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Post by Liiisa on Apr 25, 2020 16:24:39 GMT -5
Oweena - that review was hilarious. I think I read an interview with her a while ago? She sounds kind of exhausting.
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Post by Oweena on Apr 26, 2020 8:53:05 GMT -5
That's about how I felt when I was done reading it Liiisa, exhausted.
It reminded me of someone who has just found a brand new awesome hobby that takes up their whole world and they just can't shut up about it.
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Post by fishface on Apr 26, 2020 22:19:48 GMT -5
I particularly like the lack of punctuation in your review. It really speaks to the book I imagine 😀
Christian mommy blogger would probably have scared me off pretty early.
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Post by sprite on Apr 27, 2020 4:05:17 GMT -5
audiobooks: Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell I've wanted to read this for a while, but put off by the length and some of the dense prose from that era. It's a series of events from a village that is mostly made up of gentlewomen; the first chapter muses on the absence of men, because it seems that any man who moves to Cranford disappears.
As an audiobook, it was a very pleasant to have while doing mindless tasks. It was a real window in life in the 19th century, and the very strict social rules that bound women, and the very complicated relations between different social classes. It's mildly funny, but does require a lot of reading between the lines. Gaskell is on top of the Victorian euphamism game. There is a story line of sorts, but you could almost read the sections in a random order, so long as you started with 1 and ended with the last. Only a few points would be confusing.
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Post by sprite on Apr 27, 2020 4:25:53 GMT -5
another audiobook: Stillicide, by Cynan Jones So, I've read up on this, and it appears that he wrote the book, then reworked it as a 12 part series for Radio 4, which was released before the book. In each episode, one person talks about what is happening to them at that moment, and each of these events is linked to something else. The first and last episodes are the same character.
The story is set in a near-future Britain, where drought is a serious problem. A water train (with guns) runs from the rainy North to a super-dry London where people count themselves lucky if they can wash with alcohol-based sanitiser. The gov't has a new plan, to bring a giant iceberg into a specially built dock in London, and it will provide both drinking and irrigation water--but large residential areas will be demolished.
I liked the way he brought the drought alive, through the characters matter of factly mentioning all the things they couldn't do/had to do because of the shortage of water.
I didn't like the ending. There were 2 major threads left untied, and the episode that starts the book is completed at the end, but requires a hell of a lot of assumptions from the reader.
The author writes short stories, which i always struggle with because we're often supposed to 'understand' what has happened. I'd recommend it, but not sure I'll look for more of his work.
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Post by snowwhite on Apr 27, 2020 11:59:26 GMT -5
Untamed by Glennon Doyle I didn't know who she was before this book but apparently she's had a huge following for years starting off as a Christian mommy blogger morphing into a wife who writes books about getting her marriage back on track after her husband repeatedly cheats on her and now writing about her divorce and subsequesnt marriage to a woman and how they all now co parent and she's finally found herself and she will no longer let anyone tell her how to live her life and she's free of society's constraints and since she's centered herself she's gonna burn the planet down at age forty-four. So it's apparent this book is not for me. End of "review". I read about her in the Saturday Times magazine a few months back. I just finished Why Mummy Drinks, because someone posted a photo of a page of the sequel on a fb group I'm in, and said it was a good idea to read the first one first. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it - funny, with enough of a storyline to be worth persisting with (happy to post it on if anyone would like - don't think it's worth reading more than once). I must say that (unsurprisingly) when I started it, it occurred to me more than once that it could have been a set up for a much more serious book about alcohol addiction - I want to ask the author if she'd considered it. It reads just like real life accounts of 'how I became an alcoholic without realising it' that I hear on Woman's Hour from time to time - it doesn't count as drinking alone if the dog's there, etc. The author writes the 'Peter and Jane' page on fb, but I prefer the book I think. Now I should make an effort to finish one of the started books I have lying around before the sequel (Why Mummy Swears) arrives. Side note: intrigued by references to fishface's weird working hours.
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Post by fishface on Apr 27, 2020 12:22:06 GMT -5
Oh nothing interesting unfortunately! I've just been working later in the day and it's thrown me more than I realised in terms of getting to sleep and getting up at decent hours. It is nearly 530am for instance and I am still awake! Gah.
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Post by Oweena on Apr 27, 2020 19:23:59 GMT -5
Oh nothing interesting unfortunately! I've just been working later in the day and it's thrown me more than I realised in terms of getting to sleep and getting up at decent hours. It is nearly 530am for instance and I am still awake! Gah.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 27, 2020 19:40:07 GMT -5
Go to sleep!!!
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Apr 28, 2020 1:55:41 GMT -5
The author writes the 'Peter and Jane' page on fb, but I prefer the book I think. Now I should make an effort to finish one of the started books I have lying around before the sequel (Why Mummy Swears) arrives. Side note: intrigued by references to fishface's weird working hours. Funny - I generally liked the FB page but couldn't finish the book. And then after that I went off the page as well.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Apr 28, 2020 5:08:43 GMT -5
28. To the Land of Long Lost Friends, Alexander McCall Smith. As usual a great time with Mma Ramotswe and her friends. I was sort of expecting the outcome, and was delighted with Charlie’s part in the story. I think he is finally growing up.
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Post by snowwhite on Apr 28, 2020 5:20:02 GMT -5
Oh nothing interesting unfortunately! I've just been working later in the day and it's thrown me more than I realised in terms of getting to sleep and getting up at decent hours. It is nearly 530am for instance and I am still awake! Gah. Eeek, you're going to end up nocturnal that that rate!
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Post by mei on Apr 28, 2020 7:29:40 GMT -5
#9 for the year, which took a bit of time because it got interrupted by various other books: Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Quite a hyped book here, and it had been on my bookshelf for probably two years, so figured I'd finally start on it (haven't read Sapiens before this).
It's good. Thought provoking, accessible, posits some intriguing philosophical questions and have to admit he paints a pretty scary picture of what the future of humanity could look like :-(
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 28, 2020 19:10:06 GMT -5
20) Jill Lepore, These Truths
I really loved about 90% of this insightful book on American history. There's so much about the 18th and 19th centuries that I don't know, and she presented this material in an interesting and thoughtful way, making sure to weave in the stories of women and black and indigenous people throughout what usually is a long list of the achievements of famous white guys.
I say 90% of it, though, because I started taking a little exception to it by the time she got to events that I'd lived through. There was a bit of what people on Twitter call "both-sides-ism" about situations where I think the right wing was clearly at fault, and the left wing was acting in reaction to things they've done that are really indefensible. If she's right, then I'm part of the problem, I guess.
But on the whole I thought it was a great book.
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Post by sprite on Apr 29, 2020 4:34:59 GMT -5
#9 for the year, which took a bit of time because it got interrupted by various other books: Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Hariri. Quite a hyped book here, and it had been on my bookshelf for probably two years, so figured I'd finally start on it (haven't read Sapiens before this). It's good. Thought provoking, accessible, posits some intriguing philosophical questions and have to admit he paints a pretty scary picture of what the future of humanity could look like :-( I'm still trying to get back into that book, but get distracted by easier reads on the library app. i probably should just cave in and borrow it from the library app... I haven't so far found it as compelling as Sapiens.
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Post by mei on Apr 29, 2020 4:47:57 GMT -5
huh, interesting sprite. although I'm sure Sapiens would also be interesting, Homo Deus hasn't made me more excited about that first book - that might also have to do with the big stack of other really interesting non-fiction I have waiting at home!
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Post by sprite on Apr 29, 2020 5:12:38 GMT -5
I loved Sapiens. It's a constant stream of learning new things about our development, and also quite funny. I did get a bit tired of the anti-spiritual digs (ok, we get it, you're an atheist...), but overall, I'd recommend it to anyone who wonders about why we are the way we are.
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Post by lillielangtry on Apr 30, 2020 2:45:13 GMT -5
OK, I am reading a fantastic but very long book (another!), so I don't think I'm going to finish any more books this month.
#24 Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King The author is Ethiopian-American and this is my round-the-world read for Ethiopia. This book focuses on a few women in Ethiopia during the war of the 1930s, an era I knew very little about. It's beautifully written but rather slow and honestly, I considered putting it aside because I am just not quite in the mood for war books right now, but it was too good for that. I didn't enjoy it as much as I probably would have at another time, but if you are interested in the country, I'd recommend it.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on May 6, 2020 5:36:36 GMT -5
More April books. 30. Never Say Spy - Diane Henders Rubbish free kindle spy comedy romance mash up with VR.
31. The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart - Margarita Montimore A very different time travel novel - every birthday after her 18th Oona wakes up and lives a different year of her life. The novel explores not only the idea of being a 19 year old who is suddenly living the life of a 40 something woman but also the disjointed relationships that Oona experiences (living out the final year of a marriage before every having met her husband etc). I found this enjoyable and wished the book covered more years of her life.
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Post by scrubb on May 18, 2020 21:35:32 GMT -5
After our chat about the Dionne Quintuplets earlier this month, look what I found in my parents' silverware chest yesterday!
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