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3.33 AVERAGE
3.33 AVERAGE
I am glad to be done reading this book. I bought this book my sophomore year of college after finding it on a 'best books to read while you're young' list.
A couple months ago, my boyfriend sifted through each book on our bookcase and asked out loud which ones we had read. Together, we had finished about five books of the ~40 on our bookcase.
So to be clear, I only finished this book to have it put in a physical 'read' pile in my apartment.
This book was basically about an oddball, English (I think) 19 year old boy and his interest in Rachel. It was tough to read, as I didn't understand half of the cultural references and slang of an English teenager in the 70s.
I hated how crude the characters were. I really didn't appreciate the constant conversations on aging women and how pointless their bodies were after child rearing. Women were there for sex, shallow conversations and expressed desperate need for motherhood.
A couple months ago, my boyfriend sifted through each book on our bookcase and asked out loud which ones we had read. Together, we had finished about five books of the ~40 on our bookcase.
So to be clear, I only finished this book to have it put in a physical 'read' pile in my apartment.
This book was basically about an oddball, English (I think) 19 year old boy and his interest in Rachel. It was tough to read, as I didn't understand half of the cultural references and slang of an English teenager in the 70s.
I hated how crude the characters were. I really didn't appreciate the constant conversations on aging women and how pointless their bodies were after child rearing. Women were there for sex, shallow conversations and expressed desperate need for motherhood.
Just got worse and worse. Very English. Lots of talk about body functions and things that come out of bodies. If that's your thing, you'll love it.
For a book about a teenager supposedly coming of age, written nigh on 40 years ago and read by me rapidly approaching my 30th birthday; this was possibly not the best combination to get the most from the controversial debut novel from famed misogynist Martin Amis. The only thing worse could possibly have been if I were female I suppose.
A quite enjoyable read but not as depraved or as entertaining as I had been previously led to believe. Charles Highway is a quite wonderful character, the type that seems to have become synonymous with Amis over the last 40 years; rude, unsympathetic, self-obsessed, self-aware but not aware of how he is actually perceived, intelligent, occasionally witty, to the point where this is how I imagine Martin Amis to be himself.
There are a fair few laugh out loud moments and times when you can't believe what you've just read, in a novel that feels so accurate and so true to life that at no point do you even consider the fact that this is not set in the second decade of the 21st century, these are not your peers you are reading about. And this has been true of all of his novels that I have read to date. A remarkable writer of literature.
A quite enjoyable read but not as depraved or as entertaining as I had been previously led to believe. Charles Highway is a quite wonderful character, the type that seems to have become synonymous with Amis over the last 40 years; rude, unsympathetic, self-obsessed, self-aware but not aware of how he is actually perceived, intelligent, occasionally witty, to the point where this is how I imagine Martin Amis to be himself.
There are a fair few laugh out loud moments and times when you can't believe what you've just read, in a novel that feels so accurate and so true to life that at no point do you even consider the fact that this is not set in the second decade of the 21st century, these are not your peers you are reading about. And this has been true of all of his novels that I have read to date. A remarkable writer of literature.
Obviously Charles Highway, protagonist, is a totally odious and self-absorbed prick. But, I still loved him despite his superficiality, arrogance, and cold-heartedness.
I'd love to know the proportion of people who liked both this book, and liked 'Confederacy of Dunces.' I thought Ignatius J. Reilly of Confederacy to certainly be in the same vein as Charles (self-absorbed, narcisstic etc) - but somehow without any of the touching little bits of loveableness that Charles possessed, when just for a minute, you'd discover how vulnerable he really was.
I'd love to know the proportion of people who liked both this book, and liked 'Confederacy of Dunces.' I thought Ignatius J. Reilly of Confederacy to certainly be in the same vein as Charles (self-absorbed, narcisstic etc) - but somehow without any of the touching little bits of loveableness that Charles possessed, when just for a minute, you'd discover how vulnerable he really was.
I thought I could go along safely never having to read Martin Amis , but then The Martin Chronicles podcast came out, with not only Dan Kois but one of my favorite critics, Paul Sehgal, and I figured if they were at least invested enough in Amis to do a podcast, I should try this out. I can see what they mean about the clever and biting writing, but it’s not for me. I was interested in the discussion of the hatred of bodies/humans and its focus, but not exclusively so, on women. Reading the book itself got to be too much for me, but I found the analysis interesting.
DNF at page 131. I'm bored out of my mind and Charlie's an arrogant, misogynist dickhead. I gather that's supposed to be the point but I'm not foreseeing any character growth so no, can't read this anymore.
I liked this novel, it had a Catcher in the Rye feel, but was also British...
sex, drugs and literary allusions - what more could you possibly want froma book?