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Post by sophie on Oct 21, 2020 8:05:00 GMT -5
Read it, scrubb, liked it and agree with you.
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Post by mei on Oct 21, 2020 11:36:28 GMT -5
I really enjoyed Pachinko as well, but agree that the latter part is more rushed in a way than the first.
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Post by sprite on Oct 22, 2020 7:09:14 GMT -5
Rivers of London: So glad people recommended this, it was a lot of fun. I especially liked the mixture of respect and cycnicism when talking about the police force. I giggled quite a bit, and read it in two evenings.
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 23, 2020 1:31:53 GMT -5
Such great escapism, sprite, I wish I could read them all again for the first time! In fact, I might start a reread...
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 23, 2020 11:55:19 GMT -5
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad This won the Pulitzer in 2011, and I have been meaning to read it since about then :-) Each chapter focuses on a different character but they are all connected in some way (so is it a novel or linked short stories? I think rather the latter, but then Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other is similar and I rather thought of that as a novel... another example is Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout). For the first half of the book, I thought, well it's fine. But in the second half I actually really got to like it a lot. The writing is smooth and clever and figuring out your new perspective in every section is absorbing.
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 23, 2020 12:20:24 GMT -5
44) Colum McCann, Apeirogon
Pandemic distraction has made me a bit of an idiot recently, so it took me a month to read this. Which shouldn't reflect badly on it, because it's excellent and heartbreaking - the story of an Israeli man and a Palestinian man, both of whose daughters were killed by the opposite side, and how they came to work together for peace. That sounds like the kind of book that could be polemical and insufficiently nuanced, but this work isn't that - you feel their internal conflicts and conflicts with the communities there throughout. And really come to know and love them both. I'm going to keep this copy and give it a reread in a couple of years when I have a brain again.
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Post by mei on Oct 24, 2020 13:22:30 GMT -5
#24 I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.
Autobiography of 'the girl who was shot by the Pakistani Taliban and survived'. I think everyone will know about it to some extent. Impressive and gripping story.
Apparently I read the youth edition, and although I don't know how it's different from the regular edition it was fine to read, especially considering that it shares the life of a 15 year old girl.
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Post by Oweena on Oct 24, 2020 16:43:08 GMT -5
Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sarah A. Seo
My god this took me weeks to finish. It won't interest anyone who doesn't want to do a deep, deep dive on the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It shows how it has morphed into the beast it is today, and how it impacts anyone who drives or rides in a car today and may be stopped by the police. 268 pages of the background of 4th Amendment cases since the early 1900s and what they mean for us today. There's a reason I didn't go to law school and this book brought that home to me again. I learned so much but it was slow going.
It also makes me realize even more that the Alito's and Coney Barrett's of the legal world will twist themselves into illogical legal opinions to stick to their originalist views of the Constitution.
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Post by scrubb on Oct 25, 2020 14:37:30 GMT -5
This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett. A collection of short essays by someone who I thought wrote mostly fiction, but it turns out has also written a lot of short non-fiction. (I'd read her full length non-fiction, Truth and Beauty, but thought that was an outlier.) It is somewhat autobiographical in that the essays are mostly about her own life. Even those that are about a bigger idea or principle are told from the perspective of how it fits into her own context.
Overall I thought it was excellent. I really like her fiction writing, and it turns out I really like her non-fiction, too.
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Post by sprite on Oct 25, 2020 14:58:42 GMT -5
The Memory Police. An interesting concept, but at a certain point I found it really hard to read, becuase it was pretty clear there was no happy ending. A sort of story within a story. The narrator, a novelist, lives alone, on a small island where things periodically 'disappear' and the residents just forget that those objects ever existed. The Memory Police come around to check that residents are burning the objects they can no longer remember the names of.
The problem is that not everyone forgets, and it turns out that one of these is the novelist's editor, who she hides in a secret room.
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Post by Oweena on Oct 25, 2020 17:08:53 GMT -5
This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett. A collection of short essays by someone who I thought wrote mostly fiction, but it turns out has also written a lot of short non-fiction. (I'd read her full length non-fiction, Truth and Beauty, but thought that was an outlier.) It is somewhat autobiographical in that the essays are mostly about her own life. Even those that are about a bigger idea or principle are told from the perspective of how it fits into her own context. Overall I thought it was excellent. I really like her fiction writing, and it turns out I really like her non-fiction, too. Patchett is a favorite author of mine (The Patron Saint of Liars is my #1 of her fiction) and Story of a Happy Marriage is one of the few short essays books I've ever read more than once.
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 26, 2020 1:35:44 GMT -5
Elizabeth Macneal, The Doll Factory This has been sitting on my shelf a while, and I breezed through it in a weekend. It's a historical novel set in the 1850s against the background of the artists known as the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Millais, Gabriel Rosetti, etc). A young woman from a fairly poor but respectable background has dreams of becoming an artist but is also the subject of an obsession of a creepy taxidermist ;-) This does a very good job of making an atmospheric Victorian London, I think, and the story keeps you reading. In general recommended if you enjoy that kind of thing. There were a couple of minor plot points that were introduced and not resolved (unless I somehow missed them by reading the last 100 pages pretty fast, but I don't think so), which was a shame. THey didn't affect the main story but just made it feel a little less polished. I've just taken four books, all in German, off my shelves and looked at them, read a few opening sentences, etc. Then put them back and taken Rivers of London back down. I think it will be fun as a reread because now I've read the later books in the series I will be able to spot the story arcs starting, and also I read them really quickly so I probably missed some stuff. Thanks sprite :-)
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 27, 2020 8:19:50 GMT -5
45) Diane Cook, The New Wilderness
OK, so either I have gotten over my case of pandemic distraction or I just needed something a little more linear, plot-wise, because I read this in 2 days. It's very honest and intense and I will put it on my best of 2020 list. I found out about it from the Booker list (can't remember if it's short- or long-listed).
A near future quasi-dystopia in which a small band of people have signed up for a study to live like nomadic hunter-gatherers in a wilderness reserve. (I say "quasi" because society is a mess but the wilderness is quite lovely.) This is partly because urban conditions have deteriorated to the extent that children have really bad respiratory symptoms, so there are kids in this small band of people who have been brought there for their health. A large part of the story is examining the characters of a mother and young daughter - this aspect was particularly compelling. I felt myself reflected in the mother's character a bit, which isn't really a compliment to myself since the mother isn't a fully sympathetic character.
Oh, and spoiler for people who don't like certain kinds of novels: While there are some unsympathetic characters, there's no extreme violence or abuse. Also no one resorts to cannibalism (I would have stopped reading it if they had, that really grosses me out).
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 27, 2020 8:44:25 GMT -5
I've heard about two (fiction) books recently that deal with cannabalism. I won't be reading either of them!
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Oct 28, 2020 10:51:14 GMT -5
58. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman. After a couple of dreadful books, I wanted something good, and this one didn’t disappoint. An amazing story of healing from appalling trauma. Eleanor is indeed fine. Well written and full of both love and suspense, it is an account of a young woman’s journey to wholeness.
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Post by sprite on Oct 28, 2020 16:35:24 GMT -5
That was a lovely book.
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Post by scrubb on Oct 31, 2020 15:08:31 GMT -5
Just finished Lawrence Durrell's "Balthazar", the second book of the Alexandria Quartet. I'd read the first one (Justine) a few years ago but couldn't remember any details at all, so I had to almost completelyreread it before getting into this one, though I just skimmed to remind myself of who everyone was and how they all related to each other.
He's an amazing writer. Creates mood extremely well, and draws vibrant pictures with his words. Most of the characters are bit players, some for comic relief, and they're very well drawn.
The Quartet is about a group of people living in Alexandria, I think between the 2 world wars. Some of them are Egyptian but most are ex-pats. They're all having secret affairs with each other and there's an edge of danger in the possibility of being found out. The first book was the narrator's version of it all; in this second book, an old friend supplies him with a bunch of information and facts and stories that put events into a different light and changes his perspective. Presumably the following 2 books will be the same sort of thing- new information added, shifting the story again.
The only thing is, I'm not convinced that the content is worthy of the writing. The narrator/author imbues all their words and actions with great significance - the affairs are desperate and dangerous; the participants spend lots of time castigating themselves. The writing is so good that it works, mostly - but you have to be in the right mood while reading, I think. There's always a part of my brain that cynically thinks "or, you could stop thinking that your affair is different and more important than the zillion other affairs happening at the same time". I'd love to see a story where the people and events involved seemed to be actually worthy of the greet writing.
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Post by sophie on Oct 31, 2020 17:39:41 GMT -5
I havent reread this series for ages,but once upon a time I loved it. I remember that the whole quartet is better than any single book.
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Post by scrubb on Oct 31, 2020 17:47:44 GMT -5
I plan to keep going and read the rest of it now, instead of having big gaps between the books.
It seems to be something about books where illicit love affairs are written about as though they are something extremely spiritual or significant that gets to me. I'm not a prude and it's obvious to me that anyone having such an affair does find it incredibly significant; but there's an occasional book where the main character's focus on their affair strikes me as some intense naval-gazing. On Green Dolphin Street (Sebastion Faulks) and Justine both hit me that way. I'm sure I've read dozens of other books that are about affairs that didn't hit that chord with me. Sometimes I'm totally sympathetic with the inner turmoil and emotional conflict the characters feel. It's when they seem to think that THEIR situation is totally unique and incredibly significant in some way that no other affair has ever been that I tune out a bit.
That said, the Alexandria Quartet is about much more than just "the affairs" - it's about a time and place; it's about nostalgia for that time and place; and with the different books providing different perspectives, it's also some meta-fiction about how perspective changes both the time and place, and the nostalgia for it.
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Post by lillielangtry on Nov 1, 2020 9:53:13 GMT -5
Yesterday I finished the audiobook of Michael Palin's Brazil. Not his best, but he has a very pleasant voice. I've started a November thread!
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Post by sophie on Nov 1, 2020 23:40:36 GMT -5
And yesterday I finished Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York. I like her writing, and it was a suitable (intelligent!) book for Halloween.
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Post by sprite on Nov 2, 2020 7:37:11 GMT -5
Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh.
Eww. Just, eww. It was described as a 'taut psychological thriller' but the most taut thing was my gut as i tried not to vomit, repeatedly.
Eileen is a young woman living with her alcoholic father after her mother dies of cancer. they live in absolute filth, despite him having a police pension and her having a full time job at the local boys' prison. Eileen dreams of running away, but inertia keeps her home. THen the glamourous Rebecca appears, offering friendship and... what?
It's a good story, but Eileen's fixation with her body--which she hates, hides, and abuses while fantasizing about a future where she is beautiful and sexy--is spelled out graphically. I did not have any late night food cravings while reading this.
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Post by Liiisa on Nov 16, 2020 5:57:52 GMT -5
sprite I've "enjoyed" the other books I've read by her, but read somewhere that "Eileen" was honest but disgusting and therefore haven't pursued it. Thank you for suffering for the rest of us; definitely will skip it now. (for some reason I kept ignoring the fact that there was a new post in the October thread)
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Post by lillielangtry on Nov 16, 2020 7:41:44 GMT -5
I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by that author and the characters are very unlikeable. That seems to be her "thing"!
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