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Post by scrubb on Apr 1, 2023 18:25:48 GMT -5
Ok, pretty sure the April Showers thing has been used before but I wasn't feeling creative...
This morning I finished 30. Kevin Wilson - Now is Not the Time to Panic. I loved it. Am so impressed with the author's ability to get into the minds of young girls and women.
A teenage girl and a boy she meets during summer holidays make an art piece together that turns their town upside down. I think that maybe one of the things that really resounded for me was how the main character did something that felt so significant, and really was significant, and continued to be significant (to her, at least) - when I was that age I really ached to find that kind of significance.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Apr 1, 2023 22:42:24 GMT -5
Bookmarking. Thank you Scrubb.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 2, 2023 6:32:43 GMT -5
scrubb, isn't that book great? I just love Kevin Wilson. And thank you - I just started a book (Flux, by Jinwoo Chong) last night so it'll be a couple days.
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Post by mei on Apr 3, 2023 8:16:07 GMT -5
I just opened up my book spreadsheet to put in a book I finished yesterday to see it empty for 2023... and I also can't find any books listed in the threads here! I did read a few easy books a while ago, and gave up on several. But I finished a (I think) third book this year yesterday: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. A small, short book which was easy to read but for me not very captivating. Short sentences, chapters, not a lot of activitity of much of a story. It observes/shares the life of a woman who marries, has a baby, marital issues. It covers quite a few years and it's very observing & reflective. One interesting twist was a style thing where the author switches perspective, which I thought was quite clever. It was a book club book for a meeting I couldn't attend in the end so a bit of a disappointment overall!
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Post by sophie on Apr 3, 2023 8:24:24 GMT -5
Babel by R.F. Kuang. I loved this novel. It’s a different type of genre.. not fantasy, not alternate history (author calls it arcane history) but something in between the two. It is set in the 1830’s, mostly in Oxford, where students are taught translating and silver working which powers the colonial powers. The main characters are most from ‘the colonies’ and chosen for their language proficiency. As events unfold, they become increasingly aware of their role in colonization of world regions and react. Lots of food for thought as I read this novel and the role language plays in the colonization process.
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Post by lillielangtry on Apr 4, 2023 12:22:05 GMT -5
Oh no, mei... you have reminded me to update my book spreadsheet though!
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing This is one of Atwood's earliest novels (1972). I picked it up on a free shelf sometime last year. It was interesting to read because in some ways it was very far from her more recent work, and that there were moments when the Atwood I know came through very clearly. It's about a young woman from a remote Canadian island, who returns there with her boyfriend - who she doesn't seem to care for much - and a couple of friends, ostensibly to look for her father, who has disappeared. She is the only one who has any idea of how to use a canoe, fish, light a fire, etc, and intrusive modernity is represented by "Americans". As they stay longer, they all find themselves affected by their surroundings, but the main character most of all. The story shifts from strictly realistic to a sort of dreamlike, nature narrative.
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Post by scrubb on Apr 4, 2023 23:06:10 GMT -5
What did you think of it, lillie?
It was the first Atwood I read - I was 19 - and I really hated it. But, my sister had negatively predisposed me against Atwood in advance of me reading it (for a class), and I have always wondered if I would have disliked it so much otherwise.
That said, even after I became an Atwood fan, there were still several of her books I thought weren't very good. So I haven't bothered to reread that one to see if I appreciate it more now.
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Post by lillielangtry on Apr 5, 2023 0:54:26 GMT -5
What did you think of it, lillie? It was the first Atwood I read - I was 19 - and I really hated it. But, my sister had negatively predisposed me against Atwood in advance of me reading it (for a class), and I have always wondered if I would have disliked it so much otherwise. That said, even after I became an Atwood fan, there were still several of her books I thought weren't very good. So I haven't bothered to reread that one to see if I appreciate it more now. Hard to say, scrubb. I think from the perspective of an Atwood fan, I liked it - I enjoy her style, and her two big, overarching themes - women and nature - are definitely there. But I think if it'd had been the first Atwood I'd picked up, I would have forgotten it quickly and never read another one! I prefer her more speculative works. My favourite is Year of the Flood, closely followed by The Handmaid's Tale and the rest of the Maddaddam trilogy.
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Post by scrubb on Apr 5, 2023 13:45:37 GMT -5
Agree with much of that. I think The Year of the Flood is her best, and I also love The Blind Assassin, and think The Handmaid's Tale, and the rest of MaddAdam are great. I'm not as fond of most of her earlier works, but really have a soft spot for Lady Oracle. It turned me into an Atwood fan, when it was 1 of 3 English books I had during 3 months in Indonesia. I reread each of them several times, and liked that one better on each reading.
(The other 2 were a Clive Cussler - a thin one- and a Maeve Binchy. The Cussler had very annoying elements. I liked the Binchy.)
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 5, 2023 16:09:48 GMT -5
29) Jinwoo Chong, Flux
An Elizabeth Holmes-type has a flashy company that supposedly is making perpetual batteries but actually is quite different from that. The protagonist, a young partly Korean gay man, ends up working there. I thought this was really interesting, complex stuff, the way the sci-fi aspects of his employment get interwoven with the story of his family and childhood.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Apr 6, 2023 1:07:42 GMT -5
This morning I finished 30. Kevin Wilson - Now is Not the Time to Panic. I loved it. Am so impressed with the author's ability to get into the minds of young girls and women. A teenage girl and a boy she meets during summer holidays make an art piece together that turns their town upside down. I think that maybe one of the things that really resounded for me was how the main character did something that felt so significant, and really was significant, and continued to be significant (to her, at least) - when I was that age I really ached to find that kind of significance. I found that in the library today so picked it up.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 6, 2023 4:48:20 GMT -5
As I noted elsewhere, that was my favorite book of the year.
I looked by other stuff by him when I was at the library the other day but didn't see anything; I know he's got earlier stuff that I haven't read yet, so I'll have to go online and put myself on the hold list for it.
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Post by lillielangtry on Apr 6, 2023 5:50:34 GMT -5
Agree with much of that. I think The Year of the Flood is her best, and I also love The Blind Assassin, and think The Handmaid's Tale, and the rest of MaddAdam are great. I'm not as fond of most of her earlier works, but really have a soft spot for Lady Oracle. It turned me into an Atwood fan, when it was 1 of 3 English books I had during 3 months in Indonesia. I reread each of them several times, and liked that one better on each reading. (The other 2 were a Clive Cussler - a thin one- and a Maeve Binchy. The Cussler had very annoying elements. I liked the Binchy.) I don't think I've read Lady Oracle. I have another older volume of her short stories, also a secondhand find, waiting for me. I devoured the Blind Assassin when it first came out but haven't reread it and don't remember much about it. p.s. Great anecdote about having to read the same books over and over ;-)
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Apr 6, 2023 6:17:40 GMT -5
I’d never heard of Margaret Atwood until canayjun gave me a copy of The Blind Assassin to read while I was visiting her in Canada. It opened up a new world.
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Post by riverhorse on Apr 6, 2023 6:18:52 GMT -5
Have just finished The Whalebone Theatre by Johanna Quinn. The story of the Seagrave family, particularly misfit Christabel, from 1919 to post-war England, in a rambling, unmanageable old manor by the sea in Dorset. Christabel flees into making up and putting on plays, dragging reluctant relatives and house staff to participate, in The Whalebone Theatre she makes out of the skeleton of a washed up whale carcass.
As an adult, we follow her adventures as she joins the SOE and is parachuted into France to work with the resistance.
At times this felt like several stories in one, due to the long time line. However, it's well-written, with lots of interesting minor characters and Christabel is very well-drawn as the rebel misfit trying to find her place in the world.
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Post by scrubb on Apr 6, 2023 15:34:29 GMT -5
Finally finished another of Elizabeth George's massive tomes. 31) A Traitor to Memory, one of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. It was well done, kept me guessing till late in the book, and (as usual) developed several characters well. I need a break before I read any more of hers, though - this time I started finding the backstory provided for every character and every event a bit too much, while normally I enjoy it.
Also, the very ending kind of wrecked things for me a bit, unfortunately. There's a final act that felt unnecessary, overly dramatic, and also that was rather clumsily manipulated and a bit unbelievable.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 8, 2023 6:50:25 GMT -5
30) N. K. Jemisin, The World We Make
Ohhhh I loved this. It's the sequel to the other one from a couple years ago, the one where this group of people become magical embodiments of the boroughs of New York and have to fight off an evil presence from the multiverse. This sequel is the denouement to the whole thing, in which the bad guys are so obviously a representation of global racist authoritarianism that it just made the whole thing a delight to read.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Apr 8, 2023 7:58:12 GMT -5
I tried the first one and didn't get very far.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 8, 2023 8:07:39 GMT -5
I tried the first one and didn't get very far. Maybe you have to know New York really well to get it? I imagine a novel with that premise based in Sydney would be the same for me. There are a LOT of inside jokes that you'd only really get if you were from there, like all the Staten Island stuff. (Yeah I'm from Connecticut, but it was the NYC suburbs part of CT -- so that's close enough to get the joke.) This second novel is the same that way -- but also has a lot more international stuff, with an underlying idea of "cities are important in themselves," which maybe a broader audience would get. But yeah, in the end it's NYC.
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Post by lillielangtry on Apr 10, 2023 11:16:34 GMT -5
I listened to 2 audiobooks by Zen Cho for my read from Malaysia. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - a novella about a nun with magical powers who joins a gang, and Black Water Sister - a contemporary fantasy with a lesbian main character who gets possessed by the spirit of her dead grandmother. This is really far from my usual genre, but it's got a fast-moving plot and lots of interesting detail, so on the whole, I enjoyed it. I would have classed it as YA as it definitely has coming-of-age vibes, but apparently it is supposed to be adult fiction.
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Post by scrubb on Apr 10, 2023 15:25:07 GMT -5
32) Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch. Another in the Rivers of London series. Enjoyable.
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Post by mei on Apr 11, 2023 14:08:35 GMT -5
finished another book, #4!
Title is 'Polderjapanner' which is difficult to translate, by Fumiko Miura. It's a book in which she shares what it has been like living in the Netherlands for over 20 years now as a Japanese woman, and how Japan and the Netherlands are different. Fun to read, not a lot of new stuff but always interesting to read someone's personal experience.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 11, 2023 17:42:48 GMT -5
That sounds like it was written for you, mei, with all your knowledge of Japan!
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Apr 11, 2023 18:24:10 GMT -5
19. Pancakes and Corpses, Agatha Frost. A meh cozy mystery set in an English village, by an author who claims to live in England, but writes like an American. There seem to be a lot of wannabe authors who do this, so there must be a market. I won’t bother with any more of hers.
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Post by sophie on Apr 11, 2023 18:33:02 GMT -5
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor. A good crime/ Indian mafia type of book, where poverty and extreme wealth collide. The story is told via several characters: Ajay, who as a child was sold into servitude and ended up as a key servant to Sunny. Sunny, the playboy heir who has everything but feels he is missing the most important bits to be happy, and Neda, a journalist caught in the clash of riches and poverty. The last part of the book wasn’t as well written, hints mysteriously dropped but never resolved but I couldn’t put it down. I liked it.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 12, 2023 5:34:23 GMT -5
ozzie then I'll bet the author's name isn't really "Agatha Frost" either, since no one here has been named Agatha for several generations. Anyway....
31) Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night
Centers on the life and thoughts of a Japanese woman who is a freelance proofreader and is very passive. I nearly abandoned it halfway through because she starts drinking a lot, like carrying around a thermos of sake with her everywhere and going through cases of vodka and whatnot, and I thought ugh please cut back, this is getting depressing. But I'm glad I didn't because it was really very well written.
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Post by lillielangtry on Apr 13, 2023 5:09:02 GMT -5
Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Der Hass der Liebenden (orig title: los que aman, odian; EN Where there's love, there's hate) Ocampo and Casares were both prominent Argentinian writers and were married to each other, but this is the only book they wrote together (first published in the 1940s). It's a short crime novel with lots of literary references set in a hotel in which the guests are trapped by a sandstorm - classic! The narrator is a pompous ass who's always going on about homeopathy, and apparently addicted to it (is that even possible?!). Sadly for me it didn't live up to its promise. I found it hard to tell the characters apart and ultimately forgettable. Possibly me because there's a lot of love for this book.
Agatha Christie, Cat Among the Pigeons (Here's a real Agatha!) This is another one I read several times as a teen and I REALLY enjoyed revisiting it. The story is great, with a spy element and a murder element and a girls' school element. Poirot doesn't show up til three quarters of the way through. I will say, there's a lot of talk in this about "Middle Eastern" people, the appearance of women and girls from the region, their attitude to democracy which... you just have to take it for what it is, because the plot hangs on it and if you removed those parts it wouldn't make any sense. In fact, in one way the English characters' prejudices prevent them from seeing something important that Poirot identifies, so you could say Christie is playing with those stereotypes, if you were being generous. But there's some stuff that would in no way be published for the first time today. I just wanted to put that out there - I absolutely loved reading this again.
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Post by riverhorse on Apr 14, 2023 7:40:48 GMT -5
"Daisy Jones and The Six" by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I blasted through this in a day, I couldn't put it down. Quite some significant differences to the Amazon series, including a little more insight into some of the characters. I'm glad they gave Billy's wife Camila a lot more independence and agency in the series.
At times I wished that the interview format had been used a bit more sparingly throughout the entire narrative, like in the series, but all in all, a great read.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Apr 15, 2023 5:53:37 GMT -5
20. A Great Reckoning, Louise Penny. A very good read in the Inspector Gamache Three Pines series. 21. Mummy Dearest, Joan Hess. Cozy mystery in a series I’ve enjoyed, set in Egypt, with references to Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody. A fun read.
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Post by Liiisa on Apr 15, 2023 9:14:16 GMT -5
32) Alan Garner, Treacle Walker
Really a novella — a little thing that’s kind of like a folk tale with a boy who encounters two strange magical people. Really marvelous.
(It’s not available in the US yet in solid form— I was going to wait, but decided to make it one of the kindle books I bought for this trip.)
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