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Post by Liiisa on Jun 12, 2023 4:50:25 GMT -5
Ooh lillie, that does sound good.
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Post by scrubb on Jun 12, 2023 17:42:55 GMT -5
Yes, you've made me want to read it, lillie.
51) Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Without being sexist, I felt like this one fits with a bunch of other books by middle aged men that have the main theme of naval-gazing. It made me think of Philip Roth, and John Updike, and Saul Herzog. All really good writers, but I dunno, I get impatient with endless mental rehashing of internal monologues and what should have happened and why things are so sad and what could have been different and constant focus on minutia and sex and self and on and on and on. No doubt there are women authors who do it too, but either I'm more sympathetic to their focus so I don't notice it (entirely possible), or it's less likely to have made it into he lists of "quality literature" and I've just read less of it.
I mean, I'm not sorry I read it, but I don't think I would recommend it to most people, either.
ETA: I've just come back to add the word "and sex" to the line about "constant focus on minutia and self...." above. The characters are always obsessed with their penises and usually with wanking, it seems.
I realized that Mordecai Richler also fits into this category, but I still like reading his books because he does it with a bit of humour, and he's just such a fantastic writer
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Post by Liiisa on Jun 12, 2023 17:48:01 GMT -5
Thank you scrubb. Yeah I'm really tired of that genre.
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Post by Liiisa on Jun 12, 2023 18:49:29 GMT -5
48) Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel)
This starts out fairly straightforwardly - or does it? Part of the plot is about a series of places that are set up as authentic apartments from specific times and places in order to help people with dementia reorient themselves, but then that spins off into an analogy with the backwards-facing political movements of today - then it shifts into a number of short reminiscences, and talking about time itself.
It doesn't really have a plot as such, which is why it took me a while to read, but I really enjoyed it in those m moments I was reading it. It has a lot of humor in it, much of it from the wry perspective of someone who grew up in a country from the former Soviet bloc.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 12, 2023 23:18:09 GMT -5
Oh, the winner of the Booker International? Interesting.
I had a long train journey yesterday so I read a novella: We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets, translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault. It's about a young woman who takes a job as a content moderator at an unnamed social media platform, watching all the stuff that's too disturbing, or illegal, for the rest of us to see. I think it does a decent job at showing what that must be like and how it might be traumatic. There's not much plot other than that.
I like reading a whole book on a travel day, so if anyone has a recommendation for something around the 100-150 page mark for the way back, go ahead!
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Post by Liiisa on Jun 13, 2023 4:53:55 GMT -5
Yes, exactly - I found out about it because I follow the Booker account on Twitter.
I've read quite a few amusing short novels this year (how do you think I got to 48 books and it's only June). I'll put together a list.
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Post by Q-pee on Jun 16, 2023 11:30:04 GMT -5
Just started reading Stanley Tucci's Food memoir "Taste"
I'm going to be hungry until I finish reading it.
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Post by sprite on Jun 16, 2023 14:21:47 GMT -5
Skara: The First Wave. (Andrew Appleby)
Book 1 in a triology of Neolithic Orkney (Scotland). In some ways good, however it reads like an amateur, but dedicated, archeologist, went on a novel-writing course and then convinced someone on the Orkney Tourism Board to publish the result.
Shala and Oiwa live in very different places, but both have visions of each other. Oiwa goes on a 'coming of age' journey with his older cousin, and by the end of Book 1 has decided to follow his visions--which we know will lead him to Shala's islands. Coincidentally, Shala's community is suffering from a lack of genetic diversity.
I'm not sure if I'll hunt for the next two books, but if I find them, I'll read them. There are A LOT of detail about food, burials, flint making...
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Post by Liiisa on Jun 16, 2023 18:31:33 GMT -5
49) Nicholas Binge, Ascension
WHY did I read this book? No, I know why I read it - I saw a capsule review of it and it looked intriguing. The real question is why didn't I stop? It had its compelling moments but really it was like one of those crap 1960's sci-fi novels that I love so much, but I love them because they're stupid and only 100 pages long, while this was 350 pages long.
OK, so the protagonist is a genius physicist who ends up being on an expedition sort of against his will to climb a 45,000-foot mountain that has appeared out of nowhere, and his ex-wife is there and also some tentacle aliens and also stuff about evolution and God and tesseracts and mountaineering. There's a plot, which is well crafted in that I did feel compelled to continue reading it, but every fifty pages or so I would put it down and say "This book, what the hell."
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Post by sophie on Jun 16, 2023 18:51:12 GMT -5
To Track a Traitor by Iona Whishaw. One in a series of rather genteel murder mysteries which I find really satisfying. They are set in a region I grew up in, but post WW2. A woman who had been in the British secret service during the war ends up in a small town in western Canada and had various mysteries land in her lap. In this particular one, she has to go back to the UK to help her sister while her husband (a Canadian and the local chief of police) also ends up there to solve a murder mystery from WW1.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 18, 2023 2:11:39 GMT -5
C. J. Sansom, Dark Fire A reread of the 2nd in the Shardlake series. Even though I partly remembered who the bad guys were, this stood up to a second reading. Sansom is a master at slowly ramping up the tension and I love the research he has done (except in the last in this series, which I felt was overlong and won't be rereading)
Mikaela Nyman et al, Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu Women's Anthology I gave this 3 stars for the achievement of producing the first ever anthology of Women's writing from the small Pacific nation. I learned some stuff about the country (having known basically nothing before...) and there a few decent stories in here. There is also a fair amount of material that does not have much literary merit. But as I say, it's hardly fair to compare with a country with a developed publishing industry.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jun 18, 2023 3:48:54 GMT -5
I found Sansom’s books too dark and bloodthirsty! Meanwhile, your post about niVanuatu writers prompted me to do another check for women writers from Solomon Islands. Jully Makini (Sipolo) is a poet, and there is also a collection of poems by women, including Jully, Afu Billy and Hazel Lulei. Apart from that I have a mystery novel by Anne Kengalu, a teacher from New Zealand who married a local man and ran a shell shop in Honiara for many years. iIf that would qualify, I could send it to you. I’m hoping to catch up with my local friend in the holidays coming up in a couple of weeks, and will ask her if she knows any others.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jun 18, 2023 4:01:19 GMT -5
37. Death and the Madonna, Joan O’Hagan. Murder mystery set among the wealthy expat community in Italy, by an Australian writer. This book, written in the 1980s, felt a bit tedious compared with the many mysteries around today. I was interested in how community attitudes to the position of women have changed during my adult life.
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Post by sophie on Jun 18, 2023 10:10:05 GMT -5
Dark Angel by John Stanford. A bit of a spy/adventure thriller involving computer geeks and various interesting characters. Partly tied in to his other characters from other series. Bit too much ‘shoot ‘em up’ for my tastes but kept me reading.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 18, 2023 23:58:20 GMT -5
I found Sansom’s books too dark and bloodthirsty! Meanwhile, your post about niVanuatu writers prompted me to do another check for women writers from Solomon Islands. Jully Makini (Sipolo) is a poet, and there is also a collection of poems by women, including Jully, Afu Billy and Hazel Lulei. Apart from that I have a mystery novel by Anne Kengalu, a teacher from New Zealand who married a local man and ran a shell shop in Honiara for many years. iIf that would qualify, I could send it to you. I’m hoping to catch up with my local friend in the holidays coming up in a couple of weeks, and will ask her if she knows any others. Thanks so much for this offer Ozzie! I remember we discussed ideas before but I need to check my Excel sheet when I get a minute and see if I had anything prepared for Solomon Islands (I doubt it, but I'll check!) and then I'll send you a message :-)
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 19, 2023 12:33:08 GMT -5
I tried to start the new Eleanor Catton on my long train journey yesterday but I was tired and it was crowded and I just couldn't focus on it.
I listened to a whole audiobook, admittedly a just 2 hour-long one - Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road. It's a collection of the New York author's letters to, and from, a London bookshop as she started ordering from them in the later 1940s. It's really really sweet, and amazing to think how about times changed. She starts sending the bookshop staff gifts of food parcels for Christmas and Easter as the UK still had strict rationing in the early 1950s.
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Post by scrubb on Jun 19, 2023 17:19:59 GMT -5
I really enjoy that book, Lillie.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 20, 2023 0:01:10 GMT -5
I really enjoy that book, Lillie. I kept hearing about how good it was. Honestly for a long time I was being a bit stingy about using an audiobook credit, my only one for the month, on something two hours long. But good short books are a true joy. I was in the shower this morning thinking about the part where she sends the bookshop a ham before realising the owners' names are Marks and Cohen and worrying she might have offended them - but in any case, they tell the staff to keep all the contents of the parcel. There's an antiquarian bookshop on Charing Cross Road that I think was used for the filming of the adaptation, but is not in fact at number 84.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jun 20, 2023 8:18:03 GMT -5
38. The Bullet that Missed, Richard Osman. I want to move to a retirement village with a Thursday Murder Club.
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Post by Liiisa on Jun 21, 2023 5:03:09 GMT -5
I hope that implies that you would be solving murders, not causing them.
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Post by scrubb on Jun 21, 2023 14:37:51 GMT -5
I read it to mean that they'd only commit murders on Thursdays, which seems restrained on one level, but not so restrained on another!
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Post by scrubb on Jun 22, 2023 22:12:50 GMT -5
52) Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng
I liked it a lot, and felt it got better as it went on. Maybe 2/3 of the way through I decided it was a bit too black and white with the good guys and the bad guys, but it redeemed itself by revealing shades of grey in everyone.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jun 24, 2023 7:29:58 GMT -5
39. Murder as a Second Language, Joan Hess. Funny murder mystery set in a language school in an American college town.
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Post by sophie on Jun 24, 2023 15:19:41 GMT -5
Simply Lies by David Baldacci. Reasonably good thriller, with hidden treasure, witness protection issues, the Mob, victims.. it has it all! Maybe too much but it kept me reading. It’s not a book I’d read twice but for what it is, it’s good.
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Post by Q-pee on Jun 25, 2023 10:32:14 GMT -5
Taste: My Life through Food Stanley Tucci
I feel like I've just had a very long lunch with plentiful wine in the very best company.
He manages to chat about his professional life, without ever getting gossipy or nasty. He name drops madly but does it with humour. He talks about his family but keeps their privacy. The book comes right up to the first COVID lockdowns. He also talks about what he went through following a cancer diagnosis, and some of those who were namedropped turn out to be the very best sort of people in supporting him and his family.
Delightful!
Also there are recipes for some amazing cocktails...
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Post by sophie on Jun 25, 2023 11:31:19 GMT -5
Q, I really enjoyed that book.
I started Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. I could get into it.. then I read a few reviews.. sounds like a dystopian novel which I can’t handle at the moment. I am going to return it to the library and try again when I’m in a different mood.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jun 25, 2023 23:55:41 GMT -5
Sophie, I started that, then stopped again and read something else, now I'm back to it. It's intriguing. I couldn't tell you yet how it's going to turn out, at all.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jun 26, 2023 6:22:25 GMT -5
40. The Spotted Dog. Kerry Greenway.Mystery set in contemporary Melbourne by the author of the Miss Fisher mysteries. I love her characters. 41. Pride vs Prejudice, Joan Hess. The rudeness of the prosecutor when she turned up for jury duty makes an amateur sleuth determined to solve the mystery to spite him. A fun series, but I think this is the last.
( a 13 hour train trip is a great way to get through books).
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Post by scrubb on Jun 26, 2023 13:36:05 GMT -5
53. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Apparently her first novel, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer that year.
It's an amazing setting and full of great characters, but part way through it lost me a little bit. Ava Bigtree is the main narrator, a 13 year old whose family has always run "Swamplandia!", an alligator wrestling tourist attraction on an island in the Florida swamps. Her mother (who was the star of the show, swimming through the alligator pit) died of cancer 9 months earlier and then an rival exhibition opened up on the mainland and her family is falling apart.
The least satisfying part, to me, was her sister who found a book about spiritualism and decided she was having dates with ghosts and eventually runs off to marry a ghost.
Overall, worth reading. I'd be looking for her next novel, thinking that she might come out with something really excellent in the future, but it's been 13 years and she hasn't published anything but short stories since then. I can imagine that her short stories might be very good.
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Post by scrubb on Jun 27, 2023 13:17:22 GMT -5
I've been reading a book about various explorers of the Nile in bed at night - and this author did NOT like Richard Burton. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to read Burton's writing after this - according to the author he was pretty awful and his books put down others while also being self aggrandizing.
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