by Russell Hoban
"People ask me how I got from St. Eustace to Riddley Walker and all I can say is that it's a matter of being friends with your head. Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things; there are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, w...
This book did my head in. To deliberately mangle punctuation, grammar, spelling, and syntax nearly beyond recognition is a lot harder than it sounds, and even harder still to come out with a cohesive, fascinating story at the end of it. Russel Hoban did it brilliantly. The world building is fantas...
The language style (not writing but language) is very peculiar and unusual. This was done purposefully by the writer to show the future, long after the nuclear wars when there're left no social and cultural prerequisites to speak grammatically correct. So it may cause some confusion while reading bu...
http://www.errorbar.net/rw/ (h/t bonnie)
There’s a point in Riddley Walker where Riddley writes, “You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you,” which is a bit how I feel trying to write about this book. There are so many “big things” going on in it that it’s difficult to decide what to raise in a short review. But I will...
_Riddley Walker_ is the book that put Russell Hoban on the map (inasmuch as he is on the map…he is criminally neglected as an author) and will likely be the one work for which he will be remembered (sadly he passed away in late 2011). So far I have read three other Hoban novels and while I have thor...
A very odd book, in almost every way. Surprisingly, I didn't find the fractured English (changed grammar and spellings intended to demonstrate the way language might change over a thousand or more years) to be a serious impediment. If anything, it forced me to actually pay more attention to the whol...
This is already a sentimental favourite for me. I've only read it once, but I'm already imagining reading it again and again, adding to the notes in the margins as I go..... sigh. Book love.The book's premise is that an apocalyptic nuclear event (taking place roughly now) has resulted in Britain bei...
Set in a primitive future society and told in the imagined dialect of the time, involving malapropistic phoneticisms and accidental puns (and clearly an inspiration for one story of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23327001), so not something you can read quickly - at lea...
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