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Post by Liiisa on Aug 1, 2020 17:48:14 GMT -5
Whaaat how can it already be August? At least we have books to keep us company while we ponder the inexorable passage of Demon Time. Here's the link to July: The Link to JulyAs I just finished David Mitchell last night, I'm in between. About to pick up a book about zeppelins that my mom adored. We'll see how that goes.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Aug 1, 2020 20:22:13 GMT -5
Bookmarking. Thank you Liiisa. As usual I have at least 3 on the go.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Aug 1, 2020 22:57:06 GMT -5
I am behind in updating July.
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Post by Oweena on Aug 2, 2020 14:35:54 GMT -5
The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
Primarily the biography of Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi, a French gynacologist in the latter part of the 19th century. But it also tells the stories of many others in his orbit which made it hard at times to keep up. Pozzi was ahead of his time when it came to how women were treated by the medical community, and he was an innovator in gynecological surgery. He had a long seemingly loveless marriage at the same time he had a long term and seemingly happy relationship with his mistress (how French). He's also famous as the subject of the John Singer Sargent painting, 'Dr. Pozzi at Home'.
So much of this book went over my head since I'm not up on the history of France during the Belle Epoque, and know even less about the Dreyfus affair, which is referenced numerous times.
That said, even though parts of it were a struggle there were interesting sections that made it worthwhile.
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Post by tzarine on Aug 2, 2020 14:50:20 GMT -5
has anyone read elsa morante's history?
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 2, 2020 15:32:33 GMT -5
has anyone read elsa morante's history? No, I'd never heard of it until just now. From the description I just read, I think I could find it to be either incredibly interesting or incredibly tedious.
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Post by sophie on Aug 3, 2020 18:15:25 GMT -5
Oweena.. you are so right.. Apeirogon by Colum McCann is incredible.
Everyone one else: highly recommended. Incredible book. I love it. Possibly one of my top 10 ever.
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Post by Oweena on Aug 3, 2020 20:34:25 GMT -5
Yay sophie--I'm glad you like it too!
How he weaves it all together was amazing.
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 4, 2020 5:15:24 GMT -5
I will definitely read that after I'm done with this 600-page tome on zeppelins. (Which is actually pretty interesting... I wasn't sure at the beginning how much zeppelin I could take, but it's sustaining my interest so far.)
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Post by lillielangtry on Aug 4, 2020 14:24:42 GMT -5
High praise, sophie!
OK, I finished off two books at the beginning of the month:
Curdella Forbes, The Tall History of Sugar (round-the-world read for Jamaica) This is a story - a love story, I guess? - of a boy and girl who meet as children and have this very deep connection, but he in particular is a very sensitive person with unusual looks who doesn't "fit in" in their society. It's good, but somewhat overlong. I also wonder what some of the non-native English speakers of my book club are going to make of the use of Jamaican patois in the dialogue, even though the narrator does sometimes sort of translate it into standard English. I didn't get every word, so I'm pretty sure they won't.
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift (Zambia) Ohh, a long novel tracking several generations of interweaving characters in Zambia. The end section of the book really surprised me. It's great overall. If you are interested in Zambia, you must read it!
Now onto the real business of August, which for several years has been reading women in translation (not that I don't do that anyway, but in August I do it even more!)
First one: Ananda Devi, Eve out of her Ruins (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman from French; Mauritius) Definitely not a story of the holiday island. This is a short novel about the lives of four teenagers in a poor area of Port Louis. It's pretty devastating and brutal (in the way we were discussing about Toni Morrison).
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Post by riverhorse on Aug 5, 2020 13:50:43 GMT -5
I'm halfway through a German book called Die Hölle war der Preis (Hell was the Price) by Hera Lind. I remember reading a few books of hers many years ago that were quite funny, fluffy chick lit but this is very different. It's the life story of a young woman who was caught trying to escape from East Germany in 1974, and the terrible experiences she had in a notorious women's prison in Saxony. It's a true story. The incredibly bleak scenes in prison are interspersed with her childhood memories, and the author said this was done so as to break up the unrelenting bleakness of the story.
I know it has to have a happy ending, but at the moment I can't figure out whether she has to wait till the fall of the Wall, or whether she was one of the political prisoners that West Germany paid ransom for to release to them. We'll see...
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Post by riverhorse on Aug 6, 2020 13:41:29 GMT -5
^^^ just finished the book and it was a pageturner right to the end when she'd been ransomed to the West but right until she crossed the border to freedom, she couldn't be sure if the bastards wouldn't have one last nasty trick up their sleeve. Great book!
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Post by Oweena on Aug 8, 2020 19:08:55 GMT -5
The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne At just under 600 pages it's a bit of a committment but it was good enough that I wanted to get up early so I could read a bit each morning before starting work.
Tells the story of homophobia in Ireland from 1945-2015 through the eyes of Cyril, a gay closted man. He was given up for adoption due to his unmarried teenage mother being banished from her village when the pregnancy was discovered. So there's a fair bit of Catholic church bashing happening (that I'm totally fine with). Boyne writes great convesations between his characters, with the Irish sense of humor coming through in their exchanges. Over the decades you see Cyril navigating Dublin in the 1960s and then he leaves Ireland for more tolerant Amsterdam in the 70s, lives in NYC during the start of the AIDS pandemic, and returns to Ireland in his senior years. It was equal parts entertaining and infuriating. Can recommend.
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Post by riverhorse on Aug 9, 2020 8:28:50 GMT -5
The New Guy by Kathryn Freeman. Totally undemanding chick lit as that's all my brain can deal with in this heat. A software developer and the CEO of a tech startup have an anonymous one night stand, then software guy starts his new job and realises anonymous 1NS is his new boss. Cue lots of awkward situations etc. Still, there's an unexpected depth to some of the back stories and minor characters that made this a bit better than your run of the mill chick lit.
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Post by Oweena on Aug 9, 2020 21:57:58 GMT -5
The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg
Ugh I haven't disliked a book this much in a while. Husband dies in a traffic accident, grieving wife goes to Cuba for a film festival, thinks she sees dead husband walking around Havana, has flashbacks to her childhood, to her weird marriage, wanders around Havana in a fog, can't tell truth from reality, flits around from unrelated activity to unrelated activity in an effort to keep some semblance of a narrative going, and none of it is interesting or understandable. Can't recommend.
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Post by sophie on Aug 9, 2020 22:02:46 GMT -5
The Jane Austin Society by Natalie Jenner. It’s an okay read but after some of the stellar books I read recently, it’s not an outstanding novel. A fictionalization of how the society came into being in the 1940’s.
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Post by scrubb on Aug 9, 2020 23:27:54 GMT -5
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, by Margaret Atwood
Essays on science fiction, reviews of SF books, and SF short stories. Well done, interesting.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Aug 10, 2020 5:22:12 GMT -5
46. The Alpine Journey, Mary Daheim. Two central characters in the series travel to Oregon in this story, and there is some detail about life in a seaside town. The story centres around one character’s extended family, and the outcome is quite a surprise, at least for me. While the story itself is a good stand alone cozy mystery, there is some development in the lives of central characters, which is a reason I enjoy Daheim’s mystery series.
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Post by sprite on Aug 11, 2020 9:15:45 GMT -5
Starless Sea partner helpfully pointed out that no sea has stars, as stars are in the sky, not the water. (he's currently reading one of those Greek historians.) Zachary is a grad student at an american university, who finds a mysterious book in the library. it leads him to a secret world for people who love stories, and a secret society which believes they are protecting this world.
If I hadn't read Night Circus, I would have been pretty impressed with the world building in this novel. I think people who play narrative/quest games might enjoy it a little more. i loved the idea of an underworld living library, but a lot of the extra fairy tales slowed the narrative quite a bit. It just felt like a very long book, relative to the story being told. On the other hand, part of the story was the concept of Time moving differently for different people. However, I'm now in another book which feels like it should be 10 pages from finishing but after several days I'm only at 60%. Maybe time is dragging out for me.
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Post by scrubb on Aug 11, 2020 23:41:50 GMT -5
Big Sky by Kate Atkinson - the most recent Jackson Brodie book. I liked it a lot, but something about it was really familiar. I guess the main plot wasn't super creative, but the characters were great.
Brodie is an ex-cop, now private detective. As usual in this series, the author tells a number of stories that end up intersecting.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Aug 12, 2020 2:43:35 GMT -5
The Jane Austin Society by Natalie Jenner. It’s an okay read but after some of the stellar books I read recently, it’s not an outstanding novel. A fictionalization of how the society came into being in the 1940’s. I returned that to the library today unfinished. I got about half way through and then couldn't maintain enough interest in it to pick it up again.
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Post by scrubb on Aug 13, 2020 18:48:30 GMT -5
That Time I Loved You, by Carrieanne Leung. Another Bookbub special that was worthwhile. Stories of a few people, mostly kids, who live in a small part of Scarborough, a Toronto suburb. Most of them are immigrants and the point of view in most, though not all, of the stories is a teenager. It starts out being about the "parents' suicides" as 3 parents commit suicide within a few months of each other. But it doesn't go very far with that.
The stories are mostly quite well done/involving, though not all. A few chapters feel very amateurishly written - I was guessing it was the author's first novel, but apparently that's not the case. It also never really all comes together which I guess is ok, since life doesn't really work that way. But the suicides theme just fades away. most of the individual stories resolve, but not all.
I did like it, but still feel like it was just missing something to make it really, really good.
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Post by scrubb on Aug 14, 2020 11:54:45 GMT -5
Not a book, just a novella or maybe a really long short story - Minority Report, by Philip K. Dyck. BAsis of the movie, obvballs. Not a bad story, a reasonably interesting concept (arresting people before they commit the crime they are about to do), but not as thoughtful as the movie, in the end. SPOILER ALERT: in the book, they decide that the system is right and shouldn't be dismantled, but their logic is a little specious as far as I am concerned. They say that because the police commissioner is the only one who could have advance knowledge if he was fingered as a pre-criminal, he's the only one the system doesn't work for.
Which makes no sense, as they could simply tell everyone they'd been fingered and allow them to change their minds. There's one scene where they look at the deeper implications, but then it backs away and ignores them.
Also read a short story by CHristopher Moore, from before he switched to humour, called Cat Karma. It's basically a little legend. Not bad.
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 14, 2020 12:03:43 GMT -5
I have to admit I haven't read "Minority Report," but I've read a lot of the other Philip K Dick stuff, and that sounds pretty consistent - really imaginative ideas, but the execution isn't always perfect (but still worthwhile IMO).
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Post by sprite on Aug 14, 2020 12:07:09 GMT -5
Is he one of those writers who steals other people's drunken musings?
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 14, 2020 14:41:23 GMT -5
No, more just like he had super imaginative ideas but I wouldn't call him a great writer, stylistically. Some of his stuff doesn't always really make sense (to me). But ideas-wise, definitely up there with the greatest.
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Post by scrubb on Aug 14, 2020 18:39:24 GMT -5
Yeah, he wrote the basis of Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) which I think is the only other thing of his that I've read. No, I think there was one called Golden Boy or something like that too. But yeah, like Liiiiiisa said - super inventive and creative, but not a fantastic writer.
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Post by Liiisa on Aug 14, 2020 20:09:48 GMT -5
Yes! It could be said that his best work is in the films made from his initial ideas (I thought "Minority Report" was good.)
Anyway -
38) Alexander Rose, Empires of the Sky
This is really a good book! It starts out as the history of the development of Zeppelins, but eventually as the years go on, it interweaves the rise of the Pan Am corporation and its early development of intercontinental flight routes, which were a direct competitor to the Zeppelin routes. Which I had no idea were such a huge thing. It was really interesting reading the history of the 20th century through this lens of the Zeppelins and the story of the fascinating people involved in the development of these early aircraft. Recommended if you go for such things! It made me wish I could ride in a 1920's Zeppelin.
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Post by scrubb on Aug 15, 2020 15:39:58 GMT -5
Read a couple of Kurt Vonnegut books today - the first was a short collection of essays/speeches he wrote in the last couple of years before he died - "A Man Without a Country". The second was a collection of short stories and other of his writings that I think was compiled after his death. "Armageddon in Retrospect". It was introduced by his son.
Both books talked a lot about war, especially his experience in Dresden during the fire bombing. I always feel a bit depressed after reading his books. Although his essential goodness and belief in the goodness of individuals is uplifting, the realism of how cruel and stupid humans are, and the bleak demonstrations of how we won't end up making the world a better place, are depressing.
I will always love Vonnegut.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Aug 15, 2020 19:25:39 GMT -5
47. Aunt Bessie Considers, Diana Xarissa. This is more than just a cozy mystery, as it gives insight into the history and culture of the Isle of Man. One thing I’m finding very good about this series is that the victims and perpetrators are likeable people with history and reasons for what they do.
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