I'm a slow reader. Or at least I'm a slow reader when I'm busy and easily distracted by well, just about anything.
I finally finished Antproof Case. My reluctance to finish it was by no means warranted. I don't want to give up coffee and wage war against a vile beverage. If I do cut back it will have nothing to do with Helprin's sound argument or literary skill. Though I do wonder how long he took on the last two pages of the book, cause that was beautiful writing.
So next up is Harry Potter V followed by VI. I should be finished by June. I'm also going to buy a case of coffee. Nicaraguan? Columbian? Guatemalan? Who knows. Probably Guatemalan, long live Kaiser Sose.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Helprin is against coffee?
And you never told us about CZechoslovakia. Was the question phrased in the past tense or something?
I don't know know that Helprin himself is against coffee, but his character certainly is. There is a subplot behind Antproof Case, actually it might be the driving plot of the whole book.
In a very Pulp Fiction / Slaughterhouse Five sort of way the book is told out of order. The first half of the book you spend reading about how this unnamed character doesn't like coffee (abhors it actually). He skips from one unconnected episode to another. It amusing but the only overarching theme is to find out why the guy doesn't like coffee so much. You start to get the background (that by the way starts to unify all the previous episodes) in the fourth chapter from the end on page 400 or so. On page 511 of 513 you find out his reasoning that he doesn't like coffee, which has very little (though still a little) to do with what happened on page 400. A tale of eccentricities recommended to me by a fair haired girl that usually recommends such good volumes. I figured there had to be something good at the end.
As far as Czechoslovakia, I'm sorry. We suspect that the test bank is partially from a 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit (since so much of the test bank is from a 2002 edition). So whatever the card says goes, even if the geopolitics of the world has shifted drastically since Gorbachev.
FYI -
If Mrs. Wyman comes to trivia we won't be taking her to that place.
Sounds too clever by half. But maybe I just don't have as fiction-oriented a brain as I used to. Until about age 30, I read mostly fiction; I gradually switched over, and now read almost entirely non-fiction.
Even without looking at the answers, knowing the source can be an advantage in answering trivia questions.
Post a Comment