(There was a longer version of this but it’s kind of longwinded and tedious and I can’t be bothered to finish it – which is of course what happens when one attempts to read longwinded and tedious books which one can’t be bothered to finish – so I’ll just give you the gist:)
I want to finish The Magus. It’s really shitting me. I don’t like it at all. The concept is interesting but the execution is very contrived. The style is soporifically ponderous and all the characters grate my tits. The narrator, especially, is a pompous, self-absorbed pillock. He reminds so much of me; it’s terrible.
I want to read my Peter Greenaway book. And also, I’ve decided I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year and have a pile of other books I want to read or reread in preparation. Like Georges Bataille‘s The Story of the Eye, which is great.
(Opens at random)
[Insert pyrotechnically surreal, lurid and obscene passage from The Story Of The Eye here.]
Let’s try it with the Magus.
*flip flip flip*
[Insert bromidically dreary, overdescriptive passage from The Magus here.]
See what I mean? [Well, probably not.]
I am going to finish it by the end of the month if it kills me, a possibility which cannot be discounted. I have 200 pages to go.
Turns out Darth Vader is Urfe’s Father!!
Quiet, you.
I’m having a similar experience right now with David Foster Wallace’s _Infinite Jest_.
Combine the author’s penchant for an unnecessarily polysyllabic vocabulary with pointless digressions and footnotes, then subtract any possible vestiges of plot, and you have _Infinte Jest_.
I’m loathe to stop reading it, though, mostly because I have a macho desire to prove that I can conquer and vanquish the fucking thing.
Sometimes I want to drive a fork through Postmodernism’s dialated, panoptic eye.
… By the way, I think I might be down with NaNoWriMo this year as well. And I’m getting around to responding to your email, so look out for that.
Infinite Jest’s in a whole other league of unreadability. I did actually own a copy of it once, although I’ve left it behind me since I found having it around tormenting.
A friend railroaded me into buying it in a bookshop on the basis that it was the most amazing thing he’d ever read, changed their life etc.
Like “Ulysses”, I’ve grazed at it quite substantially over the years and enjoyed the bits I’ve read a lot. But from cover to cover? That just ain’t never going to happen.
>… By the way, I think I might be down with NaNoWriMo this year as well.
Yay!!
I was trying to convince Li to be NaNoWriMo buddies with me but he baulked at the idea..