Reading 1001 discussion

Adjunct: An Undigest - Peter Manson, 2004

Reviews here, please.

I opened this book and it looked like a stream of consciousness word salad for over 100 pages and my first thought was “oh no I’m going to hate this”. I was concerned that I was going to have to slog through another navel gazing “look how clever I am” insular book about writing books. As much as I am overall loving the list, there are too many of those on the list for my liking in my opinion. So, I immediately went to find out if there was something substantial behind it that would make me appreciate it. I found this overview https://www.librarything.com/topic/19910 which really make me enter the book with more understanding and appreciation.

I like the idea of the number generator to determine where to write each entry to remove the bounds of a linear narrative- quite original. The book itself ends up reading like the flow of thought and passage of time: newspaper headlines, anecdotes about the author’s struggles with alcoholism, which famous people have died, writing ideas and “shower thoughts”.

Everything gets similar treatment and no textual indicator that anything has greater importance- mimicking the way all these things in life are also haphazardly mixed together. It also ends up in a way reading like someone’s blog put just to text, which I kind of loved because it made me think of how I can go through someone’s tumblr for example and get a sense of their personal narrative from things they’ve reblogged of other people’s media, their own blogged thoughts, personal entries, news, etc. Like collage it’s a mixed media way to convey your own meaning with found content. That is how our sense of selves online looks now, so the fact that someone did this with a novel was cool to me.

Its main downside for me was that it ultimately does read as a tidbit word salad for a long time- which while I highly respect what the author was going for and was amusing enough does get redundant after a little bit. It also required the prefacing of meta from a reviewer for me to truly enjoy it. Was debating between a 3 and 4 and decided to be charitable and gave it 4 stars.

Rating: 1 star

What the heck did I just read????? This made absolutely no sense to me. It is mostly random thoughts on a number of different topics. Very non-cohesive stream-of-consciousness (like stream--of-consciousness while on drugs). Overall, an exhausting read for such a short book.