Bucket list item checked.
A book that has its moments, but it’s generally packed with junk and useless information and prattles on for thousands of words.
Other than reading about the law of Shelly’s and other ancient property cases designed to legally dupe certain people out of inheritances, I have never been so glad to be done with a book. We all know… “certain interests in property must vest, if at all, within 21 years after the death of a life in being at the time that the interest was created.”
Arbitrary rules to keep lawyers paid in perpetuity and arbitrary books to keep English departments in existence.
This piece by Jared Pollen sums it all up.
Cottage industries to get the reader through on the book have sprung up – Read alongside guides, audio books, pod casts and tic toks. I used every modality to finish this.
I can say that every book I read from now on will be far more enjoyable and easy.
And in the end I agree with Virginia Woolf:
. . . have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
On to Faulkner and Woolf and other things about which to write —— including my horror stories, one of which I will read to Aspen Writers on Thursday night.
Beth Klein 