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Truly gets better with every reread. Am I terrible for identifying more and more with Mr. R. each time? When I first read this a single 20 year-old I couldn’t stand him, but as a 35 year-old with a wife and kids his scenes connect in an uncomfortable way. Also greatly benefiting from having read all the back matter first and doing this shortly after Dalloway. Year of Woolf rereads is going splendidly.

Fourth voyage out.

This was going so well… New favorite territory… but the more women enter the story the more they exist merely to please the now saintlike Mr. Shawnessy. It’s also starting to grate with just how hard it’s going for Great American Novel status. I’m starting to think that you can only write a GAN if you aren’t trying to write a GAN, otherwise your blind spots will certainly get the best of you.

Freakin’ with Furber.

I’m mostly loving this, so it’s super frustrating that Lockridge repeatedly stoops to every stereotype regarding male authors describing female characters. It makes a certain amount of sense given that he’s a 1940s writer describing an 1850s adolescence, but I don’t know that I can ride it out for 800 more pages if he’s gonna keep his wheel in this rut to the end of the road.

First read this before I knew anything about anything, and before falling in love with Gass. Life on Books read-along has provided the perfect excuse to return.

Delightful.

After a promising start, this is really starting to drag. Not gonna let myself feel too guilty about putting this one aside. I see that several friends have it rated significantly lower than most of his other work. I may still return to binge Green’s other stuff, but whims are blowing in a different direction at the moment.

The articles have returned, the sentences are less Steinian and march along to their own unique rhythm. There is vastly more narration and already some of the most enrapturing descriptions of fire and light I’ve ever read. May be in for a binge.

“Mr. Bridges in his thinking and in most of his living was all theatre. Words were exciting to him, they made more words in him and wilder thinking.” Gertrude, is that you?

So far seems an improvement over High Wind. Intrigue. Fluffy prose. An absurd banquet bringing to mind the recent Enard. I have a very good feeling about this.

Such an idiosyncratic style. Not a twinge of guilt about hoovering these blind at John King. Only a couple remain to be collected.

So far I’m into it but not quite as taken as I was with WWCTUTW. I think Labatut is more compelling in the third person, but that feeling could change. Buts aside, Labatut is the man.

This was probably a poor choice for an audiobook, as I inevitably space out on it every few minutes while cleaning the house. My comprehension just can’t keep up with such enormous ideas. Based on what has miraculously sunken in, I look forward to picking up some of his other work in print. A physicist with the heart of a poet.

I don’t think I could have chosen a more perfect first audiobook experience.

More books like this please.

My Woolf rereading project is going swimmingly. Having read To the Lighthouse a gajillion times I felt that I knew her, but boy was I wrong. Yes, Between the Acts and Dalloway were in a similar vein (though Dalloway was a lot more experimental than I had recalled), but here we have something entirely different: a Sternian romp. Often hilarious. So there is more to VW than just simply her streamy “thing.” GOAT.

Better than God?

What a revelatory reread! I had not remembered this one being quite so avant-garde. Currently reading the Norton alongside the Liveright featuring Merve Emre’s annotations, which are excellent but really disrupt the flow of the main text. I’ve been reading solid chunks in the Norton and catching up in the Liveright when the mood strikes. This is likely to go down as one of my richest-ever reading experiences.