Day: November 10, 2015

Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

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[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve preserved the reviewers’ original punctuation and spelling. More one-star Amazon reviews.].

I had been warned about Woolf

written, I believe, to impress rather than to relate.

I don’t appreciate her writing and keep coming back for more

I may not be giving it a fair review since I only made it to page 65

pages and pages of surreal metaphors that go on for 10 paragraphs

Woolf had a huge obsession with semi-colons

The book just does not make any sense

I really liked the movie “the Hours”

nonsensical semi-flashbacks

Groundbreaking prose?

I tried, I really did

describing nothing

Written by a lesbian

Kind of like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works

DO read “The Hours”, you will be impressed

I kept losing track of which character was musing about nothing

I suppose Woolf is considered a genius since she was apparently a cavalier writer of her generation

Let us listen to an old farty woman stream her consciousness to us to hear, pointless thoughts that go nowhere

I’m grateful that contemporary writers can at least string together 2 sentences that follow one another in a logical sequence

Lets burn every sentence she ever penned to end all the unneccesary suffering that curious readers have to go through when they first pick up “Mrs. Dalloway.”

My suggestion: just watch The Hours – you’ll get all the beauty and none of the confusion

the person responsible, Virginia Wolf, has been dead for quite some time now

i have no interest in reading about that lifestyle

am stuck in her growling semicolons

slower than a tortoise

ramblings of a lunatic

As bad as Faulkner

So much language

dreadfully boring

run-on sentences

“literary” drivel

terribly written

so many words

and never getting to a plot

Stream of conscience you say?

I normally enjoy stream of consciousness

The narrative reads like the inner thoughts of a sugar crazed autistic kid with ADD in the middle of a carnival

everyone i know who likes this book only does so because he or she was told by some professor that it’s supposed to be good and can provide no evidence to confirm it

This book certainly shows the depravity of man and a self-centered life and the meaningless found amongst those who think of none but themselves.

The absence of spacing to differentiate between each character’s thought process makes for unnecessary confusion

I really liked the idea of the story taking place over the course of one day

THIS BOOK IS WORSE THAN AIDS!

meandering and repetetive

will suffice as kindling

The party! The party!

VW was mentally-ill

“Dense”

put me off

definitley not a fun read

pretty gross hair and stuff on it/ in it

I had had to read it, or was supposed to

haven’t been able to get past the first chapter

lovely idea, virginia and i applaud you for your creativity

I felt like I was reading some writing student’s homework assignment

The Hours is better, despite its inspiration

this story line is too depressing for me

Descriptions were beaten to death

Not one thing uplifting

I am an avid reader!

the book failed

hyphens

The Sacrifice of Cain and Abel — Mariotto Albertinelli

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Ian Svenonius’s Censorship Now!! (Book acquired, 9.29.2015)

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This is the blurb for Ian Svenonius’s book Censorship Now!!:
image

The non-blurb is of course a blurb.

If you think that that move is brilliant, or even funny, you might dig Censorship Now!!

Publisher Akashic Books has the good sense to offer a description of the book:

In this outrageous and hilarious new essay collection, underground music icon Ian F. Svenonius tackles such diverse subjects as IKEA, Apple, the weather, the gentrification of punk by indie rock, Marion Barry, the film Heathers, Christian pornography, vampires, hoarding, the role of sugar in empire-building, how to properly tip at restaurants, the return of the hat in men’s fashion, and other highly topical matters. No one is left unscathed, and more than a few will be left scratching their heads even as they laugh.

In high school, I dug Svenonius’s first band Nation of Ulysses—more as a concept than for the music, really (I much preferred Dischord label mates Fugazi). The goofy-seriousiousness of Nation of Ulysses was entertaining and confusing, but like later musical projects The Make-Up and Weird War, Svenonius’s band never struck me as quite as dangerous as they wanted to be.

My best friend was always a bigger fan of Svenonius than I was—enough to have read the dude’s first book, The Psychic Soviet. I texted him when I first started reading Censorship Now!!, complaining that I couldn’t tell if Svenonius was serious or if the book was all a schtick, an ageing scenester’s put-on. My pal replied that Svenonius was “a professional sloganeer,” and that every sentence of The Psychic Soviet was a “pull quote.”

Every line a pull quote, every sentence a slogan is how Censorship Now!! reads (if those two exclamation marks didn’t tip you off). The book’s essays read like the rants of someone’s older brother trying to hip you to the truth, man. But after you grow up you wonder why the brother’s still living in his parents’ basement. Okay. That sounds a bit too, I don’t know, rude of me (?) — but I can’t find anything particularly profound in Svenonius’s raging against Apple and Wikipedia and the bourgeoisie. (His riff on Ikea (“Ikea wants couples to break up”) reeks of a bad comedy routine).

Censorship Now!! (which always reads like a talk book, and never as prose) is simultaneously reactionary and nostalgic. Svenonius hates all the things you’d expect him to (NPR, Urban Outfitters, Arcade Fire, gentrification) and even some things you might not expect (tipping). Loose opinion and easy reference are employed instead of facts (sample slogan:  “Destroy All Facts” How revolutionary!).

Does it matter? It doesn’t matter. The fourteen year-old me would’ve loved this shit. There’s a fourteen year-old out there that would love it now.

A Pictish Warrior Holding a Human Head — John White

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