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Post by DeepArcher on Jan 9, 2020 6:16:29 GMT
Over the last few days read through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw for the first time. I love me a good ghost story so I thought I'd break into one of the most beloved of all-time ... I definitely enjoyed it, really appreciated its more subtle approach to the storytelling, I loved the building of suspense and the general eeriness of it all. Definitely more looking forward to re-reading it as I couldn't really pin an interpretation on it with just one reading, and since it's not just a page-turner but also so succinct I'm sure it'll be easy to go back to time and time again, definitely feels like the type of thing that rewards repeat readings.
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Post by jimmalone on Jan 9, 2020 13:01:59 GMT
I've long been looking for a book of Ed McBain's series about the 87th Police Precinct, but never found one in my country. And then to my huge surprise when I looked through the books in the legacy of my grandmother, who passed away a few years ago, there was one, which I read yesterday: See Them Die. A very simple story, which actually doesn't really has an interesting plot, but is focussed on telling the surroundings of a police action with the goal to arrest a murderer, who barricaded himself in a room. So it was quite atmospheric and spent much time to elaborate it's characters (though some still were very one-dimensional) and while I wished it had more focus on the work of the police It was fine enough to make me want read more of the series, but the only way to find them is probably among antiquarian and second-hand books. And even among them I've never been lucky enough before.
Now reading another novel of McBain (again from the legacy of my grandmother), which he wrote under his other pseudonym Evan Hunter: Strangers when we meet.
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Post by Mattsby on Jan 12, 2020 2:43:18 GMT
It's Not Easy Bein' Me - Rodney Dangerfield Very easy, funny, quick read
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Post by Johnny_Hellzapoppin on Jan 15, 2020 13:48:54 GMT
I'm about a third of the way through The Outsider. I had planned to get through it before the TV show started, but life gets in the way. So I will just record the show until I'm finished it.
Anyway, so far so good with the book. I liking what I'm reading, but fearing for where it's going.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 16, 2020 5:15:59 GMT
Blood Meridian, which I am finally getting around to reading There're some passages in this book that are so well written you feel like the thing's going to catch on fire in your hands. It's an ugly masterpiece, enjoy.
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Post by Martin Stett on Jan 16, 2020 5:28:45 GMT
I'm re-reading Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. One of the most astounding pictures of greed and selfishness ever put in ink:
"I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich."
I'll see how the ending holds up. I recall it being the one flaw before: Lewis has some grand ideas but the execution was a bit off with the very end. Still, this is one of the most penetrating, excoriating books on man's selfishness I've ever read.
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Post by jimmalone on Jan 18, 2020 12:03:38 GMT
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
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Post by Mattsby on Jan 21, 2020 0:40:23 GMT
(love this cover like crazy) The Machine in Ward Eleven (1963) by Charles Willeford If there's a Will(eford) there's a way! This is a collection of six short stories - three of which are sort of brilliant and scathing and surprisingly hilarious. My ninth Willeford and the seventh I'd rate higher than a 7/10 - he's one of my fav writers at this point. I've sometimes wondered why he wasn't more involved in the movie biz and this book maybe answers that question as he writes his Hollywood characters here as pompous hypocrites or plain lunatics. "Just Like On Television" reads like a Woody Allen satiric bit. And the final story "The Alectryomancer" is right up there with his best, a must read for fans, only 20pgs.
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Post by stephen on Jan 21, 2020 2:52:24 GMT
Blood Meridian, which I am finally getting around to reading There're some passages in this book that are so well written you feel like the thing's going to catch on fire in your hands. It's an ugly masterpiece, enjoy. Chapter 10, man.
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Post by DeepArcher on Jan 21, 2020 16:19:07 GMT
Blood Meridian, which I am finally getting around to reading. I'll be busy for a little bit. "There is no more disturbing writer than Cormac McCarthy. The Road will seem like a treat to you after reading Blood Meridian." --my professor of Southern Fiction on the first day of class today
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Post by Mattsby on Jan 24, 2020 20:11:34 GMT
Lemon Jail (2018) - Glad to meet the man (the vocals) behind the Kansas City Star cover that I love and listen to all the time! Bill Sullivan, roadie, quickly recounts some raising-hell stories from the Mats tours - he calls himself "Oliver to the band's Dodger" - and does a good job placing you right in the glorious muck of it.
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Post by Viced on Jan 24, 2020 21:00:19 GMT
Lemon Jail (2018) - Glad to meet the man (the vocals) behind the Kansas City Star cover that I love and listen to all the time! Bill Sullivan, roadie, quickly recounts some raising-hell stories from the Mats tours - he calls himself "Oliver to the band's Dodger" - and does a good job placing you right in the glorious muck of it. Dreadfully written cashgrab tbh. Maybe three good stories that were actually fleshed out... and the pictures that weren't blurry were cool. But worth the $18 I spent on it for this one passage alone:
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Post by jimmalone on Jan 28, 2020 21:05:55 GMT
P.G. Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters
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Post by Mattsby on Jan 31, 2020 20:15:48 GMT
Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) ; Ray Bradbury. Light, amusing read, less about screenwriting or Moby Dick than it is a comedy of Ireland's craic, characters, nooks, and myths. Bradbury is a fish-out-of-water writer working for one of his heroes John Huston who turns out to be as much a practical joker as he is a beast. Some chapters are long-winded... but mostly really cinematic, you could easily picture it as a movie, and there are some absolutely hilarious scenes such as the priceless townsfolk reaction upon learning at a funeral that the deceased's last wish is to be buried with his abundant wine collection.
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cherry68
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Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that.
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Post by cherry68 on Jan 31, 2020 21:18:29 GMT
P.G. Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters I adore Wodehouse. I read most of his books when I was young, and recently Piccadilly Jim. His world looks like a lost Eden. And I always figured Sean Connery as the perfect Sir Galahad Threepwood, if you are familiar with the Blandings castle characters.
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Post by jimmalone on Feb 1, 2020 9:36:15 GMT
P.G. Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters I adore Wodehouse. I read most of his books when I was young, and recently Piccadilly Jim. His world looks like a lost Eden. And I always figured Sean Connery as the perfect Sir Galahad Threepwood, if you are familiar with the Blandings castle characters. It was the third of his works I've read, the second one in the Jeeves series, while one was of the Blandings castle series. I don't exactly "adore" Wodehouse, but I certainly like his style a lot. It's so wonderful light-footed and his books are simply amusing from the first to the last page and often it has even a subliminal second humour. Though sometimes I have to admit his characters (not Wooster and Jeeves though) are getting a bit on my nerves. Really happy that thanks to a new edition I can get his books now in Austria which hasn't been the case for a long time. I know Wodehouse ranks (rightfully) high in the British Pantheon of writers, but sadly he is a bit forgotten at least in my country, so I hope there will be a renaissance. Cause in the world nowadays his humour would surely do no harm.
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Post by jimmalone on Feb 2, 2020 14:59:37 GMT
Pilote de guerre by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Philosophical thoughts on war and his own mission as an aviator in World War II from the french writer. It's especially haunting, cause he foreshadows his on death, which he would suffer on a similiar flight to the one, which serves as a the background story for this book.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2020 1:54:49 GMT
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Post by Mattsby on Feb 3, 2020 19:03:45 GMT
The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler; and English Summer: A Gothic Romance (1976)
Only about 100pgs, a scattered some of Chandler’s brief notes and unpacked ideas on writing and styles and genre…. lists of slang and similes….
English Summer (20pgs), illustrated by the great Edward Gorey, is quite rare and doesn’t have many fans but I liked it a lot, though it's maybe too squeezed - Chandler had an idea to expand it into a novel and that might’ve worked. Here’s a passage -
“She had the flowing movement, the infinite, effortless grace of a fairy tale. She had pale hair, so pale, so gold, so fine that you never saw a separate strand of it. It was the hair of a princess in a remote and bitter tower. It was the hair an old nurse would have brushed, hour after hour by candlelight, in a vast dim room, holding it softly in tired old hands, while the princess sat before a polished silver mirror, half asleep, and glanced into the burnished metal occasionally, but not to see herself. She had dreams for that mirror. That was the sort of hair Millicent Crandall had. I touched it only once and then it was too late.”
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Post by jimmalone on Feb 4, 2020 10:24:35 GMT
The Notebooks of Raymond ChandlerOnly about 100pgs, a scattered some of Chandler’s brief notes and unpacked ideas on writing and styles and genre…. lists of slang and similes…. Yeah, I read those notes as well. As far as I remember it there were some quite funny ideas involved.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 4, 2020 11:47:46 GMT
Cherry - Nico WalkerGreatish drug addiction/war dissection that is an Oscar waiting to happen for some young actor......sort of the kind of book people call a classic except it's a fairly new book too.
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LaraQ
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Post by LaraQ on Feb 4, 2020 17:38:58 GMT
Cherry - Nico WalkerGreatish drug addiction/war dissection that is an Oscar waiting to happen for some young actor......sort of the kind of book people call a classic except it's a fairly new book too. The Russo's have just finished filming an adaptation of this.Tom Holland is the lead.I haven't read the book but I wondered if it might be a baity role for Holland,who is a hugely talented young actor imo.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2020 18:07:45 GMT
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata... At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
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Post by jimmalone on Feb 6, 2020 11:25:20 GMT
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata... At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
Wanted to read this for a long time, but haven't come around to it. From Kawabata so far I've only read "Thousand Cranes", which I can recommend.
I'm reading: The Pathseeker (A nyomkereső) by Imre Kertesz
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Post by DeepArcher on Feb 6, 2020 17:34:44 GMT
A re-read of As I Lay Dying for class, which just reminded that it's one of the best things I've read. Addie's chapter has got to be one of my favorites in all of literature, and its final moment might be my favorite ending of any book.
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