The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Sterne wrote a novel that breaks every rule of novel-writing — digressions, blank pages, squiggly lines, a plot that never gets started — 200 years before postmodernism existed.
“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine — they are the life, the soul of reading.”
Why It Matters
Sterne wrote a novel that breaks every rule of novel-writing — digressions, blank pages, squiggly lines, a plot that never gets started — 200 years before postmodernism existed. It proved that a novel could be about the act of storytelling itself, and writers from Diderot to Joyce to Pynchon took note. It is the most modern book of the 18th century.
The 
Take
Personal reviewI get what he’s doing and it’s a pioneering work and has some real moments of brilliance and wit… but ultimately it’s just WAY too difficult a read and the extra work to understand doesn’t end up being that gratifying. It’s ultimately an important work to me, but not one of the highest quality.
Notable Quotes
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”
“A man cannot dress, but his ideas get clothed at the same time.”