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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Nov 29, 2020 4:13:17 GMT
welp, I just finished Mindhunter. John Douglas is just as much of an insufferable, self-congratulatory asshat as Holden Ford, go figure. Self-aggrandizing, chauvinistic, contemptuous of authority and criticism, derisive of who he calls "bleeding heart" psychologists, fiercely devoted to the righteousness of capital punishment, and apparently proud to display his autographed portrait of J. Edgar Hoover. In other words, I profile him to be someone who probably isn't fun at parties and not a man I'd want to have coffee with. narrator Richard M. Davidson compounds this affect unfortunately. Some of these individual cases are fascinating (especially Kemper and the Atlanta child murders) and I'd still call it required reading for true crime buffs (there are so many great details in here) but honestly I'm glad to have it behind me.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Nov 29, 2020 4:14:37 GMT
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Post by jimmalone on Nov 29, 2020 12:41:54 GMT
Jorge Semprun - Veinte años y un día (Twenty Years and one day)
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 1, 2020 17:04:43 GMT
I just won my first Goodreads giveaway!! Suuuper early ARC, no reviews or ratings yet at all, so this is exclusive af it's marketed as a political primer targeted towards women and feminism + politics is right up my alley so I'm looking forward to it.
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Post by cheesecake on Dec 1, 2020 21:16:45 GMT
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 2, 2020 22:23:52 GMT
OverDrive just did a gigantic dump of Recorded Books titles to my library. Absolutely massive. Hundreds of titles, and of course I combed over the whole list. Most exciting additions: - the Outlander series including the novellas and both volumes of the series companion guide. About damn time.
- Little Women and the Anne of Green Gables books narrated by Barbara Caruso. The Tantor releases of these titles were already available but those don't have Caruso. Her narration on Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH is a huge part of my childhood. She's just the right person to be narrating these kinds of young adult classics.
- a ton of classics, everything from Wharton to Melville to Austen to Dickinson, etc. Sadly a lot of these were recorded in the early 2000s or 90s or 80s, so they have really bad, tinny sound. Some exceptions: Moby Dick, Sons and Lovers, Turn of the Screw, The House of Mirth, The Jungle, and some others.
- some key nonfiction: Jill Lepore's These Truths, Chris Hayes's A Colony in a Nation, and Rachael Denhollander's What is a Girl Worth? (about the Larry Nassar Olympic scandal), among others.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 3, 2020 3:10:37 GMT
finished the Jonathan Karl book. Really excellent. Need to collect my thoughts on it, but I would say it's better than Woodward's Fear although that one had snappier quotes. A very evenhanded account generally with a fair bit of criticism for some media organization--esp. CNN's Jim Acosta who was temporarily banned from WH briefings totally unbeknownst to me, and whose own book I plan on reading eventually--but Karl never minces words regarding how Trump's longstanding tendency to tell lies has created an administration cloaked in duplicity and at war with the truth. The book was published early in 2020, and a lot of the reporting casts a dark shadow on what we just saw in November. The writing was always on the wall.
One disturbing highlight is Karl's reporting of a 2015 campaign rally in which Trump relentlessly bullied photojournalist Stuart Clark, repeatedly telling him to "turn the camera" away from the stage and towards the crowd to show its size. Clark was expressly ordered not to do this--that camera had to remain stationary and all the news organizations relied on speech footage from that single camera (something Karl posits a media-savvy Trump would've known). Other cameras were showing the crowd size but that camera had to show the stage. The audiobook includes the ABC footage of the event, and it's chilling. I remembered hearing about this, but to hear it live is really discomforting. Four several minutes, Trump is heckling a photojournalist doing his job and directing the entire crowd's anger towards this one man simply to whip up his audience. He's always thrived on negative energy. Karl does a good job here in personalizing the dangers of that proclivity.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 3, 2020 3:13:29 GMT
currently sinking my teeth into this Bigfoot horror story from the guy behind World War Z. Supposedly pretty gory.
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Post by jimmalone on Dec 3, 2020 17:15:53 GMT
Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 7, 2020 18:12:55 GMT
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Post by jimmalone on Dec 8, 2020 13:22:59 GMT
Marcel Proust - Albertine disparue
Sixth part of À la recherche du temps perdu
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Post by jimmalone on Dec 13, 2020 17:18:28 GMT
Jose Saramago - A Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft)
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Post by TerryMontana on Dec 17, 2020 6:19:29 GMT
Stephen King, If It Bleeds.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 19, 2020 3:59:38 GMT
Stamped from the Beginning is exhaustive, infuriating. The book lives up to its description: a comprehensive history tracing American racism from the 1690s to our turbulent present. The most disturbing takeaway is that so much of the current manifestations of racist discourse we're seeing today are not only not new but are clear progressions of the racism that existed pre-abolition. Kendi very quickly dispels the notion that things have gotten better. They haven't. Racism hasn't diminished, it has simply evolved. next on deck is News of the World by Paulette Jiles. It's short so I figured I should read it before watching the movie.
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Post by Martin Stett on Dec 19, 2020 12:09:33 GMT
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. Blind borrow from the library. It kinda sucks, but it's just engaging enough as a throwaway fantasy novel that I'm sticking with it to pass the time.
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LaraQ
Badass
English Rose
Posts: 2,300
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Post by LaraQ on Dec 19, 2020 18:32:05 GMT
Just re-read the Keith Richards memoir,Life.What a legend this guy is.Incredible read.
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Post by wilcinema on Dec 21, 2020 15:27:25 GMT
Sensational book.
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Post by jimmalone on Dec 22, 2020 8:51:56 GMT
The Night in Lisbon Sensational book. If you like this book, I can highly recommend you other works of Remarque - if you haven't already read them. I like "The Night in Lisbon" and his most famous one "All Quite on the Western Front" well enough, but "Arc de Triomphe" is my favourite. Also read "Three Comrades" and "The Black Obelisk", both which were very good as well.
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Post by jimmalone on Dec 22, 2020 8:55:50 GMT
Jose Saramago - A Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft) This was excellent. Next to "Blindness" my favourite Saramago so far of the nine novels I've read.
I also read Ismail Kadare's "Chronicle in stone" recently, which was pretty good.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 23, 2020 8:46:19 GMT
This will probably take me into next year lol
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speeders
Based
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Post by speeders on Dec 27, 2020 1:47:41 GMT
Pretty Things by Janelle Brown. Nicole Kidman is producing and starring in this, hopefully as not as either main character in their 20s
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 29, 2020 19:41:28 GMT
finished News of the World a couple days ago. Gotta say, it doesn't "feel" like a winner. Story is much too breezy and the relationship between the mains is underdeveloped. It really plays like True Grit-lite. Well-written but too inconsequential-feeling and I can't see the movie nabbing any major wins. next up, this classic. Dylan Baker's voice is perfect for this material. Uncanny how much he sounds like Henry Fonda.
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Post by jimmalone on Dec 31, 2020 10:41:02 GMT
Finally I'm on the finish line of the seemingly 6000 mile-long or rather 4000 pages long road that is "À la recherche du temps perdu". Only around 200 pages of the final book of that massive mountain, Le Temps retrouvé, are left ahead of me.
To be honest when I began this journey around one and half year ago I was a bit skeptical how long it would keep my interest as I had heard before how difficult it is and especially because there isn't too much story or action - and that despite it's length. But still this book is considered to be among the greatest works of all time and definitely the most mythical of at least the 20th century and so it really was a must-read for me for a long time. Soon it was already clear to me that in one point the high regard this book is totally legitime. It has the greatest style of prose I've ever read. Yes, it can be tiring and even annoying at some point, especially when you need to read a sentence again, cause with all those subclauses, you really don't know exactly any more, how Proust started it two-hundred words ago. But somehow and that's one of the many fascinations of it, the prose with it's pedantic constructed sentences, where hardly a word seems to be used accidentally, is light-footed at the same time. Often it just seems like a little melody. I can only imagine how it would sound in French.
And this style works very well with the subjects of the novel. The whole time a breath of melancholy waves over the pages and you get into the character as deep as in no other work before. Cause in the end the novel is all about how the main character views his environment. Which is funny sometimes, because of the contemplations of the people in general and especially the french high society, but beneath this there lies so much trut, that to some extent it makes you really sad about mankind. Because of the egoism, superficiality, arrogance and intrigues the people and the book is also full of. Marcel mostly is in the role of the observer except when he finds himself involved with his interests of love. And that's what most of this book is about: observations, especially of his own feelings. Proust states that the only truth lies in the way someone sees a thing himself, so you also have to rather feel this book a bit like an impressionist painting and of course this novel after all is an impressionistic work itsself.
All in all this surely is one of the most fascinating novels I've read and I can understand why hundreds of people have wrote hundreds of novels just about another novel - this book.
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Post by wilcinema on Jan 3, 2021 18:04:30 GMT
Reading Notre-Dame de Paris by the great Victor Hugo right now.
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Post by TerryMontana on Jan 7, 2021 14:56:31 GMT
Graham Joyce, The Tooth Fairy.
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