ed_moore's reviews
289 reviews

Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby by Samuel Beckett

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dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

2.5

“dead one day
no
night
dead one night”

Footfalls is a short play about a woman called May, caring for her elderly mother as she obsessively paces the stage. Beckett is unbelievably precise with the staging and stage directions (this is the case for each of these plays) but still it was very confusing. In some way May haunts herself, but very little happens and I was so lost it wasn’t the most enjoyable. (2 stars)

Rockaby focuses on an elderly lady on a rocking chair in the dark, the light focused on her face as she rocks back and forth listening to an extremely bleak tape of sorts. This was an absolutely harrowing depiction of the futility of life and lack of human willpower to exist and really look forward to studying this one! I feel it’s the sort of thing that will become so memorable and prominent when it has a bit of time to marinate and for me to think about it. (3 stars)

(I did not read ’Not I’ but this was the only edition I could find of ‘Footfalls’ to log it)
Krapp's Last Tape & Embers by Samuel Beckett

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challenging dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

2.5

“Past Midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.”

I have read ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ before, about a year ago for one university module and now I have reread it for another. It is a short piece of drama about a man in a seemingly post-apocalyptic world who plays old tapes he recorded on his thirty ninth birthday, thirty years ago, and looks back on reminiscing on the old state of the world, or rather hating himself for what he has become.

When I first read it I really disliked this play, honestly maybe in the realm of one star, and I also had to watch a screening of it that extended the 13 pages to be slowly dragged out over an hour. This really didn’t help my enjoyment I don’t think however rereading and looking at the bleak vision of the world Beckett presented, and his interpretation on the human psyche and the futility of what man can become, it is really interesting. It was much better on reread and I saw a lot more in the play, but due to how limited it is in length and what it offers I still feel like it doesn’t deserve a particularly high rating, just a significant improvement on what it was a year ago. 

Studying Beckett is brilliant, the works themselves not quite so much, and I think that given Beckett’s attitudes towards reinterpretation of his works he would absolutely hate that sadly. 
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

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adventurous challenging informative slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

“The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had rolled on five thousand years ago” 

In his tome of a novel, or myth of morality, Melville claims that “The whale have no famous author and whaling have no famous chronicler.” In writing ‘Moby Dick’ he certainly succeeded in fulfilling such absence. ‘Moby Dick’ is the story of Ishmael, who boards the ship of Captain Ahab, a one legged sailor in search of vengeance against the creature that tore off his leg, the white whale Moby Dick. Though sprawling in length, it is an incredibly written book. Melville’s levels of detail and descriptions are sublime and the conclusion was breathtaking. The small details scattered through and built up throughout the novel all cumulated and it honestly had the emotional impact of the final pages of a murder mystery. 

The protagonist, Ishmael, was the most lacklustre part of the novel. Despite being in his head for over 700 pages he really doesn’t get much development and is quite flat, if the opening line “Call me Ishmael” wasn’t so iconic you would honestly start to forget he existed. However, the flamboyant cast of characters around him on the ship, the mysterious and menacing Ahab, loveable Queequeg and even the phantom-like presence of the cabin-boy Pip make up for this absence in Ishmael. 

Most authors do extensive research for their novels, whereas very few decide to include all this research within its pages. If Melville didn’t constantly break the plot up with information on the jurisdiction of whaling laws or the average inches of a male sperm whales jaw bone this book would’ve had so much rhythm to it, and as much as I enjoyed the plot the sheer amount of this filler information (Melville being paid by the word likely being the cause of this) means I can’t let myself give it five stars despite how well Melville’s prose was written. The book does however focus on the hunting and murder of whales which is pretty uncomfortable and the image of the Pequod with a severed whale head hanging from each side was harrowing and will forever haunt me.  Though the man did truly have a talent to spin words and never did I think I would learn so much about the whaling industry of the 1800s or whale species in my life, but that is just the consequence of reading ‘Moby Dick’. 

For the most part ‘Moby Dick’ was absolutely brilliant and certainly worth the read, though the two overarching flaws of Ishmael and information overload cap it at 4.5 unfortunately. 
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An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

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challenging dark reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

“Clyde was left to cogitate on and make best of a world that at its best was a kind of inferno of mental ills - above which - as above Dante might have been written - “abandon hope-ye who enter here” 

Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy’ is the tale of Clyde Griffiths, a boy in his pursuit of the promise of the American Dream working his way up in the capitalist society of 1920s America. With tones of the high life of ‘The Great Gatsby’, the book more so reminded me of the struggle under capitalism presented in Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ as Clyde devotes himself to the industrial world in search of riches and love. The book is split into three sections, and with its length it builds up slowly and as soon as I reached the tension of the first part it ended and the scene changes, immediately killing momentum again. That was one of the main struggles of this tome, it was brilliantly paced in the final 100 pages and really engaging, partly because of a better structuring and partly because of my determination to finish with the end in sight, though the chapters were quite short hence it was very easy to put down during reading sessions resulting in me ploughing through it very slowly. 

For a long while, I was waiting for the tragedy. I was tracking Clyde on his rise as a tragic hero and anticipating the fall, and that did come although at this point Clyde as a protagonist was extremely dislikable. He is self-entitled, spoilt and completely unfaithful across his multiple flings with women that make up the motivations of his character and the plot. It was when the tragic fall did come however, myself now rooting for Clyde’s downfall, that I realise the ‘American Tragedy’ is not Clyde’s tragedy, and that realisation was powerful. 

Dreiser wrote a certainly memorable novel, with a protagonist that’ll really split opinions and has so many layers to him, but his pacing was off for the most part of the book. In all my past ‘big books’ I have undertaken I have either loved them or really hated them, and for the first time there’s one that slots quite comfortably into the middle of the pack.
The Great Return by Arthur Machen

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mysterious slow-paced

1.75

“The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread; without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.” 

‘The Great Return’ is Machen’s imagining of the events that would follow the return of the Holy Grail to British lands, set in a welsh village during the First World War. It opens establishing some sort of protagonist, but he is completely forgotten upon the arrival to the village of Llantrisant in favour of recounting the fractured miracles that occurred when the Grail appeared. The opening discussing the unexplainable being dismissed, in relation to the figure of the poltergeist, somewhat justifies the lack of conclusion or explanation following the strange events, whereas there is no particular consequences or conclusion to the story and it more reads as a factual recount with the characters it set up in the opening being entirely dismissed. It was a peculiar story, but lacked stakes and any sort of development in terms of both character and plot. I recently read ‘The Bowmen’ by Machen and through it wasn’t anything special, it covered the same themes and ideas of Arthurian miracle during the war, also lacking development but to a more effective standard, in forty less pages.
In Parenthesis by David Jones

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challenging dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

“Far thuddings faintly heard in the stranger-world: where the road leads, where no man goes, where the straight road leads;”

David Jones’ ‘In Parenthesis’ is a wild modernist work of prose-poetry (it claiming itself to be this way but primarily made up of lyrical prose) that was praised by T.S. Eliot. It is the tale of John Ball (aptly named after the priest that led the Peasant’ Revolt) and his journey across the English Channel to the fields of the Somme, where he fights in the battle of Mametz Wood. 

‘In Parenthesis’ is a sprawling work packed with allusions of medievalism, Welsh mythology, Shakespeare’s histories and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ encapsulating a mix between the staleness and the chaos of trench warfare. It is honestly very hard to keep track of the events of the narrative due to Jones’ confused and fractured prose, but in terms of an experimental piece of literature it is fascinatingly clever if not a little batshit. 
Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud

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informative slow-paced

2.75

“Psychoanalysis was above all an art of interpretation.”

Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is an essay exploring the life and death drives of man, and how we unconsciously strive for both pleasure and displeasure, attempting to make such pleasurable. In looking at these drives in relation to tragedy, Freud’s psychology on repetition in both children and lesser-so but still the case adults, often in forms of relationship, was extremely interesting. This was related to the sadistic drive of the tragic theatre, where audiences unconsciously take pleasure from watching tragedy unfold. The latter half on the inevitable death drive is also reciprocal in tragedy however this got a lot more confusing as it went on, and alike to my reading of ‘An Interpretation of Dreams’ and the Oedipus Complex I was really impressed by Freud’s theories, that is until they got too intelligent for me in sections V, VI and VII, focusing a lot on the biology and psychology of the brain as oppose to how I can apply repetition theory to literature. ‘Beyond the Principle of Pleasure’ was a very good essay, it just got a little confusing.
My rating is based on it being better than 'On Mourning and Melancholia', less stimulating than 'An Interpretation of Dreams', but still a very middle-ground text in terms of my enjoyment. 
The Bowmen by Arthur Machen

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dark hopeful fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

“There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, “It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast tab times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches” 

Arthur Machen’s ‘The Bowmen’ is a short story about a group of English soldiers during the First World War facing certain death at hands of German bombardment. They call upon the spirit of St George to gain courage and turn around the last stand, playing on supernatural elements and themes of patriotism. It was a curious story, with absolutely no room for character development and strange plot devices, and a peculiar angle to war which is both patriotic and alike to propaganda yet also critical of it. Overall however it wasn’t a particularly notable text and likely extremely forgettable if not for me logging it now.
The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien

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adventurous dark informative medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

“I Turgon will not leave my city, and will burn with it” 

Tolkien’s ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ is an extension of the tale from ‘The Silmarillion’ edited together by Christopher Tolkien using his father’s notes. The story of Gondolin’s fall and Tuor’s escape from the ruined city opens the first third of the book, and the subsequent sections are made up of other variations of the story found within Tolkien’s papers hence in reading the whole thing it did get a little repetitive. The story is written in a much more archaic language hence is a less accessible story from Middle Earth and also had nowhere near the flourish of ‘Lord of the Rings’, likely why the story was only published posthumously by Christopher rather than something Tolkien chose to publish in his lifetime. It felt a lot more like a history and I thought I was well versed in the history of Middle Earth but I still found myself looking up a lot of characters and places, as knowledge is assumed rather than explained as it is in the more mainstream of Tolkien’s works. Nonetheless I still adore the world of Middle Earth and appreciated exploring another section of it. 
Emma by Jane Austen

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hopeful lighthearted relaxing medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

“If Harriet from growing humble had became vain, it was her doing too”

I have now ended up in a circumstance where I have read three books by Austen, and many will question why I keep reading them as I am yet to like any of them. ‘Emma’ was much better than the former two I have read: ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ though that was only down to Emma Woodhouse herself and not the plot. Emma regards herself an esteemed match maker among her circle of Victorian gentry and she herself swears off love. She is however an absolute menace to society trying to pair people up in a plot that follows the usual structures of that of Jane Austen, very mundane upper class meetings and conversation with focus on suitable marriages, whereas Emma misreads emotions, convinces her friends against marriages for her own personal gains, and often just gets it wrong and acts against all social standards. It does all cumulate to the ending that ‘should’ happen though, in a very typical Austenian fashion. 

The majority of the plot I found dull, Emma salvages it by being that something different but the rest of the characters were indistinct and most had the development of a plank of wood. There were some elements of wit that caught me off and impressed me: “what are the most charming letters - M and A; Emma” given how unlike the rest of the tone of the book was. 

Despite this, my experience was so much improved by the audiobook narrator. I think I have found a favourite narrator, Wanda Mccaddon was simply wonderful and I was very pleased to see the hold I have on ‘Anna Karenina’ is also narrated by her.