Derb:
Look: I’m no stranger to hard-to-read stuff. When I was a college student I read all the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, just because everyone else was reading them. For academic purposes—by way of getting a degree, I mean—I read Riesz and Szőkefalvi-Nagy’s Functional Analysis, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, and the first 56 chapters of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which is mostly written in a symbolic language they invented for the purpose.
Then in later life, as a book reviewer, reading for money, I have forced myself to read a lot of stuff that brought to mind Dorothy Parker’s alleged response to some tome she had been asked to review,: “This book should not be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Eh, one has to make a living.
Genius T. Coates, however, I just cannot read. The prose is impenetrable.
