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connerh

Conner's Books & Reviews

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/connerh

Shelfari: https://www.shelfari.com/connerh

Currently reading

The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs
1Q84
Haruki Murakami
The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King
Stephen King, Richard Bachman
The Complete Stories
Franz Kafka
1Q84
Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
Dante Alighieri, Robin Kirkpatrick, Eric Drooker
The Purgatorio (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Dante Alighieri, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Peter Bondanella, Julia Conaway Bondanella
The Interpretation of Dreams (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Sigmund Freud, A.A. Brill, Daniel T. O'Hara, Gina Masucci MacKenzie

Book of Longing

Book of Longing - Leonard Cohen As a fan of Leonard Cohen's music, I would like to be able to rate his poetry higher. I am of the opinion that he is one of the best songwriters of his generation, however (keep in mind that this is the first book of poems by him I have read) I found this to be an overall weak and bloated collection. As one reviewer before me noted, most of these poems do in fact read like song lyrics, and some of the best song lyrics of all time just wouldn't make great poems. It's a different sort of style that requires the singer's voice to complete; I can't help but feel that I would have enjoyed this collection more if Leonard was reading it aloud. There were a few standouts, especially the ones written in free-verse, but you really had to look to find them. There were quite a few couplets, of which I enjoyed none, others were just boring and half finished, and most of the poems felt like filler to me, which is something that I'm not used to seeing in books of poetry. I could have also done without the same repeated caricature drawings of nude women on nearly every page, which no matter unrelated to the poems, gave them some weird overtones, since you constantly see these drawings in your peripherals as you read. That could have been the intention though.
This is the man who brought us lyrical gems such as Hallelujah and Chelsea Hotel #2 so I was expecting a lot more out of this than I got. I would like to read another, perhaps earlier collection by him, just to see if I enjoy it any more.