Clicking the "I am finished" button for this book was especially satisfying.
Reading this work was a very long, hard and repetitiv process but it was also very rewarding.

I am definitely excited to look into critical discourse for this book. Maybe then I'll expand my review... but for now, after reading 925 pages, I'd like to keep it short.

I actually didn't finish this book. It's repetetive Gertrude Stein to the extreme.

This is definitely a book that is more interesting to read about than to actually read. Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker piece about it was fascinating. Funnily enough, that piece also provided the quote that appears on the back of my edition’s book jacket, where Malcolm describes the book as a “near-impossible feat of reading” (accurate, but hardly an advertisement!). Mea culpa, I only got through 200 or so pages and had to throw in the towel. Judging from other reviews on here, I’m far from alone in that, and there’s no indication that the rest of the book will be a radical shift in approach, so I’m just gonna review it for my own sense of finality.

The book is essentially just descriptions — often (OFTEN) repeating themselves across tens (hundreds?) of pages — of different types of people written in the oddest language you’ll ever see. People are endlessly, repetitively described, and then frequently disappear without actually doing anything. On a sentence level, it’s like it was written in a foreign language and then run through Google Translate circa 2010. The larger structure is interesting, as Stein essentially tries to account for how people become individuals while still sharing so much with millions of others in the world. But even within that ambitious project, I have to say that these first 200 or so pages only had a few brief glimmers of real insight.

With a good X-acto knife, some one can put something inside it. They can use it, and live it, and I know it. Repeating is often irritating. And to begin again. Repeating can be irritating.

Je ne sais pas si c'est parce que j'avais pas la tête à lire, mais je n'ai pas réussi à vraiment me plonger dans ce livre. De belles idées, mais répétées, répétées, répétées trop souvent. On s'en reparlera.

Hilarious because, while I did not finish it, I've found myself drunkenly quoting it on multiple occasions.