Arukiyomi's Progress Year 13: 2019
Discussie1001 Books to read before you die
Sluit je aan bij LibraryThing om te posten.
2arukiyomi
#557: Sabbath's Theater
... a novel simply to provide himself
with a playground for experiments
in obscenity.
3arukiyomi
#558: The Virgin in the Garden
... you’d be forgiven for thinking that
the whole thing is just pretentious claptrap.
4arukiyomi
#559: House of Leaves
... simply taken the plot of many a horror story ...
and then decided to let a monkey manage the typesetting.
5annamorphic
All of your links are taking me to Sabbath's Theatre and while you have convinced me that I will never want to read that book, I'd also like to read your thoughts on the "pretentious claptrap" that is The Virgin in the Garden. Which I have, unfortunately, read.
6arukiyomi
ah sorry... thanks for letting me know. All should be fixed now. I really should check each one I post!
7arukiyomi
#560: Ada
... puns and plays on words which ...
had all the entertainment value of
dad jokes at a Christmas dinner
8arukiyomi
#561: Rosshalde
... a timely reminder to take time now
to cherish the things that are truly
important in life.
10arukiyomi
#563: City of God
If you want to judge a book by what you can take away from it,
then this is going to make very little impact.
11Helenliz
>9 arukiyomi: Phew! I sometimes wonder if it's me not getting something. I got annoyed by her self rightousness and the sensation that the world owed her something.
12annamorphic
>9 arukiyomi: >11 Helenliz: I think of this as a great book written by an intensely annoying person. Something about that period allowed or even encouraged authors to just spill out their horribleness and expect you to feel sorry for them. At least she ACTUALLY suffered, and witnessed incredible tragic historical events, unlike say Wyndham Lewis or even D.H. Lawrence. But you wouldn't want to know her in real life.
13arukiyomi
I think you both captured something there with what you wrote about Brittain. I wonder if how she comes across is in some way the result of what she's been through, PTSD and all that...
14arukiyomi
#564: Nightwood
... certainly queer, but not in the way
the gushing Winterson considers
it in her foreword.
19amaryann21
>17 arukiyomi: YES. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis. If there's one book I would not have encountered otherwise, and for which I am extremely grateful to the List, it's this one. It was not fun reading, but it felt very important. I can only imagine reading it in the current world circumstances might make it feel even more so. I recommend this one to serious readers, with the caveat that it is heavy, but worth it.
21arukiyomi
#569: 10:04
... not actually anything except an attempt
by a man to show us he understands
the word proprioception.
25arukiyomi
#573: One, No One and One Hundred Thousand
... eventually disappearing up his own bum
in pursuit of some form of reality.
26arukiyomi
#574: In Search of Klingsor
... drags so much that if you hitched it to the back
of Hamilton’s Formula 1 car he wouldn’t finish a lap.
29puckers
>26 arukiyomi: one of the List books I haven’t located yet and after reading your review my searching will cease as of now!
35arukiyomi
#581: The Left-Handed Woman
It’s a page-turner primarily because
you just want to turn pages to make it stop.
37arukiyomi
#583: The War at the End of the World
... all the intensity of the most roasted
Brazilian coffee you can imagine.
38arukiyomi
#584: The Man Without Qualities
Satire, however, is subtle humour at best,
and German humour is subtler still.
39arukiyomi
#585: Paradise of the Blind
... definitely romanticises the beauty
of Vietnam and cultural essentials ...
41RosieGlover
Deze gebruiker is verwijderd als spam.
50arukiyomi
#595: The Midnight Examiner
... picaresque and satirical but it’s
not going to be anyone’s fave read.
52annamorphic
>51 arukiyomi: You were generous on readability for this one. How I despised this book!
56arukiyomi
#599: The Moor's Last Sigh
... the novel has been infected with Rushdie
... and finds that it can’t recover.
58arukiyomi
#601: The Drowned World
... a world in which Ballard’s fiction is fact
is not one I want to live in any longer.