So besides The God Delusion I read some books on all the trains we took around England this holiday that weren't recommended by Ian McEwan (it should have warned me, that pompous little blurb on the cover - hardly a sentence and still a stilted narrative voice) and hence were much less annoying.
One of them was Hangman's Holiday by Dorothy Sayers, and I love the woman disproportionately, but meh. She needs a novel to get one of her stories across, she needs that much space; the Montague Egg stories were cool and then they were over, all of a sudden. Ugh. Frustrating. Skip it. Read Gaudy Night. And then read it again. Oh, Gaudy Night. One of those books that makes me want to beat myself on the head until I forget it so I can discover it all over again. Is it mystery? Is it romance? Is it an academic novel? A mysancedemic novel? Fucking rocks, whatever it is.
I read Lord Jim too. That was keen. The end wasn't satisfying in terms of the action of it and compared to Heart of Darkness Marlowe sounded like a bit too much of an old salt to me. But then I trust Joseph Conrad enough to accept that Marlowe was probably older and saltier than anyone I've ever known. Also Marlowe needed to be older and saltier here than in Heart of Darkness, because he was in the story; he drove the action to a higher degree, and we needed to understand why he would want to help Jim after Jim's episode of cowardice. Oh, the exposition of how Jim came apart to that act of cowardice - so extended, but so good, so understandable, and so confusing in how easy it is to understand! Fuck, I love Joseph Conrad. He seems to be taking his time but there's not a word on the page wasted.
There were a couple of others but it's work time now.
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