Drish
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Post by Drish on Apr 4, 2022 16:38:49 GMT
Has anybody here read The Name of Rose? My god I'm finding it so hard to comprehend. First 50 pages and the wordings are way too sophisticated for me to really get what the fuck is the guy talking about.
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Post by Martin Stett on Apr 8, 2022 1:03:18 GMT
I just read the first chapter of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. This is very arthouse, poetic stuff, not normally my sort of thing... but I am digging this. Using the basic narrative thread of "Marco Polo explains some of the cities he has encountered to Kublai Khan," this then jumps off into a surreal world. It's a fractured, beautiful dream of images, each image a picture of people in motion, each person in motion a part of a larger city and culture. And as soon as the picture begins to cohere in the mind, the telling ends, the image fades, and a new city takes its place.
I can't use conventional means to describe a book so unconventional. But I am digging it. One chapter isn't much to go on, of course. I'll see where I am later.
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Post by Brother Fease on Apr 10, 2022 1:50:37 GMT
Harlem Coben Fade Away
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 16, 2022 18:06:04 GMT
Say Nothing was remarkable. Features an array of intimate details from firsthand accounts that weaves a comprehensive picture of a Northern Ireland overshadowed by sectarian violence and political struggle. Keefe uses the IRA's policy of "disappearing" perceived Rebpuclian enemies as the cornerstone of this history, and focuses in particular on the high-profile abduction and murder of Jean McConville. It's a fascinating, tragic and moving story. Recommended to anyone who wants to learn more about the Troubles. next up is gonna be Circe by Madeline Miller.
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Post by Martin Stett on Apr 19, 2022 1:43:00 GMT
Invisible Cities was pretty great. Artsy-fartsy stuff and despite the short length, this is NOT binging material, but I had a blast with it. Major Kino's Journey vibes. It's more of a collection of short philosophical musings than any sort of narrative, but I dug the navel-gazing, what can I say. I'm gonna pull a completely random passage from the book and let it speak for itself.
I'll be honest, that's one of the weirder passages. Damned random choice making this tough to sell... But it does capture the strange fascination of this book: a tale of a traveler who sees a world in flux, a world of people constantly moving and changing and perhaps, in the long run, remaining forever the same in spite of that. It's heady stuff, and a lot of fun if you're into something outside the norm.
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Deceit
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Post by Deceit on Apr 19, 2022 2:58:13 GMT
Invisible Cities was pretty great. Artsy-fartsy stuff and despite the short length, this is NOT binging material, but I had a blast with it. Major Kino's Journey vibes. It's more of a collection of short philosophical musings than any sort of narrative, but I dug the navel-gazing, what can I say. I'm gonna pull a completely random passage from the book and let it speak for itself. I'll be honest, that's one of the weirder passages. Damned random choice making this tough to sell... But it does capture the strange fascination of this book: a tale of a traveler who sees a world in flux, a world of people constantly moving and changing and perhaps, in the long run, remaining forever the same in spite of that. It's heady stuff, and a lot of fun if you're into something outside the norm. I love this book so, so much! I'm glad there's someone else who dug it!
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Apr 22, 2022 7:39:50 GMT
Rereading the Court of Owls Batman comic run... really hope Reeves adapts this in some way and approaches it like Eyes Wide Shut as a Batman movie (secret society of wealthy and influential people that's existed since Gotham's founding). We've seen the Fincherfied Batman movie, now let's see a Kubrickified one.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 25, 2022 21:59:13 GMT
Circe is my favorite read of 2022 so far. Gorgeously written. Jaw-droppingly beautiful prose. next up is Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker. A psychological profile of a midcentury American family in which 6 of the 12 children were all diagnosed with schizophrenia.
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Post by Mattsby on Apr 26, 2022 2:10:32 GMT
"We are new arrivals to these small pleasures." Fires by Raymond Carver. Collection of essays, poems, short stories. The essays are quite good, writing tips and some autobiography, they give some essential context to his short-story style. And the couple of stories included are pretty nondescript but include enough brewing coffee and snowfall to boost me.
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Post by Mattsby on Apr 28, 2022 3:15:40 GMT
Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch (2022) by David Mamet.
Mamet was recently on the press tour, making provocative bids and reached new and confusing lows for himself.... he was good and bearable on Bill Maher though, admitting to some misspoken errors in this very book.
I think this is the 10th book of his I've read.... It's probably my least favorite. There are 38 Chapters and I'd recommend maybe 2 or so. One titled "Broadway" that mixes lots of historical anecdotes and witty observation, a Mamet specialty. (He mentions Duvall in American Buffalo a few times but no Pacino, hmm.). And another chapter, "Max the Hamster" was previously published and has a great bit to it where he's playing lecturer to his wife and uses the opportunity to leap topics and divulge a childhood trauma.
The politics and all the Marx babble is just uninteresting to me. Like Paul Schrader said last week, while Mamet has the right wing, he's trying them for maximum attention.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 30, 2022 19:18:00 GMT
haven't done any true crime in a while so next up is Maureen Callahan's American Predator, about Israel Keyes. This genre is never as satisfying as I need it to be so we'll see how it goes.
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Post by pacinoyes on May 4, 2022 17:34:50 GMT
The Curse Ryan Green This is a sickening, almost unbelievable true crime book that you can literally read in 1 day.......it's basically the darkest movie draft that has never been made. Waaaaaaaaaay too short - based on her journal but needs to fleshed out - there's a reporter piece that's sorely missing.......but um.....it's something for what it is that's for sure......
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Post by Martin Stett on May 5, 2022 0:36:56 GMT
Blindness by Jose Saramago
I like the book, but I am also very frustrated by it. Why can't writers follow basic rules of grammar these days? Saramago doesn't use quotation marks to delineate when people are speaking... or, you know, things like periods or paragraph breaks and even his use of commas is erratic. WHY CAN'T WRITERS LEARN BASIC GRAMMAR!? IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK!?
Here is a sample sentence from the book:
I don't know if this complete breakdown of grammar is the fault of translator Giovanni Pontiero or if Saramago himself can only read at the first grade level, but it is a fucking embarrassment that such a well-known novel from a Nobel winning writer doesn't understand that grammatical rules exist for a reason.
I can mostly get over this issue, as the book has a fast-moving and exciting narrative at the moment. But this is the reason I couldn't get through more than a few pages of any Cormac McCarthy novel, and it drives me nuts that this incompetence seems to be popular among the "literary" types. Shit like this is why normal people can't take "serious" books seriously.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on May 5, 2022 21:53:28 GMT
Martin Stett Don't know how you feel about audiobooks but if you wanna give McCarthy another shot I recommend Tom Stechschulte's narration of The Road. Can't speak to how well McCarthy reads but The Road sure was easy on the ears.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on May 5, 2022 21:59:43 GMT
Got an out-of-state library card with Brooklyn Public Library for $50 for the whole year. Have access to their whole OverDrive collection and you can loan for three weeks. Audible is dead to me.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2022 0:54:53 GMT
Got an out-of-state library card with Brooklyn Public Library for $50 for the whole year. Have access to their whole OverDrive collection and you can loan for three weeks. Audible is dead to me. Have you read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller? Somehow, it’s even more beautiful than Circe.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on May 9, 2022 0:16:54 GMT
Got an out-of-state library card with Brooklyn Public Library for $50 for the whole year. Have access to their whole OverDrive collection and you can loan for three weeks. Audible is dead to me. Have you read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller? Somehow, it’s even more beautiful than Circe. no but as soon as I finished Circe it got added to the list!
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on May 12, 2022 18:31:47 GMT
zoomed through André Gregory's memoir titled This is Not My Memoir but I'm going to go ahead and refer to it as My Memoir with André. Anyone who was charmed by Gregory's ramblings in My Dinner should check this out. It's full of wonderful stories and anecdotes (including one about getting punched by Gregory Peck!) and starts out hilariously with Gregory discussing his employment by a stripper named "Princess Totempole". Covers his theater training and directing, his friendship with Wallace Shawn, his marriage, aging. Lots of wonderful tidbits in here. Quick and very enjoyable listen. Brooklyn Public Library card is already paying itself off! re-posting the best Criterion Closet video ever. I would happily watch a two-hour version of this. "I don't particularly like to talk about films"
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Post by Mattsby on May 13, 2022 20:41:14 GMT
The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days (1903) by Andy Adams. Found this bc of Mamet who said the author "wrote the best fiction of the frontier." It's repetitive but that's partly the point. At 400pg maybe it could've been trimmed... but it comes together at the end, clever-like. If I read it again, I'd watch Red River and Culpepper Cattle Company btwn chapters.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on May 21, 2022 15:16:05 GMT
just wrapped up Krakaur's Under the Banner of Heaven read by narrator-to-the-stars Scott Brick. Very interesting book but more engaging as a mildly sardonic overview of Mormonism's origins and uneasy relationship with polygamy than as a true crime narrative. The more I read the more I think true crime is just vastly less interesting to me than history, and I felt the same about Larsen's Devil in the White City. Even so I'd say this is required reading for anyone interested in learning about Mormonism's troubled and often violent history, and about its contemporary fundamentalist offshoots where it's not uncommon for fathers to "marry" and impregnate their own daughters. For that reason I'd also call it an important text for atheists, agnostics and feminists. I started Lawrence Wright's Scientology book Going Clear which has been on my radar ever since watching the doc a few years ago. I really liked the doc, but I could not get into this book and I'm chalking that up to Morton Sellers' monotone narration. I don't want to put 17 hours into this thing. Why can't every book be narrated by Scott Brick. I'm probably just going to dive into Voyager instead, Outlander book 3. I'm ready to be scandalized all over again!
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Post by wilcinema on May 25, 2022 15:13:37 GMT
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
It's written in verses, I read it as a very peculiar rap song tbh, and it works because of that. It's spectacular, it plays as a Greek tragedy of sorts, unity in time, place and action, with a chorus of characters accompanying the protagonist that are so vivid and real. I really didn't expect to like this book so much.
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thomasjerome
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Post by thomasjerome on May 29, 2022 0:36:19 GMT
Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision by Charles Elton The Hollywood Reporter describes it more of a mystery novel than a conventional biography as the author "interrogates various witnesses in search of the Rosebud that offers a key to Cimino’s hidden life". Very private person, sometimes (but not always) misunderstood artist who invented his own life. He invented his background, his birth date and so many other things. Even the people close to him didn't always know what's the truth. Well-researched, engaging read about a fascinating man (...or a woman? We don't even know that).
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Post by sterlingarcher86 on Jun 1, 2022 15:42:33 GMT
Strange Weather by Joe Hill. He’s so damn good.
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Post by stephen on Jun 2, 2022 23:50:01 GMT
Just wrapped The Killing Hills by Chris Offutt. Basically a backwoods Columbo, it follows an AWOL Army investigator who comes home to find his wife knocked up by another man, and who then winds up entangled in a murder investigation run by his sheriff sister. Offutt's a solid writer who knows how to turn a phrase, like Pizzolatto without the pretensions.
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Post by ingmarhepburn on Jun 5, 2022 21:18:07 GMT
Blindness by Jose Saramago I like the book, but I am also very frustrated by it. Why can't writers follow basic rules of grammar these days? Saramago doesn't use quotation marks to delineate when people are speaking... or, you know, things like periods or paragraph breaks and even his use of commas is erratic. WHY CAN'T WRITERS LEARN BASIC GRAMMAR!? IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK!? Here is a sample sentence from the book: I don't know if this complete breakdown of grammar is the fault of translator Giovanni Pontiero or if Saramago himself can only read at the first grade level, but it is a fucking embarrassment that such a well-known novel from a Nobel winning writer doesn't understand that grammatical rules exist for a reason. I can mostly get over this issue, as the book has a fast-moving and exciting narrative at the moment. But this is the reason I couldn't get through more than a few pages of any Cormac McCarthy novel, and it drives me nuts that this incompetence seems to be popular among the "literary" types. Shit like this is why normal people can't take "serious" books seriously. Those things you mention in the first paragraph are just part of his writing style, and I'm glad that the translator had that in mind and decided to preserve it. That's what translators should do, especially those working with literature. Saramago has this unique style, and I get that it might not click with everyone, but he's a great writer, one of the few from this country who deserves to be called a genius. His book Baltasar and Blimunda is currently mandatory reading in high schools across Portugal.
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