New now reading

in reality, all of this has been a total load of old bollocks
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Re: New now reading

Postby ... » 26 Jan 2017, 08:33

Sorry, DP
Last edited by ... on 26 Jan 2017, 08:34, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: New now reading

Postby ... » 26 Jan 2017, 08:34

Goat Boy wrote:Confederacy of Dunces

This is right up my street. Easy to read and follow and laugh out loud funny







Remember reading this when it came out in the early 80s. Very sad story about the author who iirc topped himself after failing to find a publisher. That it ever saw the light of day was down to shameless lobbying by his elderly mother

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echolalia
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Re: New now reading

Postby echolalia » 30 Jan 2017, 13:37

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I’ve just finished this. It reminded me a lot of A Confederacy of Dunces – in a good way, of course. Both books have itinerant idealists as their hero, Ignatius with his hot dogs and Mevlut a drink called boza. And both ultimately come from Don Quijote, I think. It’s a sprawling multi-generational pot-boiler that centres around the lives of a family who move to Istanbul from a village in Anatolia in the 1960s. Mevlut sees his cousins and uncles go up in the world thanks to graft and deceit, but Mevlut himself can’t fathom out dishonesty and never gives up his original job as a street vendor. In the end it becomes a psychological more than a material necessity – he has to keep moving so he can keep thinking. Mevlut is the Iain Sinclair of Istanbul, in a way, and his dérives in its endlessly-expanding neighbourhoods embody the idea that walking and thinking are actually the same thing. The thing he’s thinking of all the time is an enigma about his life that’s always perplexed him. It’s fantastic stuff – I loved it and felt sad to say goodbye to all the characters.

After the last page is this photo, which maybe even is the last page, who knows:

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Snarfyguy
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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 30 Jan 2017, 14:47

^^^ Might give that a go. Sounds good, thanks. Meanwhile,

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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 04 Feb 2017, 18:34

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Some kind of crime fiction potboiler. Barely started it.
Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

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Re: New now reading

Postby BARON CORNY DOG » 07 Feb 2017, 03:18

Last weekend I finished Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and really enjoyed it. I bought it in Bradford and started reading it on the plane home and finished it in a month, which is a good start to my year of 19th Century British Literature. I'm a Balzac fan and Thackeray covers similar groundI, though more directly, with more comedy, and in wide screen. It was very satisfying.

Now I'm starting on Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility. Which makes for a stark contrast. A little less my bag, but fascinating nevertheless. The writing, especially at first, is comparatively bracing and brisk. I suspect my my coursework in basic common law of property will be indispensable! Anyway, I'm happy with the start of the year and I'm much happier spending as much of my spare time reading as possible.
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Re: New now reading

Postby FOR5 » 08 Feb 2017, 10:05

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"A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five."

Groucho Marx

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Snarfyguy
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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 13 Feb 2017, 14:30

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GoogaMooga wrote: The further away from home you go, the greater the risk of getting stuck there.

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Re: New now reading

Postby KeithPratt » 13 Feb 2017, 16:02

Snarfyguy wrote:Image


I enjoyed that. Armstrong is a provocative and interesting thinker.

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Re: New now reading

Postby KeithPratt » 13 Feb 2017, 20:08

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This is excellent. A very rigorous analysis of the experience of WW2 through the German people. There's a real sense that notions of patriotism fired the German people far more than National Socialism per se. The detail about how the experiences of the latter part of 1941 pretty much shaped the rest of the war was particularly enlightening.

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Re: New now reading

Postby clive gash » 14 Feb 2017, 10:18

George Saunders’ new novel will blow your fucking mind

The master returns, frikkin' stoked man.

http://www.avclub.com/review/george-sau ... ?utm_sourc
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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 14 Feb 2017, 10:19

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Another crime-fiction potboiler, which is readable, but not exactly aiming for the stars. I've only read one other book by the author, but the man character banging on about his long-missing wife gets very annoying.
Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

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Re: New now reading

Postby Samoan » 14 Feb 2017, 13:38

Toby wrote:
Snarfyguy wrote:Image


I enjoyed that. Armstrong is a provocative and interesting thinker.

She was my English Lit teacher in sixth form. She liked all the saucy bits in Chaucer but Tennyson was her passion.
Nonsense to the aggressiveness, I've seen more aggression on the my little pony message board......I mean I was told.

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Re: New now reading

Postby ... » 14 Feb 2017, 17:30

Darkness_Fish wrote:Image

Another crime-fiction potboiler, which is readable, but not exactly aiming for the stars. I've only read one other book by the author, but the man character banging on about his long-missing wife gets very annoying.


Finally gave up with PJ when his last book came out to largely dreadful reviews and discovered that the Kindle version was more expensive than the hardback book

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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 19 Feb 2017, 21:03

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Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 06 Mar 2017, 17:30

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Pretty fascinating; loads of food for thought. A journalist rides along on a container ship going from England to Singapore and reflects on shipping and globalization, Somali pirates and the lack of legal accountability to the families of the thousands lost at sea every year.

"Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters.”
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Re: New now reading

Postby joels344 » 06 Mar 2017, 17:50

If you like graphic novels and political intrigue, then you'll like enjoy this read. I haven't been consistently reading it as I should, but it's been very good so far.

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Re: New now reading

Postby KeithPratt » 06 Mar 2017, 22:45

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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 07 Mar 2017, 09:24

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Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

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Re: New now reading

Postby Jimbo » 07 Mar 2017, 14:10

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A re-imagining of the King Arthur story Cornwall-style!
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