1.
A wise friend of mine rejects the idea of there being such a thing, because it suggests that novels are like horses and the race makes assessment into a simple matter of comparison in a single field of endeavour.
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Is Wuthering Heights the Best Novel Ever Written?
Posted in Observation, Reading with tags book-review, books, Emily Bronte, gothic, gothic novel, In Search of Lost Time, literature, Pyramids, Robert McKee, Taj Mahal, War and Peace, Wuthering Heights on March 22, 2026 by Jarrod Boyle
The Monk
Posted in Observation, Reading with tags Ambrosio, Angel Clare, books, Breasts, Fiction, Matilda, Matthew Lewis, poetry, short-story, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Monk, Thomas Hardy, writing on February 25, 2026 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
Certainly, this is high drama, and skilfully rendered by Mr Lewis. I have not chosen to recount it here for that reason, however. I reproduce it because the breast, probably the only breast Ambrosio has encountered – aside from his mother’s when he was an infant – appears to him as an enigma of overwhelming power.
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The Monk
Posted in Observation, Reading with tags book-review, book-reviews, books, Fiction, Gothic literature, literature, Matthew Lewis, The Monk on February 9, 2026 by Jarrod Boyle
1.
A very literate friend of mine once described The Monk as the most boring book ever forced upon him by an educational institution. Any book that comes to take up that kind of notoriety is often contingent on timing: my friend was 19 when he encountered The Monk, and it may have become his central focus of regret in signing up to study Gothic literature.
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Black Rabbit
Posted in Film, Netflix, Real Men with tags Abel Ferrara, Black Rabbit, book-review, books, Catholic, Fiction, Jason Bateman, Jude Law, Martin Scorsese, Netflix, New York, reviews, writing on January 22, 2026 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
The golden rule of commercially successful narrative art is that the writer has to push their characters into insoluble situations, and have them find their escape. Those escapes are the watermark of quality.
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J.G. Ballard: Kingdom Come
Posted in Reading, Real Men with tags book-review, books, fascism, Fiction, J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, politics on June 14, 2025 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
I thought it was time to pay him a visit and see if he could freak me out like he used to.
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J.G. Ballard: Kingdom Come
Posted in Reading, Real Men with tags book-reviews, books, Crash, David Cronenberg, Empire of the Sun, Fiction, Five Books, J.G. Ballard, Jeff Buckley, Joyce Carey, Kingdom Come, Marquis de Sade, reading, Robert Plant, Running Wild, Steven Spielberg, The Atrocity Exhibition, writing on June 5, 2025 by Jarrod Boyle
Pussytown: Denis Villeneuve punks out on Blade Runner 2049
Posted in Film, Pretensions toward cultural theory, Real Men with tags Anais Nin, art, Blade Runner 2049, books, Denis Villeneuve, Dune, education, Film, Hans Christian Andersen, K, Kafka, Peckinpah, Replicant, Sara Stewart, Simone De Beauvoir, Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Castle, Vanity Fair, Verhoeven, writing on April 25, 2025 by Jarrod Boyle
‘You’ll love the new Blade Runner – unless you’re a woman.’
- Sara Stewart, New York Post, Oct 4, 2017
There was much ‘feminist’ criticism of Blade Runner 2049. I found it almost as astonishing as the pissweak rejoinder from its director, Denis Villeneuve in Vanity Fair, November 25, 2017:
“Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on women.”
My question is: what the fuck kind of film did Sara watch? And why doesn’t Villeneuve have the balls to stand up and defend the film he made?
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The Magic Mountain
Posted in Reading with tags book-review, books, Dickens, Dosteyevsky, Fiction, Judi Dench, literature, Nobel Proze, Pavel Tsatsouline, reading, Shakespeare, Sonnet 26, The Graham Norton Show, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, War and Peace on March 26, 2025 by Jarrod Boyle
The internet is like having a giant bilge pipe mounted above the armchair in your lounge room with all kinds of garbage gushing out of it. There is hardly a moment to take stock and discriminate amongst the torrent of what’s raining down upon you.
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Theme Park at its Darkest 