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Samuel Beckett, for instance, spent the better part of his writing life refining and refining and refining the words he used to say what he felt needed to be said (each refined piece of art taking up less space than the one that preceded it). Jorge Luis Borges, likewise (in fact: Borges famously commented that Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude could well have done with being fifty years shorter).
Kate Jenning's Snake, similarly, epitomises what can be achieved in the form of a short novel (in much the same way that William Trevor epitomises what can be achieved in the short story): over the course of just over 150 pages (and 76 chapters, some of barely a page in length), she traces out the married lives of Rex and Irene on a farm in the Australian outback, from their marriage and initial optimism through the gradual souring of the lives they share. Rather than tell us everything (rather than pin the details of this failing marriage to a calendar), Jennings scorches the details of a specific moment or pivotal event into a single chapter. As the chapters race by you, so your feelings for those involved deepen in a rather remarkable way.
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nothing comes alive. but the author obviously knows how to pick her subjects: alzheimer and the stock-market: you can not get more topical! all in all just a college 101 essay.
Read this book. Even by the second chapter, you'll understand you are entering a world that is mad as a hatter, only that the diagnosed alzheimer patient (the author's husband) is way more lucid than the bulls (the author's bosses) who ram Wall Street down our economic throats. Moral Hazard blinks yellow warning lights even when the words slice into neat little pats of cold butter on warm toast at breakfast. This makes the story edible in deceptively gentle prose. What seems like a peculiar combination of subjects is - dementia on Wall Street countered by a beloved husband's alzheimers' trials and indignities. Somehow the two stories fit hand in glove and come out swinging the reader into black-eyed shame for our dual neglect of an aging population, and withering pension funds ground into dust by tassle-shoed Big Toes. There's more, but then, that would be telling. Read Moral Hazard for yourself. I did. Twice.
Now, to some this might be a benefit (and I would see it as such too) if it wasn't for the fact that the layout of this ebook is clearly created for print. For example: the layout is layouted in two columns requiring you to constantly scroll up and down and it doesn't even uses the most simplest features of Adobe Acrobat like creating bookmarks, which would allow easier navigation between the sections.
Given, that the publisher didn't have to fork out the money for the print, I think it is absolutely reasonable for me to expect a presentation of the content that is suitable to the medium, or, that I am not going to be charged an amount that I would not be charged if the information was printed on paper.
I still think that the underlying idea of this book is good and I hopefully will end up buying some great books that I otherwise might not have read. So, I am not sure if it is worth it, but since there was no reader review on this I felt compelled to give you at least my 5 cents of wisdom.
I ordered it, got it delivered digitally same day and printed it out to take home and read on vacation the next week.
Great book, great technology, great price!
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