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coldwave@book.dansmonorage.blue

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bad

1 étoile

The most badly-written work of non-fiction I have seen in a long time. If this is really a hit with Britain's top judges, as claimed on the back, I am seriously worried for their literacy. Nothing interesting in here. Serial killers bad and we are shocked. You'll find better stories on wikipedia.

Charles Palliser: The Quincunx Aucune note

The Quincunx (The Inheritance of John Huffam) is the epic first novel of Charles Palliser. …

This is great

Aucune note

A huge book, described as "eccentric" on the back blurb. A postmodern pastiche of Dickensian and gothic tropes, arranged in a fractal fivefold structure if one is looking for it. At the same time, it's pretty readable linearly as a story, without knowing any literary theory. It's brilliant how everything just feels slightly off. Every Dickensian storyline is played almost perfectly straight, but we just know it isn't meant that way because of the shape of the whole assembly and underlying hints. I guess this is postmodernism. As the author afterword says, as much about the cumulative effects of decades of austerity in the UK as the ostensible setting. The characters slowly descend from one terrible housing situation to worse, and now I'm permanently afraid of the modern equivalent. Somehow very dark and scary - about poverty, social conditions, and betrayal - below the apparent adventure-novel surface. Unlike the source …

Michel Foucault: The Order of Things (Paperback, 1994) Aucune note

Things got almost incomprehensible in the second-to-last chapter because I don't know about philosophy terms like phenomenology. Also because Foucault likes to throw out a word salad of contradictory terms which I'm 80% sure isn't saying much, and it intensifies as he tries to describe the modern situation. Lots of spatial positioning metaphors too, maybe all this "outside of" and "on an axis" canonically means something to philosophers. Still, it is causing me to have some thoughts.