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Post by spindrift on Apr 27, 2011 14:55:09 GMT
This week I finished reading Kokoro by Natsume Soseki.
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is one of the great writers of the modern world. He was one of the first Japanese writers to be influenced by Western culture and his works are still read very widely in Japan.
Kokoro is a meditation on the changing face of Japanese culture and its attitudes towards honour, friendship, love and death; it also slyly subverts these values. This is a fascinating book, written with the most beautiful lucidity: it is subtle, nostalgic and persuasive...
Read it and you won't be disappointed.
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Post by Kimby on Apr 28, 2011 5:20:39 GMT
Just finished Seventh Scroll and am hoping that a movie has been or will be made of it.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 28, 2011 10:54:11 GMT
I'm reading an autobiography by Michael MacDonald. A boy of Irish decent raised in the projects on the South side of Boston, a 'Southie'. One of 11 children. It's a very telling story, touching and honest and a real eye opener. Four of his brothers die as a result of drugs, violence and guns. I have to stop looking at the back cover though, where there is a photo of him, (He's very cute - handsome) I've told Micheal that I will be reading his second book called: Easter Rising, but so far I haven't been able to get my hands on it. I'm thinking of asking him to mail me a copy.
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Post by foreverman on May 1, 2011 6:14:49 GMT
I have just received 'Those in Peril' the latest from Wilbur Smith. I bought it on Ebay, a signed hard back copy for less than half price what the local bookshop is selling unsigned copies for..................
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Post by Deleted on May 1, 2011 16:01:22 GMT
foreverman, good idea. I've checked and I can see that I can order it over the internet. I just wanted an excuse to talk to Micheal that's all. Playing the lost little maiden works fine sometimes
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Post by bixaorellana on May 3, 2011 3:57:23 GMT
Just finished Seventh Scroll and am hoping that a movie has been or will be made of it. Check it out, Kimby -- mini-series from 1999 ~~ www.imdb.com/title/tt0272836/I have just received 'Those in Peril' the latest from Wilbur Smith. I bought it on Ebay, a signed hard back copy for less than half price what the local bookshop is selling unsigned copies for.................. What's the background of that one, Foreverman? Congrats on the good buy! =============================================== Guess I'd better report on my recent reading before I lose track. I finished The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire & found it most satisfying. Her writing style for the book was interesting, sort of bodice-rippery, which worried me until I realized it was a sly comment on the character of the heroine & was kept to just the right amount to convey what the author wished. Overall, her prose is excellent, sometimes quite beautiful. Mexican history is very tortuous & hard to keep straight, but I wound up learning stuff from this novel. www.amazon.com/Last-Prince-Mexican-Empire/dp/193296164XRight now I'm reading Sex with Kings, which I'm enjoying, but not as much as this reviewer promises. www.powells.com/review/2004_06_26One problem I have with it is that she relates snippets of gossip as though they were fact, plus also gets caught up in her own over-statements for the sake of effect, which leaves one wondering what is fact & what is myth. But my main gripe is the way it's organized, or really, not organized. She hops between people and reigns and periods of history to the point that you've forgotten details about a person when she returns to them. Worse, I kept losing track of which particular Louis or Henri or Charles was being featured at the moment, causing me to turn back a few pages. Irritating, especially because the subject matter is quite interesting. I've also started A Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich. It's good so far, with some excellent sly, deadpan humor. The people in the book are Métis and there are references to Louis Reil and the history surrounding him. (I'm not very far into the book yet.) Right away that allowed me to feel smug because I knew who the Métis are. I haven't known very long, just since seeing these threads on this forum: anyportinastorm.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=canada&action=display&thread=3463 and anyportinastorm.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=canada&action=display&thread=3457 , but hey -- I know!
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Post by joanne28 on May 9, 2011 6:09:06 GMT
I'm up late reading "Duma Key" by Stephen King. I like most, not all, of his books and I'm really enjoying this one.
There's an elderly woman in it that greatly reminds me of one of my mother's tablemates in the nursing home that I feed, along with my mother, whenever I'm there. Even though the physical description of the woman in the book is nothing like Noreen, it's amazing how much she reminds me of her. It's made my reading that little bit more enjoyable.
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Post by bjd on May 9, 2011 6:35:01 GMT
I just started "This Body of Death" by Elizabeth George. I usually like her books, which is why I bought this one. I don't really like the different narratives/threads at the beginning here though. Of course, they will all come together but for now I find it a bit distracting.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 12, 2011 4:09:04 GMT
Stephen King pretty much lost me in the era of Chistine & Cujo, although I read a couple after that. I'm glad to know that you think he's got his magic back, Joanne. One thing I really admire about him is how well his books are constructed. Some of them are really long, but when he picks a thread back up, you never have to flip back to see what he's talking about. I loved The Stand and The Shining scared the crap out of me. I probably need to give Elizabeth George another try. For whatever reason, I find her books dense in a way that doesn't work for me. Today I finished The Plague of Doves and don't quite know what to say about it. I like Louise Erdrich so much & really admire most of her books, plus consider her an excellent writer. But P. of D. never pulled me all the way in. It's a novel told in several different voices, and I lost track several times. Also, I was just plain bored a few times, although the book always picked back up, either with excellent writing, an interesting plot twist, or her trademark deadpan humor. Mostly I felt she wasn't completely in command of whatever it was she was trying to do, with the ends-tying-up part seeming a let down. Also, a few big revelations left me thinking, "So?" Really, I feel badly saying these negative things about a writer I admire. I'd be interested in other people's take on the book. Maybe it was just me?
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Post by bjd on May 12, 2011 7:14:20 GMT
Bixa, I think it's the "density" of Elizabeth George's books that I like -- she actually develops her characters so the books are not just detective stories. Indeed, it all came together shortly before the end.
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Post by Deleted on May 12, 2011 23:20:32 GMT
I found a copy of Dorothy Dunnett's ,The Game of Kings in the used book store,the first in her series The Lymond Chronicles. I had enjoyed her The House of Niccolo series so much (at BJD's recommendation) that I was now ready to read some more of her work.
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Post by joanne28 on May 14, 2011 1:39:00 GMT
Bixa, I never read Christine or Cujo. The Stand is definitely my favourite King book - the modern, dark version of Lord of the Rings. And yes, I went out and got the extended version, which I can't find at the moment.
I'm reading The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth. And again, yes, I know it's been out nearly 20 years but that's the way the cookie crumbles. What I enjoy about Forsyth is how he explains everything so well and so convincing - details on how to construct an identity, gun running and so on. I've put Barney's Version down for a bit but will probably pick it up when I've finished this one.
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Post by bjd on May 23, 2011 11:55:45 GMT
A friend lent me the latest John Le Carré, in French unfortunately. Our Kind of Traitor. Okay , not really a page turner.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 23, 2011 21:05:49 GMT
I recently finished Henning Mankell's The Eye of the Leopard and was alternately fascinated, bored, admiring, and annoyed. He has some great characters in it, none of whom, including the protagonist narrator, are sufficiently developed. The narrator, who would be the one character who should come to life, becomes completely inconsistent towards the end of the book. I'm sure that's because the novel is really one of ideas, mostly moved along by musing interior monologues. That's okay, as far as it goes, but the clunky out-of-character actions of someone we thought we'd come to know are just more indication that the book should have been an essay, perhaps, rather than an inadequately realized novel. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview19After that, I cleared my palate by reading the 15th book in Janet Evanovitch's Stephanie Plum series. I've just started Tinkers, by Paul Harding. Nothing has really happened yet, but it's beautifully written with some fascinating historical asides. www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-04-13-pulitzer13_ST_N.htmAnd in the history department, I'm also reading The Year 1000, What Life was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium An Englishman's World by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. This is an extremely enjoyable popular history that moves right along and is making me want to know more. I highly recommend the book, especially as a sort of entremets between other kinds of reading. www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579
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Post by Kimby on May 27, 2011 3:50:43 GMT
Just finished Committed: A skeptic makes peace with marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's the sequel to Eat, Pray, Love, which I liked better. When I finished EPL, I was not ready to let the characters go off into the sunset. Now I am.
I did enjoy the research she shares on marriage, though, including Ferdinand Mount's theory that all (non-arranged) marriages are automatic acts of subversion against authority. "The family is the enduring permanent enemy of all hierarchies, churches and ideologies. Not only dictators, biships and commissars but also humble parish priests and cafe intellectuals find themselves repeatedly coming up against the stony hostility of the family and its determination to resist interference to the last."
"(Mount) suggests that because couples in nonarranged marriages join together for such deeply private reasons, and because those couples create such secret lives for themselves within their union, they are innately threatening to anybody who wants to rule the world....authority figures, much to their frustration, have never been able to entirely control, or even monitor, the most secret intimacies that pass between two people who sleep together on a regular basis."
This subversive aspect of marriage is what allows the author to submit to embrace marriage again, after a disastrous first marriage/divorce.
Another interesting tidbit: Early Christians felt strongly that good Christians should not be married or having sex. They wanted to expand their numbers by converting non-Christians, not by making babies that would grow up Christian. Interesting that fundamentalist Christians and conservative politicians are so "family-values" oriented, when originally Christians only wanted to embrace god, not spouses and children.
I have just picked up from the Library Jean Auel's latest - The Land of Painted Caves, and can only keep it for 14 days. It's a very thick book, I'll see how far I get. I loved the first two books, but it went downhill from there. It was interesting to read about how early peoples might have lived (and having been a docent at a Natural History Museum in California, some of the stuff she described was right on), but for her to expect us to believe that one woman and her partner invented or discovered essentially all the great discoveries of mankind - making fire with flint, domesticating the dog/wolf, riding a horse, inventing the atlatl (spear thrower), etc. - is stretching it a bit too far.
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Post by auntieannie on Jun 3, 2011 19:34:30 GMT
I am reading Bill Bryson's "At home". It is a good relief after books on pharmacognosy, phytochemistry and anatomy/physiology volumes, without being dumb.
The subtitle is " a short history of private life". The author leads us around a house and writes about historical facts about Britain, mostly in the last 150 years, but also dipping in and out of much older history. the Hall leads us to the Saxons, etc...
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 3, 2011 20:53:30 GMT
My mother is also reading The Land of Painted Caves. She told me it's to be the last in the series. Interestingly, Jean Auel is apparently respected by archeologists for the research she does and the accurate job of making a popular presentation of the material. My sister & I call Ayla "the girl who invented everything". I assume this book is like the last several in that you can save some time reading it by skipping the sex parts, since they're exactly the same every time & in all of the books.
Annie, I absolutely worship Bill Bryson. Who else can present so much information in such a lively, interesting, and hysterically funny fashion?
I'm reading two books right now, but will wait to report on them. Both of them are devastatingly good -- Tinkers, by Paul Harding, and Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. The second one has already become one of my favorite books of all time. From the moment I began reading it, I knew I'd need to buy a copy so I can read it over and over again.
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Post by joanne28 on Jun 10, 2011 19:56:06 GMT
Annie, I love Bill Bryson and really enjoyed At Home. I've got A Short History of Nearly Everything at hand but haven't made much headway with it.
Lately I just seem to want to reread old favourites. I just started (for the first time) A Son of the Circus but keep pulling random books off the bookshelves and rereading those instead. I don't know why I'm so lazy and unfocussed. I need to park myself in my garden with a cold drink on a warm day - when my neighbour is at work so he won't talk to me over the fence.
I normally have 3 or 4 different books on the go at the same time. I have a bed book, a car book, an evening book and often books in various other rooms of the house. Does anyone else do this?
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 10, 2011 20:15:06 GMT
Oh, heavens yes! I'm only reading two right now -- the aforementioned Tinkers, which got somewhat abandoned when I started Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. I was afraid Hotel on the Corner... was going to be cloying, with that cutesy name, but the theme interested me and it's quite well written. It's about one of the more shameful moments in US history, when new Americans of Japanese descent and first and second generation Americans of Japanese descent were rounded up and thrust into camps, often losing their health and property and businesses they'd worked years to get. Warning: I did not read the link I provided, as I don't want to accidentally see any spoilers!
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Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2011 20:52:00 GMT
I finally finished Paris Trance. I was not impressed, although there were a few authentic details.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 11, 2011 15:30:50 GMT
Bixa, you might be interested to know that right here in Missoula, Montana, we had an internment camp that housed about 2000 men, mostly young, unmarried Italians who were rounded up off cruise ships and from the worlds fair (they loved it here, called it "Bella Vista", and several married local girls and stayed after they were released), and about 600 Japanese men who had been yanked from their homes, businesses and families on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor and held here until their loyalties could be determined. Right now, the courtroom where these trials were held is being restored to tell this story. It is part of the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula where I volunteer. We also have one of the barracks buildings that housed the men. www.fortmissoulamuseum.org/aliendetention.phpAfter the 9/11 attacks, people warned against a similar rounding up of Muslims, and we are trying not to repeat this sad chapter in history.
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Post by auntieannie on Jun 11, 2011 16:05:45 GMT
Joanne! I read "A son of the Circus" in India on my first visit! I started it on the plane. 1995. I have a great fondness for that book.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 11, 2011 16:23:42 GMT
Oh, thank you for that, Kimby -- really interesting!
I knew that there were Italian and German prisoners of war in the US during WWII, but I'd thought they were all soldiers. I had no idea that tourists were rounded up and incarcerated.
Was Missoula chosen because at that time it was considered remote enough to hold these "dangerous" people?
So much of this stuff was taught so sketchily in school, either glossed over or not even mentioned. I remember the first I ever knew about the internment of Japanese-Americans was a small photo in a high school history book. It was of a general presenting a posthumous medal for her son to a mother in one of the camps. Even as a feckless teen, I recognized the event as grotesque hypocrisy.
I want to go to Missoula and of course visit the museum, of course with the hope that you'd be the docent that day!
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Post by Kimby on Jun 11, 2011 16:42:44 GMT
The docent AND the hostess, if you need a place to bunk! The Italians were not tourists so much as workers on the boats and at the world's fair. Some of them were musicians and chefs and performers, so they led a rich cultural life while in the camp. I understand the Japanese men were much less happy while here, though they did plant some irises that still bloom outside what used to be the steps of the barracks. Missoula was chosen because it had a fort (established during the Indian wars) that was on the verge of being decommissioned as unneeded, so it was a ready-built facility available for this use. It was on two rail lines, so transportation from the coast was also easy. BTW, a year ago the art museum hosted an exhibit of paintings by Roger Shimomura who was interned as a 2 year old with his 3 generation family at Camp Minidoka in Idaho. The 1100 5th graders who visited the art museum over a 3 month period were also bused to Fort Missoula to see the internment barracks and participate in a discrimination activity. (As they got off the bus, they were given ID tags similar to those worn by internees getting off the train. Those whose tags had green dots got special treatment - sitting on benches, a handful of M&Ms, glasses of water - while those with yellow dots sat on the floor and got nothing. The docents also gave preference to the green dot wearers when choosing who to call on.) It was a great experience made possible by the coincidence of exhibits at two different museums. This link has background on the artist, though from earlier, edgier exhibits than the one featured for the 5th graders. www.gregkucera.com/shimomura_reviews.htm
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2011 16:42:45 GMT
My family lived in Oxnard, CA for 6 years (I finished high school there). It was the location of the largest Japanese concentration camp in the U.S. It also had the highest percentage of Japanese & Japanese-Americans in the U.S. when we lived there, so I guess it is "normal." The mayor was Japanese-American and so was our family doctor. When I returned there a few years ago, I saw that Oxnard has now gone completely Mexican and all of the signs in the stores were in Spanish; it was even hard to find English.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 11, 2011 19:30:56 GMT
Thanks, Kimby ~~ lovely, & hope you know that is ditto from my end.
I looked at the Shimomura link. He's from Seattle, where Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet takes place.
Like Kerouac, my first exposure to any Asian-descent population was in California, where one of the positive side effects was great bulk food choices in the supermarket.
Kimby, who thought up the yellow & green tag device? It's absolutely brilliant. Were you privy to any of the comments the kids made about their experiences with that & with the exhibits in general?
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Post by Kimby on Jun 12, 2011 14:03:05 GMT
Bixa, I'm thinking that we should move - or copy - this digression to its own thread on the USA board, so folks can get back to posting about what they are reading, and so this topic won't get buried forever in a thread about books. I'll try to do it by quoting into a new thread, but if that doesn't work, can you help me set one up? Then I'll insert a link to it here. anyportinastorm.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=usa&thread=5121&page=1
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 12, 2011 15:47:07 GMT
Hi Kimby ~~ I see you started another thread already, but do you not know about the Fork feature? It was covered in the tech thread in Free Trade Zone when it was inaugurated, but is quite self-explanatory when you click on the Fork icon. Here's the post explaining it (pertinent parts highlighted), plus a little tutorial to walk you through it: Imec asked above about 'fork'. That, and other recent innovations to the forum are:
1. Fast return to main page -- just click on the logo in the banner.
2. You can now select any skin and remove the background. Go to 'modify profile' > 'acct. preferences'.
[highlight=Yellow]3. Fork/split threads. Quickly springboard off one topic to a new one you create. Tutorial/examples: iycatacombs.com/socal/resources/scripts/screenshots/forkthreads/preview.html (<--used w/permission)[/highlight]
5. Want to edit a long post and don't want to scroll back up to the top? Double-click on the post and modify away!
6. Photobucket slideshow capability. Set up a slide show with your selected photos in photobucket, or use their button which gives the url to turn any album into a slide show. Paste the direct url here, highlight, click on the blue photobucket button, then add the dimensions you want.
Enjoy! Your way worked nicely, as well. However, in the future you can save yourself some work by Forking, then asking to have pertinent posts moved to the new thread.[/size]
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Post by Kimby on Jun 12, 2011 15:50:48 GMT
(I AM good at finding unorthodox shortcuts! )
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Post by joanne28 on Jun 15, 2011 19:48:25 GMT
I've totally digressed to The Stand after reading only about 100 pages of A Son of The Circus. I had to buy a new (new to me, beat up secondhand copy) book as I can't find mine. However, my favourite bookseller knows he'll get it back when I find mine. Lately I've been triaging my books & have brought several books over to him. In return, I just take a book or two. The point is that I'm triaging books, not adding them.
Annie, once I've quenched my need to reread The Stand (1/3 of the way through), I'll go back to A Son of The Circus, which I did find interesting. I read The World According to Garp and thought it was written as a screenplay. However, I did read it over 30 years ago so should probably give it another chance.
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