Index > Teeehee > Does anybody here read Harper's? > Used to be a lot of copies laying around the house when I was a kid > That's about right > I thought Vollmann was a lot older than that

I read maybe 400 pages of the unabridged Rising Up Rising Down

Posted by Norville (@norville) on July 30, 2024, 2:57 a.m.

It’s entertaining if you don’t mind jumping around all over the place. Even by then, he had done a lot of war reporting, so you get a lot of anecdotes from Afghanistan and Bosnia. And just oddball digressions, like descriptions of knives that he owns.

The early short story collection The Rainbow Stories is wonderful, but his stuff can get extremely patchy. Even Europe Central - his most acclaimed book - is a mix of sharp writing mixed with pages and pages of rambling.