welcome to...A CONFEBRUARY OF DUNCES.is this my first good pun in a while or am i losing my mind?anyway, welcome back to project long classics, in which i read lengthy old books over a month or so usually in order to justify my penguin clothbound addiction.this is neither all that long nor all that old, but what penguin clothbound says goes.i don't know anything else about this book beyond the fact that, judging by the title, it must be about my life.here we go!DAY ONEwe have met our protagonist...

Hands down one of the funniest books ever!A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, winning the Pulitzer Prize the following year.Set in New Orleans, the star of this novel is Ignatius Reilly, a 30-year-old man still living at home with his mother.This book is irreverent fun and hilarious. Ignatius is a larger-than-life character who is very extra. He has a vast vocabulary and is exquisitely intellectual; however, he has no practical experience (he even wears a green hat) but he also has no...

This is the book that almost broke my book club. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is as famous for its back-story as it is for its content. It was published posthumously in 1980, over a decade after Toole ended his own life by carbon monoxide poisoning. Despite having been earlier rejected by publishers, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. A Confederacy of Dunces is a rambling, aimless, comedic novel centered on Ignatius J. Reilly, a buffoonish overweight man-child with poor ...

Read for the group On the Southern Literary TrailBounceBOUnceBOUNCEOh man ughh ooohhhhh.BOUNCE!BOUNCE!!ahhhhhhhhhhhhhOh thank goodness my pyloric valve finally opened. I didn't know I even had a pyloric valve until I met Ignatius J. Reilly. I had no idea that little valve could be so pesky. I can only hope it stays open long enough for me to write this review. When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.Jonathan SwiftIgnatius is...

One fine morning Fortuna spun my wheel of luck and put me on a flight to NYC. The person who was sitting next to me, refusing to indulge in modern day perversities like movies, pulled out his book and sat down reading. He must have been enjoying it immensely, because he kept laughing out loud every now and then. Soon he realized that some people had started turning around to give him weird looks. Poor guy didn't have an option but to put the book down. But Fortuna being the degenerate wanton tha...

I thought the book was ok. One of my old boyfriends recommended it to me, and while I was reading it I told him what an asshole I thought Ignatius J. Reilly was, and that I was sick of hearing about his valve. He got pissed off at me and told me that I didn't get it. He said Ignatius was a misunderstood genius stuck in a shitty town with no one who understood him. To be honest, my eyes kind of glazed over and I don't remember the rest of his rant, but I finished the book anyway. I think the most...

I hated this book. I almost gave up after the first 20 pages, but I decided to stick with it and give it a chance. Wrong. My first instinct was correct!The only thing that might have saved this for me was if the main character Ignatius faced a long, slow, painful death. There was absolutely nothing about him that I found redeeming or appealing. Has there ever been a more annoying, obnoxious character in literature? If so, I don't want to know. I had heard that this was supposed to be an hilariou...

Authors who commit suicide find their Lovelybones-eye view from the afterlife brings them no comfort:David Foster Wallace : Oh my God - look at that dreadful biography of me... and it's selling too... it's like they're murdering me all over again ... oh if I could only commit suicide all over again - but up here, you can't!John Kennedy Toole : Oh shut up you preening self-regarding self-annotating depressing pedant, what about ME?? My God, if I'd only persevered for another year or so, I'd have ...

I know I'm out on my own on this one, but I detest this book. I really think it glorifies whining to an extent never before seen in the human condition. Everyone I know loves this book, and I know I am in a minority here. But Christ... That this book is so popular with people in my age bracket and not so popular with people older or younger really makes me wonder if it is part of the problem or a reflection of the boring, whiny apathy of my generation. But if this book has any redeemable aspects...

There are a lot of ways to judge people, but I find that opinion of this book is one of the most accurate and efficient. With very few exceptions, I've found that how much I like someone is strongly correlated with how much they enjoy the book. Is it their favorite book ever, omg? Well, they're probably either a best friend, a comrade whom I hold in worship-approximating esteem, or my cool cousin or uncle or something like that. Do they not "get" it or find it boring? You aren't my type, sorry. ...