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Post by scrubb on Sept 15, 2017 11:04:51 GMT -5
The only one I've read from the list was Lincoln in the Bardo, which I really loved. It's George Saunders' first novel, but he's published collections of short stories. I'd be ok with him winning, but haven't read the others for comparison (and agree with you about the Auster).
Also, I read Heat and Dust many years ago and remember thinking it was good, but I didn't really like it regardless.
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Post by Queen on Sept 15, 2017 11:28:04 GMT -5
#46 Phineas Redux Anthony Trollope (again)
Crime mystery element, when crime fiction wasn't really a thing. Lots of nice happy endings, but lots of intrigue before you get there.
Lots of humour as well, like laugh out loud stuff. Plus some uses of the language have changed. At one point he says "There's nothing like a good screw." but I'm pretty sure the screw has something to do with a horse and not much to do with horizontal hugs. There's a fantastic character who keeps describing women as if they were horses eg; Mr Spooner who loves hunting asks a women to marry him after knowing her a very short time and it's described as "He had at any rate ridden hard at his fence. There had been no craning,—no looking about for an easy place, no hesitation as he brought his horse up to it. No man ever rode straighter than he did on this occasion." and he says of his lady love"She's such a well-built creature! There's a look of blood about her I don't see in any of 'em. That sort of breeding is what one wants to get through the mud with."
He does not win the lady.
Two more of the Palliser series to go.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 15, 2017 12:06:54 GMT -5
I've read two of the shortlist titles - the Mohsin Hamid and the Ali Smith. I really liked the former, was sort of meh about the latter - I've liked other stuff by her better.
Lincoln in the Bardo has been high on my list - just keep forgetting to look for it. (lol I keep typing that as "Barfo")
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Post by Queen on Sept 15, 2017 12:10:43 GMT -5
Had the same feeling about Heat and Dust, and other books I've read by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, they seem oddly cool given their setting and the emotional turmoil that's in the story.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 15, 2017 22:48:01 GMT -5
53. The Surgeon, Tess Gerritsen. I went back to the beginning of a series I've enjoyed, both on television and in books, to discover the origin of the Rizzoli and Isles partnership, only to find Jane Rizzoli as one of several major characters, and no appearance of Maura Isles. However, it was an excellent read, though the details of the murders are quite horrific.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 16, 2017 12:10:12 GMT -5
Sandman Volume 6: Fables and Reflections (Neil Gaiman). Different from the others in that it is a series of unconnected stories, each about some famous character from mythology - Greek, Biblical, Persian, possibly others. Some were excellent, some not as good. Overall I liked it a lot.
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Post by tzarine on Sept 17, 2017 12:09:10 GMT -5
Lord of the flies As harrowing & disturbing as before
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 17, 2017 17:38:02 GMT -5
40. Michael Frayn, A Landing on the Sun
Book from the early 90s about a British civil servant who has been assigned to research the death of another civil servant who'd fallen to his death from a roof of a Whitehall government building in 1974. The situation is a strange one for the Civil Service, and the protagonist becomes strangely and deeply involved in the case.
It's an odd, gripping little book - seems to have been made into a TV series in the 90s.
Next: Lincoln in the Bardo!
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Post by scrubb on Sept 17, 2017 22:23:04 GMT -5
Oooh, enjoy it, Liiiiisa!
I finally finished a book called "O, Africa" by Andrew Lewis Conn. It was set in the late '20s, about twin brother film makers at the end of the silent era. I kept thinking he was trying to be Michael Chabon - it reminded me of Kavalier and Clay in style. Conn uses language well, but he doesn't make sure it serves his story. If he just wants to focus on similes and metaphors (which float through just about every sentence), then he shouldn't be trying to make his readers care about his characters. It was distracting. And if he wants to SHOW us that by filming a subject, you always end up affecting it, then he shouldn't also have his main character (who is otherwise completely self-centred and business orientated and not at all philisophical in any way) suddenly say he's worried about "changing" their subjects by filming them.
Augh. It had some good elements, some good writing, some good characters - but it just didn't work overall. Maybe he'll improve and write something really good in the future.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 18, 2017 10:56:27 GMT -5
Read "The Daydreamer" by Ian McEwan yesterday. Didn't know it was a children's book when I started it - and given his usual work, I was worried that something very, very bad was going to happen to the kids. But the first chapter put me at ease, confirming that it was, actually, a kids' book. And it was pretty good, about an imaginative boy.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 19, 2017 2:25:49 GMT -5
I like Michael Frayn's Plays, Liiisa. #66 Anna Katherine Green, The Leavenworth Case (might be relevant for Queen and others, this was a Gutenberg Project find) Green was a 19th century US crime novelist and this is her best-known work, which was written nearly a decade before Conan Doyle started on Sherlock Holmes. She has a good combination of gullible first-person narrator and shrewd detective and the book is well-plotted. I really enjoyed it.
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Post by Queen on Sept 19, 2017 6:37:41 GMT -5
thanks for the tip!
It's Anna Katharine Green in case anyone else tries searching... Gutenberg isn't set up to handle common alternative spellings.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 19, 2017 8:24:26 GMT -5
oops, yes, thanks for that!
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Post by Queen on Sept 19, 2017 8:46:54 GMT -5
oops, yes, thanks for that! Went back and searched by title and found she was quite prolific so I've downloaded 2, maybe this will help me recover from my Trollope mania
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Post by scrubb on Sept 20, 2017 0:03:33 GMT -5
What a good idea! I've been having trouble getting into anything new the last few days - want something fairly easy to read but still well written and those sound like they might fit the bill.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Sept 20, 2017 3:04:45 GMT -5
Hm, 88 cents will get me a load of her books for the Kindle (it says there are close to 6000 pages). Not sure if I need that many though!
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 20, 2017 3:15:40 GMT -5
No, I'd say not! You can download from Gutenberg Project for the Kindle, that's what I did. They're all out of copyright.
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Post by Queen on Sept 20, 2017 9:36:41 GMT -5
Gutenberg specifically formats for kindle, save your 99 cents for an ice cream
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 21, 2017 5:30:11 GMT -5
My current audiobook is Cloud Atlas. It is bizarre listening to a chapter about an overcrowded, dystopian Asian city of the future while driving across the flat, empty Australian Outback.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 23, 2017 21:41:32 GMT -5
Finished a Terry Pratchett science fiction book called "The Dark Side of the Sun". It was pretty good. Set very, very far in the future after humans have colonized other planets and met up with other sentient beings. It had his inimitable style, and even a bit of carry over from Discworld (like Small Gods). It was imaginative of course, but it kind of bugged me that his way of dealing with immense things was to make them seem smaller and more manageable. (Both physically and mentally immense things.)
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Post by tzarine on Sept 24, 2017 10:32:52 GMT -5
Hilary mantel's bring up the bodies
Cromwell & the boys
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Post by sprite on Sept 24, 2017 14:43:41 GMT -5
Filth - Irvine Welsh. a scottish cop in Edinburgh investigates the murder of a black foreigner, while planning a sex trip to amsterdam and also wondering when his wife is going to come back to him. this is complicated by a case of excema in his groin, and frequent 'training' sessions for the police station about become more sensitive to minorities and women. he steals from crime victims, blackmails women into sex, shags his colleagues wives, and wanks at work in the toilets. his internal dialogue is constantly racist, misogynisit, and generally hateful to everyone.
ugh. really good, but ugh. in the end, i had to skip to the last chapters. partly because i was physically repulsed by the main character, but also because it was a library e-book and it was running out. the last chapters don't exactly redeem the character or his actions, but do explain a lot of how he ended up where he is. like a narcissist who had a genuinely traumatic childhood.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 24, 2017 22:22:47 GMT -5
A Cool Head, by Ian Rankin. A short mystery. Not bad but his main strength is atmosphere and character, and it was so short that it had to be mostly plot.
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Post by sophie on Sept 25, 2017 0:05:18 GMT -5
The Circle by Dave Eggers. It started out well but by halfway I was bored. A cautionary tale warning of awful things happening when technology (especially if it is controlled by one company) is allowed to become more important than it should be. 1984 and Brave New World already said it all and this novel doesn’t add much to the discussion. Meh.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 25, 2017 6:11:29 GMT -5
54. The Purgatorium, by Eva Pohler. This is a young adult novel I would not recommend to any young adult or teenager I know. The theme of suicidal ideation is disturbing, and the very misguided "therapy" carried on at the purgatorium is extremely dangerous. The writing style is boring and pedestrian. Definitely NOT recommended.
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Post by Queen on Sept 25, 2017 9:36:50 GMT -5
#47 The Prime Minister Yep, by Anthony Trollope
The most politically focused of any of the books so far, I'm pretty sure there are lots of jokes in there that Victorian readers would have laughed at, and characters they would have recognised... there's still plenty to enjoy, but I had to look stuff up!
There's a romance between Emily Wharton and Ferdinand Lopez, it's a classic case of gaslighting, Lopez consistently undermines Emily's views and also those of her father. There's significant racism expressed against Lopez, he's foreign (Portuguese) and suspected of being Jewish. He's more explicit in this book than in others, and that was a bit jarring to read.
One more in the series and then I will take a rest from Trollope for a year or two, I'm kinda done.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 25, 2017 23:06:47 GMT -5
55. Death at Epsom Downs, by Robin Paige. Despite my usual liking for mysteries with historical English settings, little things about this book irritated me from the start. While the history of the major characters was well researched, other things, like the titles of the British aristocracy were not. I'm prepared to try one more in the series, as the racing theme of this one was not really interesting to me either. Another annoyance was the very small print in the paperback version, making it a nuisance for my usual bedtime reading. The overlong quotes in italics at the beginning of each chapter were even worse.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 26, 2017 1:24:23 GMT -5
sprite - I read a couple of pages of Irvine Welsh once in a bookshop and that was enough for me! Funnily enough, the person next to me on the train this morning was reading him in German. I don't envy the translator. Couldn't really crane over my fellow passenger's shoulder enough to see how the dialect issue was dealt with!
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Post by sprite on Sept 26, 2017 3:17:59 GMT -5
i wonder about translating dialect too. i've now read two of elena ferrante's novels, and the dialect issue is just dealt with by saying, '...she said in dialect.' in Filth, dialect shows clearly what persona he's working in--smooth dealing with bosses or the public, being rude to criminals/lowlifes, or his internal dialogue.
inspector montalbano renders one character's dialect pretty clearly, but he's also a comic character. ("the boss wants to see you personally in person!")
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Post by Queen on Sept 26, 2017 11:31:03 GMT -5
#48 The Duke's Children Yep, by Anthony Trollope
This had a bit too much about hunting that I didn't really care about, but you see more of the Duke's character as he tries to help his three children into adulthood. I did find a little error... in the last book Trollope names a daughter "Glencora" after her mother, but in this she's called Mary. Still feel a bit sorry for Mabel... she didn't marry the man she loved because he had no money but then she doesn't get to marry the man with money either... and is just lost at the end. But still lots of laughs and lots of insight into Victorian culture and politics.
I think it's enough for a while though... time for something from 20 century - I'll move on to the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor now. He's such a dish, expect rave reviews.
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