I love all things dark in literature. I like scary, and deep, and difficult. I am ok with slow reads. I like thinking, watching and trying to understand. That’s why I was sure I’d have a lasting relationship with the complete collection of works by H. P. Lovecraft (it shows $0.59 for the Kindle edition at the moment, by the way, at least for my region). The lasting relationship never happened, even though “cosmic horror” still sounds very intriguing. Truth be told, I haven’t read much of the collection yet. And that is the problem in its core. I can’t! How do you read this? How do you read this boring, preachy, monotonous and-now-my-dear-reader type of writing?!

I’m sure there are movies (and lots of other art too) based on these stories that are outstanding because the ideas are gripping, unique and haunting. But the stories themselves are unreadable! Whenever I tried to get remotely scared I got bored sooner.

There were legends of hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight.

I guess, I was supposed to get scared but I was born a century too late for that.

There was actually one short story that I enjoyed. The Beast in the Cave is written in quite the same style but it’s concise and the topic is thought-provoking.

I failed to like a few other stories that I tried. I thought I was looking at a wrong place so I went for something that I expected to be a major treat, The Call of Cthulhu … and failed to like it either! I couldn’t even finish it! In fact, it was worse than a simple DNF – I dropped the story and read the remains of the plot on Wikipedia! I was too interested in the events but couldn’t last through this tedious enumeration of verbs and nouns.

My post is in no way a review of the works by Lovecraft because I’m obviously doing something wrong. A thing that major and important simply can’t be what I now perceive it to be – a product of breathtaking imagination trapped by pompous and unnecessarily entangled writing. So what am I doing wrong? Shall I read something else by Lovecraft first? What then?

Updated to add: got sent this as a reaction to my post. So far it’s the most entertaining thing I discovered about Lovecraft.

Updated. The awesome comment by sledpress:

“It’s okay, babe. Even those of us who love HPL admit that he is pedantic, needlessly verbose, maudlin and overwritten. I came to Cthulhu and the rest at the age of ten, which made it easier to be scared by the scary parts. But he truly did not find a voice that wasn’t a parody of itself until late in life, and I think “The Shadow Out of Time” is the best thing he ever did stylistically. The early stuff, which is all full of fainting from fright and people going “aaaggh” and contrived Gothic, is just one of those acquired tastes, like really peaty whiskey (which I also love). And those of us who treasure cats can relate to the wonderful cats in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” who in a subplot reveal an ability to leap to the Moon and back carrying a human with them, in sufficient numbers. (Lovecraft adored cats.)

He was a neurotic man deeply damaged by his mentally ill parents, stilted in relationships (his marriage lasted six months), sickeningly racist and absurdly pretentious about his New England background. But there was always something about him that made me want to throw him over my shoulder and burp him, sort of. There is a biography of him by L. Sprague de Camp which might be on Kindle, not too dense, which makes for entertaining reading.

A group called the HP Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS on Facebook) has made several retro-style films of the books, and their “Call of Cthulhu” in silent-film style, with captions, is delicious and catches both the horror and the corniness.

If you can get through “Unknown Kadath,” there is what amounts to a piece of fan fiction called “The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe” which is a feminist excursion on his dream world. Delicious.”

About the book

Nothing about The Old Drift is simple. It’s so complex I couldn’t evaluate it with a standard 1-5 star system. There are many surreal stories and mystical characters. The storyline starts in Africa in 1903 and finishes in the future.

Why it is sometimes difficult to read

The Old Drift is an ultra marathon of a book. I mean not only the size but complexity. When you run an ultra marathon the conditions often change. Sometimes the process is fast and easy, sometimes you stumble and fall. Sometimes the path is barely visible so you have to slow down and watch every step. Sometimes you get lost and you have to trace your steps back. That’s exactly what reading The Old Drift feels like. Sometimes you catch the rhythm and go with the flow but very often you have to slow down or trace your steps back to understand what’s going on.

The writing

There are many Italian words or words from an African language (I don’t know which one, Google translated it as Swahili). The book provides no translation for them. You have to guess what they mean. Very often it’s not possible. Try it for yourself. These are actual quotes:

‘Mwashibukeni, Ba Lonode’, Ba George bowed his head fondly. ‘Eyamukwayi, bashikulu,’ Ronald panted. ‘Do you know where Miss Agnes is?’ ‘ Mm?’ The old man frowned. ‘Ah, mwelbantu, katwishi. I do not know.’

“When it rained it sounded like you were in a giant silimba. Loveness kept an mbaula outside, where she fried vitumbua to sell.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d just read. There’s lots of rare vocabulary, words like “tintinnabulary”, “mellifluous”, “recalcitrant”, “malapropism”, “fratricide”. I actually find it amazing that the author used a precise term for each situation but that’s why the book is sometimes hard to read.

The repetition of a phrase about teeth sucking gets really annoying. “She sucked her teeth”, “he sucked his teeth”, “their sucked their teeth”. This phrase is all over the book. Whenever someone gets worried, frustrated or angry they “suck their teeth”. My brain got a blister in the place where this phrase is processed.

The structure

The timeframe shifts between different years. Sometimes it goes forward, sometimes it goes backward. There’s no correlation between the characters and the years. No character belongs to a certain epoch. Instead one character appears in several different timeframes and then another one appears in a few other ones, and then the third one borrows a bit from both of the timeframes but also gets one of his own. You have to really focus to keep track on who’s in the spotlight right now and what’s going on. I wouldn’t call it a traditional saga where characters are linearly connected through generations. Most of the time the characters seem not to be connected at all.

Great things about the book

The writing

Even though the book is often hard to read the first 90 percent is unquestionably an amazing work of art. The way Namwali Serpell uses the language is unrepeatable and unique. One chapter completely blew my mind. The author combined two narratives in one piece of text. If you read the whole text you get a prose version of what happened. If you only read the parts written in italics it becomes a poem.

The events

Some of the described events did happen! Which is incredible taking into account how surreal they are. For example, the bizarre space program in Zambia.

This mix of surrealism and reality creates an effect where you can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality. That’s an interesting thing to experience. The book goes on this way for the first 90%. I have only one explanation for what happens after that – Namwali Serpell left her desk and someone else finished the book.

What went wrong in the end

Suddenly, I was no longer reading intricate prose about unusual characters. The book turned into a second-rate women’s fiction with sci-fi elements about futuristic revolutionaries.

Girlish chats about men and sex promptly appeared on the pages and the heroine started “admiring muscles of his back”.

As the mutations of the book progressed, my notes on it narrowed down to one phrase only: “WTF has happened to the book?!”

I was considering DNFing The Old Drift 97% into the book! The remaining three percent seemed like too much torture. I even counted how many clicks it took to cover one percent (it took 16 clicks)! I was counting the clicks left till the end of the book!

Final thoughts

I cannot come up with one definite conclusion about this book. It’s beautiful in some places and not so much in others. You might love The Old Drift or you might hate it. Most likely you’ll do both at the same time.

I’m very thankful to the publishers for providing me with a copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.

I wonder if that’s the way authors write their books? Does it mean that if they never publish their book but keep changing it according to the way they feel at a given moment, the book will keep growing throughout life like a plant without ever acquiring a solidified form? In fact, I once heard one author saying that he would have changed one part in his book (the one I didn’t like either) had he been writing the book nowadays. What would happen to Lolita then, for example? Would Lolita happen at all?

I definitely feel that some modern books didn’t grow properly or fully. They were plucked too early from their drafts so that they could be put on shelves and promptly sold.

I’m sure a similar change of perception happens to readers too. You read a book and enjoy it. You still think you love the book so you open it later to live through all the emotions again but there are only shells left while the essence has vanished. The book itself didn’t change! And yet it feels completely different.

Maybe there is never just a book but an author’s perception crossed with a reader’s perception at a certain moment of time. Ten different people will read ten different books even though the books would have the same author and title. And then they will read ten more books from the same pages if they open the book later.

Have you noticed it too?

An absolutely stunning book has been recently published!

I’m generally very picky about the books I read. I think there are many books that are ok, there are even more books that are not, and there’s just a handful, just very few that are really stunning. The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt is like that.

Although I usually speak about things I liked and things I disliked in books, this time I liked absolutely everything and I have only positive things to say.

The story

“Aren’t memories a little like furniture of the mind?”

Miss Kratt lives in her large house with Olva who’s helping her around the house. They’ve known each other all their lives. Both of them are quite old now. They haven’t always lived alone in this house. When they were children there were other people around. Miss Kratt’s father was an influential person in the town, and his son although still very young was a key figure in keeping this influence going. Everything changed when a tragedy happened.

The characters

Absolutely all characters, regardless of their roles, are fully-developed and multilayered.

Miss Judith felt absolutely real to me and I sympathised with her a lot. Even when the book was over I still wanted to be there for her. Although she probably wouldn’t appreciate it.

There are some characters that I despised even though I could understand why they were acting that way.

None of the characters is perfect but they aren’t artificially flawed either.

The writing

The writing is perfect. I felt as if the story had been told by Miss Judith herself and not by the author. I highlighted so many quotes in my copy that it took me several minutes just to scroll through all of them. Here are a few:

“… she wore a gray dress that held the sad promise of once being black.”

“He was a small-town man who read big-city newspapers.”

“… conversations with siblings cannot be separated from all the conversations that came before.”

“We enter this world curling our tiny hands around our mother’s fingers, and we exit with those same hands cinched by arthritis. How could we pretend our grasp, clutching onto life from opposite ends, stays the same?”

I loved the fluidity of chapters, the two storylines, one in the past, one in the present, flowing two separate paths and then merging together.

I especially liked how the chapters were separated by Miss Judith’s list of inventory. After each chapter, new objects were added to the list. If you didn’t know the story behind the objects you wouldn’t pay attention to them but because you have read the chapter, you know what the objects mean, and so just a single mention of them could bring a whole wave of memories. That is pure literary magic.

What I liked most

I loved the stories themselves and the way they were told. There is no melodrama in them. The stories are deep and touching even when they are scary and sad.

Final thought

This book brought tears to my eyes just because of how perfect it is. I’m so grateful to the author for this book, and of course to the publishers for sending me the copy in exchange for my honest (albeit emotional) review. I hope Andrea Bobotis will write more books. I will be looking forward to her new works.

I recently heard an idea that exposing a child to classic literature can bring them a wider range of experience than the actual human world can bring. As much as I was suffering through War and Peace at school I think there’s some truth in it. Still, I don’t think every child can appreciate the chance to analyse human nature when there are more rewarding activities waiting outside the classroom. Now though, when the classroom is a couple of decades away, it’s a different story for me.

I don’t remember all events of The Forsyte Saga, but Irene Heron will forever be my hero. If I ever return to these books, it will be for her.

The plot of Madame Bovary is quite interesting, but Madame Bovary herself mesmerised me more than any storylines in the book, and I don’t mean to say the things that mesmerised me were noble or nice. I love watching all sorts of people, as long as I’m doing it from a safe distance of a book.

And what about Anna Karenina? I said it before and I will say it again – it will forever be a mystery to me how Tolstoy managed to lock real people within the covers of the book. But he did. Those are not characters. Those are living beings. And I love watching them.

I think this love is one of the two things that kept me through the books about Patrick Melrose, this and the impeccable, precise, scalpel-sharp writing.

Maybe that’s why it’s easier for me to enjoy literary fiction than fantasy (if I ever enjoyed fantasy). Maybe it’s because one can breathe only that much life into a book, and if you created believable dragons you don’t have any magic left to create believable humans?

I’m currently going through all the works by Daphne du Maurier. Apparently, not all of her stories are good (to my huge surprise). Some of them are so plain it’s hard to believe they are her creations, but the people… the people are always there, alive and breathing.

If you can recommend any books with characters like that, you are very welcome. The characters don’t need to be strong or do incredible things. They don’t even have to be good human beings. They just have to be real.

Mother’s Milk, the fourth book about Patrick Melrose took me the longest to read and was the first book in the series that actually made me doubt the decision to read any series at all. You get attached to the characters and so you keep paddling through the books even when you are not enjoying them anymore. At least that’s what’s been happening with me and Patrick Melrose books.

What’s the book about?

The fourth book focuses on a few important situations in Patrick’s life, mainly through the eyes of new and much younger characters. Just as all previous three books it only tells you about a couple of events that take place within quite a short period of time. Thus, all development of the story basically revolves around characters’ thoughts and feelings rather than their actions.

What I liked about the book

The writing is again thought-provoking and beautiful,

‘We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. It we merely look at the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.’

People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materialising them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

It was easy to see what was sick, but it was so difficult to know what it meant to be well.

‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain.’

with its classic dark humor,

In the end, it was even harder to behave badly than to behave well. That was the trouble of not being a psychopath.

He definitely had a Tamazepam problem, namely, that it wasn’t strong enough.

and with its perfectly captured human nature.

…necessary egotism of someone who needed to get a self back in order to sacrifice it again.

Her profound inability to listen to anyone else was unhappily married to a hysterical concern about what other people thought of her.

Eleanor believed more or less anything, as long as it was untrue.

…she was going to dedicate her life to helping others, as long as they weren’t related to her.

Noticing the arrival of her family, his grandmother organized her face into a smile, but her eyes remained detached from the process, frozen in bewilderment and pain.

Mary was such a devoted mother because she knew what it felt like not to have one. Patrick also knew what it felt like, and as a former beneficiary of Mary’s maternal overdrive, he sometimes had to remind himself that he wasn’t an infant any more, to argue that there were real children in the house, not yet horror-trained; he sometimes had to give himself a good talking to. […] Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness.

The kids

This book takes kids seriously. They are not just accessories for adults’ lives or levers for a plot development. Their thoughts and feelings are as important as the ones of adult characters.

That was the trouble with grown-ups: they always wanted to be the centre of attention, with their battering rams of food, and their sleep routines and their obsession with making you learn what they knew and forget what they had forgotten.

Whenever he was hurt he reverted to calling myself ‘you’, although he had discovered the proper use of the first person singular six months ago. Until then, he had referred to himself as ‘you’ on the perfectly logical grounds that everyone else did. He also referred to others as ‘I’, on the perfectly logical grounds that that was how they referred to themselves.

The resolutions

Even though it seemed pretty impossible, the story did progress to some resolutions which was really satisfying.

What I liked less about the book

As you might have guessed already, the lack of action in this book is close to a torture. It gets so boring that even the perfect writing and close-ups of disturbed souls don’t make up for it. The characters are like bugs frozen in amber. They are perfect and realistic, and yet you can’t get rid of the feeling that they are supposed to be doing something more in life.

Would I recommend this book?

Unfortunately I wouldn’t, which is really a shame. This is a remarkable piece of real literature with unique deep writing but I personally just don’t know readers who can be OK with such stillness of the plot.

Here are the reviews of the previous novels in the series: Never Mind, Patrick Melrose novel #1 , Bad News, Patrick Melrose novel #2, Some Hope, Patrick Melrose #3.

Here are the things I noticed:

1. All men are assholes (apart from the ones in the end of the story)

While female characters can be multilayered, male characters are there with one trait only, they are mean. They often don’t have any grounds for that apart from being men.

Those cardboard wrong-doers are already enough to ruin a story but what really infuriates me is that in the end of the story the same asshole or some newcomer becomes a knight in shining armour and rescues the woman to her happily-ever-after. Seriously?! You just created a whole story where a woman suffered because of a man but the final message of the book is find yourself a better man?!

2. Pregnancies

It seems that just like “Chekhov’s gun” is supposed to shoot in a good story, a woman is supposed to produce a baby. It either happens during the story or before its onset, but regardless of its relevance to the plot the physiological details will be provided to you with the accuracy of an anatomy textbook.

I’m still not sure if this obsession is coming from the excitement of being able to describe something that male authors have no first-hand experience of, or it’s an attempt to speak about things that people around could not listen to.

3. Society vs women

Struggling stay-at-home moms, women facing harassment at work, women treated like cattle, these all are acute issues, but as it usually happens, once a message gets overstated it stops being noticed. And that’s exactly what I’ve been witnessing in modern books. Although, maybe conveying a message is not their main aim? Maybe it’s simply done to sell the books to certain audiences?

Obviously, I’m talking about my personal observations. I’ve read some books that do not orbit around those mentioned topics but include some other themes too. If you also know such books, please, let me know

What’s a blogging slump?

A slump is a slowdown in an activity. I always imagined a blogging slump to be that cosy, lazy process when you simply don’t want to focus on your blog and choose to focus on something else. Turns out, it’s not always true. I simply had to do other things, but I was really missing my blog and the community. So hi guys, how are you?

The other end of the tunnel

Now when I’m back I thought I’d turn this experience into a positive one summing up those things I noticed while trying to return. I’ll also ask you some questions and if you want to reply to any of them, please, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. My hope is that both the post and the comments will be helpful to other people who are going through similar situations.

Here is how it was for me

I dreaded returning to a project that remained untouched for so long

I think it was one of the main obstacles that kept me away for longer. I felt as if I’d been neglecting a hungry monster and it could now eat me up when I’d finally turn up at the doors. Luckily, it was a mistake. No monsters behind the doors, just dear old blog and lots of familiar people in the comments and Twitter replies.

Replying to comments and messages

This has been my main priority because it’s the people I’m here for. They did help me get back on track.

Something super exciting happened while I was away

I’ve been featured in an article called The 19 Best Book Blogs to Read in 2019 by Scribendi!!!

Of course, I’m over the moon about it, and it also encouraged me to come back here sooner.

My genius plan on how to avoid such long breaks in the future

I’ll try to schedule several posts ahead so that if the trouble does happen again I will be able to still stay connected with everybody while not having to spend time on writing new posts.

Questions to you

• What’s your experience with blog slumps or any other long breaks in your projects?
• Do you dread returning to a project after you have stayed away for some time?
• What is the thing you try to address first once you do return?
• Has anything exciting ever happened to the project while you were away? Did it help you return?
• Do you think there’s a way to avoid slumps?

Hope to hear back from you! Wishing you inspiration and enough time to do what you love doing!

If you want to chat more, here’s my first post with blogsitential questions.

House of Glass is a platypus of literature. The book has a body of one creation and a tail of another one. It starts as a gothic mystery but turns into War and Peace in the end.

What is the book about

It’s a story about Clara, a young woman whose bones are fragile like glass and whose emotional state has also been shattered by a recent loss. Clara is hired to work in a glass house of an old estate, and of course the estate hides many mysteries which Clara will try to solve.

What I liked about the book

The gothic part

The book creates a perfect gothic atmosphere. There is an old mansion, spooky sounds, and a history of complicated lives.

The mystery

I absolutely loved Clara’s attitude which turned a spooky story into almost a detective one.

Characters

The characters are not either good or bad. They are multidimensional and complicated. It’s hard to come to final conclusions about them.

Storylines

There are many storylines and they are all connected on some level.

Chekhov’s guns

Each detail mentioned in the story has its function.

What I liked less

Women’s rights agenda

I know it’s a sensitive topic so I’ll try to tread it carefully. I understand the necessity of acknowledging the problems, both historical and current ones, but modern female-authored literature seems to be overusing the topic to the point that it’s starting to repel people rather than draw the limelight to the problems.

Random villain

It feels like the characters were drawing straws to pick up a villain, and the one who landed the role didn’t really fit it.

The platypus tail

When I want to read War and Peace, I read Tolstoy. If I am drawn to the book by its gothic atmosphere, I prefer the atmosphere to persist till the end.

Final thoughts

It’s a well-written book with an interesting and complicated plot that for the most part combines mystery and gothic. If it was not for the ending I would have easily given the book five stars.

The Salt of the Earth is an exceptional book but unfortunately I failed to like it as much as I expected to.

About the book

The Salt of the Earth is a pacifist novel about a person who loses the little he had, to be a pawn in something he has no understanding of.

The novel was first published in Polish in 1936 and received great acclaim. As a result Jozef Wittlin, the author, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1939. The book was first translated into English in 1940. It was supposed to be the first book in a trilogy but the drafts of the other two volumes were lost when a soldier in a French town threw the case with them into the sea in 1940. Only the first section of the second book survived and is included in this edition.

Good things about the book

Salt of the Earth is an example of beautiful writing. Jozef Wittlin was a poet, and you can feel it in his book. Here are some quotes.
About the news that the war has started:

The news spread by word of mouth. The mouth bit it, chewed it, ground it and crunched it until suddenly a million mouths spat one word out onto the pavement like a bitter almond.

At the recruiting station:

Around midday, Niewiadomski’s name flew out from under sergeant’s black moustache.

And more:

Stars flashed on the clear firmament, one after another, glorious, mature, brilliant. It was nights like these that gave birth to astronomy.

What I didn’t like

Unfortunately, I failed to like the novel, despite the beautiful writing and the greater message. There are only about fifteen instances of direct speech in the whole book, out of which about ten are actual dialogues, which are short and kept to a minimum. Even when communication between characters does happen it’s being recited as a narrative. Overall, the book feels as if somebody had written you a huge letter retelling different events and thoughts. This style of writing takes all possible dynamism out of the book. The book was written 80 years ago and so the rules of the story telling were probably different then, but I do read classics and I have never encountered anything so still, like water in a pond.

Although there’s a protagonist, you never connect to him closely. He’s a mere tool to show you what a state can do to a person. And as it’s an unfinished story you never even get to know what happened to him eventually.

As for the translation of the book, I’m not an expert but I think the name that sounds like “Semyon” or “Semion” would look much better written exactly this way, rather than simply transliterated as “Semen”.

Final thoughts

It’s undoubtedly a very deep book, but the peculiarity of the writing style makes it very hard to read and the incompleteness of the story brings no satisfaction. Thus, I can only give it 3.5 stars. I’m sure somebody with a different attitude to reading will like it more.

Thanks to the publishers for the copy in exchange for my honest review.