*Disclaimer: at the time of writing this review, I have not finished reading this book, and may never do so.
E M Forster wrote Where Angels Fear to Tread at the age of twenty-six. I read it aged twenty-seven, and keenly did I feel the stinging rebuke of having squandered my young life. This, the follow-up, written when Forster was twenty-eight, has been restorative of my self-esteem to say the least.
Continue reading The Longest Journey
Mr Hemingway and I have a strange relationship, and I can only attribute it to the fact that the experience of reading a Hemingway book is, for me, unlike the experience of reading any other book.
For starters, a Hemingway narrative has a very particular rhythm which is not the rhythm of other narratives. To put it baldly, it starts off boring, or at least I find it boring. And it stays boring for a while. On top of that, the book starts in the middle of the narrative and doesn’t explain who some or all of the characters are, or their relationships, or where they are, or what they’re supposed to be doing.
Warning: this post contains spoilers. By spoilers, I mean it contains information about the contents of the book I am about to review. Just how you’re meant to review a book without doing that is not exactly clear to me.
This is the first of what I hope will be at least three book reviews to be posted on this blog. There were no criteria applied in the selection of the book; I saw the First Tuesday special on monsters, in which this book was mentioned, thought, “I haven’t read that”, and bought it at the Co-op for the bargain price of $9.05.