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Post by Liiisa on Jul 2, 2022 15:56:17 GMT -5
I figure since I literally just this moment started Olga Tokarczuk's new 1000-page novel I may not have a chance to post in the July book thread for quite a while, so why not create it in order to post in it now. So anyway: here it is, and enjoy. Here's the link back to June: June book thread
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 3, 2022 2:40:52 GMT -5
Thank you Liiisa. Bookmarking. Hoping to finish a few on holiday. We have an audiobook with one chapter to go.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jul 3, 2022 4:24:12 GMT -5
Oh Liisa you're reading the Books of Jacob?!
I kind of fancy it but just can't make the time commitment right now, especially given my unread books...
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Post by Liiisa on Jul 3, 2022 7:04:14 GMT -5
Yes! It's amazing so far, but definitely a time commitment.
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Post by scrubb on Jul 3, 2022 13:15:25 GMT -5
Thanks, Liiiiiiiiiisa.
Just finished a Henning Mankell that isn't a mystery in the Wallender series. Called "Chronicler of the Winds" it's set in an unnamed African country (but lots of people have Spanish names). Kind of mystical - the narrator is telling the story of a street child who seemed to be very special. I liked it.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 4, 2022 4:00:16 GMT -5
38. The Seventh Sinner, Elizabeth Peters. A good shortish murder mystery set among post graduate art and archaeology students in Rome.
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Post by Queen on Jul 7, 2022 7:57:13 GMT -5
Red Sorghum Mo Yan
A M A Z I N G writing, giving a vivid sense of Gaomi Township and the flawed heros of the time of the Japanese occupation.
It's a gruelling period of history though so it wasn't and easy read and I'm sure I missed a lot of the historical references (although I think the translator did an incredible job) because of my limited knowledge. I will look for more of his works.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 7, 2022 20:35:03 GMT -5
39. Grizzly Trail, Gwen Moffat. A mystery set around a winter cattle drive in the Rockies, and animal poachers. I liked the main character, and will go back to the beginning of the series, but I was underwhelmed by the rest of the characters, and found the setting too alien to visualise comfortably.
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Post by scrubb on Jul 7, 2022 22:36:19 GMT -5
Red Sorghum Mo Yan A M A Z I N G writing, giving a vivid sense of Gaomi Township and the flawed heros of the time of the Japanese occupation. It's a gruelling period of history though so it wasn't and easy read and I'm sure I missed a lot of the historical references (although I think the translator did an incredible job) because of my limited knowledge. I will look for more of his works. I read "Garlic Ballads" by him and thought it was good - but I just didn't really enjoy it, and it didn't make me look for more of his stuff. ETA: I just took a look at my comments on The Garlic Ballads: "Calling it bleak would be kind - tragedy follows close on tragedy. Very interesting look at the society though."
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Post by mei on Jul 8, 2022 7:39:03 GMT -5
Red Sorghum Mo Yan A M A Z I N G writing, giving a vivid sense of Gaomi Township and the flawed heros of the time of the Japanese occupation. It's a gruelling period of history though so it wasn't and easy read and I'm sure I missed a lot of the historical references (although I think the translator did an incredible job) because of my limited knowledge. I will look for more of his works. That's been sitting on a shelf for years... maybe I should pick it up. I read his "The Republic of Wine". Really strange and surreal book, with quite a hidden political messaging but I think you need to understand Chinese politics from that time better to fully grasp that layer also.
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Post by Queen on Jul 8, 2022 9:53:51 GMT -5
I got the broad sweep of the history for this - but there's a surreal scene in the middle that's a war of dogs and I'm sure it's significant and allegorical but it was a bit lost on me.
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Post by Liiisa on Jul 8, 2022 11:57:24 GMT -5
It looks like I read yet another Mo Yan book in 2013, "Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh." I think I found it interesting but the author didn't make it onto my "read everything by this person" list.
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Post by scrubb on Jul 8, 2022 23:16:51 GMT -5
#46. "Imagine me Gone" by Adam Haslett. About a family - Margaret and John, and their 3 children - and how mental illness in some of them impacts them all. It's well done and involving, funny and tragic. I really liked it.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 9, 2022 7:46:52 GMT -5
40. Able, Dylan Alcott Actually a reread for me. I was given a paperback copy about three years ago. This was a revised audiobook edition, that we listened to on our long driving days, finishing today.
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Post by Oweena on Jul 10, 2022 14:39:27 GMT -5
I'm back from the (almost) cross country road trip and traveling 2,500 miles via the slow highways allowed me to read 2 books.
The Colony by Audrey Magee In 1979 an English artist goes to a desolate Irish island to paint the cliffs and sea life for the summer. A French linguist arrives at nearly the same time to study the dying Gaelic language. The two men don't like each other and the few remaining island residents are caught up in the middle of their disagreements. There are some spot on funny conversations between the artist and the taciturn islanders as well as some wonderful writing about painting. The plot is allegorical to the colonization of Ireland, and it intersperses the narrative with short paragraphs on the violence happening in Northern Ireland at the time. Really liked the story and writing.
The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker A bit of an epic tale. It tells the story of 6 sisters raised by a strange mother and the tragedies that befall the sisters one by one. It's set in the 1950s and has a definite feminist slant, with lots of shots at the patriarchy and societal expectations. Each sister's personality is well-written, and the ending leaves it up to you to decide what the real bogeyman in the story is. If you like your endings all tied up with a bow, then this book probably isn't for you but I liked the ambiguity as well as the storyline.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jul 11, 2022 0:23:34 GMT -5
John le Carré, A Small Town in Germany I have been wanting to read this for a while because the "small town" in question is Bonn, where I work. It's set (and was published) in 1969, amid the backdrop of protests and political intrigue. I think it's a very good book, but not really a "me" book and I lacked some of the background knowledge. Still, if you're into spy novels you'll be familiar with his work already and know he's a master craftsman. Obviously I enjoyed picking up the mentions of streets, hotels etc that I know. I work just across the road from what was at that time the German parliament.
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Post by scrubb on Jul 11, 2022 12:22:33 GMT -5
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami. It started off really good and sucked me in right away, but didn't stay so good.
Central character is Nora, a daughter of Moroccan immigrants, but the narration jumps around between pretty much all of the characters. The family moved to California in about 1982 to escape the Moroccan regime and Nora was born in the US. At the start of the book her father is hit by a car and killed and she comes home.
I guess the central theme is family dynamics and trying to find your own place in them. Also elements of racism and lingering hurt and resentment from childhood. In the second half it sort of descended into a cheesy romance much of the time, along with a lot of unproductive naval gazing that didn't result in any insight. One of the narrators is a guy and I didn't think he was all that believably done, plus it seems like all his myriad issues were solved with love. Eyeroll.
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Post by scrubb on Jul 11, 2022 18:18:20 GMT -5
This afternoon I read "The Warbler Road" by Merrill Gilfillan - a small paperback with a great cover, about the author's various searches for warblers, recommended by Liiiiisa. It's a book for birders, written by a poet. I suspect that I would not like his poems, but the style suits the subject and it evoked landscape and birds and moments very well. It has short chapters and would loan itself to picking it up and putting it down frequently, but I ended up reading it over the course of a sunny afternoon in the back yard, interspersed with a few small chores.
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Post by Liiisa on Jul 11, 2022 19:58:32 GMT -5
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I agree that I don't really have interest in checking out the poems. I honestly dislike about 95% of the poems I read.
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Post by Oweena on Jul 12, 2022 11:56:46 GMT -5
In Love by Amy Bloom
When the authors husband is diagnosed in his 60s with Alzheimer's, he decides quickly that he won't be sticking around for the "long goodbye". He also asks her to write about it. This means she is put in the position of researching and setting up his death. She details the problems with the assisted suicide laws in the US as well as the roadblocks his physicians put up when her husband shares his plans with them.
Eventually Bloom finds Dignitas in Switzerland and the book details the work it takes to be accepted into their program. In January 2020 they travel to Zurich and she is with him when he ends his life.
Interspersed with the day to day of his decline is the story of how they met, fell in love, and their life together.
She's pretty clear-eyed about the whole thing while also grieving, and I think it's an important topic for people to discuss and the book shows how our laws need to change.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 12, 2022 18:42:39 GMT -5
41. And Now For Something Completely Different, Jodi Taylor. A short audiobook in which the St Mary’s crew travel to Mars. Loved it.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 12, 2022 23:15:13 GMT -5
42. The Thursday Murder Club. If you have any connections to retirement villages, this book is brilliant and hilarious. I wanted to finish it so I could lend it to my friend, and I’m leaving her with her family in Adelaide tomorrow.
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Post by sophie on Jul 13, 2022 0:11:25 GMT -5
Ozzie, I like the next one even more(the man who died twice).
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Post by scrubb on Jul 14, 2022 0:28:17 GMT -5
Woohoo!!! David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue just showed up on my amazon page on sale for $2.99!!!!!! I wonder why bookbub didn't tell me about it?
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jul 14, 2022 6:40:18 GMT -5
43. The Mapping of Love and Death, Jacqueline Winspear. Some of this series were available on Amazon for a very cheap price, so I downloaded those rather than starting at the beginning. Another 1920s mystery, but definitely of a different class to recent ones I’ve read. I can see these characters in Lord Peter Wimsey’ post WWI England.
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Post by Liiisa on Jul 15, 2022 6:29:04 GMT -5
29) Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
Whew... that was quite something. The Jacob in the title is a charismatic man who founds a messianic mystical cult within the Jewish community in 18th century Poland. The novel tracks the lives of these people up through the Napoleonic period, with a little magic realism to throw the action forward into the present. Other that that last bit (which I thought was great), it's all based on real people and events.
I am still trying to decide whether this is going to be one of my favorite novels of 2022 or not; I think it will, though. It was painstakingly researched and described, so you learn a lot about Poland in that period (actually, Poland-Lithuania, which then extended all the way to the edge of the Ottoman Empire), plus what people's clothing looked like, the interiors of their buildings, their streets and markets. She doesn't dumb down the terminology, so I often had wikipedia open to find out who Sabbatai Tzvi was, what a zúpan was, etc... I like that in a book, I want the words preserved as people would have said them as much as is possible for me to understand it.
So really it was amazingly great; the only real problem was that Jacob is an unpleasant person with fairly bizarre ideas, so I can't say I enjoyed spending time with him, and at 1000 pages you get to see a lot of him. A minor quibble is that about a third of the way through, half the characters change their names from Jewish names to Christian names, so I sometimes had a hard time remembering which of the people on p. 150 is the person on p. 600, and which is their grandchild on p. 800. It didn't really matter that much to the plot, but I occasionally wished that she'd created a dramatis personae like Ada Palmer did.
Oh but one more thing: the page numbers I added in above for descriptive purposes aren't accurate because the book is paginated BACKWARDS as in a book in Hebrew - kind of awesome but took some getting used to at the beginning. One plus is that you knew exactly how many pages were left until the end; no math skills required.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jul 15, 2022 8:00:12 GMT -5
Woo, well done on finishing that Liisa! I do like Tokarczuk but I'm still not quite ready for it.
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Post by Liiisa on Jul 15, 2022 12:00:02 GMT -5
Well I still haven't had the guts to tackle The Eighth Life, so we're tied re our contributions to the Long Central European Novels effort.
Next I'm going to read something funny and short.
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Post by scrubb on Jul 16, 2022 0:04:01 GMT -5
Sundog, by Jim Harrison. Just heard of him for the first time and he's apparently well known, a "great American author". He's more in the Hemingway spirit/style than anything, I would say. This book is narrated by a guy who has been asked to interview someone - a man who has spent his working life building dams in developing nations around the world. He's a larger than life character, who - having forgotten to refill his prescription for anti-seizure meds while working in VEnezuela, took a local herbal remedy which, he found out too late, causes paralysis, mental issues, and sometimes death. While he's being interviewed, he's living in a cabin trying to force his body to heal by pushing himself to crawl or swim for hours every day.
It took me a little while to get into it, but eventually I started enjoying it. It's not my favourite kind of writing/book, though, so while I found it worthwhile, I am not going to rush to start another book by him.
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Post by sophie on Jul 16, 2022 0:04:33 GMT -5
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren. Chick lit. Main character (Olive) had a twin sister who is getting married. Olive is the maid of honor and during the wedding is one of only 2 people not to get extremely sick from the wedding buffet. The other is the groom’s brother, the best man. These two are asked to use the honeymoon to Hawaii. Unfortunately, they don’t like each other, but they like the Minnesota winter less. Actually had some funny parts. Acceptable for the genre.
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