I got this book for christmas 2007 from my two best friends Ditte and Charlotte. It is one of the 1001 books I have to read before I die.
- It didn't really catch on, guess I don't like the way it is written.

Mailed this to stubee last week...

It's arrived thank you so much.

Danny the Champion of the World is in the post (today) so sorry for the delay. I had to find it in some boxes in my loft! Hope you enjoy it.

I look forward to reading this soon :-]

Stubee has passed this over to me to read as I'd finished my last book. I've nearly finished this and I have to say, so far I'm with christina82, I just don't get it.

The characters are completely unengaging and in some cases just plainly dislikeable so I've got no empathy for any of them which makes it difficult to care at all about what they are saying or what happens to them.

The way the book is written makes it incredibly difficult to make sense of what the characters are talking about. During some of the conversations I have no idea what they are talking about as I don't understand what the sentences mean (and I have a good grasp of the English language and a decent vocabulary!).

I'm finding this really hard going and unless the last few pages are miraculously different I'm struggling to see how William Burroughs on the front cover finds it 'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century'.

I will update this once I have finished!

Edit 22/7/10: It didn't get better. In fact I'm not sure there was really an ending. Good luck with it Stubee!

Thanks for handing this back to me KT-J, I'll read this once I've finished my current read.

EDIT: 10th August 2010 - Ok, I've read it now and I must say that I kind of agree with the other journal entries, it was far too descriptive, if after you've finished reading the description of something you've forgotten what was being described you're in trouble. Don't get me wrong some of the writing was superb but there seemed to be too much emphasis on trying to make this a thing of beauty.

This is the story of Robin, a bi-sexual time bomb of a woman who during the 1920's destroys the lives of everyone she comes into contact with. Like KT-J I didn't care for Felix, Nora and the Doctor and therefore the novel just didn't entice me enough, I felt sorry for Guido but there so little written about him.

I have to say I was disappointed with this novel and I won't be rushing to read more of Djuna Barnes work, why did it make the 1001 list? Well it is one of the earliest novels to portray explicit homosexuality and possibly opened the door for other authors but other than that I see no reason for it being there.

Next: Yevgeny Zamyatin - We (1001 book)

On it's way to Shnedwards as part of the 1001 virtual book box at www.bookobsessed.com

It's here! Thanks stubes. This looks like quite a challenge for such a small book, I'm intrigued. It's going on the "TBR soon" pile for now.

On paper I should really like this book: it's avant-garde, it's set in the 1920s and it's an early example of "out" gay literature. There's a quote from William Burroughs on the front. So far so groovy. But it's a joyless read.

I started reading it on the train on the way home from a party and struggled with it. It seemed to consist mostly of the conversations of some melodramatic, pretentious people, in which they used a lot of words to say nothing. I thought maybe it had something to do with the fact I had only had four hours sleep on somebody's floor the previous night, and put it aside for when I was feeling a bit more awake.

So I picked it up again a couple of days later and it soon became apparent that it wasn't my hangover that was the problem. I usually like dense, rich writing, but this is just impenetrable. Words crammed into sentences the length of paragraphs! Subclauses all over the place! It reads like it's been translated out of particularly long-winded German. Here's an example:

"He wrote, after much thought, to the Pope, a long disquisition on the state of the cloth. He touched on Franciscan monks and French priests, pointing out that any faith that could, in its profoundest unity, compose two such dissimilar types - one the Roman, shaved and expectant of what seemed, when one looked into his vacantly absorbed face, nothing more glorious than a muscular resurrection; and the other, the French priest, who seemed to be composite of husband and wife in conjunction with original sin, carrying with them good and evil in constantly quantitative ascent and descent, the unhappy spectacle of a single ego come to a several public dissolution, - must be profoundly elastic."

When you finally get to the end of the sentence you've forgotten what the beginning was.

At one point I found myself pairing socks to avoid picking this book up. And that's no good.

I'm not sure what to do with this book now. I can't see it being snapped up if I put it back in the 1001 Books BookBox, not after the four slaggings it's had. Marking as AVAILABLE for now.

At the meetup.