Tuesday 26 October 2004

more and more and more on reading

I got around my Ulysses block again. I went to the American library on Saturday morning and grabbed Count Zero, another Gibson, which I polished off on Saturday afternoon/evening, and Vonnegut's Jailbird, which I got through Sunday. The Gibson was a result of limited choice in the SF section; just popcorn. I'd been looking for some Vonnegut, and was really looking more for Slaughterhouse 5 or Breakfast of Champions, but I took what I could get. I enjoyed it, too. He's a better writer than Thompson, and although less vitriolic, probably as perceptive, although not so much Steinbeck. Actually, the book owes a certain amount of its heritage, in terms of its feint but important background in American labour disputes, to The Grapes of Wrath, although that's by the by. It didn't excite me overly, but enough that I'll try to find his earlier stuff.

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