4. Updike's Rabbit Redux is weakest of book of series (especially utterly unconvincing engagement with black radicalism & hippies) BUT ...
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Replying to @HeerJeet
5. ...with Redux, Updike became more ambitious. Rabbit, Run was narrow book but Redux & later books tried to encompass USA
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Replying to @HeerJeet
6. "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" is Alice Munro's weakest collection, a book of uncertain, undeveloped stories.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
7. Yet with "Something" Munro broke with her earlier reflexive habit of epiphanic endings, shuffling narrative deck: seeds of great work.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
7. We have to fail to succeed: writers have to risk writing atrocious books in order to get the courage to do their best work.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
8. Middle period Dickens isn't bad but it's often flawed, thwarted or not quite cohesive: Barnaby Rudge, Old Curiosity Shop, even Chuzzlewit
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Replying to @HeerJeet
8. Yet in his middling middle-period works we see Dickens figuring out how to organize a big novel, preparing for Bleak House, etc.
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10. It's impossible to overstate how wretched those last few Heinlein novels are. "Number of the Beast": still shudder to think on it.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
11. Heinlein (like Stephen King & James Ellroy) also became "too big to edit" (literary counterpart of "too big to fail").
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Replying to @HeerJeet
12. We're all going to write badly at one time or another: the thing is to fail productively rather than get mired in our botched work.
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13. Of course, Beckett was way ahead of me on all this: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
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