That's a completely nostalgic four stars of course. Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as joThat's a completely nostalgic four stars of course. Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as jolly Jack and his tales of merry misogynism? But like Bob Dylan says
While riding on a train goin’ west I fell asleep for to take my rest I dreamed a dream that made me sad Concerning myself and the first few friends I had
With half-damp eyes I stared to the room Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon Where we together weathered many a storm Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn
With haunted hearts through the heat and cold We never thought we could ever get old We thought we could sit forever in fun But our chances really was a million to one
As easy it was to tell black from white It was all that easy to tell wrong from right And our choices were few and the thought never hit That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split
Well that was me and my pals. I know where each of them are to this day, but we don't see each other. The choices multiplied and it became no longer easy to tell black from white. Back then we built a whole galaxy of heroes up from wild trips to the art house cinema to quarry Bergman or Pasolini from the granite cliffs of existentialism, or raids on libraries and second hand bookshops when we got to hear first about Kerouac and Kesey, not to mention Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, not to mention Emily Dickinson and Captain Beefheart and folk music and Alan Lomax and Alan Watts and John Fahey and Buffy Sainte-Marie. In those days every discovery hit like an express train and every bookshelf held high explosives. Life is not lived at that intensity for too many years. So forgive me for my four stars for Kerouac, the old bum, the old broke down disgraced beat with his typing not writing and every other reviewer on this site liking to put the boot in, and justified too, really, they're not good books - would I recommed any young person with any marbles to read nearly the whole of Kerouac's pile of typing as I myself did? NO!! Read almost anything BUT Kerouac! But my half damp eyes are staring back to that room. It was on Willow Road in Carlton. You can find it on Google Earth but some other people live there now. ...more
You couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now. Well, okay, I'd probably do it for £200. Alright, £100. Cash.
Kerouac took over from Steinbeck asYou couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now. Well, okay, I'd probably do it for £200. Alright, £100. Cash.
Kerouac took over from Steinbeck as the guy I had to read everything by when I was a young person. Steinbeck himself took over from Ray Bradbury. All three American males with a sentimental streak as wide as the Rio Grande.
Whole thing nearly turned me into a weepy hitchhiker who plays saxophone while he waits for a ride, then gets abducted by aliens who are these very kind blue globes, I know it sounds crazy, blue globes, right, & who take him back to 1922 where he persuades the boss of the local fruit farm syndicate to double the workers' wages and build a school. ...more
made me think that some of these ratings we give to books that we read when we were young and far more delightful than we are now are a little suspect and really nostalgic. I discuss the problem of re-reading a youthful favourite in my review on Something Wicked This Way Comes; but now I wonder if goodreads should have a "read so long ago this rating is probably meaningless" icon we could add. ...more
The title of this novel is only 50% accurate, a very poor effort. Yes, it’s about men, but there’s little or nothing about mice in these pages. Mice eThe title of this novel is only 50% accurate, a very poor effort. Yes, it’s about men, but there’s little or nothing about mice in these pages. Mice enthusiasts will come away disappointed. This got me thinking about other novel titles. You would have to say that such books as The Slap, The Help, The Great Gatsby, Gangsta Granny, Mrs Dalloway and Hamlet have very good titles because they are all about a slap, some help, a Gatsby who was really great, a no good granny, a woman who was married to a guy called Dalloway and a Hamlet. I have no problem with those titles. But you may be poring over the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird for a long fruitless evening to find any mockingbirds coming to any harm at all. Indeed, to coin a phrase, no mockingbirds were harmed during the making of that book. So I rate that title only 5% accurate. And some titles seem to have a word missing, such as Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Four what? It doesn’t say. Perhaps he completed the book and left the title to the very last minute and died as he was writing it down. Same thing with The Crimson Petal and the White. White what? Wallpaper? Hat? Cat? Mouse? Mockingbird? Could be The Crimson Petal and the White Gangsta Granny for all we know. A poor title. And what about The Dharma Bums? I think a Cigarette or You Out is clearly missing from that title. Another grossly misleading title is Women in Love . I can’t be the only reader who was expecting some strong girl on girl action from DH Lawrence but I would have been better off fast-forwarding to the middle part of Mulholland Drive. Now that’s what I call Women in Love. DH, take note. Another badly chosen title is Hitler’s Niece - yes, it is 100% accurate, but at first glance it can look like Hitler’s Nice, and surely that is going to put off a lot of potential readers (except for the readers you really don’t want).
And what about Call it Sleep? – call what sleep?
The Catcher in the Rye, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Flaubert’s Parrot, The Camomile Lawn – sometimes obscure titles can be solved if you understand that the author is referring to Death, so, the Catcher is Death, the Postman is Death, the lawn is Death and the Parrot is Death. Of course, I may have got that wrong. It’s something I read somewhere and it just stuck in my mind.
Some other titles I would give low ratings to :
The Turn of the Screw completely baffled me – I know that “screw” is what inmates call prison officers, so I was expecting a story about a concert put on by the staff of a large correctional institution. It was nothing like that.
The Little Prince according to my system does rate 100% but I still think The Little Faux-naif Idiot would have been better.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – actually, I rate this as 90% accurate – there are two guys who are named Kavalier and Clay, and they do have adventures, but they aren’t amazing.
A Clockwork Orange – this must be a metaphor for “I have given up thinking of a title for my novel”
No Name – like A Clockwork Orange this must be where the author couldn’t think of any title so in this case he left it without one, like the Byrds’ album Untitled, or () by Sigur Ros, or several paintings by De Kooning and those other abstract expressionist types; but to call a novel No Name is self-defeating, because No Name then becomes its name – epic fail, Mr Collins.
The Violent Bear it Away - this is another example of a word missing - possibly "took" or "dragged", I expect that's the sort of thing a violent bear would do I’m surprised the publisher did not catch this error.
In 1960 Anthony Burgess was 43 and had written 4 novels and had a proper job teaching in the British Colonial Service in Malaya and Brunei. Then he haIn 1960 Anthony Burgess was 43 and had written 4 novels and had a proper job teaching in the British Colonial Service in Malaya and Brunei. Then he had a collapse and the story gets complicated. But I like the first cool version AB told, which was that he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and given a year to live. Since as you know he lived a further 33 years, we may conclude the doctors were not entirely correct. However - the doctor tells you you have a year to live - what do you do?* Lapse into a major depression? Get drunk and stay drunk? Buy a Harley davidson? Not if you were Anthony Burgess. Uxorious regard for his wife's future security bade him to place his arse on a chair in the unpleasing English seaside town of Hove and type out five and a half novels in the one year left to him, which, he later pointed out, was approximately equivalent to E M Forster's entire lifetime output. And the last of these five completed novels was A Clockwork Orange.
No mean feat.
So, this little novel should be on everyone who hasn't read it's must read list. It's a real hoot, and it's absolutely eerie in its predictions about youth culture and recreational drug use. It's also very famous for its hilarious language, all those malenky droogs, horrorshow devotchkas and gullivers and lashings of the old in-out in-out - the reader must be warned that it's very catching and you will for sure begin boring all your friends and family about tolchocking the millicents and creeching on your platties and suchlike. They'll give you frosty looks and begin avoiding you at the breakfast table, but you won't be able to help it. In extreme cases they might smeck your grazhny yarbles and that will definately shut you up.
* Reminds me of the old joke where the doctor says to the guy "I'm sorry to say you only have three minutes to live." Guy says "Isn't there anything you can do for me?" Doctor says "I could boil you an egg."...more
Philip Roth is a sexist pig. Who can argue about that? When he drags his mind off his wilting member for a week or so he produces Operation Shylock whPhilip Roth is a sexist pig. Who can argue about that? When he drags his mind off his wilting member for a week or so he produces Operation Shylock which is a minor masterpiece. But that was just a vacation. For years now he just rewrites the same story where some old geezer (himself) fantasises about shagging some young bird and then - just like life - gets to shag her. Bah. What a pig....more
I've said so many rude things about Philip Roth here, you know, what a sexist fucker he is, just the standard stuff, nothing surprising. He had been pretty expert in getting my goat. I waded through Americal pastoral and Sabbath's Theatre, great god almighty what crap. Oh yes, he can turn a rare sentence & make the English language dance like a five ball juggler, he's annoyingly brilliant at that. Pity he can't think of a half-decent story with some humanity about it. But here is the book that reveals the diamond geezer beneath the penis. If you haven't read Operation Shylock, then let me say this is the rothophobe's Roth. It's a complete hoot. The definition of a hoot is : a good time to be had by all. The general idea of this bonkers novel is that Philip Roth is reading the New York Times one day and is disturbed to find out that he's been on a speaking tour of Israel all that very month. Of course he's been in New York the whole time. It turns out there's someone impersonating him running around Israel preaching a crazy idea called Diasporism. This idea goes something like : "Jews! Get out of Israel now! Are you crazy, coming here to Israel? Now you're all in one handy small country, surrounded by your enemies, what do you think's gonna happen? Get back to Germany and Poland! They're the safest places for Jews now! Go on, skedaddle! Now!" So Philip Roth gets on a plane to track down the other Philip Roth and much hilarity ensues. Yes, it's a black comedy. What other types are worth reading? Are there any white comedies? Five big stars....more
I'm sad tonight - I just checked and I've run out of one-star-rated books to review. I've had my fun with all the really dreadful barrel-scrapings I'vI'm sad tonight - I just checked and I've run out of one-star-rated books to review. I've had my fun with all the really dreadful barrel-scrapings I've read over the years, and now I have to move into the two-star category. Which isn't half as amusing. Because now I have to be all wisely judging well on the one hand this, and the other hand that, you know, blah blah. So anyway, Philip The Roth. I need to explain that I went through this phase where a certain particular person (I will refer to the person as a person, the word bears no undertone of resentment nor yet intimates ill-disguised hostility) gave me to understand that Philip Roth was to literature as "We Are The World" was to the starving millions. So I read a whole heap. And I was not convinced. In fact I may say I was the opposite of convinced. I was unvinced. I was devinced.
I will say that occasionally, like every 120 pages in a long long book, you get a pretty good laugh from Sabbath's Theater, always ALWAYS of the O MY GOD that's so disgusting variety or the pages-of-spewed-forth-insults variety. That's not bad, I guess. I was going to say that's more than you get from The Bible. But actually, that's exactly what you get from the Bible. O my God that's so disgusting followed some time later by pages of hideous insults. There you go. ...more
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