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Liz M's 2019 TBR Takedown
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I've finished Pricksongs and Descants. What an unusual collection of stories. While I was fascinated by the style, the retelling of a well known story almost as the literary equivalent of a cubist painting, and for each showing many variations on how it could have happened, overall the collection is overwhelming and an over-amplification of the male gaze.
It took me all month to read the lyrical and dense Look Homeward, Angel. The story of family dysfunction reminded me a fair amount of The Man Who Loved Children although I don't think these are all that similar. At times the story is well-told and provokes vivid images, but at others my mind would glaze over and I would realize I hadn't actually read the words for several pages. The writing is ornate, verging on florid, so there is a lot more description interfering with the plot than I prefer.
Again, I barely managed to finish the month's book in time. Asphodel is an autobiographical novel, written in the 1920s but unpublished until after the author's death. It has a similar plot and style to Pilgrimage, but is more fragmented and less in the narrator's emotions. The writing is lovely, but I never really felt connected to it.
Even under the best circumstances, i usually don't get satire. So early 18th Century satire was never going to be an enjoyable read. Not being familiar with the society and ideas being ridiculed, I found Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus dull. Each chapter was written as either an intellectual exercise or as a stand alone article, so the book is more episodic than plot driven.
Reading 1001
Books mentioned in this topic
Look Homeward, Angel (other topics)Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep (other topics)
The Swimming-Pool Library (other topics)
Tarzan of the Apes (other topics)
The Path to the Spiders' Nests (other topics)
More...
1) Asphodel2) The Daughter
3) Midnight Examiner
4) The Swimming-Pool Library5) The Dead Father
6) G.
7) Pricksongs and Descants8) Things (Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep)***
9) The Graduate
10) Billy Liar
11) The Bitter Glass
12) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
13) The Trusting and the Maimed
14) The Path to the Spiders' Nests
15) A House in the Uplands16) Party Going
17) Her Privates We
18) Look Homeward, Angel19) I Thought of Daisy
20) The Green Hat
21) Tarzan of the Apes
22) The Charwoman's Daughter
23) The Man of Feeling
24) Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus***On the 1001-list, these are two separate titles, but I cannot find an edition that is just Things: A Story of the Sixties