pophead2k wrote:I'm on to Underworld by DeLillo. I'm about 100 pages in and I can't say I love it yet, but I've got 735 more pages in front of me to change my mind.
But aren't the first 100 the best? As I understand it, the baseball game is meant to be the outstanding element of the book. I have it on the shelf, awaiting a spare 6 months.
Took a break from the 12 month effort of
Against The Day [holiday would have been a good time to read it, but too damned heavy to travel with] to read J M Coetzee's
Youth (on the list, though I've had it waiting on the shelf a while), a very entertaining account of a would be great writer coming from South Africa to London in the 1960s and his general disillusion and failure to get anywhere - great picture of mid-60s London.
I then got onto my first Haruki Murakami title,
Dance Dance Dance. It's fun, though it's hard to be sure how successfully the translation nails the tone of the originally. To this British reader, it seems to be too much in the American vernacular. The cover makes refs to Raymond Chandler, so is it essential that it uses a hard-boiled US style? For me it often jars, but it's still an enjoyable read. Quite bizarre, but interesting with it. It isn't one of the 4 of his on the list, though. Anyone here read him? One thing that drove me mad was in the utterly weird scene involving Sheep Man, the latter speaks in run together compound words, soit'spresented inthissortofstyle. Now you'd have thought the copy editor would pay special attention here as it's extra hard for the eye to detect errors, but there were four on one page, ferchrissakes! Two in one sentence! I could wring their necks.