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Post by Webs on Feb 28, 2023 16:26:20 GMT -5
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Post by scrubb on Feb 28, 2023 21:33:48 GMT -5
Thanks, Webs!
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Post by Liiisa on Feb 28, 2023 21:43:06 GMT -5
Thank you Webs! Superb thread title.
I'm halfway through a book on medieval history that's only about 300 pp long, but since it's nonfiction it's taking me a little while, so I'll be back eventually. Really enjoying it, though.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 1, 2023 4:16:45 GMT -5
Thank you webs. Not sure when my current books will get finished.
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Post by sprite on Mar 1, 2023 10:37:46 GMT -5
Mmm. wooden book shelves.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 1, 2023 22:28:48 GMT -5
23. Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes
4th in the Rivers of London series. I liked it a lot.
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 3, 2023 6:03:50 GMT -5
18) Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
This was marvelous, and really quite a light read despite being a history book. They call it the "Bright Ages" instead of the Dark Ages because their premise is that our idea of what the period was like has been excessively simplified - things were of course much more multifaceted and complicated than the usual Knights of the Holy Grail situation that we imagine. The authors are both historians and academics, so they cite original sources and research done by other contemporary historians.
So I really enjoyed it. My only complaint is that there weren't any footnotes, just "for additional reading" sections at the end that discussed their sources for each chapter. Which makes it more accessible, but I like going to a specific footnote when I read something surprising. But that's a minor quibble.
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Post by sophie on Mar 3, 2023 14:05:51 GMT -5
The Promise by Damon Galgut. Booker winner 2021. Amazing book. Probably my favourite thisyear so far. A novel about a family in South Africa during the period of time change was happening, but also about so much more. Highly recommended.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 3, 2023 14:37:03 GMT -5
24) Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here
A very enjoyable, if a bit odd, book. A girl from the wrong side of the tracks, with lots of potential but few alternatives, hears from an old, rich friend with a job offer... as "governess" to a couple of kids who catch fire quite often.
A few years ago I read one of his earlier books, The Family Fang, which I found very entertaining but not written so that the reader felt any connection with the characters. This one, the main characters were very sympathetic so it was easy to care about them.
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 3, 2023 19:37:49 GMT -5
I love Kevin Wilson! His one from last year (Now is Not the Time to Panic) was my favorite book from 2021.
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 3, 2023 19:40:27 GMT -5
I posted an abbreviated version of that review of "The Bright Ages" on Mastodon and one of the authors favorited and boosted it! Yikes
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Post by Q-pee on Mar 5, 2023 3:25:52 GMT -5
Dreamers of the Day Mary Doria Russell
I bought this largely on the strength of her book about a town in Italy that collectively saved thousands of Jewish refugees right under the eyes of Nazi occupiers.
In this book she's taken a somewhat forgotten period and spun it out into a fictional story, putting the protagonist on the periphery of the discussions of colonial powers at the Cairo Peace conference in 1921, so we meet Churchill, Lawrence, Gertrude Bell... quite the cast of characters.
But because the protagonist is on the periphery there's a lot of exposition... and of course nowhere is there the voice of the local citizens.
I've read too much about the area and the period to need the detailed explanation, and the protagonists own story is a weak romance that didn't grab me. Oh and she has this damn dog with her that makes no sense. I needed something a bit more important in her story than possibly passing on information to someone who might have been an intelligence agent for another colonial power.
Kinda cool to read a fictional account of something I've mostly read non-fiction about but ultimately unsatisfying.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 5, 2023 5:17:32 GMT -5
Tom Michell, The Penguin Lessons Michell was a young man working as a teacher in a boys' boarding school, run on English lines, in Buenos Aires in the 1970s when he found an oil-covered penguin among many of its dead peers. He washes the penguin and ends up smuggling it from Uruguay into Argentina and keeping it - now named Juan Salvador - in his apartment. It's a rather slight story, but also set against the background of the 1976 coup. Michell certainly has a gently humorous tone that makes this a pleasant read.
Ben Aaronovitch, Tales from the Folly I picked this audiobook as gentle listening as I wasn't feeling so well. If you're new to the Rivers of London series, don't start here, it won't make any sense. But if you have read the novels and feel the need for a little more Peter Grant and friends, by all means go for it.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 5, 2023 13:49:48 GMT -5
Amy Poehler, Yes Please.
Eh. Not sure what I expected but it was on sale for a buck so I got it. I probably hoped it would be really funny, but it was only occasionally kind of funny. It was ok, but disjointed and I actually like her less than I imagined I would.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 5, 2023 17:16:18 GMT -5
12. The Alpine Vengeance, Mary Daheim. Murder mystery with an outcome I didn’t see coming. Lots of development in the lives of the recurring characters in the series.
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Post by tzarine on Mar 5, 2023 23:59:50 GMT -5
the best of american sportswriting 2020
read essays on vanity & death on everest women who sexually served a big football team owner. the women went to jail, the team owner walked concussions among athletes
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 6, 2023 6:01:02 GMT -5
13. Murder in Willliamstown. Another good Phryne Fisher mystery.
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 6, 2023 6:48:18 GMT -5
19) Jennifer Egan, Emerald City
Short stories from the 80s by the author of "A Visit from the Goon Squad," "Candy House," etc. Little glimpses of people's lives; all very good. I may have read some of these in various publications at the time, but that was millennia ago.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 6, 2023 15:13:18 GMT -5
Quite easy with a hint. I solved Redactle Unlimited #334 in 24 guesses with an accuracy of 62.5% and a time of 00:04:28. Hints used: 1 Play at redactle-unlimited.com/
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Post by Liiisa on Mar 7, 2023 20:13:49 GMT -5
20) Catherine Lacey, Pew
So I had had this around for a while and hadn't gotten around to reading it yet because I'd thought it was a possibly sad straightforward book about a homeless young person. But why would I have thought that? This is Catherine Lacey, she writes things that are much more complicated than that. So the protagonist is a homeless young person but they won't/can't speak except for with specific kinds of interesting people - and they end up in this creepy Southern town that has had racial violence in the past. It feels both like a really interesting take on what it's like to be human -- but also a critique of a certain type of evangelical white people.
Very difficult to put down once I got around to picking it up.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 8, 2023 14:35:37 GMT -5
Erika Fatland, Sowjetistan (English title Sovietistan) Phew. This has taken me ages, because it's quite a thick book and it's dense! But it's an excellent travel book about the author's journey through the "Stans" - Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. She focuses particularly on the lasting influence of the Soviet Union and its memory. I was going to give this 5 stars, but the chapter on Kyrgyzstan was a little thin in comparison to the others and by the end I was finding the book a bit of a slog, so I knocked one off. Also, it was originally written in 2014 so not completely up to date. But still, highly recommended if you want to find out about the region.
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Post by sprite on Mar 8, 2023 14:57:31 GMT -5
No Time Like the Past (Jodi Taylor) Another St Mary's romp. A bit silly, but fun. Our villain is still wreaking havoc on the timeline, our heroine is still managing to walk straight into bad situations and then later pinpoint where it all went wrong.
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Post by Webs on Mar 9, 2023 10:12:09 GMT -5
Finished "The Good Wife of Bath". Another book that could have been half the length. It was a good read and I recommend it, but only if you're going to do the audio book. Some people will have a problem with her being married off at the age of 12 but remember this was the middle ages and it was quite common for young girls to be married not long after they started menstruating.
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Post by sprite on Mar 9, 2023 12:49:57 GMT -5
Currently reading "State of Terror" by Louise Penney and Hilary Clinton. it's alright, I suppose. Bit too much over explaining for my taste.
But man, I can't believe the orange golfer hasn't tried to sue them.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 9, 2023 13:03:49 GMT -5
Yeah, I found it ok for a thriller, which isn't my favourite genre, but in the field of revenge porn, wow!
Also, since neither author had written a thriller before I suspect that they were following some of the devices used in movies, and they don't always work as well in written form.
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Post by lillielangtry on Mar 9, 2023 14:06:31 GMT -5
Susan Hill, The Woman in Black An Audible freebie. I initially thought this was actually a classic but it was written in the early 80s, it just feels much older. The ghost story is OK. It's a good audiobook with some additional sound effects, etc. And a version of Radiohead's Street Spirit!
No Time to Mourn: an Anthology by South Sudanese Women Glad I could get hold of this collection for my reading the world challenge. As you can imagine, war and displacement are prominent themes, so it's not exactly an easy read.
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Post by Q-pee on Mar 9, 2023 14:21:47 GMT -5
Currently reading "State of Terror" by Louise Penney and Hilary Clinton. it's alright, I suppose. Bit too much over explaining for my taste. But man, I can't believe the orange golfer hasn't tried to sue them. Wouldn't he have to read it first? On a serious note, Hillary was a lawyer and I bet she's cleared it with a libel specialist. And I suspect they've fictionalised it sufficiently. There was a bit on QI years ago about doing this, where you deliberately add some terrible characteristic to your fictionalised horrible person that they can't claim you've based the character is based on them without admitting they have said terrible characteristic. There's a name for it which I will recall at about 3am.
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Post by sprite on Mar 9, 2023 15:16:21 GMT -5
Please do come back in at 3am and enlighten us. If it was on QI, I really should have seen it.
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Post by scrubb on Mar 9, 2023 18:06:09 GMT -5
Currently reading "State of Terror" by Louise Penney and Hilary Clinton. it's alright, I suppose. Bit too much over explaining for my taste. But man, I can't believe the orange golfer hasn't tried to sue them. Wouldn't he have to read it first? On a serious note, Hillary was a lawyer and I bet she's cleared it with a libel specialist. And I suspect they've fictionalised it sufficiently. There was a bit on QI years ago about doing this, where you deliberately add some terrible characteristic to your fictionalised horrible person that they can't claim you've based the character is based on them without admitting they have said terrible characteristic. There's a name for it which I will recall at about 3am. Heh. Well, her the orange menace character: - turned out to be a dupe - finally did the right thing at the end So he wouldn't want to admit that the first characteristic would be him, and the rest of us would say the second one wasn't the orange menace-like at all. ETA: actually, now that I think about it I don't remember if he did the right thing at the end or not. It wasn't that memorable.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Mar 9, 2023 22:43:06 GMT -5
Currently reading "State of Terror" by Louise Penney and Hilary Clinton. it's alright, I suppose. Bit too much over explaining for my taste. But man, I can't believe the orange golfer hasn't tried to sue them. Thanks for reminding me. I have it on kindle or audible, but haven’t read it yet.
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