![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Your Own Personal Wednesday
Apr. 18th, 2018 09:40 amWhat I've Finished Reading
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal falls off a little when it turns into a Comedy Stereotype Mysteries of the East sex adventure, and even more when Josh and Biff return to Galilee and start rounding up disciples, but overall I still liked it. It was enjoyable enough to make me think I should read another book by Moore. Bloodsucking Fiends looks promising.
What I'm Reading Now
I probably shouldn't have read this back to back with Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son, because now poor Norm is looking awfully dull by comparison. The first thirty or so pages are so pale and non-controversial they could have been produced by a Catholic Missal Co. for juvenile instruction - just slap on a yellow cover and some Easter-egg watercolors and you're good to go. Things pick up a little when the Devil shows up to monologue about how Yahweh's problems all stem from sexual frustration, but not nearly as much as you'd hope. It's hard to say what function the first-person narration serves here; this Yeshua is neither incisive nor strange. He claims Matthew and the rest of the crew got it wrong, but so far there's not much evidence that they did. What's the point of audacity if you're not actually going to bother being audacious, Mailer? Maybe he was just tired. Maybe this will be the inverse of Biff, with a weak start and a strong finish. We'll see!
Also reading: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, and Facial Justice by L. P. Hartley. Saturday Night is a sort of breezy-sad story of a young guy who gets his married girlfriend pregnant. At present he's running around looking for someone who will tell him how to get an abortion. His aunt, whom he was sure had all the worldly knowledge anyone could want, told him to draw a hot bath and have her drink too much gin, a folk remedy which will almost certainly not work at all. Facial Justice is about a post-apocalyptic society in which people are encouraged to get their faces surgically altered to a generic standard, to cut down on envy, like a wry British YA dystopia.
What I Plan to Read Next
Next up in 99 Novels is either The Mansion by Wm. Faulkner or more C.P. Snow. I owe Mr. Snow a kind word or two.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal falls off a little when it turns into a Comedy Stereotype Mysteries of the East sex adventure, and even more when Josh and Biff return to Galilee and start rounding up disciples, but overall I still liked it. It was enjoyable enough to make me think I should read another book by Moore. Bloodsucking Fiends looks promising.
What I'm Reading Now
I probably shouldn't have read this back to back with Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son, because now poor Norm is looking awfully dull by comparison. The first thirty or so pages are so pale and non-controversial they could have been produced by a Catholic Missal Co. for juvenile instruction - just slap on a yellow cover and some Easter-egg watercolors and you're good to go. Things pick up a little when the Devil shows up to monologue about how Yahweh's problems all stem from sexual frustration, but not nearly as much as you'd hope. It's hard to say what function the first-person narration serves here; this Yeshua is neither incisive nor strange. He claims Matthew and the rest of the crew got it wrong, but so far there's not much evidence that they did. What's the point of audacity if you're not actually going to bother being audacious, Mailer? Maybe he was just tired. Maybe this will be the inverse of Biff, with a weak start and a strong finish. We'll see!
Also reading: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, and Facial Justice by L. P. Hartley. Saturday Night is a sort of breezy-sad story of a young guy who gets his married girlfriend pregnant. At present he's running around looking for someone who will tell him how to get an abortion. His aunt, whom he was sure had all the worldly knowledge anyone could want, told him to draw a hot bath and have her drink too much gin, a folk remedy which will almost certainly not work at all. Facial Justice is about a post-apocalyptic society in which people are encouraged to get their faces surgically altered to a generic standard, to cut down on envy, like a wry British YA dystopia.
What I Plan to Read Next
Next up in 99 Novels is either The Mansion by Wm. Faulkner or more C.P. Snow. I owe Mr. Snow a kind word or two.
