Jack Kerouac The Vanity of Duluoz

Jack Kerouac The Vanity of Duluoz

After reading On the Road last month I decided I needed to read everything that Kerouac wrote. This was the next thing I was able to find by him. It was listed as the book about "football, war and murder" and while I'm no big fan of football I figured what the hell and decided to read it anyway. It was written 15 years after On the Road and covers most of Kerouac's life up to that point. He's definitely an older and more bitter writer but he still writes very well and I found I did enjoy it a great deal, though I also did skip through most of the football parts! I felt it was a bit too choppy in places, he seemed to be skimming through his descriptions and all the scenes were too short. I felt like it did get much better once the beats showed up and enjoyed the last third the most, and not just because there was a murder. I have to say the politics around the murder were kind of terrifying. The justice system's whole argument seemed to be, well if a queer hits on you and you ain't queer it's totally acceptable to kill him if he tries it on. Rather terrifying, I think it did come across in the book though that it wasn't because he was a queer but because he was crazy and unstable that he was killed. I did enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to finding more Kerouac in the library and reading that too!

Ann Veronica by H G Wells

Ann Veronica by H G Wells

Wells hasn't written many books with a female protagonist and while I didn't agree with everything that he wrote in this one, it was nice to see him attempt to look at the ideas of feminism, and the suffragettes. It was also interesting to see it interwoven with his own semi-autobiographical novels but from the other point of view. Ann Veronica was a young woman, 21, living at home and dominated by her father at the beginning of the 20th century. She was wanting to go and study biology at Imperial, wanting to live on her own and experience things, and wasn't able to. It was a very interesting premise but I felt that at times Wells did make some of her arguments seem a little trivial. The physical struggle between her and her father who refused to let her go to the dance seemed a tad ludicrous, but the fact that she was unable to earn any money, and had no idea how to even rent a room, seemed much more realistic. I thought the relationships with the men in her life were interesting, I also liked how he described the attitudes and knowledge about sex, what was ignored and what was assumed. I did enjoy it. It was flawed, and I'm sure it's been pulled apart and ridiculed by subsequent feminist critiques but I think Wells managed to portray a lot of the different attitudes towards women that were prevalent at the time. I think the best example was when Ann was attempting to have a very serious conversation with a man about the plight of women, how they had no freedom and should have the vote, and he just refused to engage with her at all. Instead he just went off about how women were beautiful goddesses deserving of worship, and not to be taken seriously. Despite the weaknesses I found it interesting and enjoyable.

Uncanny Stories Mary Sinclair

Uncanny Stories Mary Sinclair

I have to say I found these stories to be a little disappointing. They were supposed to be a more psychological ghost story, but were just a little odd. I think the nicest was a story called "The Intercessor" about a man who stayed in a haunted cottage with a family and had to solve the mystery of the dead child that he heard crying every night. It was a very nice story; the man had no fear of the child ghost and just set about setting things right. The other stories were not so good. There was one about a woman who was doomed to re-live her terribly dull affair in hell, I took this to be a judgement on her having sex with a married man, Bill took it as she was being punished for having a Boring affair and no real emotions. (Which is much better). The token was another story where someone saw a ghost and was trying to put her to rest. Unfortunately the story was not as compelling as the Intercessor. The Flaw in the Crystal was the longest and strangest tale about a woman who was able to heal with some strange empathic power, which I was never sure, if it was real or her imagination. It was rather odd and too long and a little dull. On the whole not one of the best ghost story collections I've read this year. I wouldn't really recommend the stories that highly.