Started reading Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy as a follow-up to The Red and the Black. I roundly detest Waugh as a personality whilst hugely admiring the early novels, especially Vile Bodies, At one time I rated Brideshead Revisited highly, but came to think that the Catholic aspects just don't work - it all seems a bit performative to me, as does the Catholicism of Guy Crouchback, the central figure in the war trilogy, at least from my reading so far. But these are early days and the war has hardly got going.
In fact the opening chapters struck me as pleasingly dull, in contrast to the high energy of Stendhal who absolutely demands alertness in every paragraph. Sometimes you need to read something that plods along as a way of winding down, and that certainly suits my mood as things stand.
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