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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 18, 2018 6:47:47 GMT -5
92. Murder in the Art Gallery, Sandi Scott. Though it was a fun read, I think Georgie doesn’t really have enough brain power to be a detective. And how does she manage to eat so many desserts and stay healthy? The plot was quite good, but the ending a bit abrupt.
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Post by shilgia on Dec 18, 2018 11:42:17 GMT -5
Atul Gawande - Being Mortal. My expectations were high, but this was even better than expected. Gave me a new perspective on nursing homes and end of life care.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - The Thing Around Your Neck. This is a book of short stories. I enjoyed it and she's a great storyteller, but I feel like her main character is almost always essentially the same person: a strong Nigerian woman, surrounded by useless and unreliable men but able to stand up for herself, new to America, and dealing with her American neighbors' ignorant questions. "Write what you know," I guess, but it does get a bit repetitive, especially in a collection of short stories that are supposed to be all about different people. (Americanah was 100% that character, and this book probably 80%.)
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Post by scrubb on Dec 18, 2018 20:11:42 GMT -5
A couple days ago I finished "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human" by Richard Wrangham. His theory is that we started cooking our food a really long time ago, much further back than most theories suggest, and that it caused a huge, fundamental shift in us biologically by both allowing us to get more energy from our food, and creating a reason to have a "household".
Puts forward lots of good reasons to support his theory although occasionally there's an obvious other explanation possible for whatever it is he's attributing to cooking, and it's interesting. Still, I'd like to read a rebuttal - what are the reasons other anthropologists/primatologists/paleontologists think cooking came later?
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 18, 2018 21:03:57 GMT -5
A couple days ago I finished "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human" by Richard Wrangham. His theory is that we started cooking our food a really long time ago, much further back than most theories suggest, and that it caused a huge, fundamental shift in us biologically by both allowing us to get more energy from our food, and creating a reason to have a "household". Puts forward lots of good reasons to support his theory although occasionally there's an obvious other explanation possible for whatever it is he's attributing to cooking, and it's interesting. Still, I'd like to read a rebuttal - what are the reasons other anthropologists/primatologists/paleontologists think cooking came later? I read that after a professor recommended it - he was solidly in support of Wrangham's thesis. Unfortunately can't answer your question since I never really read anything else about that topic after that....
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Post by Oweena on Dec 20, 2018 10:00:11 GMT -5
Sally Field's memoir, In Pieces.
Picked it up because I'd read a couple glowing reviews. I liked her style of writing, she has a definite eye for details. That said I wasn't a fan of the book as I kept wanting her to learn from her mistakes (mostly with the men in her life) and it appears it took her well into her 60s before she clued in on her issues.
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Post by sophie on Dec 20, 2018 10:16:59 GMT -5
Rereading ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’ by Madeleine Thein for book club reasons. Likening it even more second time around. This time I am appreciating the poetic language more.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 21, 2018 4:58:02 GMT -5
93. Trains and Lovers, Alexander McCall Smith. A lovely gentle book, with more depth than first expected, written with the author’s brilliantly perceptive style. Four strangers meet on a train, and share their stories of love.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 21, 2018 19:56:34 GMT -5
66) Keith Laumer, The Other Side of Time
This is another one of those tiny 1960's sci-fi paperbacks that I buy at the used bookstore. I particularly like Laumer; his novels are all wildly implausible, but fairly gripping. There's always a male protagonist who's brilliant, imaginative, and good at hand-to-hand combat, there's always an attractive female (sometimes several); otherwise the plots vary. This one had to do with ape-men, parallel universes, and time travel. It was one of his better ones, I think.
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Post by sophie on Dec 21, 2018 21:32:44 GMT -5
Lee Child’s Past Tense. His newest novel, hit off the press.. think I was the first one to get it out of the library. Good action, quick read with his main character Jack Reacher being the hero one more time.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Dec 21, 2018 22:58:27 GMT -5
I haven't updated for ages but I finished two books yesterday that are worth posting about.
Firstly I finished the second book in the Murderbot Diaries series. These are more novellas, and the narrator is a robot/part human hybrid (but not augmented human, more robot with organic parts) who was designed to be a security unit (secunit or 'murderbot'). Some excellent sci-fi. Sadly my library does not have the next books, so I will have to hunt them down.
The other book was The summer of impossible things by Rowan Coleman. A time-travel romance which was more about family and relationships.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 22, 2018 3:57:19 GMT -5
94. Bodies on the Beach, Stacey Alabaster.
This is quite a good cozy mystery, with believable characters and plot, and a setting a bit like Byron Bay was thirty years ago. However, there are two things that, as an Australian, I am very familiar with, that I don’t think the author has researched well. The first is, Australian surf clubs are about surf life savers, not competitions for surfers. The second, a teacher in a coastal town who has been in the same job for several years would not be afraid of losing his job because of poor reviews. He would be a permanent employee, not on a contract subject to review.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 22, 2018 14:04:54 GMT -5
95. a reread of "The Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys. The first reading was so long ago that I remembered pretty much nothing. And I think I liked it better this time, although I did find it difficult to understand the character of Rochester. His motivations were confusing.
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Post by sophie on Dec 24, 2018 0:36:45 GMT -5
The Goddess of Yantai by Ian Hamilton. The newest novel in his Ava Lee series. Good action and a bit of an interesting inside look at the Chinese movie industry. Easy read.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 24, 2018 1:31:52 GMT -5
I was trying to read "Love and Friendship" by Alison Lurie. She won some big prize for another of her novels, which I read and liked. But this one... it's set at a university in the EAstern US in the '60s or '70s and it reminds me SO much of Kingsley Amis, or Saul Herzog, or someone like that, trying to be sort of funny. And that just doens't really appeal to me. I am not going to finish it.
So last night I started rereading a kids book I loved 45 years ago - The Phantom Tollbooth.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Dec 24, 2018 1:42:28 GMT -5
I have read so many good middle-grade books this year. Nothing wrong with reading kids books.
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Post by shilgia on Dec 24, 2018 10:45:47 GMT -5
Karen Armstrong - The Case for God. I loved this. Much more than I had expected. There's a HUGE amount of information in there, but in the end the book makes it very hard to believe in any of the established religions' views of God, but also very hard to discard the idea of God altogether.
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Post by mei on Dec 24, 2018 11:17:13 GMT -5
that sounds interesting shilgia. I still have another book on a more or less similar subject waiting to be read (God is not great).
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Post by shilgia on Dec 24, 2018 13:30:30 GMT -5
Curious what you’ll think of it. I find Christopher Hitchens quite annoying, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the book is bad.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 26, 2018 13:27:00 GMT -5
I found that book well done (God is Not Great).
Just finished The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, by Alan Sillitoe. It's a novella, really, in a small volume with another short story by THeodore Dreiser. And it was really good (the second story struck me as a lazy one). The title story is written from the point of view of a 17 year old in reform school for a robbery. The governor of the institution has him training for a cross country race against inmates from other reform schools.
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Post by Oweena on Dec 26, 2018 20:58:42 GMT -5
Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown.
I need to stop reading books from lists of the supposedly best books of 2018.
This was an awful book, about an awful person, comprised of vignettes that involve other awful people.
NOT recommended.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 27, 2018 6:46:30 GMT -5
Yeah Oweena, I would think a book about the exploits of edgy rich people would probably be excruciating.
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Post by snowwhite on Dec 27, 2018 14:34:34 GMT -5
I finished Transcription by Kate Atkinson - got distracted part way through then went back to it, which didn't help.
I enjoyed it, but probably not as much as Life After Life, which I think is my favourite of hers.
Apparently there's a new Jackson Brodie one due out (or already out) which I'm looking forward to.
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 27, 2018 15:20:48 GMT -5
Due out next year I believe, snow (I haven't checked just now, but I saw an interview with her a while back)
I read 2 books from the Dominican Republic: In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez - based on the true story of the Mirabal sisters, who were murdered by the Trujillo regime. I really enjoyed this, the different voices of the sisters were done well. And then more weirdly, Tentacle by Rita Indiana (translated by Achy Obejas) - well that was unexpected. Time-hopping, transgender Dominican sci fi. I feel like this could have been absolutely amazing, David Mitchell-esque, but it needed to be just a little longer to explain some more of what was going on, so it was a bit confusing. But definitely glad I picked it up.
Winter by Ali Smith This was beautifully written in places but overall I wasn't too excited by it.
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Post by shilgia on Dec 27, 2018 20:00:19 GMT -5
Blue Nights by Joan Didion. Honestly, meh. It feels unkind to say that, because it's about her daughter's death, but it's so . . . impersonal somehow. As if her daughter was no more than a beautiful young woman flitting around the Hollywood scene, and as if the author herself even in a book about the death of her daughter cares more about convincing us that she knows all the best places to go in both NYC and LA than about, I don't know, exploring who her daughter was, why she died, or what she left behind. Maybe Didion's state of grieving made her write a somewhat empty book, but for a reader the result is still that it's an empty book. Would not particularly recommend.
Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky. I loved this. It's the inside story of how hotels operate, narrated as the life story of one long-time hotel employee. It's not deep, but some of the narrative is hilarious. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author, and that made it even better. He certainly knows how to turn a phrase.
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Post by Oweena on Dec 28, 2018 12:13:30 GMT -5
Blue Nights by Joan Didion. Honestly, meh. It feels unkind to say that, because it's about her daughter's death, but it's so . . . impersonal somehow. As if her daughter was no more than a beautiful young woman flitting around the Hollywood scene, and as if the author herself even in a book about the death of her daughter cares more about convincing us that she knows all the best places to go in both NYC and LA than about, I don't know, exploring who her daughter was, why she died, or what she left behind. Maybe Didion's state of grieving made her write a somewhat empty book, but for a reader the result is still that it's an empty book. Would not particularly recommend. Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky. I loved this. It's the inside story of how hotels operate, narrated as the life story of one long-time hotel employee. It's not deep, but some of the narrative is hilarious. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author, and that made it even better. He certainly knows how to turn a phrase. Have you read Didion's Year of Magical Thinking? All about her husband's death. That book discusses the death of the daughter as well. I didn't realize she'd written a separate one about the daughter. The hotel book sounds fun.
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Post by shilgia on Dec 28, 2018 14:10:14 GMT -5
Yes, I've read The Year of Magical Thinking, but it was several years ago, so unfortunately I don't remember it in detail, but I know I didn't love that book either. (Again, it feels mean to say that, when the book is so personal and about such a major tragedy in the author's life.) I haven't read much else by Joan Didion, and should probably remedy that to see how she writes about less personal subjects, but in these two books she doesn't come across as a warm person with deep connections to other people. Not that it's compulsory to be, but it makes books about grief a bit hard to relate to or be invested in. Even the hotel book, which on the whole was really a light read, had more poignant moments. What did you think of The Year of Magical Thinking?
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 28, 2018 17:09:01 GMT -5
I have no opinion about these newer things (haven't read anything by Didion since the 80s maybe), but I remember loving her essay about the Hoover Dam.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 28, 2018 22:55:21 GMT -5
67. Molly McCloskey, Straying
A deeply affecting book about an American woman who comes to live in Ireland, gets married to an Irish guy, and has an affair. Sounds simple but the way she interweaves the passion and wreckage of it all is mesmerizing; every word feels true and honest.
I picked this up because I'd taken a short writing class taught by the author last month, and I liked her and the way she talked about literature so much that I decided to look for the stuff that she's published. All I can say is that if I'd read this before signing up, I probably would have been too afraid to take the class.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 29, 2018 7:20:30 GMT -5
95. Murder of a Needled Knitter, Denise Swanson. This is a series I’ve enjoyed for a long time. Having recently been on a cruise myself, it was fun comparing Skye’s Caribbean cruise with my Pacific one. The mystery and the character development were very good, as I’ve come to expect from Denise Swanson, and my only small niggle came from the audible narration. The Australian accent was dreadful!
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Post by sophie on Dec 30, 2018 11:25:07 GMT -5
The banker’s wife by Cristina Alger. Never read anything by her previously; a page turner where a couple of journalists are the heroes unraveling a series of off shore accounts and secret Swiss bankers and politicians. A good fast read, tightly written and well edited.
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