• GreyShack@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Finished: T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones, which was very easy reading - a folk horror kinda sequel to Machen’s The White People. I read it straight after her The Hollow Places, and although both were engaging, the similarity of protagonists and overall story arc suggests that they are probably best not read in quick succession: too repetitive.

    Continued: Finnegans Wake - reading it through the year. Just completed ‘The Night Lessons’ in book 2, which went from slightly comprehensible to utterly incomprehensible and back to slightly again, and added the columnar format with side notes by Shaun and Shem and footnotes by Issey just for fun…

    Resumed: Robert Brightwell’s Flashman and Madison’s War - the fifth of his prequels to George McDonald Frasier’s Flashman series. Although entertaining and well researched in general, this is perhaps the weakest of this series so far - which is probably why I had put it aside and not resumed until now, a couple of months after moving house, when I paused. The historical events that Flashy is involved in are scattered and episodic by nature which is probably the root of the problem with this book. Brightwell hasn’t found a strong unifying arc to overcome that.

    Started: The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten, but a chapter in I was not finding anything appealing to me, so abandoned it.

    Started: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. A chapter in I am very intrigued at the setup and keen to continue.

    • KammicRelief@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nice! Are you reading FW with TrueLit? I actually started but had to quit… I was reading Ulysses at the same time and just couldn’t keep up. But, it gave me enough of a taste that I’ll definitely return to it someday.

      • GreyShack@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes. Without the insights from TrueLit, the entire thing would be incomprehensible.

        I can certainly see that FW and Ulysses would be far too much.