Paul Fulcher > Recent Status Updates

I really should stop reading books over 200 pages, my tolerance for them is very thin and I end up disliking books that are well written simply because of their excessive length. Or better still, authors should stop writing books over 200 pages.

Please, make it stop!!!!

the fact that this is tedious to the extreme

1012 more pages like this is going to be something of an ordeal.

I am claiming my Daniel Gluck spotters badge! Aka Andy Hoffnung, a typically Smithesque pun on Beethoven

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.

I wonder where the boidie is.

The boidie he is on the wing.

But that’s absoid. The wing is on the bird.

Rather disappointed with the particular edition of this book. It doesn't come with the requisite holes in the pages - just a box and you have to cut-out your own hole. Which is difficult to do without tearing rest of page, as I have just discovered.

576 pages gone - only another 558 to go!

This is quite simply brilliant!

I love the fact that in the requisite one time at the end of the book when Faye's name is mentioned it is in the context:

'Faye', he said fractiously, 'will you just listen?'

I can only assume she has deliberately written the first part as a pastiche of the worst of the Roth/Franzen/Auster/Lerner/Hill novel 'great american novel' style of book. It would make a great half pager in John Crace's Guardian Digested Reads - but the other 139.5 pages have been very painful. Not sure where this is heading (but 'the bin' is current favourite)

'he was turning out roughly four pages for every one he kept'

If only Auster had followed Ferguson.4 's approach and kept one of the 4 Fergusons.

on some days he felt the book was trying to kill him. Every sentence was a struggle

Either you give in to your despair and wait for it to pass, or you burn your scarlet notebook and forget you ever had it.

Suspect the library may object if I follow the latter course, so guess I need to wait 150 pages for it to pass.

Glass half full: only 200 pages to go

Glass half empty: about to read a 200 page novel by an author whose previous three 200 pages novels about the same characters I found tedious.

Amy let out a prolonged groan and then tore in to him for wasting his time on trivial, asinine, college-boy humour.

And finally a quote worth noting:The bombardment of all these words, that ceaseless yammering which failed to make any distinction between important things and unimportant things, talk that could impress you with its intelligence and perspicacity or else half bore you to death with its utter meaninglessness.

I am still waiting to see much intelligence or perspicacity, but otherwise the book to a tee.

And finally a quote worth noting:The bombardment of all these words, that ceaseless yammering which failed to make any distinction between important things and unimportant things, talk that could impress you with its intelligence and perspicacity or else half bore you to death with its utter meaninglessness.

I am still waiting to be impress with intelligence or perspicacity, but otherwise sums up the book.

"Later all of this blather will be edited out" we are told early on (in reference to the video of the Packer Attacker).

Hopefully there will be a second edition of The Nix taking the same approach, and I will look forward to the resultant novella.

Fascinating to see one Booker longlistee interviewing another:

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/cult...

And an excellent and helpful review in New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Fascinating to see one Booker longlistee interviewing another:

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/cult...

Could not help laughing out loud on the train at one unintentionally funny line where the narrator reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56NjX...

Hmmm. Can't help but compare this to Panorama by Dušan Šarotar. Šarotar does the Sebald thing so much better - he even gives a more evocative sense of Flemish Belgium than Hertmans. Panorama should have been on the MBI longlist.

Got about 25 pages in and realised this is part 2 of the trilogy not part 1!

Also is it be or is this basically Brydon and Partridge in The Road with a bit of philosophy chucked in.

"Untimely death is intermittently on Fran's mind, alongside housing for the refusing-to-die elderly and her more-or-less bedridden ex-husband's dinners."

It isn't very fashionable to say it, but have to say the new novels I've read from former winners Swift, Rushdie and now Barnes are all much better than those I've read from this year's Booker shortlist.