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I always got bogged down about thirty pages into Molloy. This time I used the audiobook and it was revelatory. In many ways more like a play than a novel - the rambling voice, the digression, the self interrogation, the interruptions, all made much more sense. And, of course, the rhythms that...

Yes. I’ve read Pound Era ( big discussion on the Pound thread) and I do have an internet connection but I thought I’d ask the board as there might be some experts on here - some who might say ‘Don’t bother with Kenner on Beckett, he’s not as good as he is on Pound’ or some such thing.

Been reading quite a bit of Beckett recently - a bunch of the shorter plays, the trilogy. Who’s a decent critic on him? Did Kenner write much about him? I somehow missed Beckett when I was young and impressionable. Reading him as an older man now it is pretty painful stuff at times.

The blurb on the Penguin Chuzzlewit refers to an incident that doesn’t happen until 700+ pages into a 900 page novel. Glad to see people still enjoying Dickens - I think 21stC readers find the passive heroines hard to bear - the virtuous so much less interesting than the various shits he does...

But you live the life of a Troubadour whilst I have a choice of marking or reading.

I gave up on Ducks, Newburyport. It should have been right up my street but after 100 pages I pulled the plug. I felt it’d have been a good short story. Lots of people I respect claim it’s the book of the century but I really have no desire to ever pick it up again.

Re-reading Chuzzlewit and as with nearly all my re-reads of Dickens I’m noticing how much stranger it is than I remembered. It almost feels like he’s working out what the book is going to be about. I can imagine people giving up after 100 pages but once you get over the 300 page mark it really...

As usual a few things but the novel I’m enjoying the most is Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe. Sat on my shelf for best part of 40 years - he was Kerouac’s hero and you can kind of see it in the baggy prose style. Essentially a Roman a clef as young Eugene Gant grows up in a wildly...

What no Naomi?

There’s a talking duck

21 in 15 is just unbelievable

I’d be interested in how that stands up now. I remember reading it at the time and being rather bowled over by it. Spent about five years tracking down list tracks etc before everything got dumped on YouTube

No. No it was not. We would do the Guardian crossword and play cribbage. I’m not proud of having written that last sentence.

When I was a student (a long time ago) we’d buy a quarter of Brie, a baguette and a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream between two. It was the height of hedonism in 1986.

Saw this yesterday on Toby Litt's Writer's Diary - from Blake's Four Zoas. Van Morrison used it on Let the Slave and but I think Westerbrook might have used it before him? I was thinking of some of things Braverman said this week.... What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song...

Maxwell single handedly redefining ODI batting - today’s knock was ridiculous

Yep. A car crash of a game. VAR will be the talking point as with so much criticism of it means every decision is being micro examined, making it all so much longer. 12 mins of added on in first half and 9 in the second. Both reds were right. Chelsea could’ve lost a player as well. Mad game.

La Bas is pretty much the definition of ‘pornographic godlessness’ If you’re interested in that period of French art then Barnes’ Man in the Red Coat is a great primer. The picture’s subject is Pozzi - a pioneering gynaecologist who was a friend to Montisquiou - supposedly the model for both the...

Kevin Richard Martin aka The Bug new one- Black - ambient/drone

I guessed it was probably from Three Dialogues. I spent far too much money on a copy just because I wanted the Proust essay.