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Post by bixaorellana on Feb 12, 2018 23:17:10 GMT
A really serious person would have himself sent to prison.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2018 17:07:00 GMT
I reread with glee and delight various parts of Killing Mr. Watson. . the prose . .a real Florida book. I envy Casi's mother's contact with a man who was a genius writer. In the Berlin Noir category, I've just finished the first two books of Volker Kuts which according to Welt.de will go to nine books. What disappointment! They are n cher's Gereon Rath/Berlin Babylon seriesot good books. The pacing is just plain off with too many unnecessary details that a Philip Kerr editor would have caught. Sadly too, I bought the next three in German before I finished these. When they arrived from Amazon.de I was thunderstruck by their size . . . 500 plus pages. No good Krimi should be that long. I wonder if I'll even bother reading them. The screen adaptation of this series is likely one of the best, most thrilling, spellbinding series I have seen in a long time. Available on Netflix. Positively riveting and intense. I picked up a copy of Door Wide Open by Joyce (Glassman)Johnson at "the little library" this morning. It's a compilation of letters between Ms. Johnson and Jack Kerouac's love letters from 1957-1958. I'm not familiar with this woman or her love affair with Kerouac. I'm looking forward to reading it especially as I love reading about the Beat generation era in NYC.
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 18, 2018 5:25:49 GMT
I am reading a book right now which has me completely in its spell. I'm not crazy about the title, but the book is chock full of fascinating, well-researched history so well presented that it's as compelling as any novel: Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation <-- clickLuckily I've mostly forgotten John Crace's take on The Perfect Nanny, linked by Huckle above at #1695. I say that because yesterday a friend came over to lend me two books, one of which is the Nanny one. The other is The Vegetarian, a Korean novel which got the Man Booker International prize in 2016. With those two, plus others I have going, I have almost too much to read.
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Post by bjd on Apr 18, 2018 15:50:29 GMT
A couple of years ago I bought (second hand) a book by Josef Skvorecky, a Czech who went to Toronto after 1968 and where he started a publishing company there. I had read some of his other books, set in immediate postwar Czechoslovakia so figured I would enjoy it. Well, I just gave up after a couple of chapters of The Engineer of Human Souls. But last week I needed a book to read on a plane and really got into it. It's told by a Czech emigré in Toronto who is teaching literature to Canadian students, but is filled with flashbacks of growing up in Czechoslovakia during WW2 and the German occupation, being forced into being a factory worker, then living under Soviet domination. The "present" of the book talks about the various Czech emigrés in Canada in the 1970s. The book was written in 1977.
In the spirit of much Central/East European writing, it is a mixture of humour and absurdity and politics.
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Post by bjd on May 15, 2018 11:21:10 GMT
A friend was clearing out her book shelves and brought some books in English (pretty classic Penguin editions). I had or had read most of them but took Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. I just finished it yesterday. Rather silly and not particularly good but sort of enjoyable.
I also took Scott's Ivanhoe which I have never read. In fact, I had never read any of this books even though I have seen the Scott Monument 3 times now.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 15, 2018 18:59:39 GMT
I'm listening to an anthology of science fiction short stories, supposedly 'the best' as voted for by an organisation of American science fiction writers...the stories were written between 1929 and 1963. Only four stories in and I was surprised at how modern they seem, aside from the obvious gaffes about canals and aliens on Mars...considering that Lowell wrote his book describing the markings on Mars as vegetation and canals as late as 1908 (Mars as the Abode of Life...I have my father's copy)
That aside the authors speculations about space travel and life in their future, as well as their scientific knowledge is impressive.
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Post by whatagain on May 19, 2018 21:45:09 GMT
Reading 'britannia' by Simon scarrow. Romans in Wales attack druids to impose roman peace. Well written. Gripping. And with some historical insight.
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Post by bjd on May 21, 2018 14:41:02 GMT
I reread with glee and delight various parts of Killing Mr. Watson. . the prose . .a real Florida book. I envy Casi's mother's contact with a man who was a genius writer. In the Berlin Noir category, I've just finished the first two books of Volker Kutscher's Gereon Rath/Berlin Babylon series which according to Welt.de will go to nine books. What disappointment! They are not good books. The pacing is just plain off with too many unnecessary details that a Philip Kerr editor would have caught. Sadly too, I bought the next three in German before I finished these. When they arrived from Amazon.de I was thunderstruck by their size . . . 500 plus pages. No good Krimi should be that long. I wonder if I'll even bother reading them. That's not encouraging. I took the first Kutscher book from the library the other day. I started it today and realized I had already tried to read it once and gave up after a couple of chapters. I don't know whether I'll get very far this time either.
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Post by bjd on May 22, 2018 5:02:39 GMT
In the coincidence department, this morning I started an article in the NY Review of Books and it turned out to be about a Netflix series based on Kutscher's Berlin Babylon books. Allegedly the series is much more complex than the books.
Anyway, towards the end of the article, the author mentions several contemporary writers who set their books in pre- and post-WW2 Germany or the Soviet Union (Martin Cruz Smith) because of the interesting possibilities of action and character development in difficult political and social conditions. And to my great disappointment, I learned that Philip Kerr, the author of the Bernie Gunther books, died in March.
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Post by Kimby on May 22, 2018 13:59:30 GMT
I'm rather partial to a nice END OF THE WORLD aaaaauuuurgh! novell. Cheery, you might enjoy BORNE, by Jeff Vandermeer. I just finished it. It’s set in a ruined city after a bioengineering experiment gone very wrong. The city is sparsely populated by human “salvagers” who have to scrabble to eke out an existence as well as try to avoid being killed by other desperate humans or the biotech mutants that have taken over. There’s a war for control between the (female) Magician and a gigantic flying bear monster called Mord. The main characters are well-drawn: Wick, a guy who used to work for the biotech company and Rachel, a young woman who was a refugee from other areas as society collapsed, and “Borne”, a biotech creature of changing shape and dimensions who grows into a “person” under Rachel’s tutoring before going native. I can’t wait for the movie, if there is one. The ingenious biotech creatures will be fascinating to see brought to life on the big screen. (BTW, ANNIHILATION is a movie based on another book by this author, book one of a trilogy.)
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Post by bixaorellana on May 22, 2018 16:46:11 GMT
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Post by mickthecactus on May 22, 2018 17:17:15 GMT
Says who?
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Post by Kimby on May 22, 2018 17:22:43 GMT
Where’s all this contentiousness coming from? Has Trump infected this thread? :-)
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Post by mickthecactus on May 22, 2018 18:03:36 GMT
Not my fault if our great and glorious leader has no literary taste.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 22, 2018 18:05:00 GMT
Moi!
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 22, 2018 18:26:47 GMT
Thanks for the suggestion Kimby...I'm ploughing my way through volumes 2A and 2B atm then I shall look into Borne
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Post by bixaorellana on May 22, 2018 18:32:33 GMT
See is you'll ever get another suggestion out of me, Cheery. Humph!
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 22, 2018 19:16:05 GMT
oops...sorry Bixa...this is what happens when one is eating a melting ice lolly whilst navigating a laptop...I'd heard of The End of the World Running Club and IT'S ON MY LIST...sorry sorry...XXXXX friends?
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Post by bixaorellana on May 22, 2018 20:02:00 GMT
Too late.
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Post by onlyMark on May 23, 2018 7:24:49 GMT
"BBC Culture asked writers around the globe to pick stories that have endured across generations and continents – and changed society." There is a list of the top one hundred stories that are felt to be influential. I wondered if anyone was as curious as I was as to how many we have read. www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180521-the-100-stories-that-shaped-the-world
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Post by whatagain on May 23, 2018 7:45:05 GMT
Didnt read many. I read most of the french ones though. Hamlet in English and Tom Sawyer in French. Harry potter's first two in French then reread in English. Do I count them twice ;-) ? I had to translate parts of Ovide and other romans.
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Post by mickthecactus on May 23, 2018 9:18:04 GMT
I have read 16 of them but not necessarily to the end e.g. Don Quixote.
Some of them many years ago.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on May 23, 2018 17:41:54 GMT
I think I've read 30 of them. Trying to remember if it's books or films I'm recalling! Don't know why some of them are on the list at all...Harry Potter is on the list but The Wind in the Willows and The Lord of the Rings aren't ? so many significant authors are missing.
I've read books by British, Australian, North American, Canadian, French and Russian authors...need to try authors from other parts of the world. Can any of you recommend authors from your neck of the woods?
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Post by whatagain on May 23, 2018 21:17:39 GMT
Vincent Engel is considered as a very good frenchspeaking Belgian author. He wrote retour à Montechierro which is widely known here. and quite a few books. At least one was translated in English. He is also a good natured person and lives next door to us. We spent a dinner together. A very nice guy. My wife read nearly all his books. I read one or two only.
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Post by whatagain on May 23, 2018 21:22:23 GMT
Arturo Perez-Reverte. Spanish guy. Wrote a book translated in french as the cemetery of nameless ships. I loved it. Can't remember what it was about ;-)
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Post by bjd on May 24, 2018 5:02:00 GMT
There is another Belgian writer that I have read: Peter Aspe. Writes detective stories based in Bruges (I think). I read a couple from the library but gave up. I couldn't decide whether they were really badly written or whether the translations from Flemish were terrible.
I have read 30 of the books on that list, several because I had to for school. I always wonder about lists like that. Does The Handmaid's Tale get included because they made a Tv show about it? It's my least favourite Margaret Atwood book. And even though the Odyssey may be influential, how many people have actually read it?
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 2, 2018 15:58:12 GMT
Last week, I had run out of reading material and I had about 5 minutes to find something in Detroit airport since I had arrived at gate 2 and had to haul ass down to gate 50 during my 55 minute transfer. Most of you probably know how much literary variety is available in airport newsstands.
So I bought Don't Let Go by Harlan Coben. I have read 3 or 4 of his books in the past and am extremely annoyed that it is always the same book and yet it is so amazingly readable. The story is always based on something horrible and mysterious that happened 10-15 years in the past, and the time has come for the protagonist to discover the unacceptable truth and also usually meet up with his lost love who disappeared back then. The climax is generally outlandish but Coben is a good enough author to allow suspension of disbelief.
So this one is the same as usual. Something horrible happened 15 years ago, including the death of the protagonist's twin brother and the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist's girlfriend (they were 18 at the time). There was a group of friends and some of them died during the mysterious incident, but now all of the others are being killed, but why? Once Coben has his hook into you, all you can do is keep reading.
Things became more and more intense until the (outlandish) climax. But he pulled it off once again.
One thing that is quite surprising about Harlan Coben is that in spite of his popularity (and 30 novels!), only one movie has been made out of his work -- Tell No One, which became the award winning French film Ne le dis à personne. Something does not compute.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 2, 2018 20:08:23 GMT
Sounds like perfect airplane fare! I keep meaning to read him, but ... One of my brothers was reading a Coben book and when I asked how it was, the tone of his review was identical to the tone of yours. I believe I failed to report on a recently read book that I loved: News of the World, by Paulette Jiles. I've read two other books she wrote & admired both of them. Put this new one on my Kindle app for plane reading on the way home from my sister's in March. Lo and behold, the route the protagonist takes in the book was the same route my sister & I had just driven in Texas and Oklahoma. The title is a reference to the main character's job, which is that of buying recent newspapers in large towns, then going around to smaller communities to read the news to the people in the years after the Civil War. Along the way he is tasked with returning a little girl who'd been kidnapped by & grown up with the Kiowa to her original settler family. What a great read! Jiles is an excellent writer and the historical background is compelling. As soon as I finished it, I bought a real copy to send to my sister, who in turn read it & sent it on to our mother. They were both as enthralled as I. Speaking of books read during travel, the book I read in Cuba was one that had been stashed on the Kindle app for sometime & there, in that wifi desert, I finally got around to it. It was Lila, by the incomparable Marilynne Robinson. I would guess that if anyone has read one book by her, it might have been Housekeeping, published in 1980. Robinson waited almost a quarter of a century before publishing another novel, Gilead, the first book in a trilogy of which Lila is the last. I'm grateful to the friend who pressed Gilead on me. I love it, but it's one of those books whose premise doesn't initially seem all that appealing. One might say the same about Lila, but it turns out to be a work that seems intensely real, intimate, and important despite the main character's life and personality being something so entirely alien to our own experiences. www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/lila-by-marilynne-robinson.htmlRight now I am in the middle of The Vegetarian,by Han Kang, which won the Man Booker prize in 2016. The novel is written in three parts, I believe from three different viewpoints. I'm in the second part now, after having almost abandoned it after the first part. It's difficult to describe as, in one way it's a straightforward narrative: woman gives up eating meat after having a bad dream. On other levels, it has character studies and surprising turns of plot, plus some odd but affecting eroticism. That's all I can say right now, since it's all I know, but I can see why the book is so highly regarded.
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Post by bjd on Jun 3, 2018 4:44:42 GMT
I like to read detective stories set in places I don't know so was quite pleased to find a book set in Mongolia at the library. In fact, the author Ian Manook is a Frenchman called Patrick Manoukian, but the book is pretty good. The name, Yeruldelgger, is the name of the main character, a policeman in Ulan Baator who is not corrupt and hence in trouble with corrupt police and wealthy men who are selling the country out to Korean and Chinese businessmen. Some information about yurts and Mongolian traditions but not overly so. Some gruesome deaths too but it's still a pretty good read.
I also picked up a book set in Lapp (Sami) country at the north of Scandinavia but already returned it after reading a couple of chapters.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jul 23, 2018 14:42:40 GMT
I have a particular fondness for hardback books although I only buy them occasionally. I came across this book in my local Waterstones last week...I think that most Brits will recognise The Shipping Forecast. BBC Radio4 broadcast weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of the British Isles. It is produced by the Met Office and broadcast on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. c1.staticflickr.com/1/914/28702491747_786887cd70_z.jpgI've listened to Radio 4 (which used to be called The Home Service) since I was a little girl...so tis book is pure nostalgia for me.. The rhythmic lullaby of ‘North Utsire, South Utsire’ has been lulling the nation’s insomniacs to sleep for over 90 years. It has inspired songs, poetry and imaginations across the globe – as well as providing a very real service for the nation’s seafarers who might fall prey to storms and gales. Google books
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