100+ pages an hour, 5+ hours a day = an expensive book habit to feed! Maximalist fiction championed by Steven Moore to popular novels hated by Harold Bloom.
Joined January 2023
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Belatedly realized that the bio here has fewer characters than bsky, so I'd better pin my:
Top 3 Books
Ulysses
Gravity's Rainbow
Infinite Jest
Read Joanna Kavenna's "Seven". Remembers zipping through "Zed". This was equally enjoyable, but very different and slower going. Suspects I'll be thinking about many of the issues raised for a while. Has always liked the word 'marmalised' (and was amused by coinage 'boxtopian'.)
Read @StephenKing's ""Under The Dome". Despite greatly enjoying almost all his other books, for some reason when this came out I thought the premise sounded silly and so never picked it up. After being reminded of it, I started and couldn't put it down. Living inside a long 1/5
recommendation from Jack Reacher! Embarrassingly I only put together Colonel Cox's Barbie/Ken joke on page 747... Did like Carolyn Sturges' meta-thought about being 'Maybe a novelist, although it seemed to her that writing novels was pretty risky; what if you spent all that 4/5
Read @j_amesmarriott's "The New Dark Ages". Found this very interesting, and I enjoyed his discussion with @questingvole. Learnt things about 20th century (pre-television) reading habits, and will need to think some more to decide what I make of the arguments about politics. 1/4
due to frittering away far too much time on my 'phone, this may be the impetus I need to follow the author's lead and swap it for a dumbphone. Needs to remember the increasingly relevant quote from David Foster Wallace's 1996 interview. Was delighted to learn that Iggy Pop 3/4
once wrote a piece about Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"! 4/4
classicsireland.com/1995/Pop…
Has started @StephenKing's "Under The Dome" (which I'm really enjoying). In the second section of 'Lotta Dead Birds', after Nora Robichaud honked 'Her best friend, Elsa Andrews, rutted.' Unless there's another definition I don't know, I hope that's a typo for tutted!
Re-read Graham Greene's "Monsignor Quixote". It was (much) better than I remembered, but still not my favourite type of Greene. Had forgotten a lot about it, but remembered smiling at the condom balloons and puzzling out 'que le den por el saco el obispo'. This time around I 1/2
Read A. C. Glass' "The Hiding Season". I'd enjoyed the Emma Makepeace novels so much, that I put off reading this standalone for months in case it didn't hold up. This was probably a mistake as it was just as fast-paced and readable as they were. I kept feeling that the 1/3
familiar scenarios, characters (and even sentences) shouldn't work - but somehow they did. Yes I knew what was likely to happen next, but I still wanted to read it and keep turning the pages. Another success.
[Did notice that in Chapter 16, Maya/Lara thought about her 2/3
Read Nadine Matheson's "Shadow Carver". As grippingly page-turningly readable as its three predecessors. Took me a moment to recall the home situations/back stories of the detectives from two years ago (occupational hazard when you read 100s of these things), but once I did 1/3
I remembered just how well balanced the domestic scenes were with the developing investigation. Nicely set up for a continuation without being heavy handed. I'll be reading the next one!
[Wouldn't be me if I didn't point out Chapter 22's 'you kept man waiting' for 'me 2/3
increasingly moving and brought tears to my eyes. The circularity of the end of Section 4 recalled aspects of Emily St John Mandel's "Sea of Tranquility". I gulped it down pleasurably in a single sitting, and definitely want to return to it more slowly in a few months after 3/4