{"id":261,"date":"2007-10-14T15:23:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-14T15:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading2\/?p=261"},"modified":"2007-10-14T15:23:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-14T15:23:00","slug":"ginger-man-by-j-p-donleavy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2007\/10\/ginger-man-by-j-p-donleavy.html","title":{"rendered":"The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0802137954\/tradgirl\" target=\"'new'\">The Ginger Man<\/a> was another one of those 100 Best books that left me cold.  It was something like Tropic of Cancer in being a rambling, hard-to-follow account of some young man&#8217;s debauchery.  Perhaps it would be more appealing if I were a young man.  Or a young anything.  Instead it leaves me feeling sorry for the characters and hopeful they&#8217;ll lead more productive lives in the future.  Not that I don&#8217;t still have my moments of debauchery but they tend to be moments I regret more than moments I cherish.<\/p>\n<p>The writing style is intentionally chaotic.  The author switches between first and third person, past and present.  This, while &#8220;artistic&#8221;, does nothing for me.  Then again, a friend was just explaining to me what he gets out of Jackson Pollack&#8211;things I&#8217;ve never seen or thought of.  Perhaps I&#8217;d do better with some of these more abstract novels with some guidance.  If there&#8217;s a foreward to the book I do usually read it.  Afterwards.  Unfortunately, my edition f The Ginger Man didn&#8217;t come with someone&#8217;s explanation of what I should be seeing in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Ginger Man was another one of those 100 Best books that left me cold. It was something like Tropic of Cancer in being a rambling, hard-to-follow account of some young man&#8217;s debauchery. Perhaps it would be more appealing if I were a young man. Or a young anything. Instead it leaves me feeling sorry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-100-best","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}