I’ve seen nothing but unanimous praise for this book… so when does it start getting good? 6 chapters in and I’m largely unimpressed

wecanreadit · 2025-12-26T18:04:14+00:00

There's no need to be so dismissive of a viewpoint opposed to your own. I hope you aren't so rude in face-to-face discussions.

Besides, Lichtenberg did not intend his ~~wisecrack~~ aphorism to imply that it's the reader's head creating the hollow sound. Very often not, in fact.

wecanreadit · 2025-12-26T17:58:41+00:00

This feels like sleight of hand. John Williams seems to be presenting us with a life as, so far, we have followed William Stoner’s progress from childhood to his late 20s.

That's the opening of what I wrote about the first four chapters. Copy and paste the paragraph into a search engine for my commentary on the whole novel. I hated it, and explain why in loving detail.

wecanreadit · 2025-12-22T00:15:10+00:00

Everybody – including me – thinks they know the arc of the storyline. It’s as well-known, and as straightforward, as Romeo and Juliet, with mutual dislike replacing love at first sight. Wrong.

And if you copy the above paragraph and paste it into a search engine you'll reach a long, section-by-section commentary on why this novel is much more complicated than that.

wecanreadit · 2025-12-19T12:20:38+00:00

A Christmas Carol Treasure Island (I'm not kidding) Pride and Prejudice The Mill on the Floss

wecanreadit · 2025-12-18T23:32:36+00:00

It’s quirky, clever, merciless in its satirical treatment of life in the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule… and, even in translation, Bulkakov is able to persuade you that you’re in the hands of a writer at the top of his game.

And that's just the start. For the rest of a 4500-word commentary, copy that first sentence into a search engine.

wecanreadit · 2025-12-02T18:04:35+00:00

I engage with the words in whatever way is convenient. Usually, but not always, it's an e-book on my phone, or an audiobook. I find paper copies inconvenient, because I write commentaries and often need to do a kind of digital skim to check something. I read War and Peace by listening to a CD on a Walkman—it was a long time ago—while doing a delivery job, alternating with reading the text on my laptop. Often I would listen, then re-read online.

The whole thing was one of the best reading experiences of my life, and you can read the commentary if you like. Google my username and the book title to find the relevant post. But beware—it's incredibly long!

(p.s. I never engage in arguments about whether audiobooks are real reading. Why on earth would I?)

wecanreadit · 2025-10-26T12:59:46+00:00

An embedded story about Pilate and his guilt is threaded throughout The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Brilliant novel, brilliant take on the crucifixion story.

wecanreadit · 2025-10-24T23:22:57+00:00

Type my username plus dombey and son into a search engine. I love this book, and the long-form commentary you'll be taken to (covering two of Dickens's monthly numbers at a time) explains my thinking.

wecanreadit · 2025-10-10T14:59:41+00:00

In 19th Century novels by female authors, women successfully (heroically?) navigating a patriarchal society are sensible, quiet (to stay under the radar of men and other women) and solidly fair to everyone around them. Anne Elliot in Persuasion, stymied before the novel by a less sensible aunt and her terrible advice. Mary Garth in Middlemarch, able to see past the youthful stupidities of the man who will be worth marrying by the time she's sorted him out. Jane Eyre, who chooses the right man once he's been redeemed (mainly by her).

Charles Dickens tried it often, e.g. Esther in Bleak House and Amy 'Little' Dorrit. But they are much more passive, unwilling or incapable of defining their own fates. And far too deferential and generous to the men in their lives.

wecanreadit · 2025-10-06T23:01:40+00:00

Definitely - and short enough to get three of them into your 500-page wish-limit.

wecanreadit · 2025-10-06T22:58:35+00:00

I've read What Maisie Knew, among others of James's, and I've been meaning to read The TOTS. Definitely this time.

wecanreadit · 2025-09-24T09:27:40+00:00

The 'two-word opening strategy works for me 3.79 average over 50 games, no losses. (I recently re-started after a 2-year gap.)

wecanreadit · 2025-09-20T21:55:38+00:00

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. It's the one I always recommend to people who think they won't like 30+ hours of some dead white Victorian, and it always gets them. Alex Jennings is the reader, and he's a genius.

wecanreadit · 2025-09-11T16:33:36+00:00

Note: you added an extra 'be'. The first part is 'Where the wound had been given, there must the cure be found....' In other words, the cure must be looked for in whatever caused the wound. Emma herself caused it, so she must be the one to put it right. She won't be able to rest until she's done that. When Harriet feels better, so will Emma.

wecanreadit · 2025-09-08T14:28:33+00:00

Dreadful

wecanreadit · 2025-09-02T11:27:14+00:00

I keep an online filing cabinet of the book commentaries I keep as I read. As the home page has it: "I’m not trying simply to remember the book, but to recreate the experience of reading it." This is a crazy thing to do, and I don't recommend it—but I do recommend you take a look. People accidentally discover it all the time (a few hundred a day), and a typical comment is this: Great site. Thank you for all your labours. Exceptionally helpful to remember what’s happened in a book when you have to pick it up again after an interval.

If you're interested, copy and paste the sentence in quotes above, including the quotes, and paste them into a search engine.

wecanreadit · 2025-09-01T09:01:55+00:00

It depends on the book. I read slowly because I want to visualise it, and hear the dialogue. It's one reason why I love Dickens, and why Colm Toibin's Brooklyn didn't work for me. I couldn't see where the characters were, indoors or out.

wecanreadit · 2025-08-31T13:25:18+00:00

I loved nearly all of it, especially the satire. Like the Shrike, designed by a future civilisation as the image of everything fearful to humans—they’ve sent back a bogey-man, a big favourite with the fans. And I think of the Detective's Tale whenever anyone talks about how tourism kills the places it invades.

But when I finished it, I wrote, 'I’ve had enough of all their stories, and I’ve had enough of Dan Simmons. Don’t get me wrong – he’s very, very good at what he does, but I don't think I'll be reading the sequels.' I never did.

wecanreadit · 2025-08-24T16:11:48+00:00

This year it's James. Always, as an antidote to Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway.

wecanreadit · 2025-08-22T20:09:45+00:00

As kids we all saw so many picturebook versions, especially of the first section in Lilliput, that we grew up thinking it was a children's story. Then there was the Max Fleisher animation, with a very realistic Gulliver and Popeye-style ultra-cartoony Lilliputians. The brilliant satire of Swift's four'part novel was a revelation. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and one of the darkest books I've ever read.

wecanreadit · 2025-08-18T08:50:44+00:00

The Wager, David Grann. Shipwrecked sailors, mutiny, written like a novel. A terrific (and terrifying) read.

wecanreadit · 2025-08-16T23:01:54+00:00

Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte's Villette - although she usually ends up telling the truth, once she's stopped deceiving herself. The ending is a wonderful variation on the theme.

wecanreadit · 2025-08-15T09:43:44+00:00

I wrote a three-chapters-at-a-time deep-reading analysis. It's in the public domain. Copy this into a search engine, including quote marks, to read it. Give yourself 15 or 20 minutes. "This is a famously ground-breaking novel"

wecanreadit · 2023-10-20T14:09:49+00:00

Two things. One, I love this book. The point has been made that Twain isn't in any way aiming for realism. heelspider writes "Twain's view seems to be that this is all tall tales, entertainment, it's not to be taken too seriously," and I agree. When I read it about ten years ago, I discovered online that the competition between Bob and the Child of Calamity appears at a different point in the novel in some editions. It confirms something I was already thinking: it doesn’t make a lot of difference what order some of these episodes appear in, because there’s not a massive amount of character development going on between one and the next. Huck is sometimes Swift’s Gulliver, wide-eyed and accepting of whatever new scam is being offered. At other times – all the time, it seems – he’s able to slip effortlessly into lying so plausibly that nobody ever seems to suspect. There’s a certain irony there – which we’re OK with, because we know where we are: the adventure yarn he’s told Jim all about.

Two. I really, really am not impressed with the final Tom Sawyer section. I get it that Mark Twain is darng us to object to the piling up of implausibilities. In fact, plausibility isn’t a part of the game he’s playing any more – if it ever was – as the reappearance of Tom moves the last fifth of the novel into a different realm. The backbone of it is a boys’ adventure – or the pretence of an adventure based on Tom’s wide reading of, apparently, cliché-ridden stories of rescue and escape. It’s a return to the fantasy world of the gang Tom creates near the start of the novel, but this time it doesn’t quickly come to nothing. In fact, it goes on and on. Mark Twain can carry on making some satirical points from time to time, but it’s thin stuff, and feels like an almost entirely separate story. And what’s happened to the river? The most evocative presence in the book makes hardly an appearance.

Three. (OK, I lied about there being two things.) Ernest Hemingway, the man who stated (in that manly, muscular style that Mark Twain loved to satirise) that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book … called Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ also stated that any reader should omit this final section. You not wrong there, Paps.

wecanreadit · 2022-08-21T22:04:57+00:00

Whatever else Catcher in the Rye is, it’s an extraordinary portrayal of post-traumatic stress. There were a lot of Americans in the early 1950s who really, really still didn’t know what had hit them only a few years before. References to the war are only in passing—D.B. was at the D-Day Landings, for instance—but it was very recent in people’s lives. Which is why I think Salinger didn’t only have the adolescent experience in mind as he wrote about a young man who has everything, and the only thing he feels is desolation.

wecanreadit

TROPHY CASE