A Two-Part TBR for the Remainder of 2021 – Part 1, The Library Pile

Since the libraries re-opened I’ve been enjoying browsing – maybe enjoying it a little too much – and have maxed out my library card with the following books.

From bottom to top these are:

1 and 2 – Two Booker shortlistees, The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed and hotly tipped saga The Promise by Damon Galgut. These have been talked about ad infinitum elsewhere, so I won’t add a precis here.

3 – Heatwave by Victor Jestin, a very slender French novel that has drawn comparisons with Call Me By My Name, and according to Goodreads is: “A vivid, mesmerizing novel about a teenage boy on vacation who makes an irrevocable mistake and becomes trapped in a spiral of guilt and desire.”

4 – The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini: says Amazon, “A hypnotic [Italian] novel inspired by the strange and fascinating life of sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, brother of the fabled automaker. With World War I closing in … Bugatti leaves his native Milan for Paris, where he encounters Rodin and … obsessively observes and sculpts the baboons, giraffes, and panthers in the municipal zoos, finding empathy with their plight and identifying with their life in captivity”.

5 – Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth by A. O. Scott – why we need critics.

6 – The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley – a bit of modern Gothic nastiness for Halloween month.

7 – Beloved by Toni Morrison – because I should have read this and haven’t; indeed, haven’t read any Toni Morrison.

8 – The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead – now something of a modern classic.

9 – Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler – because it sounds relatable and I love Anne Tyler. Possibly I’ve read it before.

10 – All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison – not mad on bucolic fiction, but this one has been raved about.

11- Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector – because I’ve not read any Brazilian fiction, and Lispector seems to be the go-to writer, plus it’s novella-length.

12- White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector by Nicholas Royle – because there’s no more enjoyable nerdery than book nerdery.

13 – Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali: because I’ve decided that 25th November to 25th December is going to be ‘Turkey month’ (bad pun, get it?), when I’ll be focusing on Turkish culture for a month.

14 – Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor: historical, Dracula-orientated fiction.

15 – Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas – acclaimed life-writing by the Cuban writer, who died of AIDS.

Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor (UK)

review by Imogen G.

I read this book for #1976 month, hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. This is a bi-annual week celebrating books published in a particular year, and I’ve intended to participate before but never been organized enough, especially as work is always frantic in October. Anyway, I settled on Blaming, a short 1976 novel by Elizabeth Taylor, published after her death the previous year – Taylor wrote it in the knowledge that she was terminally ill. Not to be confused with the iconic actress, her writing has been described – by Anne Tyler no less – as that of a writer who can hold her own against Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen in her intelligent, domestic novels. I’m sure her writing must have influenced contemporary writers of everyday life, such as Tyler herself, of course, and Tessa Hadley.

The book opens with Amy and her artist husband Nick, in early old age I guess, taking a cruise around the Aegean, after Nick has spent a bit of time in hospital with an unspecified (to us) ailment. During the holiday, Amy resents Nick’s forays into art galleries and identical-looking mosques, and his insistence on contemplating tedious (to her) Ming vases and suchlike for what feels like hours on end, and she also resents his friendship with a younger American woman, writer and academic Martha, who hangs around with them as one of the only other English speakers, and shares her art books with Nick.

Then tragedy strikes, and Amy is forced to return home without him. (This isn’t a spoiler, it happens in the first few pages, and is flagged up on the back cover too.) Martha looks after her in the immediate aftermath of her loss, and escorts her back to London, but although acknowledging the American woman’s kindness Amy doesn’t warm to her and finds her presence grating. As best she can, she picks up life where she left it, alone except for her ex-publican housekeeper Ernie, who calls her “madam” and has a “mixture of servility and familiarity, like a human-being lost to his own place in the world” (despite it apparently being set in the early 1970s!).

Amy also sees her patronising son James and his family – comprising efficient wife Maggie and two well-drawn, often wittily portrayed little girls – and Nick’s good friend Gareth, an attentive, faintly smug, widowed doctor. And she sees Martha regularly too, for having forged a bond with Amy, however unreciprocated, Martha is unwilling to let it go.

In one part of this book our heroine Amy picks up a book written by Martha and notes that “the writing is spare, as if translated from the French”, and the same could be said for Elizabeth Taylor’s prose in this book really. She’s very good at cutting through to essential truths and an intensity of feeling in just a few words.

Amy keeps her feelings to herself much of the time, in her role as a buttoned-up, upper middle-class English woman of a particular generation, but, as readers, we have access to her thoughts. She can be selfish: for example, she has little interest in throwback housekeeper Ernie and his various minor ailments, while Martha points out to her on a visit to her home that she never asks a single question about her, while Martha’s questions, in contrast, tend towards the relentless.

Perhaps we’re not supposed to warm to Amy, who is penny-pinching in contrast with Martha’s generosity of spirit, who finds her grand-daughters wearing (though fair enough, small children are exhausting), and who hangs on to outmoded hierarchies. But then who hasn’t felt resentful at being forced to spend time with someone who simply feels like a massive effort, however kind?!

Amy’s deeds might seem mean spirited without our access to her inner world, and ultra-English but intensely relatable reticence. Taylor is highly adept at recognising the emotional complexity that can underpin even the most everyday of interactions. I rather liked Amy, I found her a largely sympathetic character and also found quite a few of her reflections uncomfortably familiar. For example, sadly I too am inclined to a bit of random sentimental but fairly disengaged weeping:

“Tears often came to her eyes when writing insincere letters, and they came now for a moment”

I enjoyed this book much more than the tragicomic Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which tends to attract perhaps the greatest praise (I rated it a 3/5). Looking back at Goodreads, eight years ago I also read Elizabeth Taylor’s The Wedding Group which I didn’t particularly love – I rated it 3 out of 5 at the time, and can’t remember much about it. Blaming is a great book, and a wise book I thought, which examines the sometimes terrible consequences of an excess of self-absorption. I need to read Taylor’s Angel now, which has been sitting on my shelves for way too long.

Documentary film Mystify: Michael Hutchence (Australia)

review no 182, by Imogen G

My husband went camping for the weekend so I watched this 2019 documentary film, although actually he’d have been happy to watch it – INXS were the first band he saw live, back in the late 80s. I’d wanted to see the film since an algorithm on Facebook or elsewhere targeted me with unexpectedly candid home video footage of Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence looking beautiful and radiant and open and joyful in the late 1980s, frolicking on a boat in, I think, the South of France.

Hutchence, the singer with INXS, and a famously magnetic performer, was one of the last rock stars in the traditional mould inspired by Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and the only truly global Australian rock star that I can think of.

His mannerisms and facial expressions came straight out of the Jagger playbook, while the way he planted kisses on his band members, slinging a casually affectionate arm around them while performing, are reminiscent of David Bowie’s homoerotic and, at the time, scandalously ground-breaking, draping of an arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulders while dressed in snakeskin in 1972.

Mystify, directed by ‘veteran’ Australian filmmaker Richard Lowenstein reportedly took 10 years to make. Lowenstein is quoted as saying he made it as an ‘apology’ to Hutchence, a friend, for not being there for him at the end. The number of people of who feel culpable after a suicide is another tragedy.

The film is gripping. It probably helps if you really fancied Michael Hutchence, but what straight woman didn’t? There are candid interviews with people who were close to him, such as Kylie Minogue, Danish supermodel Helena Christensen and U2 singer Bono, and concert, video and TV footage is inter-cut with more personal video clips to create a patchwork-style documentary.

While dating Christensen, Hutchence was assaulted by a taxi driver in Copenhagen, which resulted in him falling and hitting his head on the curb. Those close to him reported a change in behaviour after this incident, which is repeatedly (and, yes, mystifyingly) described in the film as “the accident”. Hutchence became more moody, mercurial and prone to violent outbursts.

We know the rest. An improbable romance with British TV presenter and rock wife Paula Yates led to a bitter custody battle with Bob Geldof, and ended in drugs scandals, attacks on journalists and Hutchence’s suicide in a hotel room in 1997. Yates died three years later.

The film is mesmerising and kaleidoscopic, providing some genuine insights into a warm, complicated man who epitomized rock god sex appeal in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s – even as it unspools towards the inevitable tragedy at its end.

Prince: Welcome 2 America review and my Top 7 Prince songs (USA)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

review no 181, by Imogen G

I’ve been feeling for a while that it is more or less impossible to pick a “best” US musician, as (along with the UK) the USA has dominated popular music basically for ever, or certainly throughout my lifetime.

Then I started listening to Welcome 2 America, the “new” album by the late, great sexpot performer Prince, another of 2016’s sacrificial lambs. Combined with Brexit and Trump, and with the losses of Bowie and George Michael book-ending the year, no wonder “fuck you 2016!” has become the exclamation of choice in our family, no matter the year. I feel lucky to have seen Prince perform live here in London, though it was a few years after his 80s heyday (2007 to be precise).

Welcome 2 America is made up of material that was recorded in 2010, but which Prince did not deem worthy of release – rather than having been salvaged from old filing cabinets and down the back of the sofa as I had expected. It’s actually really good, much better than anything he put out for release in the last 15 or 20 years of his life, and there are a couple of stand-outs on there, plus some unexpected and not unwelcome politicising on the eponymous track and others, including 1000 Light Years from Here. My husband noted that the track Stand Up and B Strong is distinctly cheesy, with the feel of a rousing finale from a stage musical, or perhaps a Year 6 leaver’s concert, while another track seems to channel ’80s Lionel Ritchie. Nevertheless, although Welcome 2 America lacks the raw sexual energy of Prince’s earlier (and best) work, it’s well worth a listen.

To round off, I thought I’d compile a little list of my top 7 Prince songs:

  • Purple Rain: I didn’t love this when it came out, and the film was frankly confusing – unsurprisingly, given it came out in 1984, when I was 10. But it’s grown on me over the past four decades!
  • When Doves Cry: this is my preferred track from the Purple Rain album, a beautiful classic.
  • Nothing Compares 2 U: Gorgeous track. He’s got the moves, too.
  • Raspberry Beret: Worth inclusion for the vid alone.
  • Gett Off: “let me show you that I’m a talented boy”, pure filth, with an excellent high-energy dance routine.
  • Cream: with a 6 minute video, almost 2 minutes of which are taken up with shots of erm yeah Prince licking cream off the fingers of sexy ladies.
  • The Beautiful Ones – another Purple Rain classic.

Alligator and other stories by Dima Alzayat (Syria)

review no 180, by Imogen G

I’ve not had much time recently, but one book I have managed to get through is Alligator & Other Stories by Syrian-born, US-raised, UK-based writer Dima Alzayat. Alligator is a short story collection that was shortlisted for the James Tait Black prize for fiction this year.

The James Tait Black prize lists for both fiction and biography are among my favourites, and the prize is the UK’s oldest, awarded each August by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. Former winners have included Eimear McBride’s wonderful Lesser Bohemians (for fiction), one of my favourite books, and Lindsey Hilsum’s riveting biography of war reporter Marie Colvin, who died in Syria in 2012.

Alligator & Other Stories is a varied, experimental collection that didn’t always work for me – I found the quality of the stories very mixed, but I was impressed by the wide variety of voices and styles of writing in this collection, which has as its heart an examination of the immigrant experience.

My favourites were the moving opening story Ghusl, in which, like a modern-day Antigone, a girl prepares her murdered brother’s body for burial, in defiance of patriarchal norms, and Summer of the Shark, which takes place in a telesales call centre on 11 September 2001, and which I read, coincidentally, on the anniversary of those infamous attacks.

The collection has its eye on contemporary sociopolitical themes, so naturally there’s a #metoo-type story, Only Those Who Struggle Succeed, which reads a bit like Rachel Cusk, or perhaps more like Kristen Roupenian’s infamous Cat Person.

Alligator is the longest and most ambitious story, based around a real lynching in 1929. The story uses a collage-like style that employs both actual and imagined documentation, and combines newspaper reports, witness statements, emails and even a script for a psychic TV reality show, and links the experience of Syrian immigrants with racism and the persecution of minority groups throughout USA history.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)

AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA

The opening lines of Nervous Conditions are disarming, and made me want to read on: “I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not that at all….”.

Published in 1988, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions was the first book to be published by a black Zimbabwean woman in English. Dangarembga initially struggled to find a publisher for the book in Zimbabwe, and it was only after the Women’s Press in the UK published Nervous Conditions that Zimbabwean publishers began to show an interest.

Nervous Conditions is considered to be one of the top 12 books to come out of Africa during the 20th century, along with other greats such as Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, which I reviewed in 2019 (though even my review of that is heavy going, let alone the book!).

Nervous Conditions was a more approachable read. It is a semi-autobiographical coming of age tale set during the 1960s and 1970s in pre-independence Zimbabwe, then still known as Rhodesia (after the now much-derided colonial-era politician Cecil Rhodes). The novel follows the experience of Tambudzai (Tambu), a young Shona girl from a family of subsistence farmers, and her wealthy cousin Nyasha, who has studied in the UK. Both girls are very bright. To Tambu, Nyasha seems crazily sophisticated, but she is a complicated and confused character, more intellectually critical than Tambu, and she questions the impact Westernization has had on her family, and resents the patriarchal strictures at home that prevent her from socialising with boys and having some independence.

Nyasha’s own mother, Maiguru, has a Master’s degree, obtained in the UK, but much good it does her – her role is as an often passive and effortfully sweet wife, mother and aunt, so she is permitted to exist only really in relation to other people. In contrast, her headmaster husband Babamukuru, the main male character in the novel, is an impassive, opinionated, authoritarian and sometimes cruelly violent presence.

Tambu’s early childhood spent working at the homestead makes her determined to escape the future that she can see laid out before her. She is a rebel in a different way to Nyasha, as she seizes the opportunity offered by Babamukuru to permit her to attend secondary school, a chance hitherto reserved for her brother, although her parents are really not in favour of her leaving her home for an education. Her father sees it as wasted on a girl, while her mother is traumatised after the loss of Tambu’s brother, as well as other infants, and wants her daughter with her.

The book is very much based around the late colonial female experience, in an environment where new educational opportunities were beginning to become available for young people, but where gender-based discrimination and traditional, patriarchal values still dominated and where racial inequalities persisted.

The title comes from a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre: “The condition of native is a nervous condition.” The characters in this novel, now a modern classic, embody that principle.

Strangely perhaps, and entirely coincidentally, I read this at the same time as the 2020 Ugandan novel The First Woman by Jennifer Makumbi, which just won the Jhalak Prize (review to follow). Set during the dictatorship of Idi Amin, and a coming of age tale partly set in a girls’ school, I could see parallels with Nervous Conditions, which was surely an influence on the later book.

Nervous Conditions is the first in what eventually became a trilogy, the final part of which was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. As well as a writer, Dangarembga is an academic and a political activist (and was briefly imprisoned during anti-corruption protests in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, in 2020).

Egyptian film Souad

review by Imogen G.

When we visited my parents recently, the teens (and my mum) spent several hours gripped in front of Catfish on MTV. Souad, created by female director Ayten Amin, reminded me a fictional, more emotionally nuanced, Egyptian version of Catfish.

Naive, romantic Souad (played by Bassant Ahmed) is in her late teens, and lives with her parents and thoughtful younger sister Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh). Souad is captivated by Ahmed (Hussein Ghanem), an influencer, ‘content creator’ and social media personality in nearby Alexandria. He flirts with her online, and they have intense telephone conversations, but they never meet, and he has an infuriating tendency to fly under the radar for days at a time.

Souad’s family is not wealthy, and her upbringing has been comparatively conservative. She’s a fantasist, spinning stories to random women on the bus about her lovely ‘fiancé’, imagining different versions of his family life and their burgeoning, mostly imaginary, romance. Ahmed, in contrast, is much older, more sophisticated, and certainly more cynical, with a serious girlfriend. We sense quickly that things will not turn out well.

The film was slightly ruined for me by a spoiler online, which popped up when I was googling where I could catch it. Knowing this pivotal plot point in advance (no spoilers here!) meant that I spent the first half of the film waiting for it to happen, and as a result the movie felt slow, and I even nodded off a couple of times. I do have a sort of parrot complex that means I frequently fall asleep as soon as the lights go down in the cinema, but it did perhaps indicate that it could have been edited down a bit.

I saw Souad at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, London, in a tiny screen I didn’t even know existed, up a secret flight of stairs. Well, a flight of stairs, anyway. When I walked into the screening my booked seat was occupied, so I sat in the (entirely empty) row in front. When the film started, the group of people behind suddenly made anxious muttering and rustling sounds, before exiting the screen, bringing the total number of viewers to four. A niche option then, but worth seeing for the affecting second half.

How to Feed a Dictator by Witold Szablowski (Poland)

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

EUROPE

Book 16 of my #20booksofsummer21 and review no 177

I was intrigued after reading a review of this book in the Times Literary Supplement. The author, investigative journalist (and one-time restaurant chef) Witold Szabłowski, tracked down the cooks who worked for several uncompromising (to put it blandly) dictators: Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Idi Amin in Uganda, Enver Hoxha in Albania, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Pol Pot in Cambodia. He interviewed the former chefs about their experiences, the food that they prepared for their bosses, and the way their employment with the various despots came to an end.

You do get the feeling that the chefs aren’t always as honest about their ex-employers as they could be, perhaps because of enduring (some might say misplaced) loyalties, or perhaps because of fear of reprisals.

Apparently, according to one interviewee, Pol Pot – the driving force behind the Cambodian genocide, which resulted in the deaths of up to two million people – was nicknamed “Mattress”, “because he always did his best to calm things down. He was soft.”

Abu Ali, the chef to Saddam Hussein, is also a bit of an apologist: “The only good person in the entire al-Tikriti family was Saddam. I don’t know how he survived among them.”

The book gives an unique and chilling insight into a role in which, as Idi Amin’s Chef Otonde Odera notes, “I knew from the start – my life depended on my cooking skills”. The risk of death was real and ever-present.

Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha, suffering from a combination of diabetes and heart disease, was on a calorie-restricted diet, with his nutrients monitored by a team of doctors – if the food provided to him by his chef failed to keep him healthy, that chef’s life would be in immediate peril. Keeping a man of 6ft 5 from hunger, on a diet of just 1500 calories a day, must have been a thankless task, and his chef (who insists on remaining anonymous, even though his former boss is long dead) expresses the view that Hoxha’s permanent bad mood was directly related to his persistent and unsated hunger.

The interviews are interspersed with a potted history of the regime in question from Szabłowski. An editorial flourish is the decision to lay the book out in the style of a menu, which forces the content into a particular format, and doesn’t quite work.

I found the book to be a slightly uncomfortable mix of memoir, recipe book and political history, but it kept me turning the pages.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Amin had spent all day carrying out his coup, arrived at the palace in the evening and found there was no supper waiting for him? He’d have given us hell. Out of hunger. People go mad from hunger: I’ve seen it many times.

I had cooked tilapia and goat pilaf; I remember that Amin liked it. We served it all on a fresh tablecloth, with silver service, left over from the British. Amin must have felt that he had won the coup and now he deserved a tasty meal. Tell me, what could be a better reward than excellent food served by a well-dressed cook in a good suit and shoes?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (b. Dominican Republic)

Review no 176. Book 15 of my 20 books of summer 21

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a work of fiction steeped in fact, specifically the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujilo, who ruled over the Dominican Republic with an iron first until his assassination in 1961.

In large part, though, this is a tragicomic family saga, set in the late 20th century and focused around the titular Oscar (a grossly overweight sci-fi nerd who lives in New Jersey, writes in Elvish and dreams both of becoming the ‘Dominican Tolkein’ and of finally getting laid). Other principal characters include Oscar’s beautiful, feisty sister Lola, his bitter, cancer-stricken Dominican mother – and his long-deceased grandfather, whose well-intentioned, even honourable, actions in the Dominican Republic in the 1940s had a terrible impact on his family for generations to come.

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

He was seven then.

The name Oscar Wao is a misnomer coined after Yunior, Lola’s sometime boyfriend and Oscar’s sometime friend (and an incontinent shagger), tells him he looks just like “that fat homo Oscar Wilde” – an insult that is seized upon by his contemporaries (“Melvyn said Oscar Wao, quien es Oscar Wao, and that was it, all of us started calling him that”).

The story, expanded from a shorter piece published in the New Yorker in 2000, shifts constantly, weaving backwards and forwards in time, with multiple perspectives. The text is sprinkled liberally with extensive, often irreverent, seemingly authoritative footnotes, providing a breezy and sometimes – as the author is eager to point out – outright inaccurate primer on the often bloody political history of the Dominican Republic.

We don’t find out the main narrator’s name until over halfway through the book, while there are elements of magical realism, including Oscar’s lucid dreams, which feature a mystical and ridiculous spirit animal – a golden mongoose – and a possible family curse. Sometimes the text veers into Spanish slang, or perhaps more accurately Dominican, without translation, but if you don’t know Spanish you can skip those bits, or certainly guess the gist. Or go on Google Translate if you’re really curious.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an ambitious, playful novel about the long shadow of history, and life, love and loss among an immigrant community. A favourite of many critics, I quite liked it, but my assessment of whether I love a book boils down to whether I want to buy a copy/keep my copy to reread later. On those criteria this book doesn’t qualify as a favourite and is off to the charity shop.

Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón (Iceland)

Translated by Victoria Cribb

EUROPE

Book 14 of my #20booksofsummer21

Time is whizzing by and I’m not sure if I’m going to get through all the 20 books on my list. I wish I’d counted the three “extra” books I read earlier in the summer! (Though that would mean going back and writing reviews.)

Set in Reykjavik in 1918, this one is a short (hurray!), intense novel. The narrative focuses around 16-year-old gay orphan Mani Steinn, at a time of immense change for Iceland, with the arrival of the so-called Spanish Flu, the recognition of Icelandic independence by Denmark at the end of World War I and the eruption of the huge Katla volcano.

Mani is something of an outsider, a people-watcher who spends his time hustling for sex and watching silent movies, but who is later recruited by a doctor to help with the casualties.

Reykjavik has, for the first time, assumed a form that reflects his inner life: a fact he would not confide to anyone.

Mani should seem a hopeless character: he’s alone in the world, poor, uneducated and illiterate. But his life is full of moments that transcend these bare facts.

Although Mani’s sexual encounters are with men, he is captivated by a slightly older girl, the mysterious, motorcycle-riding Sola G, who brings some colour to his life, representing the freedom offered by the silver screen, and the possibility of invention, or re-invention.

There are echoes of our own, present-day early reactions to a new pandemic in the initial responses of the authorities to the outbreak of disease:

… there is no cause to resort to drastic and costly preventative measures, since the mortality rate must be regarded as within acceptable limits. … The Icelandic Board of Health merely urges the public to take precautions similar to those they would take for the seasonal grippe that does the rounds every year…

Although Moonstone is much-loved by many, I didn’t really get on with the concentrated, elliptical prose and the confusingly folkloric elements – it wasn’t for me, but given the length I had no excuse not to make it to the end!