Alex > Recent Status Updates

Heading to Nordhouse Dunes on Tuesday, buttcrack-o-dawn. Very excited to drag my LCE of Moby Dick along with me.

Given the current situation in our sad nation, it seems particularly appropriate to get on with this tome...

This book is definitely a case study in how your expectations for a novel inform your reading of it, but I think not in perhaps the way that Federman thinks it is.

Between this and TIOLI I must be amidst a mini-metafiction-marathon!

###Has he started his journey yet?###
who?
me OR us. Moinous... No.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-A ROAD NOVEL=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Unlikely!

###

Estimation based on visual interpretation of bookmark location.

Somebody recommend me some poetry, please.

Losing interest... and yet so close to the end!

Let's have a little fun!

The first few sections tricked me into thinking this was gonna be the best ever. I've been doing some very ambivalent reading lately...

I read the first 200 pages of The Recognitions about a year and a half ago. After picking it up and reading about 40 pages I realized that if I'm really going to do this I'll need to start all over again... Shit.

How many of my GR friendlies are writers?

My copy of Paul Metcalfe's Collected Works Volume One just arrived. What a beautiful object!

This is a fairly efficient story, and I hate pretty much all the characters, so it's engaging (it'd be a problem if I just didn't care about the characters). I like it, I feel like I'm being somewhat apologetic about it but I don't think it deserves that. Purity is a good book, even if it's not necessarily what I think a Novel should be.

After the beautiful "Character", and the fascinating "Canoe Repair," "The Campaign Trail" and "The Last Disarmament But One" have thrown me back into frustration with McElroy, seriously killing my buzz. And here I thought I was falling in love...

I started this last year, and found much of it incredibly difficult. Yet since putting it down I've felt that somehow reading McElroy was going to be very important for developing my own prose, and I've just picked this up again, and read "Character" and it's as though some planetary-alignment, perfect-story-at-the-perfect-time shit has just gone down. I'm now ready for McElroy.

I may put this aside for awhile once I finish Inferno.

The Jade Cabinet made this necessary.

Under ordinary circumstances I would likely finish this up today, but there is so much to do! The contractor left a plump stratum of dust over every horizontal surface in the house, and we're hosting a bachelorette party here in roughly forty-eight hours. God help me.

Taking a breather from Franzen with this (thus far) perfect little book.

It's been a long time since I read a book with this much plot. Maybe my literary values have been inverted, but it seems absolutely absurd.

So I'm curious about what everyone's problem with Franzen is. It seems to me maybe it's his attitude, that he is more of a pop fiction writer though he might claim to be literary. The only bad writing in here so far is the email conversations (I winced through them), but again, that's not a literary style. Otherwise the prose is unexceptional, but efficient. Thoughts?

for the book club I have going with my mom and sister.