Judhill
Wonderous playfulness sown into children's prose - fascinating to both the pony and the dejected man in overalls. Intertwining logic and its negators in engaging subjects ranging from folly, tea, and dishes' flee. Its dialogue witty, illogical and logical, and - most especially - fun. Love how Lewis Carrol plays with language so lucidly. I wonder how Wittgenstein liked his eggs.
Solid satire. Rather on-the-nose, too, but not as blandly as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Incessant buzz over its timber after a certain character's expulsion. At the very least it maintains the reader's attention by recurringly hastily picking on its scab - they a mere observer of the act.
Wastes writing space lasciviously (baffling, really, considering Orwell's editor's nitpicks). Very on-the-nose. To work oneself into polishing the cross-referencing urbanism formulated in one's prose only to demolish it within mere pages is worthy of parodical accord. Tugs the reader with it's not-so-subtle seeds. Left me with zilch compulsion or feeling of having been compelled. Works it way with decency due to my sufficient interest in its landscape and secondary characters.
Some prose is fun, some bland. The only interviews I remember are the vacuum-and-space one and the music band start-up. I preferred the former in every way; the latter was outdated and sort of cheesy. Not offensively bad or anything though - just a deadpan read.
Not familiar with the religious blabber in the novel, but I suppose only a gist is required for an adequate understanding. Couldn't care less about the main character. One could tell how his life would transpire after a certain point, which should mostly comprise the “rites of passage” (I don't mind whether the reader finds this a nonsensical usage of the phrase or not) in the plot. Hence, I spent much time of my reading threading upon the miscellaneous occurrences that the novel so embellishes itself upon, a trait of it I find slightly endearing. But I still mostly found myself only groping space I'm already accustomed with (again, not a surprise considering the fact that I was rightly speculative of the gist of it, a passage of thought that would soon be verified later in the not-so-prose-heavy novel). The experiences of Siddharta do soothe themselves into me - very much only slightly - but it is that mere slightness that engenders me to only sufficient satisfaction not much reflective of the prose until I've probed upon it after resolution. Only after my read do I bother attempting to care due to its apparent reflective qualities, but I still require a proper experience during my read.
May read a different edition. My edition was most likely abridged, although humorously enough the redundancies in writing were, nonetheless, heavily transparent. Offered me a few insights on my conduct, so it's overall all right.
Managed to force myself into reading over 300 pages of the medium-to-large-sized font of this edition (of this prose, heh), after which I found myself sleeping within mere minutes (or, perhaps, seconds, as the haziness of my memories was surely amplified during those moments, and I'm sure such has occurred in numerous instances). Not much is remembered except that I found most characters boring. Seriously, I couldn't care less about heroes like Atticus or whatever other dust was left with the Black characters in the story. Typically I found myself in monochrome imagination, although I doubt the reader cares much about my laments on my lack of scope; but this was one of my first text-dependent, bona fide novel (not for school, to any non-Filipinos reading this who are wondering about my education); so perhaps a revisit would provide me more significant detail. Or I could watch the movie adaptation.