Eduardo > Recent Status Updates

This reads like a forgotten masterpiece. Published anonymously to widespread scandal in 1929, Ex-Wife foreshadows so much of the mid-century canon, including the disillusioned urban isolation of The Catcher in the Rye. I’m only a few chapters in, and my jaw has already dropped at how casually Parrott navigates revelations that still feel shockingly modern and raw even a century later.

Over 800 pages?!

Boring

Lorna Raver is such a great narrator and this is such a great and thoroughly enjoyable read. I forget how much I love Edith Wharton.

I’m beginning to understand why this book was a fixture of 1970s libraries, holding pride of place on the display case. It is a work saturated with classical references and a simmering, cerebral eroticism.

This book reads so dumb. More like a screenplay for a tv show targeted to children.

I can’t get into the characters. It’s supposed to be beautiful writing but to me it just seems wordy.

I can’t get into the characters right now

Right off the bat I’m sucked in. Why is this quality so difficult in other writers?

Super duper depressing. The psychopathic genocide of the natives peoples of this land was unrelenting of not just males over the age of 12 but of women and especially children and shows how deeply ingrained is the notion of white supremacy in this country. It’s clear reading the book who was the real savage.

Racing through the audiobook before I have to return to the library but what impresses me no end all the genres that the author invented just in this work. She’s the Brontës grandmother and Poe’s and Agatha Christie. So many people owe their imagination to ms Radcliffe. Just amazing.

I’m so confused and racing to the end so I can wrap it up. It gets into the weeds of science. I’m like science but here it doesn’t excite me. What does excite me is the narrator, Luke Daniels. Wow. This guy can switch characters in a split second. I’d love to see him working. I’ll probably look for more of his books. He’s narration alone is entertaining if not dazzling.

Really enjoying it this time. It feels like the first pulp novel. Deliciously trashy. What surprises me is how funny it is in parts. It seems to predate vaudevillian goofiness

I think I begin to see why Ferber is not as well regarded today as she once was. She just killed off an important and it’s just like moving right along. The plot is king it seems. I’m thoroughly enjoying the Salina’s odyssey all the same and can imagine what’s next.

What a great story teller. I’m so invested in the story and her characters. She has you rooting for Selina and So Big without demonizing the other characters.

I have the feeling this is going to be a version of the Prime of Ms Jean Brody. A story about a charismatic but dangerous character. I’m falling short of my goal to read 100 books this year and this story is already about walking away books even as it is a book.

Such charming writing. So engaging and witty. Gotta read me more Ferber

Wright is consistently naive.

Riveting

Ikemefuna. Modernist literature always has to have its victim.

Enjoy the slow penetrating psychological eye now that I’m reading it slower. Everything is being set up so perfectly and gently.

A chapter a day is working. Sometimes I have to listen to one chapter several times. Tolstoy has such a solid agenda and it can be easy to miss if you are too focused on plot.

Reading a chapter a day. Oblonsky is a handsome plump aristocrat who is waking up wondering how to deal with his wife who is angry that he slept with their nannie. Funny, the same thing happened in my other read Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House. In that case the head is household is separated from his wife.

Trying again. Slowly this time.

Ghastly written dialogue and exchanges straight out of Margo Jefferson’s Negroland. I wish the author had sat with a therapist first before using a novel as their emotional catharsis.

Food, drink and networking. He was happy because Paris was dirt cheap and he could write fiction. To him and his expatriate buddies it was cheap but I doubt it was so for the locals recovering from the war as they were.

This book is taking a turn for the worse 😳

A dull gay telenovela but also a fascinating window into what life was like for gay men pre stonewall and pre Aids

Pretty pulpy and pornographic at times but it is interesting to read about the pressure relationships between men endured before homosexuality was decriminalized. It was dehumanizing, awful and brought out the bully in everyone. Thank goodness we are at least in part well past that now.

Whatever happened to baby Jane is just as campy as the movie. Blanche is so delicate and refined while all these bad things are happening to her that she’s just as ridiculous as crazy Jane. Blanch feels like the feckless democrats trying to be so virtuous and Jane like the vicious lunatic republicans out to destroy everything