Blood and Guts in High School (Penguin Modern Classics)

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But those diamonds in the dross are so few & far between that it mainly becomes an exercise in tedium - I just couldn't wait for this book to be over & done with. This is a postmodern coming-of-age tale. A disgusting, painful, terribly serious tale in which the protagonist undergoes any sort of mental and physical alienation. Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money." Now, if you're still reading, please let me point out a few more things that seem to be conveniently overlooked by most 'serious' reviewers (though I wonder whether they've actually read the novel before trashing it).

Whilst I appreciate the non too subtle message of female sexualisation, exploitation and degradation, the curve balls keep coming hard and fast, but always from left field. So, mono-dimensional diatribe, perhaps seeking to numb with repetitive mantra even though the palette of media truncates.

Janey is the symbol of innocence in the modern world, and her story is an allegory depicting how it is stifled and exploited. It's also a heartrending, often poetic celebration of its potential: "We are all alike, we are all immaculately crazy". However I mostly found it embarrassing to read in public because of the smutty line drawings, offensive because of the continual use of foul language or confusing because sentence flow skipped lines of text. i couldn't do it. I do not normally abandon a story that I start but I could not read this book. It was miserable. No, I wish I was that cool. No one around me was on Tumblr. I just missed it. It never got popular in my weird friend group in Toronto. So I wrote a film blog literally mostly for myself and no one else. If you weren’t holed up on Tumblr, what were you like in high school then?

Great Expectations begins when a young boy, Pip, learns he has come into great expectations. What these expectations actually are, or the change from the total disparity between Pip's ideas of 'expectations' and what is real to Pip's learning to feel, is the narrative of this plagiarized Bildungsroman. This book is totally sensuous. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous noise, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just . . .Who they are." Either I judge and blame and Hell exists, or I don't judge and everything's OK. Either this is a time for total despair or it's a time of madness."

Customer reviews

I was going to start by saying something shady about film journalists and how boring they are. But then I read that you used to have a blog about film, right?