This man has feminist bones in his body.

I think Patricia Highsmith would be very upset if she were to know that this had been released. The formatting of this edition is atrocious. Sure, it is a very brave piece of lesbian fiction and I gather unusual in that it has a happy ending but the dialogue is woeful and I got no sense of depth in any of the characters. It’s interesting because I’ve read Carol and apparently this is the same book while I remember Carol as being much better written.

A very immature look at Paris.

While I have marked this as worth consuming, I was disappointed in that the movie did not come close to the beauty of the book. I think if you had not read the book then the movie would be very hard to understand.

While I have marked Christ Stopped at Eboli as worth consuming, I didn’t actually finish it. Found myself drifting off in the middle of paragraphs and speed reading. It was possibly too subtle and too foreign for me but I understand why it is viewed as a great piece of literature.

I don’t understand why this novel won the Booker. It had nothing new to say about families, society, child abuse, marriage or mental illness. The passages dealing with the grandparents were boring and at times confusing. The narrator/protagonist left me indifferent, in fact annoyed. The so-called Gathering occupied about 15 pages in the whole novel. I found this a very disappointing read. I don’t know what it says about the quality of the Booker 2007 entries. I intend to read Mr Pip and probably On Chesil Beach soon.

While this is very English, some may say annoyingly so, it is almost a love story. It speaks of a lost time which will never come again.

Maybe old silent films just aren’t for me but I found the acting in this laughably atrocious, and it’s not really a film to laugh at. I was also horrified at the racism but perhaps that was normal then.

Gruesome, but very worthwhile.