The Nobel Project

[muninnhuginn]

It's one down, 101 to go.

To start I rather cheated by grabbing the nearest Doris Lessing (although, in my defence, I had just read a novel in (albeit unchallenging) French which should help with certain other Nobel reads). I'm not sure I wasn't punished for my laziness: chapters, I want chapters (I didn't think I was so traditional), and fewer gristly lumps in my narrative soup. It's not that I didn't enjoy chunks and appreciate the feeling of it being both very much of its time and also absolutely relevant to now. I suppose that's a mark of a good book.

It's also annoying to read a book so obviously typeset prior to electronic setting becoming common: the almost pen-and-rulered (tho' I'm sure they're not) underscores, the typos. Whilst the illiteracies of the Cupertino effect can annoy, I think on the whole we're better off nowadays.

Still, I'm now discovering just how long the laureates last. I've located some Prudhomme on Project Gutenberg (payback for the odd bit of distributed proofreading I've done). The few volumes on Amazon (.uk, .com, even .fr) and Abebooks being expensive for something I might not enjoy I'm grateful that there's a single volume of his poetry that's been transcribed.

Onwards!