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Post by Queen on Aug 1, 2017 10:40:24 GMT -5
that's a book and a movie in case you're playing charades any time soon. What are you reading this month? Here is July's thread |
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Post by lillielangtry on Aug 1, 2017 14:42:34 GMT -5
Thanks q.
I read Persuasion, encouraged by the buzz around the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death. Honestly it didn't convert me into an Austen fan. It was OK but I didn't love it. Still it was good to give her another try, then I feel like I'm being fair when I say I don't much like her! Have Sense and Sensibility on the Kindle and will probably read it sometime.
Now August is women in translation month (#witmonth on Twitter) so that will be all my reading for the rest of the month.
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 1, 2017 17:59:24 GMT -5
Great title, & thanks Q!
Right now I am about halfway through Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement," which is partly about how climate change hasn't really made its way into serious literary fiction yet and partly just about climate change and society. Interesting perspective on the topic.
Also simultaneously reading John Kricher's "The New Neotropical Companion," a rather lengthy survey of Western Hemisphere tropical ecosystems, which I'll be reading for quite a while, most likely, since I won't be schlepping that one on the plane.
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Post by Queen on Aug 2, 2017 10:28:50 GMT -5
I read Persuasion, encouraged by the buzz around the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death. Honestly it didn't convert me into an Austen fan. It was OK but I didn't love it. Still it was good to give her another try, then I feel like I'm being fair when I say I don't much like her! Have Sense and Sensibility on the Kindle and will probably read it sometime. I love her, and reread at least one every year. I enjoy the humour and the deft characterisations. I think S&S is the toughest read though! Love and Friendship is a quick read and hilarious - the movie, Lady Susan which came out last year was fab. |
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Aug 3, 2017 7:20:19 GMT -5
Bookmarking. Thank you Q.
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Post by Webs on Aug 3, 2017 8:58:13 GMT -5
Persuasion is my favorite.
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Post by Queen on Aug 3, 2017 9:41:05 GMT -5
Pride and Prejudice is my favourite, partly because the secondary characters are so horrendous (Lady Catherine, Mrs Bennet, Mr Collins and Caroline Bingly). Persuasion might be second. The sister is gloriously hypocritical in it.
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Post by Queen on Aug 3, 2017 9:48:45 GMT -5
#32 Dr Thorne, Anthony Trollope,
(yes I am reading all six books of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, this is #3)
Love the nominative determinism going on in Victorian literature, Dr Filgrave is a medical man, not well respected, Mssrs Slow and Bideawhile is an inefficient law firm. Even the heroine Mary Thorne, is a thorn in the side of the wealthy gentry family.
You also get the narrator intruding in his own voice which you would never do now he says at one point "there are not enough pages left to me to go into a description of the wedding gown" and that feels very strange.
The story is a classic romance with a happy ending when it turns out that Mary Thorne is an heiress to an enormous fortune (I would have said spoiler alert but it was published 160 years ago). I liked the earlier two books better, but I'll keep going.
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Post by sophie on Aug 3, 2017 10:15:17 GMT -5
Read many books this last month while travelling, most of the books were forgettable. However, a significant exception was Emma Donaghue's The Wonder. Loved this novel. Set in Ireland just after the Crimean war, it deals with the concepts of family, truth, abuse, and faith and how they collide/intersect. Loved it.
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Post by Webs on Aug 3, 2017 12:19:52 GMT -5
I'm going to start "reading" Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore (on Audible) for the subway and bus.
The new Queens Bookstore opens Saturday and I'm hoping to go by and support.
Has anyone read any of the Flavia de Luce mysteries?
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 3, 2017 15:16:29 GMT -5
The intrusion of the narrator is one of the things I love about Trollope, Q. It's so meta.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Aug 3, 2017 18:55:27 GMT -5
I love Flavia de Luce - she is so delightfully precocious. One of the books was so much weaker than the others and more holding place but most of them have been good.
I haven't updated for months.
Currently I am rereading 'From the mixed up files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler' as I read it aloud to LC. Thankfully he seems to be loving it as much as I did as a kid (and I'm finding it is still a good book to read as an adult)
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Post by Queen on Aug 4, 2017 9:45:03 GMT -5
The intrusion of the narrator is one of the things I love about Trollope, Q. It's so meta. Yes! and quite a delight in this book because he's deliberately getting himself off the hook. He avoids describing the dress and earlier he fudges the need to explain a legal complexity of inheritance with a sort of "my learned friends in the legal professions would explain this better but I don't have a lawyer handy to help me write this" kind of aside. Makes me laugh. On to #4 |
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Post by sophie on Aug 4, 2017 16:36:48 GMT -5
Yes to Flavia deLuce.. Very enjoyable reading.
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Post by Phar Lap on Aug 4, 2017 20:42:34 GMT -5
The Teahouse of the August Moon is one of my favourite films. Love the line "Pornography question of geography"
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Post by lillielangtry on Aug 5, 2017 3:32:39 GMT -5
OK, I've downloaded Love and Friendship, thanks q!
#54 (or thereabouts!)
Liliana Colanzi, Our Dead World
A collection of short stories from Bolivia. Bolivian female authors translated into English are... well, let's just say Colanzi may be the first. This is a slim little collection which you can read in a day, but each story contains enough material for a novel on its own, particular the title story. I'm not sure I want to bring up the term "magic realism" because it's a cliche for South American books, but these stories do have an edge of fantasy/horror.
#55 Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh
Saudi Arabian chick lit. Not a perfect book - it's actually not brilliantly written and has a very annoying frame narrative - but it is fun and keeps the pages turning and there is genuine interest in reading something about young (very privileged) women from such a closed society.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Aug 6, 2017 3:11:20 GMT -5
46. Alpine Betrayal, Mary Daheim. I read this to fill in gaps in a series I'm enjoying. At first I thought it a little slow, but the ending more than made up for it, tying up several plot threads, and filling in character development referred to later in the series.
Interestingly, set in summer in a ski resort.
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Post by Webs on Aug 6, 2017 13:12:13 GMT -5
New bookstore is having soft opening so I got brown paper wrapped "date this book".
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Post by riverhorse on Aug 7, 2017 4:28:21 GMT -5
Hi book people! I never post in here as most of the time these I either don't have much time to read, or only light fluffy stuff I'd be too ashamed to bring into such intellectual discussions.
However, I just finished a book that touched me very much. "Hiding Horst" by Fred Ferber and Becky White is the story of a 12 year old Jewish boy hidden in various safehouses in Amsterdam and Utrecht in WWII. It is written a little amateurishly, and is mostly a series of episodic reflections. At the back of the book is a collection of the recipes of all the dishes referred to in the book.
The reason I read it is because it was lent to me by an American colleague who has become a good friend, and the little boy in the attic was her father!!!
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Post by Webs on Aug 7, 2017 13:05:59 GMT -5
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Post by Queen on Aug 9, 2017 7:59:52 GMT -5
#33 Framley Parsonage Anthony Trollope
The fourth of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, and it's a poor but very good woman getting to marry the rich but idle man of her dreams and overcoming the mother-in-law's objections.
#35 The Small House at Allington Anthony Trollope
Two sisters and their possible love matches, the poor and the good vs the old and grumpy
Still finding him funny as ever, and read a little more of Trollope's background and no wonder he has debtors, poverty, politics and post offices throughout his books.
I might need a break after the series but I have downloaded the Palliser series.... you are warned.
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Post by tucano on Aug 9, 2017 9:04:29 GMT -5
Has anyone read the latest Zadie Smith that's just come out in paperback, Swing Time? Thinking of picking it up.
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Post by sophie on Aug 9, 2017 9:27:24 GMT -5
Yes.. just finished Swingtime a couple of weeks ago. Good read, liked it as a summer read. Felt it was a bit too long and needed one more good edit..
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Post by sophie on Aug 9, 2017 9:40:23 GMT -5
Janie Chang's Dragon Springs Road. New author, good historical content.. tries to use some magic realism in her novel and I am not sure it worked that well, but made a decent enough read.
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Post by Queen on Aug 9, 2017 11:31:42 GMT -5
SwingTime is our read for next bookclub (September)... interesting to hear your thoughts!
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Post by lillielangtry on Aug 9, 2017 12:58:39 GMT -5
Has anyone read the latest Zadie Smith that's just come out in paperback, Swing Time? Thinking of picking it up. I have... I really liked it, but I'm a Zadie Smith fan, I just really enjoy her style. I think a lot of people will probably share Sophie's view that it could have been cut down. I also read another comment that she is brilliant at setting up characters but not so good at finishing stories - possibly true. But if you generally like her work, you'll like this too. |
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Post by Webs on Aug 9, 2017 15:15:00 GMT -5
"Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore". Don't bother. Boy was that depressing. It had potential but got caught up in its own various story lines and the main character garners no sympathy.
I'm now convinced the narrator didn't like the book either and that's why she read it as if she hated it.
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Post by fishface on Aug 10, 2017 4:30:35 GMT -5
I finished reading The Night Strangers, by Chris Bohjalian.
I liked the idea behind the book but the ending (SPOILER....
SPOILER.....
....
SUCKED.
I do not expect all happy endings, rainbows and unicorns. I can even understand an ending that makes the reader say "say what now". But this ending was illogical. It was not logical. Most of the epilogue was ok. And if that's all there was I would just say that it was a surprising but disappointing ending. But it had an absolute leap that made no sense unless a reader was to draw a very very very long bow as to how it could possibly and that way.
If it was a hardcopy tree book, rather than my ereader, I would have thrown it against the wall.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Aug 10, 2017 7:51:19 GMT -5
47. The Uncynical Cannibal, Dewi Llywelin. This was a rather silly audiobook that came as a freebie, with a book authored by one of the narrators. Funny,, but not hilarious.
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Post by Oweena on Aug 11, 2017 13:04:45 GMT -5
Read many books this last month while travelling, most of the books were forgettable. However, a significant exception was Emma Donaghue's The Wonder. Loved this novel. Set in Ireland just after the Crimean war, it deals with the concepts of family, truth, abuse, and faith and how they collide/intersect. Loved it. Sophie I posted in the July thread about The Wonder. I really enjoyed it too. Just finished 'My Cousin Rachel' by Daphne du Maurier. Don't know why I'd never read it before because I like du Maurier. |
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