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Post by sophie on May 21, 2018 14:33:12 GMT -5
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. Excellent murder mystery done in a takeoff of the classic English murder mystery as well as a mystery within a mystery.
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Post by Liiisa on May 21, 2018 17:38:52 GMT -5
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. Excellent murder mystery done in a takeoff of the classic English murder mystery as well as a mystery within a mystery. My mom just read that and really liked it!
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Post by HalcyonDaze on May 21, 2018 20:13:49 GMT -5
25) William Gibson, Pattern Recognition Have you people READ this? It's 15 years old and I somehow missed it. A super compelling novel, with a great protagonist (a young woman who advises companies on their logos and what's going to be cool next, but she also has great plausible weaknesses and such) and an interesting plot. But the greatest bit is that since it was from 2003, there's all this ancient tech from the not-so-distant past. They don't have smartphones! They have to use dialup in hotels! They have Palm Pilots! And a large chunk of the action takes place among people who spend all their spare time on an INTERNET FORUM! Seriously, if you haven't read it yet I think you'll be amused. The final thing I have to say is that the reason I had this book is that I was in this bookstore and I saw a bowl full of books wrapped in newspaper. I asked the guy at the desk what that was about, and he said they were grab bag books, so of course I had to buy one of them, because I love randomness. And look what it was! Brilliant. My local library has a copy! Have placed a reserve on it.
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Post by Liiisa on May 21, 2018 20:41:03 GMT -5
Glad to hear you liked that, mei. I have a love/hate thing with him - really liked a couple of his books but the New York Trilogy made me scream uncontrollably, so I was hesitating before picking this new one up!
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Post by sophie on May 21, 2018 22:24:59 GMT -5
I have 4321 waiting to be read.. almost next in line!
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Post by sprite on May 24, 2018 12:11:02 GMT -5
finished 'gentleman in moscow' and was pleased with the ending. it was a book that demanded to be read slowly, which i'm not good at. i enjoyed the characters, and the running battle with the Bishop. I also enjoyed that when people left the story, they didn't always miraculously reappear--Stalin's Russia wasn't like that.
i really must get to russia someday.
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Post by Queen on May 27, 2018 4:56:29 GMT -5
sprite I did like that slowness, you're drawn into following life at his pace. When you occasionally see outside his life it's like the lights are too bright or something. Very clever writing. #whatever + 1 Mansfield Park Jane Austen A reread, and I wanted to read it because in the biography "Jane Austen at home" that I just finished she talks about how Fanny Price's situation matches her own to a certain extent (poor relative at command of richer relatives) and so I read it a little differently this time. I also saw the Billie Piper version on TV and it's horrendous. Truly awful, from the screen play to the costumes to the acting. So, back to the book.
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Post by lillielangtry on May 28, 2018 1:20:47 GMT -5
Emily Ruskovich, Idaho - this is really good; perhaps one for fans of Reservoir 13? It's the Story of a couple in (you've guess it) rural Idaho, a younger woman and an older man. We learn right at the start that something terrible happened to his daughters and he has some Kind of hereditary dementia and is losing his Memory. Then we start to fill in the Story of what happened from her Point of view, his, the first wife's, and others. Just typing that out made me feel I had to go and read it all over again. OK, not to overhype this; I did prefer Reservoir 13, but this is excellent too. Then I had a couple of tiny reads, stretching them to be described as books really. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists - I love Adichie, but you could just watch her TED talk on this. Perhaps a good gift for someone who really knows nothing about feminism and buys into all that "man-hating" stuff. Preaching to the converted in my case. Will Harris, Mixed-Race Superman Another short Essay (they make about 120 pages out of it, but they are small, well-spaced pages!). It kind of ranges from growing up as a mixed-race kid in the UK, through to Keanu Reeves, Barack Obama, and the weirdness of the co-opting of The Matrix by the Far Right. Apparently "everyone" thinks of Keanu as just a white guy? I'm not convinced I did, but perhaps that's because he has a (to British ears) unusual Name. And I reread Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End (sent to me a couple of years ago by Queen!). Because who doesn't need a bit of advice from Athill from time to time.
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Post by Queen on May 28, 2018 2:19:31 GMT -5
Ohh! I do love Diana Athill, glad you're still enjoying her.
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Post by lillielangtry on May 28, 2018 2:22:27 GMT -5
Ohh! I do love Diana Athill, glad you're still enjoying her. I've read Stet, the Story of her career and various authors, and I just ordered one of her other books as well. She celebrated her 100th birthday fairly recently. She's wonderful.
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Post by Liiisa on May 28, 2018 6:58:23 GMT -5
Athill: Noted.
26. Ned Beauman, Madness is Better Than Defeat
Beauman is one of those writers who I look for, so I was happy to see this on the library new acquisitions shelf. It's convoluted and absolutely strange - a corporate team and a movie company both arrive simultaneously at a ruined Mayan temple in the Honduran rainforest in the 1930's, and instead of cooperating or leaving they both just remain there. It's absolutely bizarre and of course recommended.
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Post by scrubb on May 29, 2018 0:04:19 GMT -5
In the lsat few days I finished Spike Milligan's "Peace Works" which is the 6th? I think? volume of his war time memoirs, but I haven't read the others. It's very readable and a nice little snippet of time right after the war. He was in a music trio playing shows all over Italy, where he had previously fought. He has a nice little romance with a ballerina from Rome.
And "The Skin Game" by John Galsworthy, which is actually a play, not a book, and very short. It's made me want to put his book "The Forsyte Saga" higher up my to-read list.
I'm also very nearly done The Bone People by Kerry Hulme about which I have mixed feelings.
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Post by lillielangtry on May 29, 2018 0:37:03 GMT -5
re: The Bone People and mixed Feelings - I imagine that most Readers do about that particular book! Will be interested to hear more once you're done.
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Post by sprite on May 31, 2018 4:13:59 GMT -5
Apparently "everyone" thinks of Keanu as just a white guy? I'm not convinced I did, but perhaps that's because he has a (to British ears) unusual Name. I would describe keanu reeves as white. i've attributed his first name to being from Hawaii, and "everyone" "knows" that people in hawaii are a bit more relaxed than the mainland. if he is mixed-race, it is sort of heartening that being a crappy actor yet being paid billions is no longer just for white boys.
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Post by Liiisa on May 31, 2018 4:57:35 GMT -5
Hey now "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Part 2" is a FINE film. (I really did like it, actually)
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Post by scrubb on May 31, 2018 23:34:37 GMT -5
I liked Bill and Ted too.
Today I finished Keri Hulme's 'The Bone People', Booker winner from 1986. I almost stopped reading 3/4 of the way through, because of an event in the story, which would have been a first for me. I'd been really liking it up till the, but it was just so upsetting. I couldn't stand that I was supposed to feel some kind of sympathy for the characters who had done such evil. I wanted them to suffer - much, much more than they seemed to be suffering.
But I kept going and I am glad I did because the last quarter of the book turned the whole thing into a fable, kinda sorta. Or an allegory, maybe. EVen though the first chunk of the book made the characters very real, empathetic characters who drove an engrossing story, in the end they became less real individuals and more representatives of their culture, and went through a kind of mystical Maori redemption. So I could stop hating them, and focus on the allegory.
I read a few reviews of the book and thought it was pretty funny that the first one I read (from the Guardian, I think) said that it was a mixed bag with some abysmal writing but some excellent writing too, however, the last third of it fell apart into utter silliness. The next one I read said it was uneven but really came into its own and reached new heights in the last third!
So I give it an overall thumbs up but it's a challenging book!
ALso read Joan Didion's "Play It as it Lays". Clever book, but I didn't really relate to it. About life in Hollywood, written in the '60s or early '70s, and people feeling disconnected from each other.
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Post by sprite on Jun 1, 2018 3:56:28 GMT -5
Hey now "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Part 2" is a FINE film. (I really did like it, actually) yes, but you must admit that while he excels at 'whoa, dude! what's happening! where am i?!?' he is pretty crap at all other emotions. hence, very good in bill/ted/matrix, but destroyed 'a walk in the clouds.' someone needs to cgi another actor into his role, as that was otherwise a lovely little movie. books: Hogfather, terry pratchett. I like Susan a lot, and hope she'll appear somewhere else. a few of the recurring characters seem different than i remembered, so i'll go back and read some of the earlier stories. i enjoyed it, but i suspect i didn't quite get the point. i was a bit worried about a possible romance storyline, but thankfully it didn't happen.
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Post by sprite on Jun 1, 2018 4:02:06 GMT -5
also, BBC radio 4 is doing 'book of the week' with Zadie Smith reading "Feel Free", if you're interested. Feel Free (essays)
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 1, 2018 4:24:00 GMT -5
I liked Bill and Ted too. Today I finished Keri Hulme's 'The Bone People', Booker winner from 1986. I almost stopped reading 3/4 of the way through, because of an event in the story, which would have been a first for me. I'd been really liking it up till the, but it was just so upsetting. I couldn't stand that I was supposed to feel some kind of sympathy for the characters who had done such evil. I wanted them to suffer - much, much more than they seemed to be suffering. But I kept going and I am glad I did because the last quarter of the book turned the whole thing into a fable, kinda sorta. Or an allegory, maybe. EVen though the first chunk of the book made the characters very real, empathetic characters who drove an engrossing story, in the end they became less real individuals and more representatives of their culture, and went through a kind of mystical Maori redemption. So I could stop hating them, and focus on the allegory. I read a few reviews of the book and thought it was pretty funny that the first one I read (from the Guardian, I think) said that it was a mixed bag with some abysmal writing but some excellent writing too, however, the last third of it fell apart into utter silliness. The next one I read said it was uneven but really came into its own and reached new heights in the last third! So I give it an overall thumbs up but it's a challenging book! ALso read Joan Didion's "Play It as it Lays". Clever book, but I didn't really relate to it. About life in Hollywood, written in the '60s or early '70s, and people feeling disconnected from each other. Yes, you've summed it up well. We read it for book Club and some People Chose not to finish it, which I could understand. I do think it could have been shortened. I appreciated the Moral ambiguity of the characters. Oh, it was a very tough read. I felt it had a fair amount in common with A Little Life (very Long, with detailed descriptions of extreme abuse) but while I felt emotionally exploited by that book, I didn't by this one. However, some others who read it with me were the other way around.
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Post by snowwhite on Jun 1, 2018 7:37:49 GMT -5
Whoo! I finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Enjoyed it, I think, even if there's lots of nasty stuff in there (think human sacrifice, since it's partly about the history of religious worship). Odd bits reminded me of ideas in Terry Pratchett. Not sure if it makes me want to read more of his stuff or not.
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Post by sprite on Jun 1, 2018 8:30:28 GMT -5
I really enjoyed that novel. I read some of his Sandman series 2 decades ago, and keep looking for Vol 1 at the library so I can restart. agree with the terry pratchett similarities.
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Post by Queen on Jun 1, 2018 15:20:06 GMT -5
Loved American Gods, it reminded me of Ben Okri's "The Famished Road"
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Post by Queen on Jun 2, 2018 1:29:02 GMT -5
Poirot and Me David Suchet
The beginning was interesting where he talks about creating the character, and there were some cute stories... he took a taxi to the studio one morning because he was ill, the driver came back for him in the evening unasked out of sympathy and ended up being his driver for 20 years and even had a non-speaking role in one episode. There was one other story that made me shake my head, he talks about filming one episode in which almost the whole cast was female, and how it felt really strange to him to be performing the denouement scene in a room where he was the only man. The director was male and I am guessing that many crew members were male so he certainly wasn't the only man in the room. But here's what made me shake my head... he would have been around sixty when that happened. I suspect that I've been the only female in meetings in every job I've ever held. It's astonishing to me that he had a career of forty years before it happened and even then it was only the onstage room not the whole room. Weird world eh.
But mostly it was a chronology of the episodes and a who's who of the actors.
Fun read because I love both Suchet and Poirot but not as interesting as hoped.
Now... on to June... just started reading about the Bad Ass Librarians of Timbuktu... lovely stuff.
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