(Original Review, 2002-06-20)Many very good books are not difficult to read--at least for the people who read them and have read them. But books can become difficult when difference of culture, or viewpoint, or language, or elapsed time intervene. Dickens is more difficult now than 150 years ago, an...
So...this book is one giant joke constructed of smaller jokes and it takes the mick out of nigh on everything; novels, novelists, travel, travel writers, army officers, doctors, clergymen, amours, marriage, you name it, and not least readers. Considered by some to be the first Modernist novel, app...
'Tristram Shandy' was my October, and I'm a little upset about that. It's true that I was able to squeeze in a few other things, but a few graphic novels and a child's book fail to even out the scales of a month.Sterne for his day, I'm sure, was hilarious. Countenances must have lit up left and righ...
Whatever I was expecting when this turned up on my university reading list, it wasn't this. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published (unbelievably, for reasons that shall become clear in a moment) in 1759, is a novel (perhaps) following the perenially unlucky, not to say ridi...
There’s nothing quite like this in all the books I’ve read. Although in its erudition and exuberance and experimentation and bawdiness and its massive digressions it reminds me in some ways of Melville’s Moby Dick, in other ways of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and in other ways of Joyce’s Ulysses. ...
Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk- so little to the stock? Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?Are we for ever twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for ever in the same track- for ...
"Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! Read...for without much reading, by which, your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the meaning of my next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel th...
This book is at times hilarious, and all the other times, boring. Probably the most accurate phrase would be "hot mess." This is a book about snubbing conventions and does not even attempt to construct a linear narrative. The narrator becomes distracted by context so much so that in his supposed aut...
Since my name in part derives from this book (in the book, our hero is christened Tristram because the maid couldn't remember the name Trismegistus as she ran from one room to the next), I of course had to read it. It's quite a tome and from a different time, but still completely odd and hilarious. ...
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