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Post by riverhorse on Mar 16, 2021 2:16:23 GMT -5
I've just finished reading the book Hal recommended in January:
"2. The Valley of the Lost Stories - Vanessa McCausland.
I loved this for the sense of place it created. A group of women and their kids go on holidays to a remote valley the other side of the Blue Mountains. While there, one disappears, which has echos of the disappearance of a woman in the 40s. Some very creepy gothic overtones, intense friendships that flare up and burn out, different ways modern motherhood is portrayed. It felt like something Liane Moriarity had tried to do before but this book was so much better,
And it has made me want to go and stay in the Capertee Valley."
I ended up going down an internet rabbit hole about the true history of this valley, and the real-life Art Deco hotel the story is based in. Definitely going on my to-travel-to list. With Hal, of course!
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Post by Oweena on Mar 16, 2021 20:48:59 GMT -5
Finally done with the 600+ pages of this book that I started on or about March 2nd and which I should have returned on or about March 4th.
Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing by Peter Guralnick
27 chapters covering the greats of the blues, each chapter about a different musician, with some chapters the length of a short book.
A few chapters were interesting, and because he was friendly with many of the musicians he writes about they're more personal than the usual.
But while I like the blues, I don't like the blues that much. Or need to know the minutiae of each of the artists he profiles.
Someday I'll learn to toss a book aside that's just not doing it for me.
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Post by riverhorse on Mar 17, 2021 7:29:51 GMT -5
Not sure if magazines count, but I was thrilled to see that Hal's local library, to which I have Libby access, had a whole bunch of great magazines the last time I was nosing around on the weekend. So I've just "flicked through" the latest releases of various crochet magazines, as well as BBC Good Food, which I used to subscribe to in the UK but had to give up when I moved to Germany, as it was just way too expensive to ship to Europe.
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Post by mei on Mar 18, 2021 6:31:10 GMT -5
finally finished #3, took quite a bit of time:
Less is More, How degrowth will save the world by Jason Hickel.
Very very good. It's on a topic that's not new to me (how our focus on indefinite economic growth is destroying the planet) but it's explained very well, pulls in a lot of perspectives I hadn't considered before and shows convincingly how it's possible to live in an economy that actually works for people and planet. Recommended if you would like to understand more about how capitalism works, but also more in general about what we have to do to stay within ecological limits and ahead of negative impacts of climate change.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 18, 2021 7:39:03 GMT -5
#14 Satham Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain
The reason for my quietness on this thread is probably obvious: I continued with 1Q84 (currently 400 pages in!)
Anyway, here's an audio book on the influence of the British Empire. Sections of this are excellent, others are rather obvious or slightly dull. On the whole I'm glad I read it. We Brits should absolutely think more about our past role in the world and its consequences.
Two negative points that are not the author's fault: this book looks at the lasting impact of Empire and is not, in itself, a potted history of Empire. If anyone has a recommendation for a good history of the British Empire, please let me know - I'm probably looking for something a little less sweeping than Jan Morris' trilogy! Secondly, I didn't think the audiobook reader was that great. He sometimes paused in odd places that made the sentence less easy to follow or sounded as if he hadn't fully grasped its sense. Odd for a professional actor, although I don't know how long narrators typically get to prepare.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 18, 2021 18:21:01 GMT -5
Finished two fairly light reads this morning.
23. Christmas Calamity at the Vicarage, Emily Organ. A silly classic cozy mystery.
24. The Old Girls Network, Judy Leigh. A gentle, optimistic, modern story set in an English village, with assorted quirky characters and events.
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 20, 2021 5:53:24 GMT -5
6) Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
One of those books that took me a little while to get into because I've been super busy and brain-dead, but then I stayed up late last night to finish it because it was so good.
Wonderful book - best of the year so far. It's a murder mystery featuring some endearingly odd characters in rural Poland.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 20, 2021 14:00:39 GMT -5
Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Essays written in the '60s. The focus is America - she is a Californian who lived in NYC for 8 years in her 20s. She's good, but I think most of the essays would be better appreciated by people who live in the places she writes about. Still, an interesting look at the '60s. The one on Haight Ashbury and the hippies (and the runaways, and the drugs, etc.) was really good.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 21, 2021 18:49:38 GMT -5
Diane Pomerantz - Lost in the Reflecting Pool. A Bookbub special. At the start, I thought it was a pretty boringly written novel, but then realized it was a memoir/autobiography which kind of made the lack of storytelling somewhat forgivable. It was competent writing, if not gripping. It's by a woman whose husband was completely unsupportive/useless/heartless when she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. This book goes back through all the "signs" that he wasn't ever thinking about her, and she says he treated her terribly for years before the diagnosis. At the end she says he was a narcissist (she's a psychologist).
She doesn't do a great job of showing him to be the manipulative sadist she says he always was, though. Her description of their life together prior to her diagnosis sounds really positive, overall and she didn't provide any examples of behaviour that seemed abusive and cruel. Her examples - the most egregious things he did - left me thinking "...and? Oh, that's it?" Anyway, he definitely was horrible after she got sick, and came across as having some kind of mental illness, for sure. But beyond the lack of strength of her case/writing/ability to get the situation across, was that I just wasn't all that interested. And she didn't make me interested.
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Post by Oweena on Mar 22, 2021 10:49:23 GMT -5
Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley
An odd novel, told from the viewpoint of a racehorse (Perestroika) and the dog, raven, and ducks she befriends after wandering away from her stable.
The setting is Paris and the horse travels around the streets and parks of the city at night, interacting with a few select humans who aren't sure they're seeing a real horse or not.
The main human character is a little boy who lives with his deaf and nearly blind great grandmother, but the animals are the stars here.
I've read Smiley's novels before, this one is not like any of her others.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 22, 2021 11:10:10 GMT -5
Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley An odd novel, told from the viewpoint of a racehorse (Perestroika) and the dog, raven, and ducks she befriends after wandering away from her stable. The setting is Paris and the horse travels around the streets and parks of the city at night, interacting with a few select humans who aren't sure they're seeing a real horse or not. The main human character is a little boy who lives with his deaf and nearly blind great grandmother, but the animals are the stars here. I've read Smiley's novels before, this one is not like any of her others. Is it better, worse, or about as good as, her others? I've read a couple of hers and one, while good, was so dark that I wasn't sure I was glad I read it. The other was good but forgettable. |
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Post by Oweena on Mar 22, 2021 20:16:48 GMT -5
scrubb this one isn't dark at all.
It's more suspending your belief in order to get in the mindset that the horse and dog and raven are the narrators of the story.
My most recent Smiley read was her Last Hundred Years trilogy and this new one is nothing like those 3 novels.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 23, 2021 20:18:51 GMT -5
Thanks, Oweena.
Read another Harry Dresden (Wizard PI) - Turn Coat. It was better than the last few I've read - less gore and torture. Pretty good plot.
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Post by Oweena on Mar 25, 2021 8:21:18 GMT -5
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
I know a few of you here have read this and liked it.
For me it fell flat due to my inability to buy the premise.
I made it through the 400+ pages because the chapters are so short and we were on a mini-getaway where I wasn't working full-time.
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Post by mei on Mar 25, 2021 11:42:51 GMT -5
Finished #4, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu after shilgia recommended it a few months ago.
It seems strangely timely, as I've followed a few people online about discrimination and violence targeting AAPI individuals and communities, following last week's shooting.
The book is about how an Asian American man is trying to find his place in American society. I liked it but the style and structure made it really confusing for me at times (written like a movie script). That said, I enjoyed reading something different and unusual.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 25, 2021 21:11:20 GMT -5
Kelly Rimmer - The Things we Cannot Say.
Eh. It tells a story on two timelines, jumping back and forth between them. A teenage girl in Poland during WW2 and a family in modern day USA with a child profoundly affected by autism. The first half was quite good, especially the American family storyline. The second half was stretched out by bad romance writing that stopped the plot from moving; and the finale tied up everything too neatly and solved everyone's problems far too simply. Oh, and although the author made some effort to have shades of grey, she still heaps of Polish characters be "good Poles" who defied the Nazis to help Jews in spite of the terrible risk. And who had no idea what was happening at Auschwitz, a mere 19 km away.
Overall an ok read, but aside from the what seemed very real and interesting depiction of the family with the autistic child, there are better novels set in the war.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 28, 2021 19:12:48 GMT -5
S.M. Hulse - Black River. I really liked this Bookbub special. Hard to describe exactly what it's about - a stoic and hard man, and his difficult relationship with his past, with his stepson, and with God, all of which he is confronted with after his wife dies. The book does have some resolution, but not too much. It's a slow and quiet book and very sad much of the time, with great atmosphere (set in Montana).
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Mar 28, 2021 20:03:36 GMT -5
Argh - I have book club tonight and still have over 100 pages to read.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 29, 2021 1:37:21 GMT -5
#15 Haruki Marukami, 1Q84
Soooo I finished 1,100 pages of Murakami.
The story is enjoyable, otherwise I wouldn't have continued with it. It's typical Murakami in that it's our world with a twist, which is something I generally like. At some points I was really gripped by it and read over 100 pages a day.
Does it actually need to be that long? Probably not. Is Murakami really bad at writing women? I think so. Here's a quote from near the very end:
"Aomame mourned the deaths of those two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts - breasts that had vanished without a trace."
I suspect that because Murakami is such a superstar and his books are going to be translated into many languages (it is absolutely exceptional for a book that large to be translated, by the way, because translation is expensive), he has been rather indulged in some respects. Anyway, there we go, it was fun nevertheless.
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Post by riverhorse on Mar 29, 2021 2:36:12 GMT -5
Now that the Easter holidays are here, I'm making inroads into the books I downloaded on Libby a while ago and now have to plough through!
Currently reading The Nightingale by Kristin Harris, set in wartime France and the story of 2 sisters who cope during the German occupation in very different ways. Impulsive, 19 year old Isabelle joins the resistance to smuggle British airman to safety.
I'm really enjoying this book, I live reading about this period in history, and this book is told from the perspective of women, mostly, which is refreshing.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Mar 29, 2021 3:27:12 GMT -5
Finished the book club book. Will update the books for March tomorrow.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 29, 2021 7:00:01 GMT -5
#15 Haruki Marukami, 1Q84 Soooo I finished 1,100 pages of Murakami. The story is enjoyable, otherwise I wouldn't have continued with it. It's typical Murakami in that it's our world with a twist, which is something I generally like. At some points I was really gripped by it and read over 100 pages a day. Does it actually need to be that long? Probably not. Is Murakami really bad at writing women? I think so. Here's a quote from near the very end: "Aomame mourned the deaths of those two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts - breasts that had vanished without a trace." I suspect that because Murakami is such a superstar and his books are going to be translated into many languages (it is absolutely exceptional for a book that large to be translated, by the way, because translation is expensive), he has been rather indulged in some respects. Anyway, there we go, it was fun nevertheless. I found a copy of this in a box of TBR books today. Now that I’m retired I might have time to read it. |
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 29, 2021 12:59:04 GMT -5
lillie, that quote is hilarious. I have lost many women friends but never once did I mourn the world's loss of their breasts... I mean personalities, yes, but some random body part? Haruki, you are a strange dude.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 30, 2021 13:46:40 GMT -5
It makes me happy that all of my best friends' breasts are still in this world.
I finished Matt Haig's "The Humans" last night. It's probably YA fiction. Narrated by an alien who arrives on earth to take the place of a mathematician who solved a theorem that would vastly progess human technology and understanding. He has to kill everyone close to the mathematician to ensure the information is not spread.
There is some ok stuff about what it means to be human, but it's overall kind of banal.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 30, 2021 18:00:41 GMT -5
25. Class Reunions can be Murder, Susan Santangelo. Supposed to be a Baby Boomers mystery, but for a journalist, the author has an annoying writing style, first person, with too many asides, as though the reader was her best friend.
The mystery itself was quite good.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 30, 2021 23:33:55 GMT -5
#16 Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
I heard about Josephine Tey, a crime writer who died in 1952, on the excellent podcast Backlisted.
The Daughter of Time is very unusual in that it's part of her series featuring Inspector Alan Grant, but he spends the entire book in hospital recovering from a broken leg, and he passes the time by examining the mystery of what happened to the "Princes in the Tower" who were supposedly murdered by King Richard III.
This book wasn't really for me, but I would wholeheartedly recommend it if you are a history buff and enjoy the whole Kings and Queens of England stuff. The writing style has stood the test of time very well (although it is amusing that patients are allowed to smoke in hospital!). Apparently it featured as "the best crime novel of all time" on some list or other.
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Post by riverhorse on Mar 31, 2021 1:28:14 GMT -5
I was in bits at the end of The Nightingale. Am now making inroads into "Dance Away With Me" by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. "When life throws her one setback too many, midwife and young widow Tess Hartsong takes off for Runaway Mountain. In this small town high in the Tennessee mountains, surrounded by nature, she hopes to outrun her heartbreak and find the solace she needs to heal."
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Post by sprite on Mar 31, 2021 15:43:48 GMT -5
I should be reading 'think like a monk' but the author's grinning face on the cover makes me want to slap him.
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Post by sprite on Mar 31, 2021 15:46:18 GMT -5
#15 Haruki Marukami, 1Q84 Soooo I finished 1,100 pages of Murakami. I spent 20 minutes going through old posts here to get an idea of which Murakami book to read, as I haven't yet. I wondered why none of them rang a bell from when I checked to see what was on Libby. You guessed it--i was looking at Ishiguro. V. Embarrassing. |
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Apr 4, 2021 2:32:41 GMT -5
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