Group Read, September 2019: Great Apes

Our September group read is Great Apes by Will Self. Please join the read and add any comments and thoughts to this thread.

This book was so bad that when I finished it, I literally left it in a waste bin at Abu Dhabi airport.

Bit of a pain as I was in Glasgow at the time...

I'm about 60 pages into Great Apes. arukiyomi may have understated its badness...

I picked it up at the library a couple of days ago and I rather like the cover, so there's that.

you should probably stop there then

here's my review... no spoilers: http://arukiyomi.com/?p=6577

I concluded "Suffice to say, if you left an infinite number of chimpanzees in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, they might come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, but they’d probably form a committee to ensure they never randomly produced the rubbish that is Great Apes."

OK, now I am intrigued! I think I have to read it just to find out!

On the downside, my library does not have a copy and it sounds like it is not a book I want to keep. May have to wait until I find a copy at an op shop or garage sale!

I am quite nervous about starting this, currently on a streak of not great 1001 books.

I'm about two-thirds through and while I don't think it's a great book, I don't think it's all that terrible either.

Inventing the Chimpanzee society is both the strength of the book (some of is quite intriguing) and the weakness because it seems a bit random what parts of human society are retained and what parts are different. I hope to finish today or tomorrow and have some more thoughts on the whole book.

I am about 120 pages in, it isn't really grabbing me. I saw a review that said it should be a novella, and it seems that a shorter book would have made the book more interesting.

I finished the book last night, and the ending was meh. The idea of the Chimp society was interesting, but the book was just too long for it's own good. Like >9 soffitta1: says it should have been a novella, ended before inconsistencies showed up and Self's endless attempt to provoke got boring.

Still, I don't think it was horrible and it's definitely a book I would not have read without the list.

I remember the author being on Question Time a lot at the back end of the '90s/ early 2000s. Very much in vogue. Can't decide whether to look out the other book of his on the list. Are we all missing something?!

>11 soffitta1: His books are only in the 2006-edition, so maybe they were not so obvious choices in the first place. Besides, we are terrible judges of our present and it is really hard to tell what well stand the test of time.

When someone in 2117 have forgotten everything about Boxall's book and decides to launch the 1001 Books You Have To Read Befor You Die app (or whatever the format will be) they will probably agree on a lot of the choices from the 19th century but look very differently on current literature.

That is very true, many of the books taken off the original list weren't awful, but were rightly replaced by books from outside the English / French speaking world. Would love to see a smaller book of the best of the 21st Century, say 100 books. That would be interesting.

the guardian just published such a list...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/best-books-of-the-21st-century

>14 arukiyomi: Thank you for this list. I have only read seven of them, but so many of them are on my TBR.

You all were kinder than I was.... I found this to be really tedious after the first 50 pages or so. I'm not sure I even would have enjoyed it as a novella.... maybe a short story. The idea was interesting, but it just got dragged out so much.