It took me awhile to complete Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis due to finals. I got this for like $4 from Times warehouse book sale, and considering that it's "regarded by many the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century" (Goodreads), it's probably quite a good deal.
For this book made me smile and chuckle and all on the MRT!!! It might be its quintessential English comic precision (like what other reviews have claimed; I am unsure of what exactly constitutes English), or perhaps, plainly, its expressions are really quite hilarious.
This book is a satire about the bourgeois in post-war English society. I don't know anything about the English bourgeois, much less in the previous century lol so I just read it with an open mind. I felt that the book kinda lost its essence due to my ignorance of English archetype. Unless you're talking about how ridiculously polite the English are; I mean it can't be any more obvious through the dialogues in the book. Or hypocritically polite, very much demonstrated by Dixon making faces and pranking behind other people's backs.
In the book, Jim Dixon is just an impossibly jaded young professor sick of playing up to Department head Welch. Tea parties, art retreats hosted at the latter's house are obligations to Dixon as he has to impress upon Welch to secure tenure in the university.
"He read it through, thinking how admirably consistent were the style and orthography. Both derived, in large part, from essays of some of his less proficient pupils."
and
"Finally he stuck a stamp on, slobbering on it for further verisimilitude"
Another Christie opus that propounds my love-hate relationship with her mystery novels. Good plot, boring delivery. I must say the revelation in Murder on the Orient Express is really quite unexpected, but it didn't keep me on my toes like how a good mystery novel should because you can't just piece together transcripts of interrogations of X number of passengers in the train (can't bother to count, 9?) and expect me to stay excited. I thought it was like a Mrs Marple thing for her stories to be bland but no it seems that be it Poirot or Marple, I can't quite agree to her style of writing. 2.5/5, I'll need some time for this unsatisfying aftertaste to go away before starting on the The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which I have downloaded since Goodreads promised me of a shocking twist and I can't seem to learn my lesson.
So... THERE'S A NEWLY TRANSLATED HIGASHINO BOOK! I am so so so excited to be reading it!!!!!!!!!!!! My last Higashino was December 2014, you can read it here. I read from some random website that the sales of Journey Under the Midnight Sun actually surpassed that of The Devotion of Suspect X and Suspect X was - REALLY GOOD - BUT NO I need to suppress my expectations!!!!
I just googled for the above photo and by chance I discover that the translated A Midsummers' Equation (another book of his) will be published this year :'-) Yay another addition to the Detective Galileo series!!!! Caught the movie approximately 2 years ago and it made me cry because the plot is so so good but excruciating!!!!!!!! How exciting!!!!!!!!
I just need a physical copy of Naoko to complete my Higashino collection :-) I hope that Higashino catches on to the sudden "Contemporary Japanese Authors" fad (Murakami, Ruth Ozeki, Natsuo Kirino lol) and earns abit of deserving recognition (and MORE translated works dammit) for himself. I wanted to finish Journey Under the Midnight Sun and do a combined review with the above 2 books but NO, a Higashino book warrants a special post for itself.
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| "Some infantile fa-la-la-la stuff" lol |
Welch's son is an up and coming artist (probably the embodiment of aristocracy in this satire) and the middle-class Dixon hates his guts and ends up trading his own plain, boring girlfriend for Welch's son's impeccable girlfriend, which meant alot of catfights between the 4 people involved.
I love how Amis wrote with very mean undertones throughout the book and this defined Dixon and his outlook on the people around him, and generally made the book really funny:
"The only thought that presented itself to him at all clearly was one of mild surprise that the fictional or cinematic treatment of hysterics should be based so firmly on what was evidently the right treatment." (Refer to above photo, for context lol)
Despite the hilarity of all the situations Dixon gets himself into, I felt the book got a little dreary and uninteresting. Still a good book 3.7/5.
Another Christie opus that propounds my love-hate relationship with her mystery novels. Good plot, boring delivery. I must say the revelation in Murder on the Orient Express is really quite unexpected, but it didn't keep me on my toes like how a good mystery novel should because you can't just piece together transcripts of interrogations of X number of passengers in the train (can't bother to count, 9?) and expect me to stay excited. I thought it was like a Mrs Marple thing for her stories to be bland but no it seems that be it Poirot or Marple, I can't quite agree to her style of writing. 2.5/5, I'll need some time for this unsatisfying aftertaste to go away before starting on the The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which I have downloaded since Goodreads promised me of a shocking twist and I can't seem to learn my lesson.
So... THERE'S A NEWLY TRANSLATED HIGASHINO BOOK! I am so so so excited to be reading it!!!!!!!!!!!! My last Higashino was December 2014, you can read it here. I read from some random website that the sales of Journey Under the Midnight Sun actually surpassed that of The Devotion of Suspect X and Suspect X was - REALLY GOOD - BUT NO I need to suppress my expectations!!!!
I just googled for the above photo and by chance I discover that the translated A Midsummers' Equation (another book of his) will be published this year :'-) Yay another addition to the Detective Galileo series!!!! Caught the movie approximately 2 years ago and it made me cry because the plot is so so good but excruciating!!!!!!!! How exciting!!!!!!!!
I just need a physical copy of Naoko to complete my Higashino collection :-) I hope that Higashino catches on to the sudden "Contemporary Japanese Authors" fad (Murakami, Ruth Ozeki, Natsuo Kirino lol) and earns abit of deserving recognition (and MORE translated works dammit) for himself. I wanted to finish Journey Under the Midnight Sun and do a combined review with the above 2 books but NO, a Higashino book warrants a special post for itself.
