Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Two Joe Poles

I'm busy finishing off my thesis so haven't posted much recently nor hope to any time soon. This is just a quick note to say I've been reading Conrad - 'Falk' and 'The Shadow-Line' (the former is awesome, the latter merely good) - and now I've started Joseph Roth's 'Flight Without End'. I have Peregrine Pickle waiting in the wings, but as it's 700 pages of small type and is described, slightly dauntingly, as 'Smollett's third best novel', I'm waiting till I just can't resist it any more, and in the meantime these short, beautiful novels by Mitteleuropean masters are just dandy.