Samuel Smith > Recent Status Updates

Lol this is soooooooo bad!

This is why Goodreads ratings are never to be trusted.

This is... bad?

I have made it to the end of the "normal" chapters...

First of all, not enough of y'all appreciated my Odyssey joke.

Checking in after Chapter three (Proteus); I'm excited to meet my main man Leopold Bloom in chapter four (Calypso).

I am really enjoying this. Because I read this so hard and with such attention during both senior year of undergrad and second year of grad school, it feels so familiar even though it's so dense and challenging.

I heard they were making a movie of this so I thought I'd check it out.

*Lil Jon voice* ...uh gawd DAMN

Well, that's one way to start a novel, I guess!

"Was was all there was and was was what we were."

Oh, so this is gonna be like THIS

Bruh

We are so back.

My guy Paolo really wants you to know that human energy is measured in calories and that machine energy is measured in joules.

Soooo much technobabble

Just outrageously bad; I'm glad I didn't pay money for this.

Ok now there's a serial killer. The writing is still hilariously bad, but that makes it skimmable. I'm gonna give it an extension to 50%.

This is immediately comically bad; I'm gonna give it to 25% but it's trending toward a DNF.

Looking forward to learning why this book isn't applicable to academic advising

This book is weird as hell

I got about halfway through the audiobook of this in 2023, and do not remember much of what was going on. I thought about just DNFing it, but it has such a good reputation that I'm gonna give it a shot.

Kicking this up to 1.5x

Fighting for my life

Part XII: 1958-1971

A lot of this section was bad: increasingly prosy and self-important, hyper-specific, "occasional poems," etc. But there were some high highs, including the sequence "Thanksgiving For A Habitat." This section is also interesting because one doesn't imagine Auden as living at the same time as Vietnam, the Beatles, the hippies, etc--though one is not surprised to learn that he didn't like them!

This is like the opposite of the Snoop Dogg affirmations--"your feelings are evil!" "Your friends are all criminals!" "Your life is all lies!"

This guy suuuuucks

Part XI: Dichtung Und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

This was interesting--a sort of ars poetica for love poems, specifically. It feels like something that somebody else would probably like to study!

Part X: 1948-1957

These are inconsistent in quality and trending toward prosiness. But the stand outs (especially The Shield of Achilles and the Horae Canonicae sequence) are very good.