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Post by Liiisa on Jan 21, 2023 7:22:27 GMT -5
I don't have the strength for the rest of this trilogy (or her other stuff) anytime soon, but she writes well enough to make me want to know how she ties it up.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 21, 2023 10:52:13 GMT -5
#7 Agatha Christie, And then there were none I've got some more Christies on audio. And then there were none is one of her best known books and I'd never read it. OK, I see why... but actually, I just like her Poirots and Marples, so back to those.
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 21, 2023 21:35:37 GMT -5
8) R. F. Kuang, The Poppy War
Well that was kinda gruesome but also hard to put down. Starts off as a sort of predictable "poor but brilliant kid gets accepted to elite school, has to deal with preppy assholes" kind of plot, except in a fantasy novel version of China. But it becomes much more interesting as it goes on. I thought it was pretty great, though I'll probably take a long break before I continue with the rest of the trilogy since I've got a big pile of books here already.
Edited because spelling
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Post by tzarine on Jan 21, 2023 23:19:07 GMT -5
the bluest eye by the brilliant toni morrison a dark beautifully written coming of age story
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Post by sprite on Jan 22, 2023 4:04:07 GMT -5
Anatomy of Murder, by The Detection Club. (1937)
If you like true crime, you'll like this a lot. Several famous crime writers analyze a crime case, based on court records and newspaper accounts. They highlight interesting tactics or obvious failures of the police, lawyers, judges, and other people associated with the case. They look at public reaction, and compare social expectations with private realities.
I liked individual paragraphs, but on the whole I don't enjoy mysteries where the solution isn't clear.
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Post by scrubb on Jan 22, 2023 18:11:27 GMT -5
Wild Lives: Leading Conservationists on the Animals and the Planet They Love, by Lori Robinson and Janie Chodosh.
A collection of chapters that tell about people who work in conservation, and a little bit about the areas they work in and some of their major studies.
I thought the idea had great potential, but it would have been better with more in-depth profiles of fewer people. Each chapter came across a bit like a grade 8 essay. Some of the people were really interesting, and the projects that were described in a bit of detail were too, but there wasn't enough to it, to make it a really good good book. It was ok, even good, but not good enough to recommend it.
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Post by Webs on Jan 23, 2023 12:19:16 GMT -5
Loved "The Dark Queens". While I hated the Queens (okay only Fredegard, Brunhild seemed to have gotten the blame for a lot of things that were done by Fredegard), it was such an awakening as to how much we just don't know about world history because of men silencing the stories of women.
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Post by Webs on Jan 23, 2023 12:28:30 GMT -5
I'm starting "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" I'm trying to get through my "wish list" of 30 so far.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jan 23, 2023 19:01:01 GMT -5
I finished two books yesterday. 5. Sugarplums and Scandal, a collection of 6 short mysteries set at Christmas. I got this because there was one for a favourite series. Another was a good historical mystery. The others were really not to my taste, although it did lead me to be reading a story about vampires at the blood bank yesterday. 6. Good, Great, Perfect, Rebecca Ray. Audible’s freebie this month. A series of short talks about overcoming perfectionism, by an Australian clinical psychologist. Quite useful, but her tone made me think she must live in the Byron shire. I was close, she lives in Maleny in Queensland.
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Post by scrubb on Jan 23, 2023 20:44:16 GMT -5
10. Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows.
It was a very tough read. I love her style and her characters and her plots, but this one is devastating almost start to finish. Two sisters, one who is a bit of a mess in the middle of her second divorce, and the other who is a world famous concert pianist with a loving husband, but who is also, and has been for many years, depressed and unwilling to go on living. I'm still kind of a mess an hour after finishing it, from the constant feeling of anxiety/fear/sadness that pervades the book.
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Post by sprite on Jan 24, 2023 10:43:21 GMT -5
Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik.
Set in the time of Napoleonic wars, but what if there were dragons? and they were sentient?
A man and his dragon go with a group to South Africa to find a cure for a virus destroying Britain's dragons. I like these books, they aren't demanding but they are entertaining. THere's always a good couple of battles and heros being rescued from tight corners. The author includes quite a lot of social and political detail as well, and the underlying theme of this book is the fight for the abolition of the slave trade, contrasted with Laurence and Temeraire's struggle to gain respect and decent living conditions for the dragons of the Aviation Corps. even Napolean shows up.
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Post by scrubb on Jan 24, 2023 17:54:01 GMT -5
That sounds fun.
I finally finished the kids series I started early in the month. The books are long but pretty easy reading so I only counted each one as half a book :-) It's the "Incorrigibles" series by Maryrose Wood. Mid 1800s or so, 3 kids are found living in the woods being raised by wolves. The estate owner brings them into his home and hires a governess for them (she's the main character). It's pretty funny and well done. It takes the whole 6 books to work through the mysteries, with new clues being uncovered in each book. I'd recommend it for reading to younger kids (5-8, maybe) or for kids 8-10 to read on their own.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 25, 2023 0:21:33 GMT -5
If there were dragons, I'd want them to be sentient :-)
Scrubb, that sounds interesting. I'm looking for a present for my godchild who is 7 and a very strong reader for her age but also very sensitive so nothing too scary. Sounds like it might fit the bill?
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jan 25, 2023 5:44:37 GMT -5
If there were dragons, I'd want them to be sentient :-) My favourite series about sentient dragons is Anne McCaffrey’s books about the dragons of Pern.
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 25, 2023 6:48:10 GMT -5
Yes (though I also used to make jokes about them, calling them the Dragonwriters of Porn).
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Post by scrubb on Jan 25, 2023 20:46:39 GMT -5
If there were dragons, I'd want them to be sentient :-) Scrubb, that sounds interesting. I'm looking for a present for my godchild who is 7 and a very strong reader for her age but also very sensitive so nothing too scary. Sounds like it might fit the bill? I think they would be good for her. My sister said that she found it a bit foreboding that there was a threat that the children could be sent back to the woods at any time - but I really didn't feel anxious about that. The Lord who took them in never seemed to consider it for even a second and it was up to him. There is someone out to get them, but it only comes clear in the 5th book that he's actually hoping to get them killed - and I feel like it's written so that the reader would feel sure that they'll solve the problem and keep everyone safe, even at that point. Besides, your god daughter would take a while to get to book 5 and would know by then if she was enjoying it and wanted to keep going.
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 26, 2023 19:24:32 GMT -5
9) Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West)
A kind of historical fiction (?) about the people who developed (or struggled against the development) of the equations and theories of quantum mechanics.
A group of interesting, irrepressible characters, like Heisenberg and Schrödinger, with the baffling material they worked on described engagingly. I call it "historical fiction" because the author states that the biographical material is sometimes true and sometimes fictionalized.
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Post by scrubb on Jan 27, 2023 16:03:08 GMT -5
The Years, by Annie Ernaux.
She won the Nobel Prize last year, and this book was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2018 (or 2019?). This is her autobiography, sort of, and is the only thing I've read by her.
It's not truly an autobiography, but more like an autobiography of women in France between 1940 and 2010 or so. To be honest, I didn't particularly like the style. Lots of random phrases to evoke a single memory, and switching back and forth between using "her" (to refer to the girl/woman who is/was herself) and "we", meaning her generation. She hints at events in her life but doesn't clarify. For example, she seems to say she had an unplanned pregnancy during college, and that "it must be got rid of", but never truly says if she did or not. Instead, she jumps back to "we" and how in those days they couldn't talk about sex, and the word "abortion" must never be uttered.
It is an excellent example of what it is and how it is done. But I can't say I really enjoyed it. The style irritated me sometimes - although at other times I would feel immersed. It didn't help that the footnotes were messed up in the e-copy I had - I could click on them and read the footnote, but then there was no way to return to the text. In this case, because so many things were France-centric the notes would have been really helpful.
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Post by scrubb on Jan 28, 2023 15:39:35 GMT -5
12) Miriam Toews, Women Talking.
The movie was just nominated for best picture - but I notice that in spite of a female ensemble cast, there were no actor nominations. There were a couple roles that strike me as ripe for awards.
Anyway, I really liked it. It's a pretty heavy book in terms of understanding what happened to the women and girls in that closed religious community - especially knowing it's based on real events - but it's also got that Miriam Toews' patented optimism*. Over on the Stew, VinnyD made me laugh, because he posted the movie in a list of movies he wished he'd never seen - because there's nothing he hates more than a poorly organized meeting, and that was ~80% of what this movie is.
Take 8 women of 3 generations who have lived their lives in a patriarchal closed religious community with the attendant illiteracy and subjugation; make something happen that is so completely unacceptable that they know they must respond; and put them together to talk about what the response should be. That's the book.
And it's really, really good.
*exception: All My Puny Sorrows. And even that one had characters with her patented optimism.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jan 28, 2023 22:26:50 GMT -5
That sounds fascinating, Scrubb.
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Post by riverhorse on Jan 29, 2023 2:16:10 GMT -5
Hooray! I managed to double my New Year's resolution target of one book a month!
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville. The imagined "secret" memoir of early colonial settler Elizabeth Macarthur. Very well written, the writer really got the "knack" of the vernacular style of the time. I'm glad I'd read the non-fiction biography beforehand, as I liked having a bit more background to some of the episodes and situations in the novel.
It surprised me that the narrative ended much earlier than I would have expected in her long and eventful life, but all in all a fascinating interpretation of one of Australia's best-known women of history.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Jan 29, 2023 2:34:56 GMT -5
Hooray! I managed to double my New Year's resolution target of one book a month! Heh, that's a bit how I feel - after not reading any non-fiction last year I've managed to finish two non fiction books this month
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 29, 2023 18:31:04 GMT -5
10) Katya Adaui, Here Be Icebergs (transl. Rosalind Harvey) A group of short stories about a dysfunctional family by a Peruvian author. I found her style really interesting - some had a clear linear plot, but some were a list of things, a conversation, other interesting stylings. Not all happy, but all kept my attention. lillielangtry I thought of your international women's literature project; couldn't remember if you'd read Adaui yet.
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Post by scrubb on Jan 29, 2023 20:10:53 GMT -5
13) If Cats Disappeared from the World, by Genki Kawamura
A young man finds out he has a brain tumour and not long to live. He writes up a bucket list which is extremely pathetic, and then the devil comes and offers him a deal.
The book started out well, but the last half or more descended into the narrator just saying what the lessons he was learning were. It became annoyingly simplistic and predictable and kind of dumb.
I've noticed that a lot of books translated from Japanese have a similar feel and use similar language - no idea how well that reflects normal Japanese usage? Also, the characters don't reveal much about themselves by words, even when narrating in the first person. (This character changed part way through and started a bunch of self evaluation, but it was kind of facile/superficial.)
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 30, 2023 22:01:43 GMT -5
11) Yoko Tawada, The Emissary
Another strange little Japanese novel. In this one, some kind of environmental catastrophe has caused nations (including Japan) to isolate themselves, and while old people live into their hundreds, the children are weak and may die early. The plot involves a hundred-year-old man caring for his great-grandson.
That sounds depressing, but the mood is actually light and kind of surreal, which is what made it interesting.
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Post by sophie on Jan 30, 2023 23:55:56 GMT -5
Cold snap by Maureen Jennings. Set in Toronto 1936, a mystery featuring a female private detective solving a family mystery involving her family and a mysterious immigrant from Germany. Okay I was expecting more. The author is the writer of the Murdoch series. Like those. This one was acceptable.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 31, 2023 0:53:04 GMT -5
10) Katya Adaui, Here Be Icebergs (transl. Rosalind Harvey) A group of short stories about a dysfunctional family by a Peruvian author. I found her style really interesting - some had a clear linear plot, but some were a list of things, a conversation, other interesting stylings. Not all happy, but all kept my attention. lillielangtry I thought of your international women's literature project; couldn't remember if you'd read Adaui yet. Thanks for thinking of me! I have an author for Peru (Claudia Salazar Jimenez) but as I have a particular interest in Latin America, I do read more from that region - if I remember rightly Adaui is published by Charco Press in the UK. They have another Peruvian author I'm interested in, Renato Cisneros, so when I decide I'm book-buying again I might get both!
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jan 31, 2023 1:44:32 GMT -5
7. The Alpine Uproar, Mary Daheim. Next in a mystery series involving the staff of a small town newspaper in Washington State.
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Post by sprite on Jan 31, 2023 9:20:06 GMT -5
12) Miriam Toews, Women Talking. The movie was just nominated for best picture - but I notice that in spite of a female ensemble cast, there were no actor nominations. There were a couple roles that strike me as ripe for awards. Take 8 women of 3 generations who have lived their lives in a patriarchal closed religious community with the attendant illiteracy and subjugation; make something happen that is so completely unacceptable that they know they must respond; and put them together to talk about what the response should be. That's the book. And it's really, really good. I've just heard an interview about this movie with Ben Wishart, but wasn't listening closely enought to know what he's doing. Between your review and his chatter, it sounds like both the book and movie are worth the time.
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Post by sprite on Jan 31, 2023 9:57:15 GMT -5
Remodelista: The Organized Home. (Julia Carlson and Margot Guralnick)
Normally I avoid books with 'ista in the title, but this one had a cat on the cover and was only £2.95. Plus, we'll be re-doing the kitchen in a few years, and I'm trying to collect ideas. Confusingly, there are several similarly named books, because 'Remodelista' is a website.
It was a very pretty collection, organised by room/space. Lots of storage tips and products, including advice from various professionals about things to consider when putting various things into places/containers. Lots of Shaker-inspired ideas and techniques.
They are mildly obsessed with putting smaller stuff on trays. It does look pleasing, but all I can think is, "I'll have to clean that tray too." There were also a few annoying photos, like a hairdryer hung on the inside of a cupboard door, but in such a way that the door would never close. Or a kitchen cupboard with some flat baking pans on the bottom shelf and tins on the upper, but the upper shelf was quite high, meaning lots of wasted space.
On the other hand, after reading, I reorganised several kitchen cabinets, and wrote down a few ideas for my office. And most of the photos were quite soothing.
The book has supppliers listed for nearly all products, but it's an American book and has quite a few stores from LA. It would make a nice gift for someone moving into a new home and not sure how they wanted to sort it out, but otherwise, not sure it's worth 25 USD.
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