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Post by bjd on Jan 27, 2019 14:41:20 GMT
Maybe Huckle posed for the postcard I bought in Leipzig a couple of years ago. It's a grandmotherly-looking lady in slippers, apron and with an electric guitar and sunglasses. It says, "You are as old as you feel", that being my loose non-German speaker's translation for "Man is so alt, wie Man sich fühlt".
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Post by kerouac2 on Feb 4, 2019 6:40:10 GMT
I finished ploughing through the book that didn't interest me by reading about the last 20% "in diagonal" as they say in French. My eyes only paused for sentences containing a verb of action, so it really went very quickly.
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Post by casimira on Feb 26, 2019 16:20:23 GMT
I am onto my second Joy Williams after having enjoyed the first one I happed on, the aforementioned Taking Care.
The newest one is Honored Guest. A gem.
Why I had never known of this author before Bixa's high praise for I have no clue, but am ever so grateful to have been.
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Post by Kimby on Feb 26, 2019 21:02:07 GMT
Timely read: “How Democracies Die”
“Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: is our democracy in danger? Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang - in a revolution or military coup - but with a whimper: the slow steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.”
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Post by whatagain on Mar 9, 2019 21:26:59 GMT
Just finished ´la cuisinière d'Himmler' by f-o Giesbert. Dont kno if translated but it was very very good. Story is about a woman who starts her life in Armenia a few years before the genocid then finds herself at one point cooking for Himmler.
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Post by whatagain on Mar 9, 2019 21:38:20 GMT
Back to my Martin Walker. Fatal pursuit. I remember anyporter saying that Walker picked ridiculous first name for his characters. This one is no exception complète with one Felix and a sylvestre - name more suitable for cats by our standards.
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Post by bjd on Mar 10, 2019 7:54:46 GMT
I found a book by Nick Hornby, Funny Girl at the junk store. Set in 1960s England. Unfortunately it's in French. I say unfortunately because it seems to be about a comedian on the BBC so I suppose some of it just doesn't translate well.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 10, 2019 11:20:25 GMT
I just finished the highly acclaimed Remainder by British author Tom McCarthy. (It's about 10 years old.) I hated every page of it.
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Post by bjd on Mar 25, 2019 18:59:27 GMT
Well, the Nick Hornby book wasn't so good although I generally rather like his books. I guess you had to know more about British TV in the 1960s to appreciate it. And to read it in English too, since I assume there was humour in it which didn't translate too well.
My daughter gave me a book she found in a book box, in English, since she doesn't read thrillers. I don't either as a rule, but I don't have anything else to read at the moment. It's called A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson. Rather hops about from 1941 to 1999, Germany to Portugal. I suppose that at some point it's all going to make sense but the style is really pretty awful. If I hadn't been desperate, I would have thrown it away after reading this sentence: "Outside the snowfall muffled the suburb to silence, its accumulating weight filled craters, mortared ruins, rendered roofs, smoothed muddled ruts and chalked in the black streets to a routine uniform whiteness."
But as I say, I'm desperate.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 25, 2019 19:32:43 GMT
I read some other British book which wasn't good either (Out of the Woods by Luke Turner) -- damn you, Foyles, for getting me to read crap. It's about some bisexual guy with a forest obsession. Both his sex life and his forest life were of no interest to me. Then I started reading Goodbye Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. I was afraid that I might have already read it, but I don't think so. Most of the things I recognised were due to the movie Cabaret but the descriptions are all new. I found the style and the vocabulary quite modern, and it is quite enjoyable. (I confess that it made me want to see the movie again.)
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Mar 25, 2019 20:21:58 GMT
I have been looking for something to read for a while...I generally cast about until I come across a writer that appeals to me...you know the feeling? You dip into a book in the bookshop and find a paragraph that resonates to some obscure place in your brain ? Then I read everything by that author that I can get my hands on.
At present I'm comfort reading Terry Pratchett because I have to read something. Going into town tomorrow so hopefully I can wander around the bookshop for an hour or three...
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Post by bjd on Mar 26, 2019 6:01:09 GMT
Do you not have a library nearby, Cheery? At least if you don't like a library book, you can take it back with no regrets.
I reread Isherwood's book last year sometime. It's true that it's quite modern and interesting, although I also ended up with scenes from the movie in my mind's eye.
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Post by questa on Mar 26, 2019 6:38:26 GMT
BJD see wiki re Fannie Brice.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fania Borach (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951), known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American illustrated song model, comedienne, singer, theater, and film actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.[1] Thirteen years after her death, Brice was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the 1964 musical Funny Girl; Streisand also starred in its 1968 film adaptation, for which she won an Oscar.
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Post by bjd on Mar 26, 2019 7:29:03 GMT
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Post by mickthecactus on Mar 26, 2019 8:46:37 GMT
It’s a very, very English book. I know all the people mentioned but outside the UK it would mean nothing.
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Post by patricklondon on Mar 26, 2019 12:36:25 GMT
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Post by questa on Mar 26, 2019 12:55:06 GMT
A wild goose chase! Sorry bjd. I knew the Funny Girl connection with Fanny and can see it would have been pretty boring.
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Post by mossie on Apr 30, 2019 18:35:43 GMT
Picked up a couple of booklets yesterday, both extensively illustrated with contemporary photos. One titled 'The Blitz 0f Canterbury', describes the preparations by the City authorities prior to, and then the actual raid itself and the damage etc. The second is 'Canterbury after the Blitz, 1942-45'. The shot I show is on the cover and shows the Cathedral almost unscathed after the damaged buildings had been made safe. In the left foreground are two figures who are schoolboys walking down the path from the school gate to the main road running through the City. That school was the one I attended a year after the Blitz and I still remember that view of the cathedral. I have referred before to my mother taking us out into the back garden at home to see the red glow caused by the City burning. The raid had started just before 1am on 1st June 1942 and we had been woken by the sounds of the planes and guns. I started at the school in Sept 1943, so memories and sites were still fresh
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 30, 2019 20:10:15 GMT
Great find, Mossie! I must feel kind of weird to see your personal memories reproduced in book form.
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Post by whatagain on Apr 30, 2019 20:42:16 GMT
Friendship in the army called le bomber command because I was reading a book about bomber command. By Ribéry Harris i think. They suffered heaviest losses in the war. I think worse than them was the u bootwaffe.
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Post by bjd on May 1, 2019 9:33:44 GMT
Just read A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré. Sort of a follow-up to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, mentioning the same characters but from a contemporary perspective. It's okay but I'm glad I got it from the library instead of buying it.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 1, 2019 19:42:56 GMT
I finished a book on Kindle which I liked so much that I bought a copy for one of my brothers before I finished reading it. And when I did finish, I immediately wrote a review, awarding it five starts on Amazon. The book is Tie My Bones to Her Back. It's set in the western US some years after the civil war, in the time when the buffalo were being systematically wiped out. The writing is sheerly beautiful, taking the reader to another place and brilliantly creating empathy for some very alien points of view.
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Post by kerouac2 on May 6, 2019 18:56:40 GMT
My bookshelves have been overflowing for years, but I keep buying books. Since I found the last 3 or 4 books disappointing, I have been pulling books off my shelves almost at random to reread them and have discovered that I have totally forgotten almost all of them 20 or 30 years later. Therefore I don't need and new books, because they're all new to me now.
The only drawback is that I very much prefer contemporary fiction and just about all of my books were written in the 20th century. Everything the people do and think seems out of date. The world has really changed fast.
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Post by Kimby on May 6, 2019 20:44:19 GMT
Reading the book I thought I’d left on the airplane, but Mr. Kimby rescued it.
It’s an old one (1985) I hadn’t read, that I got for $1 on the library’s used book sales shelves.
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of another strange and wonderful book I DID read, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m finding it a good beach read. Better than the pulp novels I usually find to take to the beach.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jun 14, 2019 20:31:33 GMT
I just finished The Rain Watcher by Tatiana de Rosnay and hated it. I read the French version, but I don't think it made any difference. She is referred to as a Franco-British author and reputedly lives in Paris, but she wrote the book with a map of Paris in her lap and felt a need to mention the name of every single street the protagonist was on. Basically, it is about a family crisis during a big flood in Paris. The author constantly refers to the great flood of 1910, all copied from a book of course. And the protagonist's father is a tree specialist, so there are loads of information about the way trees work, also copied from a book that I even recognised. I slogged through this absolute dreck because I was wondering how it was going to end. Well I reached the last page and just thought WTF? I don't know what happened. But the next page says "here are the five books that helped me write this one" -- and lists "Paris Under Water 1910," "The Secret Life of Trees," and other stuff such as a book by Susan Sontag about photography, because the protagonist was a photographer. It's as though she knew nothing about anything and yet she has been a bestselling author for a long time.
Naturally, being a Parisian made me even more critical, but she is supposed to be a Parisian, too. Her description of the rising water did not correspond at all to what I have seen in the past and as various areas flooded, they were not at all the places that would really flood in that order. She closed the metro and the museums completely unrealistically, and I was personally offended when she said that Paris was being looted by gangs from the northern suburbs, particularly since the Seine flows through those same northern suburbs and would flood them, too, which would kind of change the agenda of some of the criminal elements.
Nevertheless, I suppose that anybody who knows nothing about Paris and who takes every word at face value might find the book gripping.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jun 25, 2019 16:02:22 GMT
Just finished ' Theft By Finding' David Sedaris, the more I read his essays and diaries the more I love this man. This book was a bit challenging initially as the author was a penniless alocoholic drug addict for years...living in Chicago in a rough area. This book covers 1977 - 2002 I think. By the end of the book I adored him (and his unusual family). I've read his books of essays in the past, or listened to his radio performances Meet David Sedaris that air quite frequently on BBC radio 4...these have me giggling like a loon and sobbing into my pillow (sometimes at the same time) He is a wicked, wicked man. I've started Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan..as an audiobook largely because the man himself reads most of it...some chapters read by his widow Ann Druyan. I've wanted to read it for a while.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 25, 2019 16:36:09 GMT
Thanks, Cheery. I've sort of been avoiding Theft by Finding, but your review is pushing me toward it. His funny stuff can leave me helpless and gasping with laughter. I am reading The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro. He is a wonderful writer, but I was a little reluctant to read another book by him because his excellent Never Let Me Go left me so sad for so long after reading it. The Buried Giant called out to me both because of its early medieval setting and because of the fantasy element. I'm not very far into it so far, but reading eagerly. I only scanned this review because of my well-placed fear that a review will give something crucial away. Cheery, the review is by one of your preferred authors, Neil Gaiman: www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/books/review/kazuo-ishiguros-the-buried-giant.html
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Post by bjd on Jun 25, 2019 17:11:00 GMT
I am alternating two books at the moment: a collection of Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers and "The Master and Margarita",a book written in the 1920s by Mikhail Bulgakov but not published in the USSR until the thaw of the 1960s. I actually read it while at university but have forgotten it all. I found a used copy in Spanish and am using my old English-language paperback to check stuff I don't understand instead of looking up words in the dictionary.
Today I also found an Ian Rankin book for 1€, in English, so will read that next.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jun 25, 2019 17:17:42 GMT
A large section of Theft By Finding is quite harrowing...just to warn you...
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Post by whatagain on Jun 27, 2019 17:54:33 GMT
Never finished a Ian ranking. Just finished 'la rage ' by Zygmunt Miloszewski. Set in Poland (how strange for a polish writer). Gripping polar wit an Intelligent scénario. Also reading head of tails by ? And origine - french translation of the book of by dan brown. Boring. Grandiloquent.
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