Fiction:
Back on the Beckett [First Love, The End, The Calmative and all his other shorts - yes, short shorts] because I can’t not read the funny-Gaeli-fucker without getting wry-humour-withdrawal-syndrome. He is a cure and the symptom but mostly the Calmative.
Finished The Reluctant Fundamentalist the other day and found it somewhat…reluctant. Reluctant to tell a parable when, in fact, it only needed a parable-length piece. Not a flouncy, full-blown mildly entertaining novel-sized conversation piece. It isn’t ‘exciting’ nor ‘tense and gripping to the end’ as the back would have you believe but it does have its merits in exploring enchantment and disillusion but it’s not – as the front would have you believe – as religiously interesting as it should be.
Also started Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. Too early to say, but thus far – intriguing, most intriguing.
Non-fiction:
Mapping Michel Serre – various
The Novelist at the Crossroads – David Lodge [poor Lodge, in the 60s, he loved a good bit of Modernism and then in this - '71, I think - he tells us Modernism was dead end...poor, poor disillusioned chap now writes pretty boring , exceptionally middle-class novels about academics who think about sex when they should be thinking about philosophy..uuuurrrrggh]
On the comics front:
-Picked up M.O.D.O.K Dark Reign, issue 1 ’cause it looked hilarious and it is hilarious, if only for the bus ride half-drunk geek-fest that it was
-Started on the entirety of Bone that I picked up some time ago. We shall see. thus far, I’m not convinced why everyone loves it so but I’m only two chapters in and what do I know?
[re-posted from Whitechapel = yep. I am that busy.]
