"The gays, good heavens" - Harold Bloom

Was sceptical of the 14th century but a great read. I'll admit the theological stuff did go a bit in one ear out the other but the murder aspect of it all was brilliantly done and Eco has a great detail of prose to sink your teeth into. William is delightfully ridiculous at times, and the whole abbey forms a wonderful cast of homosexuals, heretics, and horticulturalists that all come together to construct an incredible dark atmosphere and narrative. Best literary library since Borges.

Would recommend/10

Will likely turn out to read very dated-ly, probably even moreso than carve up given its more limited time frame - and indeed, what with Liz Truss being presented as the most conservative mainstream politician while Nigel is up in the running now. It's still fun, it's still well written, it's still got characters that are so intensely hateable precisely due to the fact they're unfortunately real, but the plotting is lamer and the characters (minus Wagstaff) aren't nearly as lively. The murder mystery gets in the way of the political commentary and the political commentary gets in the way of the murder mystery, so really less than the sum of its parts. Also the "the book is really the book in the book" ending is just a worse carve up.

Wouldn't recommend, not because it's a bad book (although it's not the craziest) but because Carve up is much much better/10

Doing my french presentation on this guy. And there is certainly a reason; as with other Houllebecqs, this is brilliantly written in a technical but politically rather repulsive. Simply gratuitous amounts of graphic sex; bordering on pornography, but I'm not overly fussed about that - it is, at least, well written pornography given the semi-recent unpleasantness of John "Brassy Froth" Updike. But anyway yeah usual Houellebecq blaming women for male sexual issues. Qu'est-ce qu'on peut s'attendre at this point. Also an extra dash of Islamophobia because "threats to identity in society" is naturally gonna get to racism extremely quickly

You could live without it but also worth a read/10

Call me conflicted.

Annoyingly, this one is very good. Annoying because it's really not fun to read for a good 70% of the book - the opening section is fantastic, and I love Queequeg's whole...existence, I suppose. The homoeroticism is of course appreciated but him and Ishmael are very sweet outside of that too. And the ending sequence, once the pace gets going, is just class: whaling, danger, Pip (all characters names pip are just great ig. not including agggtm), the dubloon speech, that st elmos fire bit, the prophecy business, and the literal last page ending is of course perfect for what it's doing. It's very Shakespearean which I naturally fuck with. Speaking of I like when it randomly turns to the play script stuff. Oh yeah and Ahab is yk Ahab so he's good.

But holy shit that middle 300/350 pages are so fucking full of whale facts I could not care less about. I've said it before and I'll say it again: scientific, calculatory language is just not fun to read in novels for me. I want PROSE not a fucking encyclopedia. And I'm doubly annoyed because now I've sat with it for a few days I'm starting to think "hmm maybe it was worth it to build the pacing of the novel and get you going with the whaling stuff so Ahab's ultimate failure is more effective" but I know deep in my heart that is a betrayal of my past self because wow I was bored for the like week and a half it took me to get through that part.