I finished Stalking the Unicorn, but it wasn't worth it. Too many forced jokes, and Resnick doesn't know how a detective story should be structured -- you can't have the big plot revelation 75% of the way into the novel; the rest is waay to anticlimactic at that point.
A.S. Byatt's Matisse Stories was also incredibly disappointing. In general, I'm a big fan of her writing; I loved Possession, loved her short fiction, and even liked The Biographer's Tale, which was relatively weak. But the Matisse Stories just didn't have a spark to them. Part of it was the way things sometimes felt contrived (Gerda Himmelblau's name means "heaven blue", a phrase that is repeated through the story to indicate terror of open spaces).
And I've begun listening to Joyce's Ulysses again. It's one of those books where new things jump out every time. In the Telemachus section, we move from the solid outside world, starting with a sentence about Buck Mulligan, rather than Stephen Dedalus. We gradually move into Stephen's interior world until we get to the solid interiority of the third episode. Then we go back to the exterior world for the first Bloom episode (although this time we start immediately with Bloom himself).
What I love about Ulysses is the way that it's a sort of showcase for a lot of ways of writing. The newspaper section is wonderfully impressionistic, as conversations overlap and we read them overlapping, yet it's always clear who's responding to whom. I must admit that I don't get the point of Stephen's story about the two women, but someday I will...
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