h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A word deserving of use beyond references to JJ's magnum dream work surely. I have just had the pleasure of listening through 4 tapes I have of an edited down reading of FInnegans Wake - have you ever had the complex pleasure of looking at the work (reading suggests too simple an experience). My appreciation only took off, having stumbled early in many attempts to read it myself, when I heard the meelifluous flow of a Dubliner's voice unleash the clash of 42 languages. It was only hearing it read aloud that the humour came out.

I have had similar experiences. I tried and faltered several times with the book, then listened to the cassettes and found I could follow the story surprisingly well. I restarted reading, maintainig reasonable forward progress (as they say in driving tests) but was diverted by the need to read something else; I plan to return to FW . . . soonish.

Indeed, I think there maybe always is a need to read something else. I think maybe it is best to put down and return to return to - he did say 18 years to write, 18 years to read.
anax

I don't know when I started trying but I'm 57 now so I should be getting along. It amazes me how many people give up on Ulysses; the first chapter isn't *that* obscure, and some of the chapters are pulp fiction.

Anyway I've just discovered that I have to read His Dark Materials.

(I wonder do the Germans call that Seine Dunkle Stoffen?)

I'm struck by the your writing numerous ideas and opinions that aren't particularly strange but are rare and they accord with my own. Your Ullysses thought being one had by me, well as much as two can share one thought. I can remember reading it for the first time, having put it off thinking it would be turgid and difficult, being greatly surprised that not only was it simple to read - I think I expected sentences like those in FX - but it was fun. Maybe the surprise made the jokes all the funnier. It's late into the book that I found some chapters an effort, not from their obscurity as much as their long-windedness.

I had the good fortune for a few years of having a partner who enjoyed reading aloud as much as I did. We had a preference for big books and Ullysses was amongst our favourites. I was surprised how quickly a couple can get through a book if they read a chapter or equivalent each night.

Though repeatedly recommended I'm still not convinced to try Pullman.

Northern Lights is a page-turner; echoes of Sylvie and Bruno (the Oxford world with a magical dimension) and Gormenghast (the semi-feral girl at the centre, roaming the rooftops) but without the turgidity of either. My daughter shivers to remember reading it, she had to stop in the middle because it was too exciting . . . and she was in her twenties when she read it! Pullman matches a simple narrative with fascinating fantasy-history, revealed in glimpses; it is set in a world where the Reformation had gone Calvin's way and he had been the last Pope . . .

I never did much reading aloud but would like to; it was a favourite occupation of Wittgenstein and his friends.

Of course the magical/thriller/university genre also owes something to Douglas Adams, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Read that?

My D Adams spurt didn't last long after the trilogy, think I only dipped into the fourth, and my initial enthusiasm was spent and I stopped thinking myself a fan. Don't think I could pick him up again.

Your suggestion of Pulman does however stir the interest that was very stron when I first heard of his work from a dear friend back in SYdney, so it must have been soon after publication, - I recall now he was still keenly awaiting publication of the next volume. It's pencilled back in on my to read list. After my next reading group choice: Sharon & my Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry.

And I'm currently enjoying The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk et al, which I'm reading through after years of dipping in. I recently read Guthries' The Greeks and their Gods, which was a very provocative or rather inspiring though rigorously academic and a tad old-fashioned read. On fiction side I'm on Margaret Atwood's Wilderness Tips, poignant short stories. And for nights with insomnia tapes of Byron's letters or ELiot's poems, lacking a human reader that time of night.

Spoiler:

Dirk Gently is pleasant enough. It turns on Coleridge receiving coded messages from aliens in visions for the purpose of putting them out in "Kubla Khan", and some devastating threat to the world being narrowly averted by a time-traveller arriving at his door in the guise of the man from Porlock, making him forget most of the fiendish stuff.

Now you don't need to read it

Thanks for that, I won't bother with DIrk but interested as I'm fascinated by Coleridge, such a wilder creature than his limp buddy WW. I caught a brilliant Brit film called Pandemonium about their lives and STC's drug issues. Gave me a new appreciation of his dream works.

anax