Phil > Recent Status Updates

I got so close to a DNF with this book. But after two DNFs last year, I didn't want to begin this year with one in January. Thankfully I'm finally nearly finished.

Like the other 3 Mark Twain books I've read, this is turning irritatingly episodic - I did this, then I did that, and now I'm going to philosophise about something, and then I did this and then I did that. He has a good line in aphorisms and incidents, but Twain isn't great at coherent stories.

I'd forgotten just how unlike anything else of the period this book feels: fetid, feral, claustrophobic, manic and barely constrained. It's also so easy to read - it just slips along as though the act of reading isn't involved.

I'm losing the will to live. I now have two of the most mawkish lovers in literary history.

C'mon, Agatha. Decide where St Mary Mead is and stick with it..

There are few classic novels that could be improved by removing roughly 80% of the text, but I feel this might the main contender.

"We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us ..."

Just a throwaway line, but utter genius. Ajay the opening scene of February in Vienna and the gravediggers having to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in order to bury Harry Lime, and then covering him with soil like bricks.

Greene's "entertainments" are always much better than the serious books.

I can't help thinking that - unlike Moby Dick, for example, where deep dives into detail reflect Ahab's obsession with the whale - the endless digression in this book is because Hugo is paid by the word. It's one of few classics that could definitely be enjoyed in an abridged version. Count of Monte Cristo it ain't, which fairly rattles along.

A fifth of the way through and so far nobody called Shirley has arrived.

Am I allowed to say about a work that's on endless lists of Greatest Novels of All Time that I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that this book is just a massive pile of self-indulgent old wank?

Ulysses it ain't.

Javert = bad