{"id":349,"date":"2021-10-30T13:51:33","date_gmt":"2021-10-30T13:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/?p=349"},"modified":"2021-10-30T13:51:33","modified_gmt":"2021-10-30T13:51:33","slug":"not-much-light-shining-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/30\/not-much-light-shining-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Not much light shining here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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<\/a>Solar<\/a> by Ian McEwan<\/a>

My rating: 1 of 5 stars<\/a>


I’ve enjoyed past novels I’ve read by Ian McEwan<\/a>. I particularly loved Atonement<\/a> and Saturday<\/a>. But I just couldn’t get through Solar<\/a>. In it, McEwan indulges his worst instincts, with utterly despicable characters that he moves around on a chess board to teach readers the desired lesson. I could write more about it, but I found a review that perfectly summarized my thoughts. Here is Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times<\/em>:

“McEwan\u2019s novel of Decline and Fall becomes a case study in Decline and Stall, lapsing into a display of his finesse as a spinner of silken sentences and composer of sonatalike paragraphs. The performance is an exquisite bore, with all the overchoreographed dullness of a touring ice ballet cast with off-season Olympic skaters.”

The review is actually pretty amusing overall. You can read it here: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/18\/books\/review\/Kirn-t.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Solar by Ian McEwan My rating: 1 of 5 stars I’ve enjoyed past novels I’ve read by Ian McEwan. I particularly loved Atonement and Saturday. But I just couldn’t get through Solar. In it, McEwan indulges his worst instincts, with utterly despicable characters that he moves around on a chess board to teach readers the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRPpr-5D","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}