Ben Mines

Journey without Maps by Graham Greene is interesting.

I have an edition of The Confessions of S. Augustine printed in 1897.

I can't remember if I've said this already, but the modern reader has to cheat to fully understand Ulysses. This is not due to Joyce being intentionally difficult or obfuscatory, but simply because of the novel's realism. To give just one example, the novel is a very accurate linguistic portrait of the English spoken in Ireland in 1916 and therefore its characters use a lot of street cant and colloquialisms that the modern reader is unfamiliar with. Similarly, the current affairs and gossip discussed by the characters is over 100 years old. Joyce strived for a pure realism (once remarking, famously, "I have no imagination") and therefore did not allow his characters to escape even for a moment the medium of fin de si

According to Nabokov in his book of interviews, most serious Russian writers couldn't understand the English-speaking world's love affair with War and Peace. They viewed it as sordid romantic pablum spatchcocked onto a didatic and overlong journalistic screed about the Napoleonic War. In my humble opinion that's going to far. It's a wonderful book, but I agree: It's not Ulysses. You could knock it off in a leisurely two weeks without so much as a glance at endnotes.

War and Peace is light reading. The only minor difficulties a reader faces is that it is long and that the English-speaker has to get used to Russian naming conventions.

I read it in one sitting because, like pulling off a sticky plaster, I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. File under Sanctimonious Pablum.

Have you read Ollala?

There are many things I don't understand about the popular conception of the vampire. Where did all that Brilliantine come from? Was there a scene in which Stoker describes the Count lustily trowelling Brilliantine into his hair? I don't recall it. Generally speaking, Stoker's creature is far more insectile, and more interesting, than that black-caped, Brilliantined, blood-drinking and yet somehow still cultivated Transylvanian gentleman. I remember in particular a scene in which he scurries down the wall like a lizard; and how he buried himself mole-like in a crate of soil for his journey to England. I also remember the farcial Victorian gentlemen who hunt him down with thinly-disguised xenophobic zeal.