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Stuff I've just finished reading:
Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut -- I haven't read this in ages but, unsurprisingly, it's still ace. The good thing about this particular re-reading was that I had completely forgotten most of the details of this novel, so it felt quite fresh to me. Like a lot of Vonnegut's stuff, it feels a bit like a song and dance act at points, with the hops skips and jumps through time feeling like little comedy routines, but this isn't a bad thing - in fact, it's part of the sort of sad absurdity that makes the man's work feel so damned human.
Fiesta - The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway -- The last time I tried to read Hemingway, I found the nakedness of his prose a bit much, but I was into it this time round. Very compact and immediate, but also very rich - I like.
The Hard Life, by Flann O'Brien -- The deadpan voice is good, and there are a couple of brilliantly ridiculous touches (mail order lessons in high wire walking!), but... it felt like it lacked a certain overarching drive to hold it together. It's not like At Swim-Two-Birds, which is all over the place in a masterfully controlled way - it just doesn't have much to keep it moving.
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon -- it took me a good 30 pages to get into the prose style here (which is slightly problematic when this book is only 120 pages long), but once I got into the rambling groove of the man's writing style, I enjoyed it quite a lot. There's a certain sort of smart-arse silliness to the humor here that really appeals to me (from the names onward), and I'm quite into the post-modern anti-detective novel aspect of the plot (the more we learn, the less clear things become!), but I'm still unsure whether or not I want to take on some of Pynchon's bigger novels right now.
Coriolanus, by William Shakespeare -- I wrote an essay on agonistic heroism in this play, like, two years ago, but it was pretty boring. I can't quite get in anyone's corner in this play - everyone, even the characters I really want to get behind, is undercut in one way or another, and I like this effect. It makes things feel pretty tricky and tense.
Stuff that I've just started reading:
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Puritan soap-opera. It's all been quite juicy so far, but I'm currently unable to articulate my thoughts on it beyond the level of a back-cover blurb ("Exploring the relationship between the private self and public..." etc).
Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem -- Mmmm... lucidity. I'm 200 pages in and liking it a lot so far - it's such a vivid look at friendship, comics, music, isolation, and race (we're in back cover blurb territory again!), and I'm digging the sort of aching slowness of it all. A couple of bits feel a tad overwritten, but that comes with the territory I suppose. |
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