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Rants on the books I'm currently reading

I've come to the conclusion that Virginia Woolf's style is an acquired taste. At first, I hated it. It is more digressive than Bellow - I like Bellow's style - and terribly vague: full of incomplete sentences, half-voiced thoughts, strange connections that lead to nowhere. It looks like the automatic writing of the modern. And I loathed its vagueness. But then, I gave up trying to follow Woolf's line of thought and began to infuse my own, completing her reasoning myself, as if I was her. And then I started to enjoy it. Maybe that was her intention - to involve the reader, to make him or her the author. So now I love her to bits. I wished I could buy another of her books, but I cannot. At least, until November. I'm penniless.

Les Contes de la Bécasse doesn't surpass Boule de Suif et Autres Récits de Guerre, even though it belongs to Maupassant's prime period. Still, it does have that sense of uneasiness so characteristic of his works. Even Notre Coeur had got swing and wit - this considering Maupassant was already mad and dying. Hell, writers should live more - or at least write frenetically - so I would have an endless supply of books. Nah, I would run out of money. I already did, so many times...

Svevo's Zeno's Conscience is remarkably simple - in plot - but wonderfully written. It makes me laugh. And wonder about life. It's a man telling us about his life in a very ironic way. You cannot help but relate to him. He's flawed, and he knows it, and laughs at himself, sometimes bordering on self-pity, sometimes on cruelty. It's the common man exposed inside out. I gotta buy another book by him as well.

I stopped reading Swift just before reaching Laputa, so I won't talk about his book now. Indeed, I should be fast asleep by now. Or reading. Or writing. Wait, I'm writing, in a way. I write more in my blogs than in my stories. It's so easy to talk about ourselves and to bitch about life than to take our time to invent new worlds and build characters. I don't know how our parents do it.