I was gonna start them, but when I ordered the first one from Amazon they kept postponing shipping until I gave up.
I’m on a mission to read a lot of Hispanic (or Latino, whichever) -American authors just to flesh out my background before I start on my thesis. My current gleanings are City of Night by John Rechy, Paula by Isabel Allende, and Iguana Dreams which is a short story collection. I’m also finishing up Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga and David Eddings’ Mallorean series.
Not important. I just wanted to report the rush of seeing me acknowledged in print.
I usually don’t have to post twice in Watcha Reading, but this time, I do … I got entirely sidetracked. I had a recommendation for David Weber’s Honor Harrington series from a friend for a while now, but I never got around to ordering them, mainly because I always forgot when I was shopping on Amazon. But I recently found On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen online, for free, and got hooked – spent virtually an entire night in front of the PC reading the latter. These are the first two, and I just started the sixth, leaving me a couple still but really making me afraid I will be out of Honor novels too soon.
But I might want to read it! No one will think you’re bragging (although if I had a book published, I’d brag.)
Well, I suppose the fact that after 8 days no one else has ventured an opinion may be all the review you need. That being said, as it’s one of my favorite books, I’ll say what I can about it.
As you’ve already been given to understand, Tristram Shandy does nothing in a straightforward manner. The book is determined to act out with the reader the experience of setting out to tell a story and finding that no matter where one chooses to begin, there is always additional material, more backstory, that the reader really should know before he can make sense of what is to come, and the attempt to drag in that backstory inevitably requires more backstory, and so on, so that it becomes impossible to get anywhere in the story. The book starts at the moment of Tristram’s conception, and manages to get as far as his breeching in the six-hundred-odd pages of my Penguin edition. It parodies and subverts every convention the traditional novel had then or would ever have, but none so much as the conceit that a novel can present a coherent picture of a human being by describing the events of their life and recording their thoughts and impressions along the way. The more that Tristram tries to relate of his life and opinions, the less coherent the picture becomes.
What does come into consistently sharper focus as the book wends its way is the character of the people around Tristram, particularly, his father Walter Shandy and his brother, Tristram’s Uncle Toby. Walter is in many ways the frustrated author of Tristram’s actual life, as Tristram is nominally the frustrated author of the story of his life. Walter attempts to bring under control and organization every aspect of his son’s life, in accordance with his wide range of fixed philosophical notions (his “hobby horses”), and is thwarted at every turn. He rails against the injustice of fate and loses his temper readily at the contretemps that befall him, but is also quick to return to a more truly philosophical, stoic stance when confronted with his brother Toby’s example. Uncle Toby was described by William Hazlitt as “one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature” – a gentle and generous soul, always willing to believe the best of others and believing the worst only when no other alternative is left. And yet his foremost occupation is the study of warfare, specifically fortifications and earthworks, which he and his servant Corporal Trim spend endless hours modeling on his bowling green. It is just the sort of inexplicable but immediately familiar contradiction that the book revels in.
Of course, all this could be completely insufferable if Sterne weren’t so incredibly light-handed about it, and if it all weren’t so funny. The bawdy nature of much of the humor helps, but at root it’s the humor of wry recognition of ourselves in the nature of the foibles of Walter, Toby, Tristram, and the rest that makes this one of the most humane books ever written, in my opinion. In other hands (Swift’s, for instance, or someone like Tom Sharpe), the same subjects could be treated with lacerating humor, but neither Tristram nor the author ever uses it to wound, but rather to comfort and reassure us that even though nothing ever goes the way we plan, and things often go horribly wrong (Toby’s groin injury at Nemours, Trim’s lame knee, Tristram’s crushed nose at birth and his inadvertent circumcision by means of an improperly counterweighted window, not to mention his baptism under the one name his father despises above all others), it all generally turns out OK. Ultimately, life is worth all the stuff that happens along the way.
So is it hard to get through? A lot of people seem to think so, but I’ve always enjoyed it. If you’re focused on what happens, you’ll miss the point completely, and frustrate the heck out of yourself, because precious little happens. If you just go along for the ride and enjoy the scenery, taking none of it too seriously, you’ll be fine.
I saw the movie over the weekend, and while I should point out right away that I enjoyed it and thought they did a pretty good job with the classic “unfilmable” novel, I do think it missed that tonal keynote from the book. The difficulty of making a movie of Tristram Shandy was mapped fairly well from the difficulty of writing such a book, and it succeeded intellectually while still, unfortunately, missing the emotional point. Part of the problem is that however you arrange things, the problems and experience of being a movie actor trying to play Tristram Shandy in such a film are very remote from daily life for most of us, while certainly to Sterne’s middle-class audience, and to a certain extent for us today, the problems and experience of an English country squire are less alien. I may not meet up with any on any regular basis in my daily rounds, but Sterne’s audience would have, and at any rate it’s far easier for me to identify with that sort of existence than with that led by Steve Coogan or Michael Winterbottom.
Thanks for the review, rackensack. I’d wanted to see the movie, but have been unable to actually get anyone to the theater with me (I’ve heard some of the lamest last-minute excuses imaginable), so clearly that is not Meant To Be. I guess I should read the novel (which sounds wonderful), then catch the movie on DVD whenever.
After posting two replies to other posts in this thread, I figured I should at least provide a response to the OP. So:
The Second John McPhee Reader. McPhee’s someone I’ve always enjoyed reading when I’ve encountered his stuff in The New Yorker, but I’ve never really made the commitment to picking up any of his books. I bought this years ago, in a book sale somewhere, and never got round to it until recently. One of the only good things about moving is that it shakes stuff off the shelves that you’d forgotten you had.
Nobody’s Perfect, Anthony Lane’s collection of his reviews and other pieces for The New Yorker. A review with his byline is one of the things that will almost always get me to pick up a copy at the newstand, now that I no longer subscribe.
Just finished Lost in a Good Book, the second Thursday Next novel by Jasper Fforde.
As promised, here is the follow up.
I quite enjoyed it. I am slightly annoyed with myself for not having realized that it was the first in a trilogy. I hate waiting for the others to come out and usually wait and get them all at once.
I am reluctant to give too much of a review because I fear that what I view as not a spoiler might be one, so I will simply say that it is well written and enjoyable.
Re-reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower finale. Also reading a book about Zen, written by Chuck Norris. And Tuesdays with Morrie.
The Breaker by Minette Walters and Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Enjoying both, immensely.
I love that book 
It was my favorite book from a Madness in Literature class.
Since Dostoevsky has come up in this thread, would you recommend Crime and Punishment to someone who liked The Double but not so much Notes From The Underground?
I read a review of a new novel called Labrynth, and it sounded good. Bought it. Got on a plane to L.A.
Read half of it flying west, half of it flying east. I landed with fifteen pages to go, and would have finished it if not for a charming woman who performs reiki healing rituals on horses who was sitting next to me who struck up a conversation.
Reiki. On Horses. I swear to god. Anyway, buy Labrynth, it’s wonderful.
Who wrote it, Cartooniverse? It’s spelled “labrynth”, not “labyrinth”?
I finished the Walters, breezed through a critter book with bats terrorizing NYC – Vespers by Jeff Rovin, and am on another Walters, The Shape of Snakes.
I finished Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis Trilogy) last night, and am so pleased I finally got around to reading it. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I read about interesting aliens, and in such depth. I’ve been occupied with cyber- and post-human sf, contemporary fantasy, and it feels good to go back to the familiar old roots of sff.
Not that there’s anything too familiar in these books. Butler’s original and complex society of Oankali captivated me from the beginning. I liked the biological twists and the cultural ramifications, both in the Oankali themselves, and in the ways humans and Oankali came together. The resistance, the acceptance, the blending, the numerous possible outcomes of the genetic mixing, were all involving at both the level of society and at the individual character levels. I found the construct characters fascinating and enjoyed how the characters in the first book didn’t fade from view, because I cared about them too.
You spelled it correctly !! It is by Kate Mosse.