Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence.

Basically a treatise on hating women.

I could go on for days about how badly Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby adaptation missed the mark. Just a few points:

🙄 Nick’s characterisation was ridiculous, he came across as a vacuous idiot instead of the shrewd observer he has to be for the story to make sense. They also made him an alcoholic for no clear reason when in the book he makes a point of stating he has been drunk twice in his life.

🙄 Gatsby’s bouts of explosive rage made no sense against his characterisation at all. This isn’t the Gatsby Tom mocks for his pink suit and general impotence in handling his “presumptuous little flirtation” with Daisy.

🙄 the implications that Daisy was in fact trying to call Gatsby before his death. Dude, no. Careless drivers. It’s right there in the book.

🙄 why introduce Owl Eyes at the party and then not bring him back for the funeral? That was the entire point… he’s a Chekhov’s gun.

🙄 similarly, why introduce Klipspringer at all, and give him a stupid, made-up backstory, then just abandon him there like a red herring?

🙄 and alllll the party scenes seeming to be the point of the movie. That’s… not the point of the story.

“Honeypot”

Once is enough 😅

Huxley used “pneumatic” a lot in Brave New World,to describe women. I interpreted it to mean they were voluptuous (“blown up”) but then my friend thought it meant they were windbags who wouldn’t shut up.😒Any clarification would be appreciated 😆

More prosaic, but I always notice that Jane Austen uses “cried” a lot, in place of words such as said, responded, retorted. It’s an odd feature that takes me out of the otherwise excellent writing and makes characters sound weirdly histrionic. Compare delivery by Elizabeth Bennett in the book vs the miniseries. “I deserve neither such praise nor such censure”, she cried in the book, but in the series she delivers the line with cool poise.

A Vietnam War memoir called, “The War Within” by an Australian ex-soldier, Don Tate.

It was ugly, racist, poorly-written, self-serving, boring, and did I mention racist?

Lowlights for me:

• The guy unironically continued, 50 years after the war, to refer to Vietnamese people as “zipperheads”

• He was a voluntary enlistment who actually was keen to go to war, and acts like he was duped. Despite talking about how he was keen to go shoot zipperheads.

• He tells a story about how he and another soldier went to a brothel on leave, and how his friend was having sex with a pregnant sex worker who went into miscarriage during the act. He frames himself as the victim in this story, because those mean Vietnamese women apparently kept glaring at him and saying critical things he couldn’t understand. (Cause I mean like, how dare sex workers in a war zone have feelings?)

• after returning home from the war he says was so horrible, he saw protests against it. He literally - no insight or irony here - says the protestors were unAustralian (this is our equivalent of MAGA idiots) and that they should have been marching in support of the war if they supported soldiers…

I usually donate unwanted books but I’m pretty sure I binned this one.

1. Lolita, of course:

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.”

2. The Great Gatsby - so many beautiful passages, but this is one of my favourites:

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

3. Also, I feel like there’s a smorgasbord of Steinbeck quotes to choose from, so here’s just one:

“…and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence

Or, ‘How I destroyed the women who loved me, then murdered my mother under the guise of euthanasia, because I am a Modern Man of Letters and Dem Bitches Beneath Me.’

You are a person of excellent taste.

Slaughterhouse 5, of course.

Listen, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time…

I enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s dedication at the beginning of Invisible Monsters, rather more than I enjoyed the novel itself. It goes:

For Geoff, who said, “This is how to steal drugs.”

And Ina, who said, “This is lip liner.”

And Janet, who said, “This is silk georgette.”

And my editor, Patricia, who kept saying, “This is not good enough.”