Rick Seery > Recent Status Updates

Re-read [First read 20 odd years ago].

Extremely slight. 2.5.

I finished Ya! - kind of profoundly bad, naive beatnik literature.

Will get to John-Juan in the coming weeks...

Essentially three novellas.

I've almost finished the first one - one of the toughest things I can remember reading. Super dense and uncompromising.

I'm parking it after the first, to return to the second one whenever.

Two stories in... total craftsmanship. Just wow.

Surpassed where I previously tapped out with this - p.348.

Twenty pages a day....arduous.

I've started again.

Hopefully I can get past p.348 this time.

I'm

Been a while since I read something quite this bad.

'Dazzling chorus of voices.' Don't make me laugh.

Experimental fiction for people who don't read experimental fiction.

The whole conceit seems quite forced, lazily conceived and... unnecessary.

Saunders seems quite toothless in terms of expectant wit.

Page 82 of 184 of the actual novel.

Well into this tricky, mental and frequently hilarious novel.

Once again a rating seems futile. A book filled with slight, but satisfying pick-throughs on a range of interesting literature, music and film pivoting around his central twin themes - minus Christopher Nolan. He was chancing his arm shoehorning Nolan into a chapter on Tarkovsky.

Two tales remain.

Yes, this is quite timely.

The writing in this is poor.

I'm amazed at some of the praise being lavished on it.

Maybe it's off it's time, but formally it offers nothing.

I feel there are ideas here for a Brett Easton Ellis to

Will persist.

Last read this last Sunday.

I quite like the psychogeographical elements that James uses to shape his characters' predicaments - or in this case, solely the character of Lambert Strether.
Still, it is a tiresome slog - the dialogue between characters is stultifyingly unrewarding and seems like some hopeless charade you might expect to see lampooned on a sketch show parodying the opaque conversation of period dramas.

Rereading this "old favourite" that I first read in 2005... taste is not static, so I'll be interested to see if this bowls me over again.

I haven't read Bernard Malamud since 2015. That was a collection of shorter stuff, 'Rembrandt's Hat.'

I'm not sure about this. It seems drawn out. Which is maybe in keeping with the tropes of the novel. Tropings and trappings.

There's something Bellovian about this character and general conceit. The aphoristic tendencies seem lightweight. Perhaps because Dubin is a lightweight.Or is Malamud perhaps the lightweight?