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“Technology may be progressing, but what about ethics? What about mortality and humanity?”

Pryakhin: “We have to love life, all life…You’re a destroyer of the old, but are you a builder of the new?…If you love her, you must fight for your happiness.”

Kronos: “No…it’s not the right time. If I stay alive, maybe we’ll meet some other time.”

Pryakhin: “That’s a great pity. I thought I could help you rebuild your life.”

Flux & Love: The two great themes in Stalingrad.

Is it bad? Not at all.
Do they talk in Shakespeare quotes too much? 1000%.

Slow going, but still going. Still amazing.

I don’t know how else to describe this other than you feel like you’re reading real life. Sometimes episodes contain whole novels, and it’s just a paragraph of someone suffering (who you never see again). Equally exhausting and exhilarating book.

Novikov’s first day of the war chapter was a twenty page chapter that flew—and felt like an entire film.

This is why you read. Incredible. I’m not reading a story, this isn’t something you like or dislike; it’s honest: I’m reading about people. I hope to write like this someday.

Hm. I don’t know if I’m gonna finish this or not.

“…what we are engaged in is a kind of fraud, possibly an offense to our whole society.”

Guys, unless things are radically different in Japan, the “offense” is, effectively, ghost writing.

“A knight does not protect the truth; he lives inside it and the truth protects him.”

Doesn’t get much better than this.

I was loving Tengo’s story and only begrudgingly getting thru Aomame’s, until—!

The same normal complaint with Murakami novels, the same normal praises. This one feels distinct tho.

I hate this novel. When the author does actual dialogue, where he can’t be overly creative, it shines. But, Good Lord—dear angel!—make it stop.

“And that’s it. Bagger vomits up what feels like a jellyfish with a gasoline kick.” 🙄

This is what happens when people read Blood Meridian *because* it’s the most violent book in the canon or whatever.

People who think this is a gripping war novel are after violence. Not that it’s the threat of relationships and personal dreams dying that makes war narratives so engrossing.

Why love Helm’s Deep? Battle of the Bastards? It’s not the violence. It’s what the violence defends.

“…Bagger’s scaling the ramp of a trench exit, out of dank sewage funk into a troposphere of hot ash that burns a cigarette cherry into his every bronchial.”

Every sentence! Clear and brilliant, then verbose and try-hard. Chekhov’s Advice: to make the reader feel something, restrain your prose. This has turned up every sentence to 11. But you end up not needing 3 of 5 sentences to get what’s going on.

Why read two giant novels at once and listen to two more? Suffering advances the plot, I guess.

Murakami is a spectacular storyteller, but much of his content drives me—hear me—absolutely insane. I hit a block in my own storytelling, picked up a Murakami book, and immediately loved it and started rolling my eyes: block demolished.
So far, it’s enjoyable. Even if the usual HM fare can drive me nuts

a barbarian noise, lionlike in solipsistic bloodthirst, its shadow was swelling, widen black pool. And, boy it stings to have gotten so close to saving his own butt one last time. Stings even more that he failed to protect this woman’s breathtaking light. But at least Uncle Sam’s gone quiet, happy and satisfied at long, long last. And then so then but then it happens. A thing happens. A thing, it happens…

Yeah. I don’t like this at all. Don’t get the hype. I’m getting curious if you could just read “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and get all you’d need.

I’d still look at Whalefall. Or maybe just watch the movie. But mix stream of conscious writing with McCarthy’s thesaurus and an Instagram poet’s sense of language, and you got Angel Down.

I’ll finish this—probably—but, boy do I not care about anything happening here. There’s not a likable character for miles.
The shrieker’s still shrieking.
The narration, undeniably skilled, is a too verbally extraordinary: tiring, overwrought.
Kraus is a good writer, though. I don’t know how to identify this, cuz I don’t care about his characters, but I he comes off as a genuinely likable author.

I genuinely can’t tell if I love or hate this. The language is beautiful and musical, but sometimes feels off. But I could be wrong. What is nice is a well-regarded novel that actually has a plot.

It’s giving Moby-Dick, except Transcendental religiosity is Zen Buddhism; motorcycles are the Pequod; rationality is the White Whale; and Ishmael and Ahab may be the same person.

The tone/style is very 60s-70s, a continuation of Steinbeck-like prose, with Beat Gen navel-gazing. Very readable and enjoyable, thus far.