I spent the entire day reading Doris Lessing's autobiography and came to dislike her. Maybe she would feel likewise reading me, I don't doubt.
So she was a Communist, fine. Get over it. Plenty of people were back then. It's not a big deal. All of this hand-wringing and agonizing and "how could I have thought such and such" was unappealing. Like we haven't heard about repentant Communists before. I found her too circumspect. She wants to place the spotlight upon every iota of her own being and that of others in order to indulge her guilt fantasy. I want to tell her to stop it, for your reader's sake stop it and just let things be for once, do whatever it takes to stop all of this dreadful, unending slicing and dicing of every thought and feeling, just let things be. After a couple hundred pages I felt a headache coming on and had to put the book down.
I much prefer Anne Rice's early novels about vampires. Anne Rice could be riveting back in the day, before her light faded.
I will not take Doris Lessing with me to work again, that's for sure. She can only be absorbed in small doses. Her books make passable bathroom reading material, two to five minutes at a time.
3 comments:
Read "The Prince" by R.M. Koster.
Chase that with "The Dissertation," also by Koster. But when you read "The Dissertation," be sure to read the footnotes and be sure to read them in context (that is, as you encounter them). You won't "get" the story if you don't read the footnotes. They are NOT boring.
I'm making my way at a snail's pace through two books at the moment, with many more on queue, one of them the first book in the twenty-book series by Patrick O'Brian concerning a sea captain in the early 1800s Royal Navy. I'll put Koster on my queue.
I know what you mean by "put it on my queue." I have about 500 books on the wall behind me, nearly all of which I've read. My "queue" is three mid-tower shipping boxes, all of them tightly packed with recent acquisitions I haven't yet read and there are two more tall stacks (one on each side of my desk) of things to read. Now I'm starting to get books in the mail (most of which I do NOT want) from authors and publishers who want reviews but aren't going to get them. Life is too short to start reading self-published authors.
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