This is how anyone is ever going to be able to read this fucking book. Audiobook. But be warned, I estimate there are about thirty hours of it.
Having said that, it's is amazing and brilliant and an unbelievable achievement.
I drove to Adelaide on Friday and back today. I'm half way through. I think maybe MAYBE I'll be able to read the paper version after this. Or read it while listening again.
Extraordinary stuff and now I want to know more about his background. I wonder whether his marriage was happy, how much of a sensualist he was. How he worked, how he worked on this.
Hope everyone had a good weekend. I did.
6 comments:
About eight years ago I participated in a Bloomsday reading of (several sections of) Ulysses, fell in love with it and decided to read it. Needless to say, I failed. I've never got more than about twenty pages in before my eyes go squiggly.
However your method sounds brilliant and I think I may have to adopt the idea. Maybe the trick is (much like Shakespeare and most poetry) is that you can't just read it in your head. You need to either read it aloud or have someone read it to you.
Thanks for the tip!
Hey m_m
The funny thing is I got half way through the audio (other half will have to wait for another long solo road trip, solo because I don't think anyone else in my fam will tolerate it)BUT I have now gone back to the book and am reading it. It's like the wheels have been oiled (or the eyes, as you say, mine would go all squiggly too after about twenty pages or less). Now I'm up to page 76. SEVENTY SIX! You cannot imagine the pride I have to know that.
The words have come alive it's quite extraordinary because they are the same words I was struggling with first 30 years ago and then at 5 year intervals since. I tried to read it again about two months ago and failed. But now, the words are slipping easily into my brain. I can let you know the audiobook I have because even though I haven't listened to any others, this one is excellent. Irish accents, beautiful reading voices. Layers of narrative and effect. Simply beautiful.
I'm glad to hear you're making headway. This reminds me of my own experience with Shakespeare when I was younger. I liked listening to it enough that I went out and bought some of it to read. And hated it. I've heard a few times that the quality of audio-books is frequently quite amazing these days. I've also heard that if you turn the speed up on your player a tiny bit every month, you can train your brain to understand stuff that's so fast that it just sounds like gibberish to most people. Don't know how true that is though.
Glad you had a good weekend. I spent mine looking into independent and alternative news sources which led to me reading/hearing quite a lot about Todd Akin and Pussy Riot. (turns out that A) American Christian fundamentalist politicians are frighteningly ignorant fuckers and B) the fuck for forest people aren't the only ones into nude/sexual activism).
I reckon that some things are meant to be listened to and you're no doubt right about Shakespeare as well, after all, they are plays.
Ah yes, Todd Akin, have been abreast of that matter through my work stuff. What a fuckwit. Pussy Riot haven't seen anything beyond the headlines. Are they into the sexual activism? Fuck for Forests; every time I think of it I kind of laugh. Oh those FFF peeps!
What tops it all for me with Akin is that he sits on a bloody science committee and claimed his statements were based on things he'd heard from medical professionals. Christ on a bicycle; how would you like to be doing what you do over there, eh? The two best responses I've seen both came in the form of songs. Here and here.
Apparently some of the Pussy Riot girls were members of the protest group Voina, who staged this fuck against Medvedev protest in a science museum. Some articles also seem to be linking them to the topless Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN. A lot of this stuff seems quite daft to me, but I can't help but sort of admire the bravado a bit too; y'know what I mean? I even pinched the symbol off the flag one of them is waving in a bunch of photos. I'd never seen it, but apparently it was big in the 70s.
Following on from the Todd Akin thing, here's a couple of news articles I saw on the weekend that I thought you might be interested in (if you haven't seen them already).
This one is about a female judge in Arizona who tried to shame a woman for getting molested by a drunk copper.
And this one is about a Turkish (alleged) rape victim who snapped. I know you've spent time in Turkey, so you might see things in this that I didn't find obvious.
Funny that for both stories, the best articles I found came from a blogger rather than a proper news source. (And she even had news about the upcoming season of My Little Pony. How thorough is that?)
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