When I was a teen I tried to read both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but couldn’t finish them. When I went back to them in my thirties I couldn’t put them down.I’ve now read both books twice.
I read Crime and Punishment from cover to cover when I was 16, and found it an exceedingly unnerving experience emotionally which I have never been able to forget. Since then, I’ve tried to read it twice, but have hardly been able to get past the first few chapters.
I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter novels, or the Da Vinci Code.
Books I feel guilty about not reading: Marx’s Das Kapital.

Back on the topic of this exhumed thread, two other great books I’ve also pecked through with gusto but never fully finished are “KA” and “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” by the interesting Roberto Calasso.

And agree, more threads like this would be very welcome.

Another book is Harlots Ghost by Mailer. But not only could I not get through it. But I don’t reccomend anyone try.

Well I loved it Birdy.

Its just that the first couple of hundred pages are just so magnificent you could buy the book for those pages alone.

Which I did.

It winds up with all these letters the characters are sending to eachother. Perhaps there is some literary precedent to this that if I were familiar with it I would have taken it in my stride.

Yes, for the middle third it is an epistolary novel. And the fact you claim you’re not familar with a narrative genre dependent on cumulatively escalating missives exposed for an audience beyond the putative reader is ironically a core part of your ineffable charm.

But the first couple of hundred pages are really something else. Superior effort.

It does get better. I’ve just been rereading it in parallel with Legacy of Ashes while watching ‘The Good Shepherd
and damm my eyes, that ancient soak Mailer’s 16 year old work makes far better use of declassified research product and is far more historically, pyschologically and sensually redolent of the strange alpha and omega world of CIA in the fifties and early sixties than either Ashes or Shepherd.

I’m now happy to go on record as claiming it’s Mailer’s masterwork. Or am I just saying that to go on this record?

Also, a big thanks to toliwhatisit for resurfacing this thread even if you/it had other motives in mind. Can we have more of these kinda threads again on LP? It’s been awfully dry and earnest around here lately.

The writing is so good. And there are enough women in it to get one mans washing done. But not enough to have a really good time.

I don’t think you can ever read it from start to finish. Because you can’t sustain the mood with all these blokes, that darkness, and for light relief its like this extended encyclopedia.

It starts off where the Puritans landed or thereabouts and so I suppose its what you expect.

The initial essay is brilliant. And its a buzz to open a book and it says “Call Me Ishmael” and I don’t know why.

Another book is Harlots Ghost by Mailer. But not only could I not get through it. But I don’t reccomend anyone try.

Its just that the first couple of hundred pages are just so magnificent you could buy the book for those pages alone.

It winds up with all these letters the characters are sending to eachother.

Perhaps there is some literary precedent to this that if I were familiar with it I would have taken it in my stride.

But the first couple of hundred pages are really something else. Superior effort.

I think there was a bit of a love triangle going on between Biggles and his two proteges. This is from the end of chapter 3:

Algy watched the little upright figure [Ginger] disappear briskly around the corner, with a peculiar smile on his face. `I like the way that kid walks and the way he holds his head up,’ he mused, as he made his way towards the club house.

I can’t say I’m at all surprised to hear that, Algy.

Mr. Scott, why does the spectre of a bit of unrequited shirt-lifting between Biggles and Ginger, cause sleep to pull upon your penthouse lids so lightly?

Methinks you betray a sobriquet
That got you where you are today.

Ken Scott:”(Note too, that Ginger has been ‘a protege’ for some eight novels at this stage. This has caused me some sleepless nights over the years.”

You some kinda secret swinger schmuckens, orwot?

There is at least one Biggles school-story book.

Mostly full of the usual ‘what ho, chaps’, “I’d rather take six of the best than be gated over Whitsun” etc stuff, but it does have a memorable line when a schoolmate is explaining the rules of fighting to Biggles. The schoolmate is saying that you aren’t allowed to use a sneak attack, you have to fight with your fists. Biggles says (paraphrasing):

That rule sounds like it was invented by someone who was good at fighting with their fists.

I’m sure that years after Capt. W.E. Johns died, someone else wrote a novelised version of Biggles’ life – remember reading that when I was 12. It contains the “sexy spy” to whom Nabkov refers, who I think was in the chapter “Affair de Coeur” from “Biggles of 266″.

When I was reading Biggles I was too young to be paying attention to homoerotic undertones, but, speaking of class, I do remember how Biggles’ mechanic from WWI (what was his name? Smith?) stayed part of the team in the between-the-wars adventures. He was always addressed by his surname, he always called the other characters ‘Sir’, and when one major character would speak to Smith about another major character, he would always say, for instance, “Take Mr Lacey to the airport”.

I remember it well. One of the great sadnesses of my adult life is that I didn’t rescue my large collection of Biggles books from my parents’ home, so they were given to charity.

Perhaps my passion for those books as a 12 year old was an indicator of future queerness.

- ‘You seem to be cogitating with considerable concentration,’ observed Ginger Hebblethwaite, their protege…

- ‘Since you’re both so confoundedly inquisitve, I’ll tell you what I was thinking,’ growled Biggles. ‘I was thinking what a queer thing coincidence is’.

A discussion on ontology and the epistomology of coincidence follows.

(Note too, that Ginger has been ‘a protege’ for some eight novels at this stage. This has caused me some sleepless nights over the years. Is it an industrial matter? Is it a class thing? or has Ginger brought this upon himself by his boy-man atttitude?)

“Foucault’s Pendulum” I would agree starts slow and turgid but it’s worth perservering with. By about the start of second act it becomes very funny indeed about the business of vanity publishing and by the start of the third act it blossoms as a brillant pisstake of conspiracy theorists falling for conspiracy theories about conspiracies.

“We’re the Tres and you know more about us than we do.”

Biggles – Air Commodore (WE Johns) is easy to read but unrewarding.

Well doh! You’re at the crappy moribund end of the series.

You wanna start at the beginning with “The Camels Are Coming”, “Biggles of the Camel Squadron”, and “Biggles of 266″.

In these first stories, young James Bigglesworth drinks half a bottle of whiskey a day, smokes like a chimney, swears like a trooper and carries on with sexy spies. Johns cleaned up his act rather a lot after the books found a more youthful audience than was first intended.

The ‘tween war stories are also full of derring do in exotic locations -kinda like Raiders of The Lost Ark meets Terry and The Pirates albeit with lips as the only organs that get stiffened.

But like “The Saint” the series went right off the boil after WW2. I blame that humourless prick Air Commodore Raymond m’self.