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A book that started out like Othello, a close-knit character study full of jealousy and the tradegy of adultery, becomes in the "last act" more like Hamlet with a host of supporting roles: a stepfather, a mother, a spurned lover (almost going to a nunnery), a ghost and a lead character who turns out to have been secretly Catholic. And then there's a priest's Macbeth-like rumination on time.

For someone whose career as a writer would almost demand a close reading of texts for clues and the ability to read between the lines, it is surprising that Bendrix would so completely misconstrue Sarah's intention with the diary and get all rapey. If anything, chasing her into a church so he could grab her breast and whisper subliminal commands has made her the stronger person, made Henry more readable than Maurice.

A wonderful method that combines many of the things I love about research, only marred by what I hope were a couple of typos but know is more of Riessman's stance. She puts a couple of [sic]'s after directly quoting Iser's "he" and "himself" - really, I mean, really? - yet commits a few herself: "contemporary black [sic] rap" (p. 118) or the double "the" (p. 118) quoting Brown (or Bakhtin?). Gonna sic you now biotch!

A pleasant break from Bendrix hate-on for Sarah and his impotent prose, to hear her side of the story with complexly-voiced diary entries. Not only is her struggles with love, God, and a strawberry cheeked nay-sayer a more satisfying narrative, she might also have tapped into superpowers to make Maurice a zombie and perhaps be able to kiss away Richard's blemish. Her haunting dream doesn't bode well for a watery end.

A slight shift from thematic to structural analysis give free reign to the social linguistic scholars, and a few familiar (and in some departments, infamous) names pop up: Chomsky and Gee, and old chestnuts like Heath and Labov. Putting someone else's words into clauses or stanza helps organize data, but far from King Lear for the all-encompassing emotional oomph you get when those words mean something more.

After weeks away from this book, it is suddenly getting so much better or maybe it is all those narrative inquiry texts I have read in between? In any case, the four thematic inquiry methods are straightforward and encouraging, instilling a sense that I could do that myself despite being warned in this chapter that there is no by-the-books way of inquiring narratively. Being familiar with Cain's AA ethnography helps.

No wonder Bendrix is such a bitter, confused ex-adulterer: his codeword for love and sex is "onions" while he describes an orgasm as a "crisis." He positively reads everything the wrong way and barely keeps his story straight while writing. And yet, for a few brief pages he describes a robot invasion of London - part of me knows this was the word for V-1 bombs of the period but what an awesome story it might've been.

Here's less to do with love, and more with hate. Even for a Englishman who survived the barrage of bombs that fell on London during the Second World War while having an affair with his neighbour's wife, Bendrix is incredibly sour about everything he narrates. Perhaps a somewhat insightful look at a writer's routine creating handwritten stories but not enough to make the reader care for his extracurricular activities.

Good to know there is another fictional world where virtual reality has a part to play, and much like Stephenson's Diamond Age, Vancouver has some part to play in making VR happen - add another book to my ever-growing list of resources! Ryan's conclusion seems like it will be a doubtful diamondless future for VR and we should be happy with what we have got, but she hasn't seen one qubit of a new virtual age.

Theories pile upon theories as Ryan reconciles how virtual reality can be both immersive and interactive experiences by examining a variety of other im & in examples: children's games and religious ritual leading up to the purpose of dramatic theatre. When the next chapter gets to the digital turn, including Multi User Dungeons and Artificial Intelligence (in the form of chatterbots), the holodeck seems farther away.

Cohesion is the chief concern of any storyteller, and the hypertextual stories (and print-based prototypes occasionally mentioned by Ryan) are a collection of nodes that can be linked in a variety of networks. The more closed the system is risks clarity for the reader yet dead ends and feedback loops sacrifice narrativity and become über-postmodern. Fortunately the action spoof I'm Your Man unites this knot.

With all the immersion metaphors and listed-off qualities of hypertext, this chapter could just as easily been on of the "listicles" featured on Cracked.com: all that is missing are the open-access JPEG images with tongue-in-cheek captions. Instead, we get the Internet's answer to making reading both a narrative exploration as well as a chore. Much of the Twelve Blue hypertext shows what passes for cohesion.

Emerging from the virtual world of text and stepping into an interactive, game-like reading experience, Ryan and a host of French (re: postmodern) linguists explore text's ludic qualities, and surprisingly the results are not so fun. Even the serious game angle gets played out, but much of it seems like taking something enjoyable, like getting lost in a book, and If on a Winter's Nighting it into submission.

The remaining chapters in the immersion part of Ryan's text dip into the cool, familiar texts like The Hamlet's Yoknapatawpha County and The Magician's Nephew's Narnia, then gets deeper with barely described landscape of Wuthering Heights and suddenly fictional people haven't got their noses yet only brief mention of Gogol. Are we the readers concerned for Cortázar and Calvino's characters?

Offering steps towards immersion in virtual reality, Ryan mines the worlds of cognitive psychology, philosophy and phenomenology to make up for where poststructuralist literary theory dares not go: beyond language and I would argue into meaning. Her take on possible worlds (thanks to Eco et al.) would be greatly improved with a reading of any quantum theorist, so instead the quarks spun in favour of Jesuits.

The series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation ("All Good Things...") gave us an overlapping sense of time and an excellent send-off for the beloved series of narratives. Ricoeur set of conclusions have a similar scope in mind, wrapping up everything he and numerous other philosophers wrote on these topics. Can't say I am as won over by his rhetoric, but perhaps will in the future. For now, Dasein is Q?

Taking two examples from the fin de siècle, the classier version of Y2K, authors show a antedigital interest in artificial worlds, yet one spirals into hallucinations from bad drug trips and the other a sterile, natureless room. Why not Gogol's The Diary of a Madman to represent that century or Serafini's Seraphinianus Codex for the next one? Even Coover's virtual baseball team gets tied to reality.

Taking a pause before the first interlude to report on the first two chapters which are as amazing for Ryan's erudition as explicit about the often misunderstood applications of the words virtual and reality. Plenty of overlap with Time and Narrative, especially as she presents a history of thought as far back as Aristotle, and as cognitively present as the phenomenological studies I will have to read up on.

Here's an idea I can get behind, as in it will always be in front of me, apparently unobtainable: the future is a horizon of expectation, the past a space of experience. Each is removed from a present position and being able to observe all, or any, of it prevents us from acting in such a closed system. So at some point in the past space, I muddled through a book by Nietzsche not knowing this chapter was on a horizon.

Most of the questions I have about virtual reality in its current emergent state and the connection to fiction were topics of discussion for a couple of decades, and now it is a chance to catch up with all the connections laid out in the writing of Marie-Laure Ryan. So far, she sets up an intriguing analysis of immersion and interactivity, and I am keen to see whether dramatic play gets included as literary formulae.

Not sure why Hegel of all the many philosophers mentioned so far is the first one to be renounced, and suspect that finding an answer would mean reading a whole bunch of book - not that I am complaining, just have to manage how much literary input I am able to take in. Accepting a non-Hegelian spiritualism, however, makes sense as the history of the world spirit and the progression of our own are beliefs I hold dear.

Yes, that's right, narrative and time, the latter element being brought back into the discussion to differentiate between history and fiction. Then the history is fictionalized, and guess what, the fiction gets historicized. So far, we're good? It is really hard for me to tell what goes on from page to page, even in one of the more slender chapter, without a few stories to contextualize his train of thought.

Oh you continental philosophers, bandying about references to Cervantes and Rabelais while serving up a linguistic oddity like Mimesis3, why didn't you just say at the start of your book you were going to discuss reader response? Perhaps it was there all along, but still strange to have this theory laid out halfway through your text without a mention of Rosenblatt. All is forgiven for your picnic metaphor.

So after a brief respite from the overly specific philosophical terminology with last chapter's mention of fiction, Ricoeur launches into more of the same, this time with seemingly familiar words like history, real and Analogous made virtually incomprehensible. Just figured out it is me not getting it rather than him not getting on with it: perhaps if I read more French classics than Dickens and Tolstoy I'd be savvy.

Now I am on familiar ground as Ricoeur wanders into the literary and imaginative uses of time. Even with the running joke in class about nobody reading Proust these days, even the young heroine of A Tale for the Time Being has a more stripped down, hacked version, here is some sense that his Remembrance of Things Past is of a temporal kind with Mrs. Dalloway and The Magic Mountain.

Perhaps my biggest struggle with this book is that it is a translation from French while the author juggles German, Latin and Ancient Greek to define his terms, that are then translated again. At least I can start to make sense of the importance of documents and data in memorializing beings-in-time, described in this chapter as our dead predecessors, the contemporaries growing old with us and computerized successors.

Back on track, I gather, with how narratives and fiction shapes human notions of time, as will be written about in the following chapters of this book. Ricoeur refers to ideas already mentioned in volumes 1 and 2 of his four-part thesis, yet I wouldn't be surprised if the preceding book were not published, and like Star Wars: A New Hope the story begins with part four, yet why am I wondering about section 1.

Wow, where to begin? It is like the first three chapters are extended essays turned into epic philiosophical battles between Aristotle and Augustine, Kant and Husserl, Heidegger and something called Dasein. Moments of overwhelming dense commentary were every so often illuminated by flashes of awesomeness that only made me want to quantum leap ahead to the narrative uses of time, or is it the timely uses of narrative?

I've lost track of the pages read and the percentage of the book still to read, this short chapter on Irish folklore as represented mostly by the ceili was more enlightening on the researcher's process as well as his shortcomings than it was the actual day-to-day lives of his chatty participants. While I liked to find out that ethnography has its narrative elements, so much is up in the air to legitimize it.