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Post by Q-pee on Oct 4, 2022 2:45:47 GMT -5
Here's to your October reading! My first book for Booktober is "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", by Richard Flanagan. It's based on his father's memories of WW2 when he was a POW in a Japanese camp. It's a tough read, with fairly explicit descriptions of unrelenting torture, and the PTSD survivors had. There's a side story where the main character is obsessed with his uncle's wife that I was less interested in. But I recognised the "australianess" of lots of things in the book. I also appreciated that the torturers were humanised by showing the brainwashing (for want of a better word) that they were under, and that one was essentially a prisoner himself (Japan had invaded Korea and forced Koreans into the Imperial Japanese Army). It won the Booker in 2014... so I might get around to this years winner in about a decade Link to September thread. Grateful if the mods could stickify this please.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Oct 4, 2022 5:26:43 GMT -5
Thank you Q. Bookmarking. I found The Narrow Road to the Deep North a hard read, but worth reading.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Oct 4, 2022 5:46:05 GMT -5
What Ozzie said. It is one of the books that the library has in the book club sets but I've told my group I cannot read it again so if someone wants to read it they have to organised that one! Richard Flanagan can be a wonderfully descriptive writer, which is an issue when you are reading about the horrific conditions on the Thai-Burma Railway.
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Post by Q-pee on Oct 4, 2022 8:45:22 GMT -5
I had to read an Agatha Christie in the middle for light relief… the only other time I’ve done that was the book about Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch
Yeah a murder mystery to take my mind off it…
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 4, 2022 16:24:01 GMT -5
Thank you Q! Bookmarking.
I've had "The Narrow..." on my to-read list since first hearing about it, but I keep not quite being up to it.
I'm currently about a third of the way through a John Scalzi (sci-fi) novel that could have been a little more absorbingly written, but I'm working my way through it nonetheless in hope that it will pick up.
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Post by scrubb on Oct 4, 2022 20:11:55 GMT -5
I finished Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith, a couple days ago. Two men meet on a train, and one suggests they could commit the perfect murders by doing them for each other.
One of the reviews I read summed it up well - "a good short story, crammed into 280 pages". Some of the characters were well drawn but it dragged and I ended up skimming a lot of it. And while I think it was worth reading, it also decided me that I don't need to read anything else by her. I didn't like her style enough to bother with more.
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Post by sophie on Oct 5, 2022 0:42:08 GMT -5
Five Wives by Joan Thomas. A fascinating novel based on real events in the 50’s. A group of American evangelical missionaries went into Ecuador, specifically near the land of the Waorani who at the time had no contact with any westerners. Five male missionaries were killed and this novel is focused on the women and children before and after the killings. The author (a Canadian writer whose work I hadn’t read previously) incorporated fictional characters into the events of the ‘50s and also used fictional family members in the present time as part of the story line. This technique was very successful. I can’t say that I sympathized with the evangelical missionary zeal many of the characters had, but I really liked the book. Recommended.
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 5, 2022 1:01:42 GMT -5
We read Strangers on a Train for book club years ago, scrubb, and I hardly remember anything about it, which tells you something! But more recently we read The Talented Mr Ripley and most of us really enjoyed that.
Unusually for me, I read two books by the same author back-to-back. I had Occupation by Julian Fuks (translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Daniel Hahn), and shortly after starting it I realised I was probably more interested in his earlier work, Resistance, so I went back and read that first. Both of them are very short, about 120 pages, works of "auto-fiction", ie, something between autobiography and novel. The author calls his main character Sebastian, although a couple of times the name Julian appears as well. Resistance deals primarily with the life of Fuks' parents, who were Argentine dissidents who fled to Brazil during the dictatorship, and his adopted brother, who may or may not be the son of disappeared people. This is a subject that interests me and I really loved this book. Occupation is partly about a group of people occupying - squatting - in an old hotel in Sao Paulo and partly about the main character's wife trying to get pregnant. I also liked the style of this one, but I didn't like the book quite as much as Resistance.
If you like this style of work, heavily autobiographical and beautifully written, you will probably like these.
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Booktober
Oct 5, 2022 6:23:28 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by scrubb on Oct 5, 2022 6:23:28 GMT -5
Five Wives by Joan Thomas. A fascinating novel based on real events in the 50’s. A group of American evangelical missionaries went into Ecuador, specifically near the land of the Waorani who at the time had no contact with any westerners. Five male missionaries were killed and this novel is focused on the women and children before and after the killings. The author (a Canadian writer whose work I hadn’t read previously) incorporated fictional characters into the events of the ‘50s and also used fictional family members in the present time as part of the story line. This technique was very successful. I can’t say that I sympathized with the evangelical missionary zeal many of the characters had, but I really liked the book. Recommended. I agree it was very worthwhile. I really liked it too.
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Post by scrubb on Oct 5, 2022 15:13:46 GMT -5
Greenwich Park, by Katherine Faulkner. It was on my goodreads "want to read" list so I got it from the library. I don't know when or why it went on that list - it's a thriller/mystery which isn't usually my thing.
It had a decent plot, and I read it fairly quickly and easily, but the main character is irritatingly dense and wishy-washy. And most of the other characters weren't very well drawn so that the big twist ending doesn't feel like much of a shock. If you have no real idea of what a character is like, it's not a psychological surprise if they turn out to be a bad person.
The motivation was also pretty unbelievable.
I had been thinking it wasn't bad, but now that I'm writing about it I'm realizing I don't have anything very nice to say about it!
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 5, 2022 20:59:09 GMT -5
47) John Scalzi, Zoë's Tale
Teenage girl on colony planet saves colony from alien attack!
The beginning was a little draggy because it had a lot of exposition and was way too interested in Zoë's friends and boyfriend and such, though I'll admit that was important for character development. It speeds up eventually and reads kind of like a long Star Trek episode. It kept my attention; there are other books of his with these characters, and I'll return to them at some point, I'm sure.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Oct 5, 2022 22:16:37 GMT -5
That sounds more like my style of science fiction than a lot of what is available today.
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Post by sophie on Oct 6, 2022 20:33:17 GMT -5
Burnt House by Faye Kellerman. A bit older (2007) murder mystery. I read it as a bit of a rest between heavier books, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are enough plot twists and entwined elements that it kept me up late reading.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Oct 8, 2022 4:58:54 GMT -5
61. Crossed Bones, Carolyn Haines. Murder mystery set in the Mississippi delta. I’m not usually a fan of southern belles, but this author questions all the traditional racist and sexist values.
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 8, 2022 21:22:52 GMT -5
48) Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide
This was very good. The protagonist is from a poor background but managed to go to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, where he met two other students who then loom large in the story. But it's really the story of this one man, and the decisions he makes, and kind of about contemporary India itself.
One thing I really liked about it was how so much of it doesn't dumb down the details, relating conversations that were in Hindi in the actual Hindi (with the English added in parentheses), adding deeply imagined descriptions and references to things I know from when I went there and was briefly obsessed with it afterwards. That made it for me a very engrossing novel... not sure if you would like it quite as much if you didn't "get" those references. But still, as a novel about an individual's growth and thought processes, it's definitely good just for that.
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Booktober
Oct 10, 2022 10:51:25 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by scrubb on Oct 10, 2022 10:51:25 GMT -5
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway.
A paean to his youth in Paris, mostly. Categorized as fiction.
I enjoyed it a lot. After reading a biography and this one, I'm much more kindly disposed to him than I was after reading his short stories.
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 10, 2022 19:16:25 GMT -5
49) Benjamin Percy, The Unfamiliar Garden
A short sci-fi novel in which a comet causes a meteor shower, which then causes an alien species of fungus to wreak havoc in Seattle. The protagonists are a mycologist and his ex-wife, a police detective. The writer did his research - there's a lot of accurate discussion of fungal lifestyles, antifungal drugs; interesting stuff.
However, at times it was absolutely horrifically gross to me, since Cordyceps-type fungi finding a way to infect people is my absolute nightmare, so I nearly abandoned it yesterday. But the plot and characters kept me going, and the end was pretty great. This is actually the second book of a three-part series. The author is also a comic book writer, and you can kind of tell - I could easily see this being done as an appallingly gross graphic novel.
I'll read the third one when it becomes available, why not, but I think the next thing I read is going to be Trollope or something that doesn't involve anything with spores.
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 11, 2022 0:00:23 GMT -5
Yeah Liisa, that is kind of an anti-recommendation for me! I can basically do without spores any time.
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 11, 2022 4:55:58 GMT -5
Yeah, and the spores are honestly the least of it. But he's a very creative writer - I'll look for other stuff by him.
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Post by sophie on Oct 11, 2022 23:40:46 GMT -5
Pokes Apart by Terry Fallis. OMG funny. Laughing out loud funny. He’s a Canadian writer who has carved out a niche for himself in the tradition of Stephen Leacock. Most of his books would be understood by American readers despite our culture differences. This one definitely would. Takes place mostly in the US. Free lance writer Everett Kane has to move to Florida to help care for his father. While there, he starts blogging about something he is passionate and ends up in all sorts of entanglements. Loved it; not deep or life changing but sure fit the bill this week.
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Post by mei on Oct 12, 2022 10:43:30 GMT -5
The Richard Flanagan book is really impressive, I thought. Hard read, but beautifully done.
Finally finished #14, Normal People by Sally Rooney. Good travel read. Really enjoyed it.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Oct 13, 2022 7:33:06 GMT -5
62. The Bellbird River Country Choir, Sophie Green. I’ve sung in several country town choirs. They all have their own quirks. This follows 5 women who join the choir in a small fictional town near Tamworth, as their friendships grow and enhance their lives.
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Post by mei on Oct 13, 2022 14:25:26 GMT -5
And #16: The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a grown-up economy. Written by Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams. I have been reading this for a while and had 10 pages more to go which I didn't really get to until this afternoon. It's a good book, but I found it harder to read than others on this topic. It shows how growth is not the goal of what economies should aim for but instead should aim for 'arrival': an economy that has matured and is wealthy enough to support its population to have a good life. Many countries are already way past this point, and should be focusing on redistribution and correcting inequality instead of believing 'more growth' will fix it. (Ms Truss, are you listening?) Not necessarily new arguments to me, but well put together in language that is easy to relate to. I wish more politicians would read this kind of stuff :-(
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Post by sophie on Oct 14, 2022 0:02:02 GMT -5
Long Shadows by David Baldacci. A good murder mystery/ thriller in his memory man series featuring Amos Decker. Not top literature but an excellent story. Enjoyed it.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Oct 14, 2022 6:05:21 GMT -5
63. The Steam Pump Jump. Jodi Taylor A funny short episode in The Chronicles of St Mary’s
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Post by Liiisa on Oct 15, 2022 19:46:04 GMT -5
50) Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway
Well this was a page-turner. I don't even know how to start... an incredibly convoluted plot involving two brothers from Nebraska who are both very appealing characters and have a heroic adventure of sorts. Recommended
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Post by scrubb on Oct 16, 2022 12:59:23 GMT -5
83) The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich. An enjoyable, easy to read story set in the 1950s when there was a move to "stop federal support" of the Turtle Indians in North Dakota. It's based on her grandfather who fought the initiative by Congress, but also presents a fuller picture of life on the Reservation by following several other characters too.
Although I enjoyed it, it didn't carry the impact of a couple of her previous books (like LaRose, which I really loved).
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Post by sprite on Oct 16, 2022 13:38:22 GMT -5
The Poppy War
This hold came through near the end of my holiday, and I finished it in a few nights. It's a reimagining of the conflicts between China and Japan, post-European contact. A young woman gets into a prestigious military college, then discovers she's a shaman. Pain and chaos ensue.
A well-written historical fantasy, with moments of light humour to stop it being too full of itself. I think Sophie said it was quite violent, and I agree. A lot of people are incredibly horrific to each other and sometimes themselves. I'll read the others in this series, but I'l space them out.
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Post by scrubb on Oct 16, 2022 14:06:46 GMT -5
Hmmm. I read The Poppy War a few months ago, and although I enjoyed the first half of the first book, it went quickly downhill IMO. The heroine was annoying and often idiotic and as both sophie and sprite said, it was extremely violent and there were absolutely no likeable characters or people to care about, and it wasn't at all clear whether there was a side to cheer for in the conflict. I finished the book but had no interest in the rest of the series.
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Post by lillielangtry on Oct 17, 2022 3:00:05 GMT -5
My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (various authors and translators) Maclehose Press published this incredible anthology of short stories by Afghan women under extremely difficult circumstances (which have since become even more difficult). It's amazing. Hardly surprising, many of the stories are extremely sad and hard in subject matter - yes, there is war, hunger, awful treatment of women, etc. I couldn't just read them back to back but interspersed them with other things. There is one story about a girl's determination to go to school that I literally read through tears. But I also felt the literary quality was very high; these stories are not just of interest because of their origin but are fascinating, interestingly structured pieces. Highly recommended, although with the caveat for content mentioned above.
Dina Salustio, The Madwoman of Serrano (translated by Jethro Soutar) My read for Cape Verde. I found this novel rather difficult to get into, but I think that's because it goes backwards and forwards in time and I kept just reading a few pages at a time and getting a bit lost. But it is interesting, with a magic realism feel to it.
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