Hell In A Handbasket Novel, which really, this is (Iraq, global warning, environmental destruction, overpopulation, oh oh oh woe is us woe is us, smite us Lord, we fully deserve every last smite). And : now obviously JF does not wish to do this, but every time one of his young characters (say Jessica) berates one of his slightly less young characters (say Lalitha) for being out of touch with they way young people do right now (e.g not knowing that kids have mostly abandoned emailing for texting) he, JF, is perforce, as author, advertising just how down with the kids he himself is, which, alas and alack, is kind of like seeing your 52 year old uncle do the Twist. No, the Frug. No, I mean that Body Pop thing. And - this book is built out of sturdy slabs of knowingness and social nuance. You have to get what’s intended by the great many phrases like “in the earliest years when you could drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious”. Well, maybe some of us can’t quite be bothered to rack our brains to think what a Volvo 240 is and why it became something you would be ashamed of. (JF : Well, do your homework then. I want active engaged readers. PB : Yeah, I know, sorry and all. But I did finish your damned big book. So, you know, be quiet.) JF in a Freedom-promoting interview said that the most important thing he should be doing in his novels is ‘To find an adequate narrative vehicle for the most difficult stuff at the core of me, in the hope that that might resonate with the reader who otherwise has been feeling alone with those deep, difficult feelings.’ Well, he tried, he really tried, and for a great number of star-besprinkling reviewers, he succeeded. It’s good, it is … er… good, long but good, long long long but quite good. (less) | Notes are private!
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I remember reading this one, years ago, in a really bad flat in Mapperley Park. It was so horribly dusty all the time. That was because I never dusted...more
I remember reading this one, years ago, in a really bad flat in Mapperley Park. It was so horribly dusty all the time. That was because I never dusted. And when I looked out of my window I saw a wall. And when I looked out of my other window, I saw a different wall. Much like the hero of this brilliant novel - metaphorically speaking. And then, one day, in the wall, he notices a door. And he wants to open it and pass through to somewhere better. The very thing that other reviewers didn't like about this whopping novel was what made it another of my great reading experiences (which I remember like the memory of passing through something tremendous as if it was the Grand Canyon and not a novel at all) : they didn't like, but I did, the painful awful awe-full inevitability of the events, the doom of the characters, the dance of death we get drawn into for the last 200 pages - it's a quadrille, very formal, the partners are the characters, the plot, the author and ourselves, us, the readers. It's like a nightmare you can't wake up from. We know that, the characters know that, they're screaming, we're screaming, Dreiser has us caught in his fist of words and won't let us go until we know how it is that ordinary people can do terrible things which they never wanted to, they would have sold their souls not to, but they did. (less) | Notes are private!
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JG Ballard's stuff divides fairly neatly into three phases: 1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, and he was really cranking it...more JG Ballard's stuff divides fairly neatly into three phases: 1) 1956-64 - At first he was writing actual science fiction, and he was really cranking it out. There are some beautiful ones in this early part, probably my favourites - "The Sound Sweep", "The Concentration City", "Billenium", "The Voices of Time". It became gradually clear - to JG and to the reader - that he wasn't really able to do the hard-sf thing (extrapolation with a lot of wires and diagrams), but instead, he was developing, slowly, a genuine voice, a way of seeing the present in the guise of the future, and a unique form of poetry. He also wrote a trio of potboiling disaster novels, which are fun for people who like contemplating the destruction of humanity, which I know is a popular form of entertainment. 2) 1965-83 - Something happened. He became noticably strange in 1965, at the exact time when the 60s counterculture was becoming self-conscious. You may be thinking that he would have turned out like the Michael Caine character in Children of Men, all long hair and the best hashish, the poshest, most mature and most well-read hippy, but no, he kept his suit on and his hair was cut every three weeks. Intellectually, he was hurtling towards the outer edge, and then when he found it, he built a further edge on top of it. Falling in with a bunch of other new crazed experimentalists (like Michael Moorcock) he became part of the take-over of the formerly staid British sf mag New Worlds. This mag then became a major platform for cultural madness and outrage in Britain in print for the next five years. (And was duly prosecuted for obscenity.) There was an assumed sf sensibility behind the madness published by New Worlds but often it was hard to see because it wasn't there. This was when sf became "speculative fabulation". I wish I had a collection of New Worlds 1965-1970. Man alive! I would look over them and be amazed – so prescient, and so gone. So anyway, in this period JG invented "the compressed novel", i.e. the very refined, hyperintellectualised mashup of Hollywood Babylon, the National Enquirer, the facelifts of the rich and famous, the autopsies of the rich and famous, the study of autoerotic fatalities, the architecture of Los Angeles with especial reference to its swimming pools, inner space as alien landscape, the topography of hospitals and beaches, aeronautical engineering manuals, the soundless autogeddon of the near future, the frigid poetry of motorways, decayed technologies, abandoned futures – all rendered into distilled prose in which the more lurid the event being described, the more crystalline became the prose. JG became infatuated by public events like the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was not space opera. There were no aliens. Earth is the only alien planet, said JG Ballard, and he meant it. The apotheosis of this most ballardian phase of Ballard was, of course, Crash. Typical short story titles from this period: The Terminal Beach The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race The Atrocity Exhibition The Intensive Care Unit Memories of the Space Age Myths of the Near Future 3) 1984 – 2009 – With the publication of the non-sf, non-weird The Empire of the Sun, JG suddenly got himself a massive hit, and his long time fans were amazed to see him atop the bestseller lists and being filmed by Spielberg. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy but it was like seeing Captain Beefheart at No 1 in the pop charts. Huh? God help anyone who bought Crash after reading Empire of the Sun – “Oh look, dear, this is by the same author as that one you liked” “Oh okay, let’s see – whoah! Engine oil! Semen! Internal organs! Surgery! Deliberate car crashes! Aaaargh!”. So anyway, in his final phase JGB abandoned the short story form (only 80 pages of this 1186-page collection are from this period) and instead cranked out seven dystopian novels of varying qualities, which I confess have never tempted me. Maybe one day. No, what I like is JGB at his most elegiac, which is to say, at his most lethal. It's all in these short stories. Every home should have one. Random quote generator - from page 817 : Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man’s life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with , vehicles without wings. Some first lines of stories: In the evening, as Franklin rested on the roof of the abandoned clinic,he would often remember Trippett, and the last drive he had taken into the desert with the dying astronaut and his daughter. All day this strange pilot had flown his antique aeroplane over the abandoned space centre, a frantic machine lost in the silence of Florida. At dusk Sheppard was still sitting in the cockpit of the stranded aircraft, unconcerned by the evening tide that advanced towards him across the beach. Later Powers often thought of Whitby and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels… These stories are sad, wistful, clinical, upsetting meditations on the future we thought we were going to have and the future we turned out to be having all the while, which were two very different things. (less) | Notes are private!
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After about page 200 I realised this was like eating Turkish Delight morning noon and night and my spiritual teeth were beginning to dissolve under a...more
After about page 200 I realised this was like eating Turkish Delight morning noon and night and my spiritual teeth were beginning to dissolve under a tide of sickliness which didn't ever let up. All these characters are so unbearably cute, even the less-nice ones. If post-independent India was crossed with Bambi, it would be Vikram Seth's endless gurgling prose. So I stopped reading and drove several three inch nails into my head, and I've been all right since then.(less) | Notes are private!
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If every other novel was like this it would be terrible. I'd never leave the house. I'd call my office : "sorry, can't make it today, I have 450 pages...more
If every other novel was like this it would be terrible. I'd never leave the house. I'd call my office : "sorry, can't make it today, I have 450 pages to finish, I'm sure you'll understand, put it down as a family emergency" and eventually they'd email me - "you're fired" - but I wouldn't read the email. My cat would have to become feral. Empires might tumble, Bob Dylan might be chosen as the next Pope, I wouldn't notice. Anyway, fortunately, most novels aren't either this good or this long, so we can live reasonably normal lives. The Quincunx involves lots of delicious Victorian squalor, detail upon detail of filth and horror, the bilgewaters floweth and the sewers burst forth, there are villains, people have goitres, there are beatings, and I think there's a little donkey in there somewhere.(less) | Notes are private!
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This is a great biography. Henry James dined out like B B King toured - relentlessly, unswervingly, exhaustingly, in one year over 200 times. After st...more This is a great biography. Henry James dined out like B B King toured - relentlessly, unswervingly, exhaustingly, in one year over 200 times. After stuffing his orifice with broiled warthog, steamed lark and pomegranite marinaded in brandy and garnished with something unspeakable he'd stroll back home and dash off a chapter of The Wings of the Dove and wake up next day and do it all again. Respect. Probably reading this giant biography is in my top ten of useless time-wasting things I've done. What I should have been doing in the hours it took me to finish it was practically anything else. For instance, dancing the night away with a seemingly endless parade of lovely young women. That would have been better. Why didn't I do that?(less) | Notes are private!
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You know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves aro...more
You know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves around people who meet each other after they've had their memories of each other already erased, so they re-meet and re-love and it's all poignant and kind of whoah and oops I kind of gave the plot away - well, you should have seen it by now, come on, it's years old. Anyway, I'd love that particular invention to be true true true so that I could hustle down to the memory doctor's office and after having ALL of my romantic entanglements DELETED from my brain, obviously that would be the very first thing to do, then I'd present the doctor with a list of books to delete; and The Crimson Petal and the White would be right there in that little list, and it would, of course, be just so that I could have the pure unsullied delectable pleasure of reading it for the first time - again. This is such a corking good page turner like if some giant Dickens and The Quincunx and The Worm in the Bud (great book about the Victorian sexual underworld) and some other stuff were shoved in the blender and then written up by a guy who really knows what he's doing. Now, the ENDING of this huge novel was criticised greatly as being NOT AN ENDING at all but merely a dribbling away. So please note that there is a book called THE APPLE which is short stories accounting for the rest of all the characters' lives, and that's great and essential too. I envy you people who have not read this. And I'd also ask for my memory of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be deleted too, that would just be a little bit of post modern humour to share with the memory doctor. Oh, and the memory of writing this review.(less) | Notes are private!
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There's an old 1950s science fiction story in which aliens have taken over Earth and now wish to learn everything about the human race. But they can't...more
There's an old 1950s science fiction story in which aliens have taken over Earth and now wish to learn everything about the human race. But they can't tell what's important and what's trivial, yet. So to be on the safe side, they employ people to read every single book ever published and summarise its main points. And the story is a day in the life of one of these readers. And he's got Moby Dick. And what he writes on the file index card is : Nineteenth century knowledge about cetaceans, particularly physeter macrocephalus, was inadequate. Another way of summarising this one is boy meets whale, boy loses whale, boy gets whale back. And another way would be : brilliant, terminal, essential, outrageous, infuriating. (less) | Notes are private!
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It's like one of those very psychedelic albums from the late sixties, where they do all those funny stereo effects, and all that phasing or whatever i...more
It's like one of those very psychedelic albums from the late sixties, where they do all those funny stereo effects, and all that phasing or whatever it was called - all great fun but you still had to have good songs. As you'll know by now, "House of Leaves" has more tricks up its sleeve than you can shake Jacques Derrida at, but not enough tunes. There are two stories. One's about this, you know, uh, what can I say - house. Okay, all right, it's about the story of the book about the film about the house to be precise, but let's not overcomplicate things. The film at the centre of it all is called "The Navidson Record", and so is the book about it. And so is the book about the book about the film - STOP doing that! Hmmm - well, the house story is pretty good - yes, stolen from numerous genre horror books and movies, like  No, not that one!! This one!  but it's not bad, sufficiently interesting, even a little bit creepy. (But come on, by no means edge-of-seat keeps-you-up-all-night,  Come on, dear, get a grip!! (actually I didn't know there was a remastered full color edition, what the hell is that?) - so I have to wonder about the encomium from Brett Easton Ellis - he should get out more. He should meet feminists with a full Black & Decker power tool kit more...) Now the story of the house is wreathed with hundreds of footnotes - even the footnotes have footnotes, we are in David Foster Wallace country, textually speaking - and I really liked them. They're a kind of deadly straight-faced parody of various kinds of commentators, some scholarly, some not. Very funny stuff, in a solemn, unsmiling way. Many intellectual jokes. Not much knockabout. But so far so good. However, and here's the downside, the footnotes are themselves encrusted with the random autobiographical jottings of the guy who supposedly discovered the bookaboutthefilmaboutthehouse. His writings comprise story number two, the tale of Johnny Truant. And it's dire. It's cringemaking. It's lame. It's stupid. I found the events of the spooky house more believable than I did the ludicrous cavortings of Johnny Truant - gratuitous sex, drugs, tattoo parlours, and existential angst by the bucketful. Channelling all the badboys he can think of, Bukowski, and that other fellow whose name I can't think of, and the other one, you know who I mean, yeah, him, Johnny Truant is inclined to spout off into pages of incomprehensible rantings at the drop of a tab, and it's just as interesting as someone describing their most brilliant acid trip, which is to say, it's really so so so tiresome. Eventually I gotta say that JT and his pal Lude and his sexual fixations and his loony mother and his fights and his whole depressed, defeated and miserable schtick just serve to capsize what was otherwise an interesting and almost bold satire. Final note : like the movie 2001 which in the last part goes JUST CRAZZZEEEE so this novel when you get to the heart of the spooky-ookums house horror goes CRAAZZEEEE with all this super-lunatic typography like the pages containing just one sentence or three words written back-to-front, or pages withone sentence going up at a slant (describing our hero surmounting an incline)  and  - I always enjoy this stuff, Alasdair Gray does it in Lanark and Janine 1983 and way back in the 50s Alfred Bester did it in his great sf novel Tiger Tiger - and then there's the photos and poems in foreign languages et etc - so anyway, given all of THAT, this is a 400 page book posing as a 700 page book. Still big, but not as big as you think. Which may just be a neat REVERSE metaphor for the house in House of Leaves itself. Damn!(less) | Notes are private!
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Each chapter is rated out of ten for difficulty, obscenity, general mindblowing brilliance and beauty of language. Note : if you're after my short cour...more Each chapter is rated out of ten for difficulty, obscenity, general mindblowing brilliance and beauty of language. Note : if you're after my short course bluffer's guide to ulysses, here it is : http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... But now... the real thing. ******************* 1. Telemachus. Difficulty : 0 Obscenity: 0 General mindblowing brilliance : 8 Beauty of language : 7 Stephen the morose ex-student isn't enjoying life. Lots of brittle dialogue, mainly from motormouth blasphemer Buck Mulligan. Breakfast. An old crone delivers milk (this was before 24 hour Tescos). A modicum of swimming. Sea described as snotgreen. 2. Nestor. Difficulty : 0 General mindblowing brilliance : 8 Obscenity : 0 Beauty of language : 7 Stephen is teaching history. He has a crap job as a part time teacher because he doesn't know what to do with his life. i can sympathise with that, I still don't. His pupils are mostly eager and polite so God knows how he'd get on in today's hellhole classrooms. Anyway he gets paid and his boss the pompous old git Deasey gives him a letter about foot and mouth disease to give to somebody else which Stephen couldn't give a flying fish about. He mooches off. 3. Proteus Difficulty : 9 General mindblowing brilliance : 10 Obscenity: 2 (there's some nosepicking and urination) Beauty of language : 10 Now we get emo Steve trudging along the beach on his way to get a few pints down him, and now the Stream of the Consciousness starts up and gushes and torrents all over the place. And it's all stunningly beautiful. If I was a genius this is exactly how I'd think too. This may be my favourite chapter. May Stephen mooch about forever. Mooch on! 4. Calypso. Difficulty : 5 (now we are getting used to the S of C and Bloom's S is so much easier than Stephen's S - although also a great deal less lovely) General mindblowing brilliance : 5 Obscenity : 8 Beauty of language : 3 We jump back to breakfast time and enter the house and mind of Leopold Bloom who's rustling up some breakfast for himself and his dear lady wife. As we are moseying along in Bloom's brain, accompanying him on his trip to the butchers, suddenly out of nowhere we get the c word - and it really isn't anything but a train of thought. Joyce could have included another stray thought. But no. Joyce was completely committed to the truthfulness of his technique and also convinced of his own genius too. Still, it comes as a shock. Later we trip down Bloom's garden to his outside toilet where he has a pleasant bowel movement: "that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right." I mean, Jimmy, is this really necessary? But of course, in Ulysses, it is. The obscenity they found in Ulysses was mostly the disgustingness of minute descriptions of ordinary activities. In movies people never ever used to go to the toilet. Now they do it all the time - what was the first toilet scene in a movie? You could write a list of 20 great toilet scenes. (Contributions welcome.) It must be said that Bloom's mind is cram-ful of bits and bobs about his own life which are never explained, you just have to pick them up and piece them together if you can be arsed. But for instance Bloom is trying very hard not to think that Molly will be meeting Blazes Boylan in the afternoon and will probably be going to bed with him. It's one of those he-knows-but-does-she-know-he-knows situations. So, all in all, a very uncomfortable chapter. Oh, since you asked, I just went to my own toilet for the very same Bloomesque purposes - but not being Joyce, I'm not going to tell you anything further. But it was okay! Thanks for asking! 5. The Lotus Eaters. Difficulty : 4 Obscenity: 4 (see below) General mindblowing brilliance : 2 Beauty of language : 2 There's a couple of tedious chapters of Ulysses, it must be confessed (aside from the chapter that's deliberately boring!) and this is one. Bloom is off on his rambling day, meets a couple of coves, visits a chemist and then a public bath (this was before the days of houses having bathrooms! Imagine that!). We get a lot of this kind of stuff - (Bloom is at the chemists): Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid. Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature. I might have to agree with critics of Ulysses here - I don't need every scrap of word association and mental flotsam that swishes through Bloom's bumbling brain. But Joyce thinks I do! The obscenity in this chapter is here: Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam. Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. and here (he's in the bath now) [Bloom:] saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. Well... Bloom pleasures himself but you must say it's rather delicately put, no? (Another list please : greatest masturbation scenes in literature without mentioning Philip Roth!) 6. Hades. Difficulty : 3 Obscenity: 2* General mindblowing brilliance : 2 Beauty of language : 3 Another chapter I'm not a fan of because we're stuck mostly inside the brain of Bloom who's full of Readers Digest tips and quips and boring "I wonder if" and Molly this and Milly that. The Homeric parallels : yes, well, he goes to a funeral and thinks about death and rotting and such, so that's Hades. Helen's friend Eleanor is living with us at the moment and she CLAIMED to have read Ulysses as part of a course on epics but when pressed admitted that she had SKIMMED it and didn't like it much to which I said "Skimmed? SKIMMED? You can't skim the greatest modernist work of literature in English! Faugh! Crivens! Help ma Bob! I think I'm coming down with the apoplexy so I am!" Even the tedious chapters, of which this is one, have to be read word by word, line by line. * the only trace of rudeness I could find in hades was this - Bloom is thinking about precisely when his son (deceased) was conceived: "Must have been that morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at it by the wall... Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins." To readers of 2010 it all seems somewhat coarse, yes, but to readers of the 1920s these stray remarks were incendiary. However I would like to complain about this otherwise handsome Modern Library hardback edition I'm reading. This is one of the two available hardbacks of Ulysses and it comes wreathed with introductions, blurbs and reprints of judicial decisions all of which are entirely to do with the alleged obscenity of the book. Hence I thought I would reread it partly with that in mind. But really, who cares any more about that? Get rid of all this stuff. Let's have an introduction all about the crackle and the pity and the joy and fire of this bizarre book. * 7. Aeolus. Difficulty : 5 Obscenity: 0 General mindblowing brilliance : 2 Beauty of language : 3 Oh dear - do I actually like this damned masterpiece at all? Another tiresome chapter full of huffy snippy geezers sniping and out-quoting and oneupmanshipping each other. Next! Quick! Review continues here http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2... (less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 05, 2010
| Mar 10, 2011
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Sep 25, 2007
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