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Post by fumobici on Dec 23, 2017 3:17:24 GMT
I was originally introduced to Camilleri watching episodes of the Montalbano series at my father's house in Italy. When I first began watching I could only get pieces of the dialogue, but as my Italian improved and I became familiar with the basic Sicilian words and phrases he introduces through the characters, it got easier and easier to follow. Then I bought a couple of the Montalbano books in Italian which helped more. Reading an unfamiliar language is much easier than understanding speech at normal speed. Camilleri is very adept at writing dialogue in Sicilian that is pretty easy for a normal Italian reader/speaker to follow. He's got a great feel for how much and how fast to challenge the reader, without it ever becoming burdensome or difficult. Plus, Montalbano is a great protagonist and the stories are quite fun. The gorgeous Sicilian setting helps it all go down sweetly as well.
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Post by whatagain on Dec 25, 2017 11:44:47 GMT
I remember hating reading some Agatha Christies' book whihc translated 'Tuppence' into 'miss Quat-sous' I found it so stupid and really annoying to the point of taking away a lot of fun.
I lost my Donna Leon book, finished Stasi child which could have been great but was just ok misplaced my book on Churchill that is not well written and am going to start reading Guderian's memoirs that I got for Christmas - I actually selected it at the bookshop next to home and told the owner (Jean-Luc, a friend actually) to keep it somewhere and to tell my wife that it could be a good read for me just in case she came to buy a book for me... Some tricks do work.
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CrackedCode
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Post by CrackedCode on Dec 26, 2017 3:13:48 GMT
They don't necessarily. Imagine a sentence written without spaces and then cut up into 5 letter blocks. Something is then done with the letters to scramble them into other letters. If you have a sentence that doesn't have a multiple of 5 letters then just add a couple of random ones to make up the numbers. If it is decrypted by the right person in the right way they'll see the last two or three or so make no sense and will discard them - depending on the method of encryption. As for me decrypting it, the first stumbling block I come against is the letter frequency. Normally the letter E is the most used. Then the letter T followed by the letter A. In your text the letters F and H are used the most, I think. So naturally you'd expect one of those to be actually the letter E or maybe T. I've started you off, so you can now finish it. Ok? Note - it isn't a code called Caesar cipher. Thanks for the start, Mark. But, ask Bixa, she’ll verify: I like to have people do things for me! Especially confusing tech things. BTW, I finished the book and the mystery was not alluded to, nor a code for solving it. Sigh. The book does, in fact, allude to the code that solves it! The cipher that he is given at the NSA interview is the same as the one on the dedication page. I won't spoil the solution but that should help!
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 26, 2017 4:24:06 GMT
Ha ~ a real Christmas cracker!
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Post by Kimby on Dec 26, 2017 5:08:00 GMT
Thanks for the start, Mark. But, ask Bixa, she’ll verify: I like to have people do things for me! Especially confusing tech things. BTW, I finished the book and the mystery was not alluded to, nor a code for solving it. Sigh. The book does, in fact, allude to the code that solves it! The cipher that he is given at the NSA interview is the same as the one on the dedication page. I won't spoil the solution but that should help! Except I don’t have access to the book anymore...
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Post by mickthecactus on Jan 18, 2018 13:36:19 GMT
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Post by bjd on Jan 18, 2018 14:27:22 GMT
I just clicked on the second link and in the first illustration I see; The Waste Land by TS Eliot. Sorry, but that's fiction. I find it strange that poetry is classed as non-fiction.
As for the first list, I discover that I have read a lot of the books on the list but mostly those from 1900 to 1980 and almost none of those since then.
At the moment I am reading an old detective novel from 1880. It's called The Mystery of the Hansom Cab and takes place in Melbourne, Australia.
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Post by mickthecactus on Jan 18, 2018 15:52:03 GMT
It also has Waiting For Godot which I would have thought was fiction.
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Post by questa on Jan 20, 2018 8:19:48 GMT
Not poems, it would seem!
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Post by bjd on Jan 20, 2018 8:31:00 GMT
Interesting that the bible is classed as non-fiction too!
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 20, 2018 16:09:06 GMT
The second list should have been titled "A Bunch of Books That Aren't Novels".
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Post by mickthecactus on Jan 20, 2018 17:20:24 GMT
Yes I think the definition of novel has been somewhat stretched.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jan 20, 2018 19:58:58 GMT
Just started a book by the British comedian/actor/writer David Mitchell Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse opening chapter is about the stock market crash in 2008. It's a series of rants. Fabulous. Just what I need atm. Laughing out loud despite the subject matter.
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Post by bjd on Jan 23, 2018 16:09:33 GMT
Oh goody! Casimira, I set the book aside when I went on my trip, but the fact that you're now reading it will spur me to pick it back up. I do think you will enjoy it and am eager to know what you think. I want to report on two books, one which I neglected to praise to the skies when I read it a few months ago, & one that I finished night before last. The recently finished one was "Exit West", by an author lauded by Bjd: Mohsin Hamid. It's a lovely, unputdownable book, with a single magic realism conceit that is totally acceptable in the way it moves the book along by skipping what would have otherwise been details that would have pushed it in an entirely different direction. I feel the review here is a perfect summation: themillions.com/2017/12/a-year-in-reading-michael-david-lukas.html You might be interested in this interview, Bixa www.france24.com/en/20180123-encore-culture-literature-mohsin-hamid-exit-west-magic-migrant-crisis
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 23, 2018 17:23:40 GMT
WOW! Yes, thank you! That is a wonderful, uplifting 17 minutes. Really, I think anyone would appreciate watching it whether or not they've read the author.
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Post by Kimby on Jan 24, 2018 0:43:24 GMT
I have finally begun reading Peter Matthiessen’s KILLING MR. WATSON, which my dearly departed MIL highly recommended. Among the things we inherited were TWO copies of this book. I left the hardcover copy in the Florida house for renters to enjoy, and brought the trade paperback copy on the plane.
It has a lot of historical information about Ft. Myers and points south along the Florida gulf coast, and speculates on the events surrounding the actual death of an actual character named Watson around the turn of the century. Each chapter is told by another person in Watson’s sphere. I read a few pages a day at bedtime, and savor it for the next 24 hours.
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Post by Kimby on Jan 24, 2018 17:03:38 GMT
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Post by mickthecactus on Jan 24, 2018 17:19:50 GMT
Some good looking books there - except The Great Gatsby which I’ve tried twice and still not finished.
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Post by bjd on Jan 25, 2018 18:38:52 GMT
I have never heard of most of those books although I do have an old copy of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.
I was moving books from one place to another and found a copy of Greenmantleby John Buchan. I must have read it before but remembered nothing so I enjoyed it again. Not politically correct any longer, of course, but fun to read.
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Post by questa on Jan 27, 2018 7:07:59 GMT
John Buchan wrote other "spy" novels and based his character on his friend T E Lawrence (of Arabia). In an interview Buchan said that the descriptions TEL gave of his adventures and intelligence work became Greenmantle' (Buchan became a 'Lord' after serving as Governor General in Canada)
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Post by bjd on Jan 27, 2018 8:03:41 GMT
Yes, I also learned that he died in Montreal in 1940 after an accident.
His Richard Hannay character may have been based on TE Lawrence, but some of his adventures are so improbable that it's more like James Bond.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 28, 2018 20:19:22 GMT
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Post by bjd on Jan 29, 2018 6:21:21 GMT
When I woke up too early to get up this morning, I was thinking about the final book of her trilogy and couldn't remember much about it even though I read it just a few months ago. Not something on my re-reading list,for sure.
Meanwhile, I recently read The Crow Road by Iain Banks, which I enjoyed. It takes place in Scotland. I had actually owned that book but lent it to someone who either lost it or lent it to somebody else.
A visit to the library on Saturday led me to a book I hadn't read by Fred Vargas, a French detective story writer who is very popular here. She, Vargas, is an archaeologist or something and her books are nearly all set in Paris but with excursions out to the countryside for various reasons, some of which are a bit supernatural.
And someone lent me a Spanish book called El Impostor. The first 2 or 3 chapters are concerned with the author deciding whether or not to write the book so it may take me some time to read. If it had been in English or French I probably would have abandoned it by now but I might slog on just for the language practice.
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Post by bjd on Feb 3, 2018 18:47:37 GMT
On the library trip mentioned just above, I also found Wild by Cheryl Strayed. It's the account of her walking the Pacific Crest Trail in the summer of 1995. Pretty good although I would never do such a thing myself. It was made into a movie I believe although I'm not sure how the screenwriting went. Much of the time she talks about her painful feet and talks about she suffered when her mother died. I suppose much of it was flashbacks.
Well, here is the trailer.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2018 21:40:16 GMT
I remember when the book Wild came out after reading an interview and was very intrigued by it.
Kimby, I'm glad you are enjoying Killing Mr. Watson. Everything Mr. Mattheisen wrote and he covered many genres (nature, adventure, Buddhism, fiction and more) was magic. (My mother knew him personally and said he was a very humble gentleman. I went to parochial school with one of his daughters and recall her as being very shy and a loner type)
Anyway, back on topic here. A friend gave me a copy of Philip Kerr's March Violets, the first book in the Berlin Noir Trilogy. I am devouring it. Right up my alley. Why did I not know of this writer baffles me but one of life's wonderful surprises when they happen.
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Post by bjd on Feb 4, 2018 8:05:08 GMT
I like Philip Kerr's books too, Casi! All the Bernie Gunther ones are great. He has kept the set going much better than Alan Furst. In fact, they are all stand-alone, but it's good to read them in order of publication, even though they are not chronological. I guess as they got popular, Kerr went back in time to fill in some background.
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Post by patricklondon on Feb 4, 2018 12:13:40 GMT
I enjoyed Philip Kerr's Gunther books, too; I've been getting in my language practice over the years with Cay Rademacher, who wrote a series of detective stories set in immediately postwar Hamburg, and then switched to a series set in the contemporary south of France. Currently on "Tödliche Camargue". They're rather in the same territory (if a different part of the south of France) as Martin Walker's Bruno series. In between I followed up various references and recommendations and got into Jaan Kross's The Czar's Madman; published in Soviet Estonia in 1978, it reads as a family saga set in the early nineteenth century, but the contemporary overtones at the time of publication made me wonder how he got away with it, since the basic situation is that a former confidant of the Tsar has been released after years of imprisonment for speaking his mind on the need for reforms, but confined to his estate deep in rural Estonia, apparently because he has been deemed to be mad. The development of the family's story is tied up with the question not only as to whether he is mad or not, but what exactly it was he said to offend the Tsar, who's reporting back to the authorities on them, how they will preserve the estate, or whether they will try to escape. My blog | My photos | My video clips | My Librivox recordings"too literate to be spam"
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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 5, 2018 5:47:37 GMT
I think this is the part where we say literature is dead. Good grief.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Feb 8, 2018 18:43:48 GMT
I'm rather partial to a nice END OF THE WORLD aaaaauuuurgh! novel. Currently reading Pandemic The Extinction Files by A G Riddle. So far pretty predictable conspiracy theory/haemorrhagic fever starting in Africa/secret service type tish...but it's easy to read.
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 12, 2018 23:13:43 GMT
I am reading a book of collected letters by prisoners as part of some essential research.
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