Wednesday, February 27, 2008

nemesis


This is funny:

"You pay the big man, the big name, to be on your faculty, for publicity's sake, and naturally he does very little in terms of actual teaching, might in fact be on leave every other year or traveling much of the time. The real work of teaching is done by others, as we all known. Do we know!" (212. "Nemesis").

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

thomson...



Inspired by 'the most hated woman in the UK', a serial killer that's never named in the novel, we are faced with a cop's vigil as a warder of the woman's corpse in the morgue. Many thanks to Carmen... again! for this extreme and beautiful novel that should be quoted entirely; so at random:
"He studied himself for minutes on end, trying to catch a glimpse of it. The weakness, the ugliness. The fatal flaw. It must always have been there, he thought. Other people had seen it, perhaps. If they had, they'd said nothing: it wasn't the kind of thing you could talk about. It had taken the birth of a child to establish it beyond all doubt. To bring it out into the open".
A read that lingers...

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

darkmans


Incredible to think that in the US Harper Perennial ignored a hard back for this incredible novel and went directly to the paperback, which is a shame in a 838 pages book (as well as an irony: perennial?). Darkmans was shortlisted for the booker and it's an impressive novel, absolutely Barker from every angle! Quotes later