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Post by scrubb on Sept 15, 2022 19:44:40 GMT -5
Ick. The Little Paris Bookshop, by Nina George. I think I realized it was going to be a romance but the initial premise was intriguing - the main character has a barge on the Seine in Paris which is a bookshop, except he "prescribes" the right book for the right person. This is the premise of Chocolat. I've been tempted a couple of times by this book and I'm glad I resisted. If you want something intriguing with the charm of Chocolat, try "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Geoffrey Trousselot (Translator) I must have read Chocolat a long time ago, because I'd forgotten the book premise. Yeah, I liked "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" quite a bit. Just finished "Just One Evil Act" by Elizabeth George - one of the Inspector Lynley mystery series. It focuses on his partner, Havers, on a personal case. Liked it quite a bit, though the little bits and pieces with Lynley in them weren't very interesting in comparison to the main story.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 16, 2022 6:31:11 GMT -5
58. More Ketchup than Salsa, joe Cawley. A funny account of a British family who bought a bar in Tenerife.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 16, 2022 17:16:15 GMT -5
I Am, I Am, I Am: 17 Brushes with Death, by Maggie O'Farrell. It's a memoire, jumping around in time, with each chapter about a brush with death - ranging from childhood illness, to being attacked, to almost drowning, to childbirth. (And some of the brushes with death are not precisely her life being threatened.)
I really, really liked it.
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Post by tzarine on Sept 17, 2022 11:07:29 GMT -5
front desk a ya novel bout an immigrant fam that runs a cheap hotel near disneyland seen thru the eyes of the 10 year old daughter fun light read
lectures on literature v nabokov
from the best professor ever! great insights lucid, entertaining analysis of the classics bleak house, madame bovary
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Post by snowwhite on Sept 19, 2022 11:09:35 GMT -5
Finally got around to reading Big Sky by Kate Atkinson, and now she has another one out later this year.
Have started reading Outlander, not having seen any of the TV adaptation(s). It's OK but somewhat slow in terms of narrative pace...
Anyone read and like it? Or is it not really worth the effort? Also reading 'Are We Having Fun Yet?' by a Guardian journalist, which was a birthday present. It's OK so far, seems a bit semi-autobiographical - lots of professional/middle class families in the same vein as various FB blog-type spin-off books.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 19, 2022 12:36:34 GMT -5
I read about 1/3 of Outlander before petering out. It just didn't keep my attention.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 19, 2022 21:59:34 GMT -5
First Person Singular: Stories, by Haruki Murakami. Several of the stories seem more like memoirs, but there are others that are clearly fiction. I enjoyed them all.
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Post by Q-pee on Sept 20, 2022 15:04:13 GMT -5
Have started reading Outlander, not having seen any of the TV adaptation(s). It's OK but somewhat slow in terms of narrative pace... Anyone read and like it? Or is it not really worth the effort? I've watched the first series or two, up till they landed in the US, at which point I thought it got too stupid... They look the same as when they first met, and yet they're supposed to have done about three lifetimes of living. There's no way I'd bother reading the books.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 20, 2022 19:46:40 GMT -5
43) Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
Ooh, I really enjoyed this. How to describe it, though....
It's a book of essays? stories? organized in chapters by different types of rocks and minerals. He talks about the indigenous people and early colonization of Manhattan by setting it in a discussion of the marble outcrops in the Inwood neighborhood; about Neolithic Scotland by a description of the 2-billion-year-old gneiss underlying it there, etc. It's effective and engaging because he wraps each story with people and his own experiences in those places.
I'd read some recommendation or review when it came out in 2020 and put it on my to-read list but then only just got around to finding it this year, so I really had no idea what it was going to be about. It was a very pleasant surprise.
PS: I just learned that he's written a similar book called "Insectopedia," so that definitely goes on the list.
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Post by sophie on Sept 20, 2022 22:09:06 GMT -5
Finished the second book in the trilogy I’m reading. The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang. Vengeance, friendship and power all mixed in equal parts. About to start book 3.
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Post by snowwhite on Sept 21, 2022 3:12:33 GMT -5
Have started reading Outlander, not having seen any of the TV adaptation(s). It's OK but somewhat slow in terms of narrative pace... Anyone read and like it? Or is it not really worth the effort? I've watched the first series or two, up till they landed in the US, at which point I thought it got too stupid... They look the same as when they first met, and yet they're supposed to have done about three lifetimes of living. There's no way I'd bother reading the books. Thanks - I figured the first one was worth a go at least... I hadn't remotely committed to all ten or whatever it is now.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 22, 2022 21:46:02 GMT -5
The Invisible Circus, by Jennifer Egan. Her first novel. It was good, but I think she improved with her later books.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 26, 2022 0:18:17 GMT -5
Memories of Love, by Aminatta Forna. Set in Sierra Leone both before snd after the civil war.
It was excellent, but it felt just a little bit long. At the same time, I can't think of anything ybat felt extraneous.
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Post by sprite on Sept 26, 2022 3:24:35 GMT -5
I gave up on Lincoln in the Bardo. I figured if I'm 50 pages in and still hadn't worked out where the Bardo was, I'm probably missing a lot of other stuff. I kind of assume the Bardo is the cemetary? Anyhoo. I can see that it's well done and creative and clever, but I was having to work really hard to stay in the story. All the little excerpts from other people's books kept making me go off on mental tangents.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 26, 2022 4:31:03 GMT -5
59. The Elusive Mrs Pollifax, Dorothy Gilman. I think this is the best yet.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 26, 2022 5:00:40 GMT -5
You have to be in the right mood for Lincoln in the Bardo!
I believe the Bardo is the same as what is in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I remember being like a waiting room after you die, before you reincarnate again.
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Post by Q-pee on Sept 27, 2022 0:56:07 GMT -5
Death in the Clouds - Agatha Christie
as a bit of light relief from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is an intense read... and somewhat irritating. I'm fine with the main story of prisoner of war/Burma railway part of the story. It's intense and grueling but I've read first person account and had a relative who was a Japanese POW so it's not new.
But the love interest part of the story is just horrible writing. You'd know a man wrote it by how he describes women's bodies and clothing. So I grind my teeth a little and skim read those bits.
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Post by lillielangtry on Sept 27, 2022 1:13:58 GMT -5
Andrea Camilleri, Die Rache des schönen Geschlechts I was starting to think I wasn't enjoying my Montalbano reads as much, but this volume - of three short stories and three long ones, practically novellas - was really good. Perfect relaxation.
Two rereads for book club: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys' masterpiece, a prequel to Jane Eyre focusing on the character of Mr Rochester's first wife, Bertha/Antoinette. Rhys has such a spare style, no extraneous word anywhere, the whole book is barely 150 pages long, but it does so much. It conjures up the atmosphere of the Caribbean together with the Gothic of Jane Eyre. Wonderful.
And to remind myself, I also listened to (most of) the audiobook of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, brilliantly read on Audible by Thandiwe Newton. I did have to fast forward a few bits to get to the relevant wedding scene before book club. I don't know how many times I've read this book - 3 recorded instances on Goodreads, but many times before Goodreads existed!
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Post by sophie on Sept 27, 2022 23:53:37 GMT -5
Finished! The trilogy has been conquered! The last book of this trilogy, The Burning God by R.F. Kuang. The whole series is based on Chinese legends and history. It’s also a rather dark work, dealing with the price and sacrifices made when there is warfare, for whatever reason. The author is a skilled and intelligent writer and she takes the reader for quite the ride. She has won some awards and nominations for her work. And she will be even better in her future work. It’s not an easy read and I found the level of violence over the top in some places. But hey.. it’s fantasy, isn’t it?
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Sept 28, 2022 7:14:53 GMT -5
60. Mullumbimby, Melissa Lucashenko. A story set in the region I’ve lived in since 1985, told from a First Nations (Bundjalung) perspective. Loved it.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 28, 2022 16:29:34 GMT -5
44) NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory
An allegory of Zimbabwe, and all African and other countries that have been under the control of tyrants. All the characters are animals, and somehow it works. There are parts of this book that are brutally violent, so warning about that. But the sun shines again at the end. I thought it was very good; intense and excellent.
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Post by scrubb on Sept 29, 2022 14:48:31 GMT -5
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, by Emily Danforth. A coming of age story for a lesbian growing up in rural bible belt Montana. Mostly well done and highly readable.
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Post by sophie on Sept 29, 2022 23:58:07 GMT -5
The It Girl by Ruth Ware. A murder mystery set in Oxford but events which solve it (or rather get the real murderer instead of the man who died in jail who had been found guilty) occur in Edinburg 10 years later. It’s a jumpy book, changing time and location too frequently, and I didn’t care for it.
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Post by Liiisa on Sept 30, 2022 14:32:06 GMT -5
45) Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet
I think other people here have read this already? It's historical fiction that told a story about Shakespeare's son who died young, and the effect of that death on the family. I found it hard to put down, and interestingly told. I particularly liked how the name "Will Shakespeare" was never said anywhere in the novel - it was always "the father" or "her husband" or the like. An interesting novel that I found I wanted to be reading instead of doing anything else.
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 2, 2022 11:56:35 GMT -5
46) Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun
Weirdly this book was coincidentally related to "Hamlet" too, except only very tangentially.
In the near future a novelist is in LA because his book has been optioned for a movie. He goes out there thinking that he's going to be involved intellectually in the project, but instead ends up doing errands and chaperoning the star of the movie, a Lindsay Lohan kind of problematic former child star (who ends up being a sympathetic, complex character).
That all happens with the background of the environmental devastation of the near future, particularly how there is now hardly any water in California anymore. A corporation has figured out how to make synthetic water in a laboratory and people are drinking it and using it in their homes, but there is something problematic about it.
At first I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but I was won over by the description of what it's like for someone from New England to go to LA for the first time - the dryness, the insubstantiality and plastic newness of it all; it felt deeply familiar to me from the first couple times I went out there. And then the writing and the very weird plot carried me along. I thought it was pretty great by the end.
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Post by mei on Oct 12, 2022 13:15:36 GMT -5
I forgot to add this book: #15 Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 12, 2022 15:17:42 GMT -5
mei - did you like it? I almost picked it up yesterday but resisted because I found The Buried Giant incredibly irritating
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Post by mei on Oct 13, 2022 7:03:54 GMT -5
mei - did you like it? I almost picked it up yesterday but resisted because I found The Buried Giant incredibly irritating I did, but didn't love it. It took a while to get into the story though. It's an interesting premise set in a nearby future. I haven't read much else by him so I can't really compare it.
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