Good, odd unsettling - but do I really have enough time left in my life to read the whole thing (again, apparently, this is third time apparently - I mentioned Prince Myshkin in my high school valediction, which is some serious pretension and presumption - think I said he was Christlike. true enough. but aren't we all, in the end?)

Still at it a month later and approaching the 200 page mark (not even halfway through). The plot is almost entirely psychological - it's an unusual novel even for Dostoevsky, his last and his favorite, apparently, but critics are split.

The naive, child-like, but clear-headed Prince Myshkin arrives back in Russia after many years abroad in Switzerland recovering in a spa from TB or epilepsy or something. He moves among an ungainly collection of St. Petersburg upper middle class folk, all jockeying for position and money and love.

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

 

Another masterpiece miniature. She's already in my pantheon of short novel geniuses for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with the likes of Penelope Fitzgerald.

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

 

Early strange one. Spends an awful lot of time getting started, which I remember in his other later novels was part of the thrill and the horror and the revelation of it all. But wondering if this one will pay off.

Didn't even finish it. Got close enough that I could have, easily, but it was boring and frustrating. Good writing but no paydirt, or at least it didn't pay off for me.

Time of the Child by Niall Williams

 

This one I'm finding hard. His prose style is very beautiful indeed, but now feels overwritten in places to me. If every single sentence is so dense it feels like it's from a poem, my cosciousness has a very hard time moving in a linear narrative fashion and getting involved with characters, plot, and setting.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

 

Particularly good Jackson Brodie episode. Criss-crossing murder, kidnapping, and trainwreck plots serve up lots of tension and release. Some of the good guys win, but not all - and Jackson, as usual, fumbles around with his set ways and ends up not doing too much damage. Despite a near-death experience, coma, a fleecing from his new much-younger wife.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

 

Amazing novel, less about Hollywood than about existential despair, more Dostoevski than the Pat Hobby stories.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

 

Re-read this after, say, 45 years. It was de rigeur as a tortured undegratuate - and is even more bleak to read now. The alcoholic advice columnist tormented by his boss, whose wife he's dallying with, and further confused by his own thoughts. It's known as a "black comedy" but I counted exactly zero fun.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

 

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

 

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

Return to Barry after some months. a young Irishman signs up for WWI and ships off to Belgium. An exruciating four years is served, his loyalty to Ireland and to the British crown, his father and his girl friend and his faith, are all tested. Unshockingly, the war takes everything from him. Descriptions of mustard gas attacks are particularly terrifying.