Though life has frequently got in the way, my girlfriend and I have been reading this aloud to each other. A chapter here and there102nd book of 2024.
Though life has frequently got in the way, my girlfriend and I have been reading this aloud to each other. A chapter here and there. Though 'children's' fiction, it is incredibly well-described and developed, profound (though in a gentle way), and enjoyable. It felt only slightly less detailed than something like The Left Hand of Darkness. To this day an interesting take on a children's novel, whereby the protagonist, Ged, is half-insufferable in the beginning; he is arrogant, self-important. I do wonder what a child would think of him. The 'lesson' works tenfold in this way: Ged is humbled, truly!, and spends the novel in attempted atonement. The concept of the true names of things, the Taoism and Ged being 'red'-skinned and the marauders being white... as usual, Le Guin spins all things on their head and fragments the lenses we look through. Great stuff, for a child and an adult alike. ...more
57th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Argentine painter Lucio Fontana.
You are new in the area and your parents are desperate to get rid of you57th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Argentine painter Lucio Fontana.
You are new in the area and your parents are desperate to get rid of you because although you are only trying to help, you are getting in the way of the moving process—the boxes are too big for you to lift, the lorry-men talk with such cigarette-smoked voices that you cannot understand them or their quips to you, and as much as you'd like to appear helpful, you cannot wait for all the boxes to be gone and everything go back to how it was (that is, move back into the house you've just left, the house you loved dearly).
It is for these reasons that they allow you to go (alone) to the park opposite the house ("we can still see you fine," they argued). The park is named "The Oulipo Playground"; and because you are new to the area, you (and by extension, your parents) are unaware that the playground is generally avoided. The boys found in the playground are strange; they play odd games that no one else has heard of, they whisper to one another, talk in inside-jokes (one quickly realises who is on the inside—it isn't you) and laugh at a lot at things that don't seem, to you, particularly funny. You are ignorant of this, and so push the gate open with happy abandon and enter into their strange domain.
All other playground inhabitants are also without parents and many of the boys look like grown men: one boy, nearby, looks at you quizzically from behind very round glasses. But your eye is drawn to another boy, and the reason is twofold: firstly, he is standing at the top of the slide and looking down on you and, secondly, his hair is wild, an explosion from his scalp, thick and curled. You are naturally drawn away from the slide-stander and towards a genial-looking chap to one side. You ask him what is going on. He replies, with a foreign accent, that the boys are playing a game. (You look around you but can't form any concept of a game: all the figures in the park are very still and looking at one another with silent, but smirking, faces.) You introduce yourself anyway and the other boy introduces himself back, Italo, he says.
Over the next few weeks as your parents continually unpack, decorate, argue, redecorate, etc., you continually go downstairs and across the road (you've never seen a car drive down it, but you remain vigilant as taught) to The Oulipo Playground. You now consider yourself friends with Italo, though you find him volatile; at times he is eager to explain the games the other boys are playing with one another, saying Perec (the French boy with the wild hair) is doing this, and this means that Duchamp must do this and Queneau (round glasses) must retaliate with this, and so on. You never really grasp what Italo is explaining to you and the others sometimes call upon him (“Calvino! Calvino!”) to join in and he leaves you for a time to do so, but you remain interested all the same. Other times you arrive at the playground and Italo seems irritated by your presence and despite your questioning, will not give you any answers to what is happening or why. “Why is Perec doing that? What must Queneau do?” And Italo turns his back on you, even, at times, holds up his hand; but most irritably of all is when he begins to tell you but before he has finished his explanation, he suddenly stops and goes quiet, and no amount of badgering gets him to finish what he was saying. You have cried sometimes at night thinking that it must be your fault that Italo is acting in this way: suddenly cold and disinterested from the day before, when he was affable and witty. You’ve tried only once to talk to Perec but otherwise you shy away from him. The others seem too distant for you to even try. Queneau incessantly repeats himself to you, telling the same story over and over again but each time with a slightly different spin on it, so you never quite know whether he is telling the truth or mad. You report none of this back to your parents because it is baffling for you, let alone them, and they are already tired enough from attempting to build cheaply-bought but apparently highly convenient and affordable furniture.
Once again it is a day (a slightly overcast one, but warm) where you find Italo in a disgruntled mood. He began by explaining the current game, “Yes, and you see Perec over there on the swings, well this is because…” but soon he appears bored by explaining it all to you in minute detail and stops. You hide your frustration and stand silently (and sullenly) beside him to observe the rest of the unintelligible game of long silences, strange words, odd movements, and general, you believe, madness. You go to bed that night flustered and hurt, once again. The following day you set out with purpose: to tell Italo that his manner is unfair. He is standing in his usual spot at the side of the playground and the other boys are dotted about, some standing, some sitting, some doing precarious handstands (seemingly vital to the game at hand) and some with their fingers either over their eyes or ears. “Italo,” you say, “I am tired of our friendship.” His eyebrows jump. “But why?” he asks. You throw your hands in the air, how can he not see! “One day you appear to be my friend and the next not! Some days you tell me the games and the stories and other days not, or you tell me only half and leave me frustrated! I never know where I stand. I can’t even call you a friend, but you’re not an enemy,” you hasten to add; “I don’t know what you are!” Italo, for once, is the flustered one between the two of you. He scratches his face and tuts. “We are playing our own game, I thought you knew.” You say: “I didn’t know, and I don’t understand this game, or any game!” Once again, you fling your arms around. Italo pacifies you with a smile and says, “The rules hardly matter, only that you have fun.” You grumble. “I can’t have fun if I don’t know the rules or what the aim is, I don’t understand the point of any of this. I think you might all be mad.” Queneau is standing nearby but luckily he has his hands over his ears and does not hear this. “We play differently from other boys,” Italo tells you, “but we think our games are more fun.” You don’t see anything wrong with hide-and-seek. “All games are the same, so banal,” Italo moans (you don’t know what banal means but it sounds negative), “we are trying something different. That’s good, no?” You honestly can’t answer: your mother says being different is a wonderful thing and that you should embrace the fact that you seem to have less friends than everyone else and read all the time instead of playing football, but on the other hand, this sort of different seems so farfetched. “But Italo, I’m not sure I’ve had any fun at all.” Italo sighs and yawns loudly (rudely) and then says, “You kept coming back, I thought that meant you were having fun." “I came back because,” you begin to say, and find you aren’t sure why you kept returning; it was all so strange and different, it intrigued you, yes, that is one reason. Were you having fun, through your frustrations? On some days it might have been close to fun, on other days it was certainly frustration, even boredom. Italo had a nice way of putting things and you liked that. Under all his stories and false-starts he seemed like an interesting person and a good sort of fellow to have around, but other than that, what was the reason? Even after yesterday’s poor affair you returned once again, if only to tell him your true feelings, but what was your purpose for doing that, to reconcile and allow your friendship to carry on? “It doesn’t matter why you came back, only that you did,” Italo says, interrupting your thoughts. “We all have so much fun here,” he says. You knew that already, looking at them all smirking and whispering to one another. “If I stay will it be worth it? Does it get more fun?” Italo shrugs his shoulders: “I don’t know! I invent the fun. You have to invent your own sort of fun here too.” For a split-second you consider hitting Italo on the nose as your fun-invention but that thought is gone in a flash and you embrace your strange comrade. “So, let me explain this game currently,” he then says. You rub your hands together. “Queneau is standing here like this because Perec over there, and Duchamp, are teaming up against him. Rumour has it there is some back-stabbing involved. The swings are key, as is the jeep on the springs that rocks back-and-forth. The others are all somehow involved too. There’s a great conspiracy. The truth is, the real back-stabber…” Italo looks up suddenly and sees a bird going overhead. You ignore it, listening in. But, he’s gone. Italo is no longer going to finish what he was saying. You walk home in a sulk, kicking old cans and grumbling (though you do check left and right at the deserted road). The next day though you wake up and find yourself eager to return to the playground to see what Italo has to say to you, if anything at all.
*****************************************
2nd Reading: 2021.
The fakery in the novel appeared to me more overtly on my second reading. The games were, as ever, frustrating and engaging at once, in typical postmodern fashion. I refer to it as the Postmodern Pendulum; it tends to be, for me, the swinging between high-brow and low-brow, which is more Pynchonian and DFWallian, but here in Calvino it feels more like Nabokov postmodernism, which is perhaps subtler. (Calvino gives credit to Nabokov and Borges for this novel, which is no surprise.) On one page we feel almost as if we can sympathise with Humbert Humbert, for example, and on the next we are reminded of his true nature and we are sickened by him, and in turn, ourselves. Calvino adopts this sort of pendulum of emotion: boredom/frustration v. intrigue/wit/entertainment. This book is only 200/250 pages long but feels longer. All the false-starts bog it down and the second-person sections are enjoyable especially in the beginning but eventually go too far and become a little too much. That first chapter is purely golden though, a giant reflection on reading as a process and as an abstract idea. As the novel opens:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice—they won't hear you otherwise—"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.
[image] “Concetto Spaziale, Attese”—1960
(Calvino reflects on literature in other books too; he does with great warmth and beauty in The Baron in the Trees, which is vastly different from this.) As it goes on it gets deeper and deeper and more tangled in its own web, so to speak. Really, we end up looking at multiple fakes, multiple forgeries, multiple beginnings, conspiracies, ideas, realities: it is quite a lot for such a short novel. Calvino lets us in at times and blocks us out at others, making for a very volatile experience. Frankly, almost for this reason alone, the book falls short of 5-stars for me, though I think it’s quite exceptional. I have read before (I don’t know if it’s true or not, so to add more fakery) that Calvino was being pressured to release another book but had nothing but a load of first chapters of abandoned projects so he lumped them altogether, added the second-person chapters to the mix and published it, calling it, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. If it is true it’s sort of brilliant and a giant cheat all at once, which describes the novel perfectly anyway. It’s a head-wobbler.
I still think Invisible Cities is better. Not the best place to start with old Calvino. If you like him, dive-in, and see if you still like him. As my lecturer once called him, "the icy postmodernist", prepare to get cold (but, also, at times, warm).
It's taken me a while to read this, which is no fault of the book. I've had a real surge of writing and inspiration recently so I've spent my time writing rather than reading. Then that will exhaust itself and I will read constantly and have no time, or inspiration, to write. It's quite frustrating how the two can't work in perfect harmony beside one another. Almost as frustrating as trying to find If On a Winter's Night a Traveller....more
Well Scott felt like rational reading before journeying to Scotland in a few weeks, but what a disappointment. I always imagined h116th book of 2023.
Well Scott felt like rational reading before journeying to Scotland in a few weeks, but what a disappointment. I always imagined him in the adventure leagues with Dumas, Stevenson, etc., and though I'm not generally a fan of mindless swashbuckling fun, I wanted at least a bit of fun. Sadly, Rob Roy follows whiny Francis Osbaldistone talking his way through 400 pages of novel before we get a taste of anything remotely close to action. The book's namesake is wasted and collectively appears in less than about 30 pages of the book. I guess the main thing is the bad marketing of the book: it's no an adventure story at all. Scott's writing was dialogue-heavy and rarely interested, either. There were some nice descriptions of the Scottish landscape, but only briefly. A shame. I'm just hoping Ivanhoe has some more kick to it, when I finally get to it. ...more
2.5. A hard one to rate (being the same book as Little Women) because here in England they are published as two separate volumes, th29th book of 2023.
2.5. A hard one to rate (being the same book as Little Women) because here in England they are published as two separate volumes, though that does make it is easier to critique them as individual beings. The March girls have grown up and the playfulness of the first book/first half has mostly waned. It took me a while to get involved in this one and I kept putting it down after only several pages. It's just less fun. There are some standout scenes, a poignant bit in both "Heartache" and "The Valley of the Shadow", some beautiful and surprising descriptions of nature in "Lazy Laurence", and so on, but generally the book plodded along. If you read the other reviews of this text, most people seem to hate it and claim the March sisters all turn out horribly, as do their marriages. Some of the sentiments are outdated, but I guess I just expected that from the book. I liked Laurie till the end, though Alcott doesn't give us the most satisfactory ending, considering. The only reason I read this is because without it, I'd essentially only read half of Little Women, and if I went to watch the film adaption (which I plan to do for once, hearing such good things), the second half of the movie would be a complete surprise to me. Though, of course, one of the main shockers of the book was ruined a long time ago, by Joey on Friends....more
1.5. I was in London for a long weekend visiting my old university housemate and he asked me about this novel as it was a book-club103rd book of 2021.
1.5. I was in London for a long weekend visiting my old university housemate and he asked me about this novel as it was a book-club choice, a club we are both a part of. He hadn't found the time to pick up a copy. I told him he missed nothing, it was poor and I didn't like it at all. Returning to my review then, I realise 2-stars isn't accurate. I've given it a half star more purely for two scenes in this novel which are fine, the rest is just aimless boring prose with ridiculous characters and events and no (evident) purpose to any of it. It is constructed mostly with dialogue, none of which is engaging. The relevance of the titular sundial was completely lost on me, at times I thought perhaps it was even lost on Jackson. I can't fathom the point of it or why it was written, I was only glad that I finished it and could move on. Just to give Jackson some respite, The Haunting of Hill House (as someone who doesn't like "genre" fiction) is a decent read. ...more
3.5. Quite inferior to his Fathers and Sons but a gentle read all the same about first love. The novel was made all the gentler by m97th book of 2021.
3.5. Quite inferior to his Fathers and Sons but a gentle read all the same about first love. The novel was made all the gentler by my reading of it in a shepherd's hut in the middle of the countryside in Dorset. It's fairly standard of its period and of its Russian sensibility. An enjoyable and fast read. I will write a fuller review once I'm home again but really there's not much more to say about it. I've got an old copy of On the Eve by Turgenev from Badger's Books in my hometown, so I will read that as my next....more
4.5. I'm on holiday so I'll write a review when I'm home, but this is brilliant. Despite only being Nabo's fourth novel, it reads li96th book of 2021.
4.5. I'm on holiday so I'll write a review when I'm home, but this is brilliant. Despite only being Nabo's fourth novel, it reads like his later work. And to think the novel that follows this (two years later) is the brilliant Glory... The early 30s were golden years for Nabokov's émigrée novels written in Russian, it seems. Full review to come: but suicide, ghosts, snooping, Berlin, unrequited love, this short text is quite the scimitar-blade of Nabokovian wit/trickery/genius. ...more
2.5. This is Fitzgerald's messy and juvenile debut from 1920. It's told through vignettes mostly with no real semblance of "plot". I85th book of 2021.
2.5. This is Fitzgerald's messy and juvenile debut from 1920. It's told through vignettes mostly with no real semblance of "plot". It reads of its time and reminds me of numerous other novels from the same sort of period (Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Woolf's Jacob's Room, Nabokov's Glory). The most prominent flaw in the first half of the book is its seemingly complete lack of self-awareness: where later Fitzgerald works value vapidness as a theme, This Side of Paradise feels only vapid, without the dissection of it. This is rectified by the end somewhat but it's a lot of detached prose to read with a self-centred and fairly unlikeable protagonist Amory Blaine doing nothing. He goes to Princeton (as Fitzgerald did) and talks incessantly about his world view, what books he likes. . . These are things I usually like to read but Fitzgerald's delivery is poor. Frankly, it reads as if Fitzgerald had done and said everything that is in the book and simply recorded it all. At one point a character accuses Amory of writing things down and saving them for later, and maybe that's what Fitzgerald actually did. Other than being lifeless, the structure is mostly a smorgasbord is stuff: random numbered lists, several chapters that drop into the structure of a script with no apparent benefit, even a Question and Answer page (the latter two both appearing as chapter styles in Ulysses which I find interesting as this was published two years before). The Introduction does suggest that Joyce's Portrait must have been a great influence for Fitzgerald and he naturally tried to downplay that. Despite all its faults this novel was an instant success in 1920 and "overnight" sent Fitzgerald into money and literary fame. Just two books later he would write The Great Gatsby so somehow he learnt the craft fast. Very fast. There are tiny, tiny flashes of his later genius in here with some beautifully structured sentences in an otherwise hurricane of bland characters, bland happenings and dizzying structure....more
Pretty mediocre for Maugham, whom I consider a good writer despite reading recently that Dorothy Parker believed he "couldn't write 48th book of 2021.
Pretty mediocre for Maugham, whom I consider a good writer despite reading recently that Dorothy Parker believed he "couldn't write for toffee"; though, having said this, the writing here is nothing to write home about. An entertaining plot, a novel to kill an hour or two, but nothing more than that. Compared to the other Maugham novels I've read though, this one is weak. Rowley is a good character, but hardly like a Charles Strickland. Perhaps I'll write a fuller review soon, though this one doesn't prompt much deconstruction....more
[22nd book of 2021. Artist for this review is Argentine figurative artist Antonio Berni.]
This is one of Márquez’s novellas, at only 122 pages long. Sa[22nd book of 2021. Artist for this review is Argentine figurative artist Antonio Berni.]
This is one of Márquez’s novellas, at only 122 pages long. Santiago Nasar is going to be murdered and the whole town knows it—so why isn’t it stopped? There had never been a death more foretold, so it says. The town knows where it will happen, why and when. And yet, Santiago is still murdered. And thanks to the structure of this short novel, he is murdered multiple times— Márquez has structured the story without the confines of chronology, drawing in, drawing out, skirting around, coming in again; we know from the blurb who is to die and that they do die. Even by the end, when the inevitable happens (again), there is tension. The town is a living mass, all watching and waiting, making excuses, feigning confusion, as a murder foretold takes place.
[image] “Manifestacion, (Demonstration)”—1934
As the novel is so short there isn’t a vast amount of things I can say, especially as the plot is almost entirely known before starting it. It is told by our narrator in a semi-journalistic way which adds to the realness of the novel, which, I read, is in fact based on real events. Supposedly something very similar happened to Márquez’s own godbrother. If you want a short, satisifying and intriguing read then I recommend it. This was my first Márquez novel that hasn’t been translated by Edith Grossman, but I hardly noticed. Márquez once said in a Paris Review interview that he was very fond of Rabassa (the translator for my edition) as he never used footnotes. Not my favourite novel of his but a very good one, and for how short it is, stunningly structured and written, as expected....more
I'm a big Jack Kerouac fan, who in turn was a big Jack London fan, which means I've been eager to read London for some time. As wel148th book of 2020.
I'm a big Jack Kerouac fan, who in turn was a big Jack London fan, which means I've been eager to read London for some time. As well as that, London is one of those classic writers I see mentioned a lot, and at least one of his books (usually this one) appears on those lists we are drawn to, like the 1001 to read before you die... etc.
This was okay-it started poorly for me; the plot is repetitive and a little dry to begin with. Though, it was interesting reading from Buck's (a dog) point of view (albeit in the third-person), and the writing was decent throughout too. Ironically, the boring start was not without action, but that was my problem. Action in books often bores the hell out of me (and the same with movies) - so all the dog fights and whipping that was going on in the beginning of this just turned me off. As the story progressed I became more invested and enjoyed the end and flew through the pages where I had partially slogged through the beginning. I'll get around to reading London's White Fang at some point, but really, Martin Eden is the one I am most interested in reading. All in all, a good read, but nothing fantastic; by any measure, I prefer Kerouac to London, if we are talking about Literature Jacks....more
2.5. This wasn’t really what I had anticipated and therefore I don’t think I’m the ideal reviewer. Some[35th book of 2021. No artist for this review.]
2.5. This wasn’t really what I had anticipated and therefore I don’t think I’m the ideal reviewer. Some reviewers I “appreciate” rated this highly and I was led to believe it was literary fiction, ignoring the so-so title of the book. That’s not really the case and the so-so title is rather indicative of the novel. It read to me like an old 90s romance film. Maybe Hugh Grant would be involved. Definitely. The writing isn’t poor but it isn’t exceptional or stand-out. I enjoyed a certain element of the plot, the protagonist, Casey, is a struggling writer. She’s been writing a novel of six years. Other than that, it quickly becomes a love triangle novel: Casey trying to decide between two guys, the distant, flaky, Hugh-Grant-type-man Silas, and the Jude-Law-type-man Oscar, who is also a writer, and the father of two children. Not my type of book, in short.
There are some nice ruminations on writing, the process, on being an ambitious woman, being in debt, grief. At times the novel felt like a lot of loose ends, bits thrown in. Compared to the main focus of the novel, King dedicates far too long on restaurant scenes, taking plates, taking orders, angry chefs—it wasn’t interesting in these moments. As I said too, the love-triangle did nothing for me either and ended up being predictable (I thought). I despise the fact the term “chick-lit” exists, as I’ve said many times before, but as it does exist, this novel falls into that “genre”, I’d say. It’s tightly wound and meant to be satisifying, which ironically, makes it unsatisfying for me. Maybe that says more about me than the novel. I don’t question those who do love the novel though because I can see why people would, but it did nothing for me, except for the reflections on writing and struggling with writing.
Finally the most satisifying thing of the whole novel for me was all the writer/novel/story/poem allusions and references. A lot of writers are mentioned in Casey’s thoughts, a lot of books. I took the time to record, to the best of my ability, every literary mention and allusion throughout. They are all below. They are recorded as they came, so there may be a writer early on in the list and then one of their novels later, that’s just the way they appeared to me. I left out doubles. I “translated” the allusions. For example, someone is called Holly Golightly, so Breakfast at Tiffany’s is in the list. Someone quotes “Politics”, so Yeats is down. So, here are all references:
Martin Amis, Roddy Doyle, Marcel Proust, Céline, Duras, Günter Grass, John Barthes, Sur Racine, Cuore [Heart], Honoré de Balzac, Montaigne, Valéry, À la recherche du temps perdu, Middlemarch, W. Somerset Maugham, J.G. Farrell, Cormac McCarthy, “The Letter Writers” (Elizabeth Taylor), Leo Tolstoy, John Updike, George Eliot, Walter Scott, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Jayne Anne Phillips, William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, War and Peace, Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September, T.S. Eliot, J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey, The Evening of the Holiday, Beloved, Independent People, Troubles, Housekeeping, Woodcutters, Hamsun, Hunger, Shirley Hazzard, Edmund Wilson, “Politics”, William Butler Yeats, Fitzgerald, Robinson Crusoe, Sula, “The Liar" (Amiri Baraka), The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Cheever, Didion, Morrison, Macbeth, All the Pretty Horses, Hemingway, Thomas Bernhard, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, William Carlos Williams, To the Lighthouse, Jane Eyre, The House on Mango Street....more
2 stars seems harsh, but by Goodreads' definition - "It was okay."
I'll go ahead and say now this isn't a book I would normally choo90th book of 2020.
2 stars seems harsh, but by Goodreads' definition - "It was okay."
I'll go ahead and say now this isn't a book I would normally choose to read - but, rather than limiting myself to only reading classics, I am (trying) to read more contemporary fiction, and I've seen and heard a lot about Ng. The title of this one, would usually be enough to dissuade me. I think, as a general rule, I never read anything if 'You' is used in the title. To me that just screams I'm not going to like this. Everyone's different.
This novel is often likened to The Lovely Bones, which I read and studied at A-Level English, and didn't like. I'd say this is better than Sebold's novel though. The writing, in the beginning, was better than I was expecting, but eventually became 'easy-reading'. To explain my definition of that term: to some people, like my mother, for example, 'easy-reading' is good writing. I'm not saying it isn't. I think it was Stephen King who once said something like, "Easy reading is hard writing." I think it's true. I'm studying Creative Writing currently, and write myself, and it is hard to convey exactly what you are trying to convey simply and succinctly. However, 'easy-reading' to me is boring. I like writing that blows my mind, the kind of writing that people, like my mother, would call "pompous" or "over-the-top". The writing in this book is good, but it isn't what I like to read.
The genre isn't my go-to either. I tend to avoid murders/thrillers/crime in fiction and anywhere else. I don't think there is much scope to do anything new with the genre, especially a realist genre. The Lovely Bones did something new - it had that saving grace - but I didn't like the writing, or the characters. The few books that do come to mind that involve murder/crime that I've enjoyed: In Cold Blood, The Secret History, and I suppose, on the 'detective' side of things - The New York Trilogy. For those who know me, I can't believe I'm recommending this next one, but: the best book I've read about a missing child is The Child in Time - despite the fact I dislike most of McEwan's books.
Like The Secret History - the death is revealed on page one. Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. Ng then takes us through the story, the chapters alternating, present, past, present, past and so on. Lydia, despite being the dead girl, is hardly fleshed out till the end of the novel, which meant for a long time (this sounds awful) I didn't care that she was dead. Her parents were really the focus of the novel, and the past flashbacks to how they met and got married were the most interesting part of the book for me. Forget dead Lydia. The family is Chinese-American, and a lot of this book addresses racism - which is horribly topical at the moment. Lydia's mother says at one point, "If she were a white girl, they'd keep looking." These bits were important and interesting. And though the exploration of race kept up through the whole book, it slumped at times, and went into other (sadly predictable) events. I find that this genre is always filled with (and this book includes some but not all of the following) drug abuse, affairs, a frantic searching for answers, taking the law into one's own hands, lack of faith in policing, family secrets, family tensions, sibling wars... the list goes on. This book had a few of those.
So, in the end, this book had everything I expected it to have. Which, when my mother read it before me, she breathed a sigh of relief for. I had previously thrown Tender is the Night at her, and she gave up on it. Ng was on my shelf, and though I give recommendations rather than books I haven't read, I thought, this is what she is looking for. And I was right, she enjoyed this and Ng's next book, Little Fires Everywhere. Mother and son are the two cases for and (not really against) against this book. For me, not as disappointing as I thought but not my preferred read, for my mother, finally something that wasn't Fitzgerald - or whatever other pompous books I told her she would love, that the language is exquisite....more
S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF84th book of 2020.
S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?
[image]
I’m unsure how to start this review; for the first time in a while, I’m finding it difficult to access my thoughts on this. I’ve got so much to say, but even after waiting a whole day, my thoughts are all scrambled in the wind. I’ll start with this. At 2am the other night I tapped the touch-lamp on my bedside table and opened my copy of Into the Wild – in pencil, I scrawled, “Literature Failed the Heroes in this Book.” It is pictured below. I then turned out my light, rolled over, and went to sleep.
[image]
I was born in 1997 – five years after Chris McCandless died. The note I used to start the review was found on the bus his body was in. He weighed about four stone. Jon Krakauer wrote an article about the 24 year old boy who died in Alaska, but his obsession held him longer, long enough to write this beautiful, horrible book. I am glad that he did. This book transcends being about McCandless.
One does not look have to look far to find people laughing at McCandless, calling him an idiot, or worst of all – “He deserved to die.” Ironically, comments like these, which have been wrenching my heart, came out my own brother’s mouth. Though my brother is one to speak rashly, and flippantly about things, he said to me over the dinner table, after I explained the book rather briefly, that it sounded like McCandless was an “idiot”. We are very unalike. My brother sees the world in black and white. He believes something or he doesn’t, there are no grey areas in his life. It was at the dinner table this happened, and when I opened my mouth, clearly some sort of fury or defiance in my eyes, my mother gave me the don’t eyes, the drop-it eyes. Chances are my brother said it only to get a rise out of me, though I think he partly believed what he was saying. McCandless, as far as he was aware, as far as many people are aware, went into Alaska with almost no equipment, no food, and little idea on what he was going to do. He survived 114 days.
Literature is Dangerous
I’ve been unpacking my little late-night scrawl. I awoke in the morning thinking, “Why the hell did I write that? What does that even mean?” I put it down to trying to be clever, 2am delusions. But, I’ve thought about it, and I now stand by my past, tired self. I do not mean that literature is to blame for McCandless’ death, or any of the other people in the book that Krakauer tells us about. What I mean to say, I think, is that they were failed by literature. Literature is dangerous. Book burnings show how intimidating books can be. Rushdie’s six-million pound bounty for writing The Satanic Verses is a modern day testament to the power of books, and the consequences of writing. It’s interesting to think that just about anyone, the most malleable of teenagers, can read books by mad philosophers, to take fiction literally. McCandless loved Jack London, Tolstoy, Thoreau. Krakauer takes us on a jaunt in his own life, when, a year younger than McCandless was in Alaska, he nearly lost his life climbing the Devils Thumb. He admitted to be on a high from reading too much Nietzsche and Kerouac – as if these were factors of his journey. They were. They were for McCandless too. Each chapter of this book starts with a quote, many of which are highlighted quotes from the paperbacks found with McCandless’ body, and many of them mirror the existence the young man was striving for. So, in way, literature inspired McCandless, Krakauer too, into searching for more meaning in life, for something bigger than themselves. To quote Kerouac, “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” If that doesn’t make your heart swell with possibility, with ideas of escape, or living in fresh air and leaving behind this mundane 21st century life, then I don’t know what will. And if doesn’t, maybe that’s proof that terrifyingly, if I were less safe and secure in my home, if I lived in America, I could have been a McCandless, or a Krakauer, depending how lucky I was.
I’ve read a lot of Kerouac. I’m getting interested in spirituality, Buddhism, the soul, the nature world. Things that seem to steer me towards the life that the men in this book began striving for. Krakauer is impartial, though you can sense some to some degree a biased opinion, he is mostly removed from the book, leaving it entirely up to the reader to decide for themselves. He includes some of the comments he had, the negative, attacking ones. There are also arguments on my side of the fence: It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behaviour is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war: It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionary adaptive, a behaviour merely encoded in our genes. McCandless knew the risks, and Krakauer allows that he was arrogant too, he was unprepared, yes. His failings do not, cannot, outlive what McCandless was trying to do. A 24 year old man does not die to be remembered for his failings. At least, his words will be remembered.
It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.
Heroes in this Book
This book moved me so much is because of the parallels I have found, possibly projected, in McCandless. I am currently 23, just a year younger than he was. I have a love of literature, some say “obsessive” love, for literature. I am into the outdoors, I have been to many countries, I was in the scouts for most of my childhood, I adore camping and walking… I love the things that McCandless loves. And above all, I can imagine, as I have suggested, if I was less invested in my life here, I can picture myself doing something similar. Maybe not Alaska, and maybe not without supplies, or a map, but certainly walking out with grand (maybe naïve) ideas of transcendence found in the wilderness. Krakauer makes an important distinction: McCandless didn’t want to die, that much is clear from the S.O.S note. In the end, he must have known he was dying, which does pain me a little to admit that he was in that bus, dying, and he knew it. I won’t reveal all the heart-breaking notebook entries, but there are some which show that despite his situation, McCandless was happy. He had escaped civilisation; he was living a truer life than his hero, Jack London, even more than Tolstoy. They were hypocrites where McCandless wasn’t. He lived the life he wanted to live, he lived the life he chose to live. I couldn’t count the amount of people I know that I believe live lives of unfulfilled yearning. It is the most common thing in today’s society – with social media we constantly see lives that we think would be better, lives that we imagine for ourselves. Oh, to be more attractive. Oh, to be more famous. Oh, to be richer. We strive for lives that we can’t achieve, or else lives that we can’t be bothered to try and achieve. McCandless died with complete fulfilment in the life he wanted. He carved through the bullshit of life and reached the epicentre of his yearnings. His yearning was the death of him. But I dare say that he died having fulfilled himself, more than most of the people I know in my own life. Possibly, more than I will ever be able to fulfil my own life.
That is why I call the people in this book “Heroes.” The photo in this review is one of McCandless' final acts - one hand holding his final note toward the camera lens, the other raised in a brave, beatific farewell. Krakauer goes on to say this, of the photograph: But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours- because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down- it's not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God. Or as McCandless once wrote of himself in the third person, But his spirit is soaring....more
This is another brilliant book by Tartt. I guess I'm a big fan now. Her characters are always unbelievably developed, so that they 33rd book of 2020.
This is another brilliant book by Tartt. I guess I'm a big fan now. Her characters are always unbelievably developed, so that they become, well the opposite of unbelievably - wholly believable. I feel as if I know the characters, as I still know (as if personally) the characters from The Secret History.
I'm going to be a little Catch-22 now. This book is way longer than it needs to be, but I think by the end it was even too short, somehow. Some parts are completely irrelevant and probably should have been trimmed out, but I enjoyed them. The issue with Tartt is, she's such a brilliant writer. There are a few slips, but it's hardly noticeable when her books are so large. I've given this 4 stars for two reasons.
1. There were times where the plot didn't feel like it was moving, or Tartt was taking us down some side routes, the scenic route, when really I wanted the main route - the motorway.
2. I loved Harriet and Hely, honestly, especially Hely - but they don't compare to The Secret History - when Tartt gives us the mundane scenes like Harriet lying in bed or cutting out magazine pages, or cycling around, I just didn't find it as interesting personally as a load of guys my age drinking and smoking and talking about Greek mythology and love. That's just more my deal. However, this was a great novel, and I'm thoroughly looking forward to The Goldfinch....more
[20th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Dutch painter Hendrik Jan Wolter.]
A wonderfully written, philosophical novel by Camus, which Sartre call[20th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Dutch painter Hendrik Jan Wolter.]
A wonderfully written, philosophical novel by Camus, which Sartre called "the most beautiful and the least understood" of his books. The Steppenwolf of Camus, so to speak.
We move between Paris and Amsterdam. It is slightly disarming on opening the first page as the entire novel is addressed in the second-person. It is a series of dramatic-monologues by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who was a wealthy Parisian lawyer, before his "fall". It's the fall of man, but also the fall of this one man, whose turmoil is evident before our eyes.
[image] "The Oude Schans with the Montelbaanstoren in winter, Amsterdam"—no snow in the novel but this is my favourite Wolter of Amsterdam, so I decided to include it anyway.
Most of the present day happens in Amsterdam's Red-Light District, in a bar named "Mexico City". After a bit of research, I found that the bar did actually exist once in Amsterdam. As Clamence says, Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life — and hence its crimes — becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle. And so, the last circle of hell is the Red-Light District itself, where they frequently meet (they being Clamence and, well, "you"). Camus draws Amsterdam fittingly, it is grey, drizzly, foggy... Not the Amsterdam I remember from my own experience, which was bright, radiant with sunshine, and a relatively chirpy place.
[image] "The Amstel in winter, with the Amstel hotel and the Ceintuurbaanbrug in the distance; a view from the artist's studio"—circa 1914-1920
One of the flaws of the novel is its size; it is just shy of 100 pages and though not an easy or fast read by any measure, for its rather dense, I do wish it was longer. I don't want to try and delve into the philosophy of the book though, I think it's a novel one has to read themselves and, as Sartre said, I might have misunderstood it. A lot "happens" in the last 10 pages but until then it's quite a wandering narrative that doesn't bring much until its climax. It's not quite as good as some of Camus' other books, but still a stunning, poignant little (but long) read. I just have one Camus novel left to read now, his final, unfinished, The First Man.
A book that is really a mirror for all involved, those inside, those outside... Maybe all accusations are truly confessions....more
I am unsure where to begin. Firstly, I respect Miller and this 1-star rating feels horribly harsh for one of her novels – but it is134th book of 2020.
I am unsure where to begin. Firstly, I respect Miller and this 1-star rating feels horribly harsh for one of her novels – but it is, sadly, the only rating I can give it that holds true to my experience. It took me twice as long to read this as it did Ulysses. Somehow, I could have read Ulyssestwice in the time it took me to read this. It is a 333 page novel: it took me 2 months to read.
As I put it off for probably about thirty other books in the meantime, I couldn’t begin to understand why I disliked it so much. The more I read the harder it got, the writing became more irritating, and so did the novel in general. The text was simply impenetrable – I read no more than a page before dropping it, before even realising I’d dropped it. Not a good sign, for starters. Though the novel started well with Circe and her character’s backstory (a bit like Rhys giving Bertha a backstory in Wide Sargasso Sea), it quickly lost its charm. Any emotion that was drawn in the beginning, for there was, sympathy for Circe, soon vanished. The rest of the novel dragged with no emotion whatsoever. Circe was a husk; she was a wooden chess piece: even when she moved about, or did anything of worth, she was still a tiny wooden figure with no emotional value. I’m a sucker for Greek and Roman myth. I really enjoyed The Song of Achilles: the plot had a good rhythm, plenty happened, and the love between Achilles and Patroclus lay at the beating heart of the story. Which brings me to the fundamental problem with this novel.
Miller certainly challenged herself here and I respect her for that. Circe is banished to an island and spends most time alone – doing nothing – so how does one write a novel about that? It is like a stage, with Circe sat in the middle for the whole novel and characters coming and going all the time. The issue is (I discovered around 75% of the way in) that as a reader, I got the impression everything exciting and interesting was happening behind the curtain, off the sides. All these characters arrived to tell their stories… But why couldn’t I see them for myself? I cried. Why was I stuck here with this boring, moping, miserable woman? Even when Odysseus arrived with his men (which I presumed was going to be the saving grace of the story) I was bored, and realised not even he could bring any worth to the story. The last 50 pages, more stories were recounted, ones we knew already or ones we wished we had seen in the story’s ‘present’, but instead have some character telling them about it. The whole novel felt like sitting in a coffee shop whilst all your friends tell you all these amazing stories about a weekend away they’ve had when you were stuck at home with your grandma. They all say, “Then this happened! Then this! Oh, you had to be there.” On the island with Circe, we were not there, we were not anywhere, but the same depressing island where nothing truly happened.
And though the writing in The Song of Achilles was gentle and lovely, the writing here got tiresome. On page 306 alone these are all the mentions of how Circe is feeling is the same overdrawn way which in the end had no meaning to me whatsoever:
I felt as though I had slipped from a cliff. I was in the air, falling, with nothing to hold me. I bared my teeth I was breaking to pieces. I was a grey space filled up with nothing but air. One of us must grieve. I would not let it be him.
On a single page. This sums up the whole novel. Great exciting things happening elsewhere and Circe sitting about feeling sorry for herself, wanting to break apart, or run away, or sleep forever, or disappear, or cry her kidneys out, or sit on her lungs, or eat her heart, or knock her own teeth out, or rip her hair out, or rip her ears off, or jump off a cliff, or run into a wall, or hit her head on a table, or punch herself in the face, or stab herself, or throw herself into the fire, or be eaten by one of her own wolves, or drown, or be shot by a bolt of lightning, or be crushed by her collapsing house, or poison herself, or explode.
All in all this book tired me and frankly I’m glad it’s over. Miller tried something difficult here and it didn’t pay off. But, on the other hand, for my 1-star review, there are ten 5-star reviews, so who knows? I’m hoping in my next few books I’m there at that party and not having my cool friends constantly telling me what I missed out on....more
[10th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Ecuadorian painter and sculptor Oswaldo Guayasamín.]
A beautiful novel that shouldn’t be beautiful. Flore[10th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Ecuadorian painter and sculptor Oswaldo Guayasamín.]
A beautiful novel that shouldn’t be beautiful. Florentino is an obsessed, and, essentially, creepy, lover who oversteps many boundaries, and yet Marquez draws us into his web and we feel for him as some end up feeling for Humbert Humbert. Without the magic realism I adored in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez tackles the theme of love, unrequited, fulfilled, false love, real love, innocent and not. These are themes that have been done over and over, perhaps almost as long as stories have been told… But Marquez’s novel is a rather original beast.
[image] "El Grito No.3"—1983
It is a “slow” novel: dialogue throughout the four-hundred pages is sparse, the paragraphs long, the sentences long and the prose dense, brimming with evocative language. It’s really a book about a love triangle. The structure is done cleverly, so as a reader we are drawn to sympathising with a certain character, and then we see them in a new light, and then we are tricked into liking them again. There are qualities of Florentino that are not morally ambiguous, they are wrong: and yet, Marquez leads us inevitably towards liking them. I wonder if one of the hardest things in novel writing is making a character who should be unlikeable, likeable. As for the story itself, it’s hard to comment. There are not many pivotal moments, nor does it race on with any feverish energy; it floats in and out of moments, moving forwards and backwards in time and even in the passages where my interest waned, Marquez’s language kept me involved. The world is incredibly drawn, and probably my favourite part of the world within this novel is not all the stunning descriptions, but the mentions of Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad as characters who interact with the characters of the novel, some, if only briefly, or mentioned in passing.
[image] "Ternura"—1989
Florentino’s character is not one easily forgotten: his violin serenades, his love letters, his desperation, his wounded heart, his obsessions, his jealousy, his self-loathing, his patience and his dedication to love… He is a flawed character but I think everyone can relate to a single side of his multifaceted self. I said it shouldn’t be beautiful, and I mean it: I can still picture the bodies of cholera victims floating in the rivers, the underwhelming and shockingly real sex portrayed in the book, the ruminations of life and death, and love, the sickness, and as with One Hundred Years of Solitude, the vertigo Marquez creates by the unrelenting passing of time; and yet, in the end, it ends beautifully, shockingly so, for a novel so full of time, love, death, and cholera—though the latter’s importance isn’t realised until the end.
63rd book of 2021. Artist for this review is American painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910).
Finally got around to reading it. As style goes, it was what I63rd book of 2021. Artist for this review is American painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910).
Finally got around to reading it. As style goes, it was what I was expecting, and what I'd heard—fragmented. There are some key events in the characters' lives that the plot sort of whirlpools around, sometimes churning closely, other times not. We dip into the lives of Sethe, her daughter Denver, Paul D, the grandma (Baby Suggs) and by dipping in those heads, we really do: Morrison does a lot of without-overture head-hopping, time-shifts. Sometimes, particularly at the beginning of chapters, it takes a few lines, even pages, to climatise to the new part of the story, whether we are in the past, or the present, and from whose eyes we are looking. The beginning of the novel requires a fair amount of concentration, but after that it gets easier. I think you could say the same with most books, to varying degrees.
[image] "The Cotton Pickers"—1876
The majority of the book takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873. Sethe and her daughter Denver are living at 124. I was surprised by how supernatural the novel really was; though I was aware of the general plot, namely the haunting, I didn't expect it to be portrayed as it was. On finishing, it wasn't actually the writing, or even the plot, that affected me the most, but the structure; Morrison's structure is genius, and this novel reaches new levels purely because of the whirlpools raging in the pages. Things aren't always clear, but with enough patience, we come to understand before the end. I would say that Beloved is really hinged on a single event from Sethe's past, linked, of course, with her baby. I found Paul D's bits quite interesting and wished he had slightly more time in the novel. At times the novel feels a little creepy, but never more than that. One sweet moment is Sethe, Paul D and Denver attending a carnival together, and so this Homer painting is very apt for that.
[image] "Dressing for the Carnival"—1877
It is well-written, thoughtful, and violent. I'm glad I finally read it. That's all I can say for now, I'm finding it hard to review such an important, messy (but really constructed) novel about a woman and her love for her children....more
The other day, sunshine in the garden, my mother said to me (genuinely astounded in tone), "How do you enjoy every book you read?" 95th book of 2020.
The other day, sunshine in the garden, my mother said to me (genuinely astounded in tone), "How do you enjoy every book you read?" It was a true question from her, because over my many, many recommendations she never says much other than "It was alright." Or her favourite, which she says about almost every book she's ever read: "I didn't like the ending."
This is all relevant to my point. The point is now: I like most books, in fact, I thoroughly enjoy most books I read. Now, that is partly because I read mostly classics and enjoy classics, I read mostly 20th century books because I get a kick out of it. The blurb of The Overstory thrilled me. It sounds incredible.
An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.
Right up my street. This is the blurb to Part 1 of the book, which, whilst reading, I was thinking this book was going to be a five star read, and not only that, but in my favourites. Add almost every other review floating around of this being five stars also... Well, I was invested. That changes.
Orwell once said, "Nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad.” And that is just the issue with political books, of any persuasion. They are hard to do. I've seen some pretty good attempts. I'd say 1984 is a fantastic example. The remainder of this book became heavy-handed and clumsy. Or, let me put it better.
Now, that was a tiresome way of simply saying clumsy. In fact, you probably skimmed it. Well, that's Overstory for you. That's exactly how tiresome and skim-able some parts are. Another example.
I am currently doing an MA in Creative Writing. I am not saying I can write as well as Powers, or even do a better job. I won't fault the language in this, which was beautiful at times, especially in the brilliant first Part. The other day my lecturer and I had a Zoom call about a certain scene he was reviewing for me. In the said scene I have a character in her room late at night, her boyfriend is asleep beside her, and she is watching another man (an artist) being interviewed on television. The scene I wrote it mostly the dialogue between the interviewer and the artist on the television. My lecturer said that what they were saying was interesting (phew, I thought) but not interesting at the same time (oh). The issue is, he said, that the characters are what the reader cares about. At the end of the day however interesting the words are, it isn't fun to read about two people who aren't even 'present' in the story-world, on the screen. He said that instead, I should be going into my female character and exploring what she is thinking. Is she reflecting on her day whilst idling watching telly? Does the telly cause her to have an epiphany? So, I thought that was fine advice. A few weeks later, here I am reading Overstory, and I am astounded that in a political piece of fiction, Powers has decided to literally write protests and speeches into them. The incredible characters and backgrounds and ties to the world of nature in Part I are gone, and instead they become cardboard cut-outs blurting out whatever message he wanted to convey in this novel. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't long. My argument to my lecturer was, well it's only a few pages of the interview- surely I could get away with it? Powers has his characters up a tree for almost 100 pages. There is no going into them, their childhoods, their aspirations. At one point they do a questionnaire, up a tree. Unbelievably on-the-nose.
The worst part, still, is the plot. From the incredible, almost magic-realist like start it turned into stupid happenings and borderline stupid writing. From being in awe of Powers, I was rolling my eyes at him. I'd say that someone else wrote Part I, or someone else wrote everything else. But not only was the plot stupid but aimless; I couldn't even work out what the end goal was. I might have been able to sit through 100 pages of protests if he had set up something wonderful and exciting for the end of the novel, but he didn't. It was a metaphor collapsing in on itself: just wandering around in the forest, lost, tired, and wanting to get home and leave it all behind. So the characters were gone, reduced to boring floating mouths (essentially), the plot was like wandering around some overgrown maze and the story was ridiculous, and boring.
And once finishing the book, the message seemed... pointless? Lost? Even after 100 pages of literal protests I'm not sure what the message was. There were so many characters saying things like this: "O Humans are beautiful but stupid," or, "Don't they realise how much we need trees?" I'm a lover of nature, but even people who aren't know, by now, that trees are important? Calling humans stupid but beautiful every 20 pages means nothing to me. The whole thing was confusing and boring.
To conclude on a slightly positive note - read the first Part, Roots. Honestly, it is gentle, fascinating, the characters are brilliant, and the writing is wonderful. After that, don't get beat around the head with protests about trees, it isn't worth it. I trust that you know that trees give us oxygen. Oxygen is important. Trees are pretty. Humans are stupid. Job done. ...more
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