New now reading

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

Postby Darkness_Fish » 31 May 2017, 09:02

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All this talk of Corbyn and his IRAness or otherwise has made me revisit this tome.
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 Velvis » 02 Jun 2017, 04:12

I'm reading some Greg Iles. Liking it.
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Re: New now reading

Postby KeithPratt » 03 Jun 2017, 19:29

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Brilliant.

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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 05 Jun 2017, 13:05

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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 » 16 Jun 2017, 18:07

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I don't have any particular interest in the topic, but the writing is good enough so it doesn't matter.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 21 Jun 2017, 08:33

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Fathers Day present, actually picked out by Tom, which is a first (I also got chocolates, beer, a t-shirt and a pot noodle).
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 Fonz » 21 Jun 2017, 10:53

I've just started the Rebus books again

Also reading Jimmy Carl Black's memoirs.
Heyyyy!

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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 26 Jun 2017, 20:10

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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 Darkness_Fish » 27 Jun 2017, 09:31

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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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Tactful Cactus
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Re: New now reading

Postby Tactful Cactus » 27 Jun 2017, 12:37

Has anyone read this book? On the surface it looks like another "hangers on" 60's London biography but the reviews I've read go well beyond that.
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As soon as I'm done with the new Varafoukis I'm onto it...

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Re: New now reading

Postby joels344 » 27 Jun 2017, 13:27

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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 27 Jun 2017, 14:33

Tactful Cactus wrote:Has anyone read this book? On the surface it looks like another "hangers on" 60's London biography but the reviews I've read go well beyond that.
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As soon as I'm done with the new Varafoukis I'm onto it...

I was intrigued by a review and it's on my list, but it appears to already be out of print over here. I hope to catch up with it at some point.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Minnie the Minx » 07 Jul 2017, 03:55

I've just finished 'Open Up and Bleed' which was pretty extraordinary. I thought I knew a lot about Iggy Pop, but I think the extent of a lot of it surprised me.
Now I'm starting Hemingway's 'Across the River and Into the Trees', which is already quite beautiful and I'm only 30 pages in.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Six String » 07 Jul 2017, 05:23

I'm far ntoo she's ng some food related essays by Jim Harrison, better known for A Good Day To Die, Legends Of The Fall and other works of fiction. One of his essays mentioned a book Outlaw Cook by John Thorne so I have that now and have begun reading bits of it. He has one essay on salt. Some have recipes some don't but like Jim Harrison the writing is unimpeachable.
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Re: New now reading

Postby joels344 » 09 Jul 2017, 16:28

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Despite the title being quite gaudy, this book has been a fantastic read. If you like space opera with brilliant and ambitious world building with immersive storytelling, then you will have trouble putting this one down, so to speak. It'll probably end up in my top 10 or maybe top 5 in the space opera genre.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Geezee » 10 Jul 2017, 09:20

Geezee wrote:
Geezee wrote:
Geezee wrote:
Probably not yet - it was only released in November I think in Sweden, so it would likely take a few more months to make it over here.



Says in the article below that it will be available next year. As I said elsewhere, this story is like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rosemary's Baby, Silence of the Lambs, the Millennium trilogy and Catch-22 all rolled into one, true, story. And I've been reminded of the book while reading about the ongoing search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane - in a similar way, Bergwall led the investigators on massive wild goose chases across the country to reveal where he had hidden the body parts of his victims (who were with a few exceptions still missing with no indication over what actually happened to them - allowing him to fantasise whatever he wanted really). They drained massive lakes, searched through entire forests etc and of course never found anything - and one keeps wondering while reading about those searches that it's an absolute miracle, considering the huge territory they covered, that they didn't accidentally actually stumble across a body! But as the article accurately, and painfully points out, it was essentially "psychological terrorism" for the families of the victims - imagining the worst, hearing the worst, but now finding out that they never knew anything.


Sweden’s ‘Hannibal Lecter’ is Set Free

http://time.com/31497/sture-bergwall-th ... tric-ward/

After convincing the Swedish public for over two decades that he was a serial rapist and murderer, Sture Bergwall, a.k.a. Thomas Quick, was released on Wednesday

The story of a man who raped children, murdered eight people, and cannibalized at least one of his victims, had appalled and captivated Sweden for two decades, and kept him locked away for as long. But on Wednesday, Sture Bergwall, who formerly went by the name of Thomas Quick, finally saw the light of day as a free man, with his confessions to those crimes discredited. It has left a whole country wondering how it could all have gone so wrong.

“It’s the judicial scandal of a century,” says Dan Josefsson, who was nominated to Sweden’s foremost non-fiction award Augustpriset for his book on Sture Bergwall, Mannen Som Slutade Ljuga (“The Man Who Stopped Lying,” to be published in English by Granta in 2015). “And it all has to do with a therapeutic idea that was in fashion in the nineties.”

Bergwall’s plan was born in 1991, when he was about to be released from Säter psychiatric ward, to which he was sentenced after a botched bank robbery. A long-time drug fiend, estranged from the outside world, Bergwall figured he’d be better off remaining in the clinic and started confessing to one murder after another.

“It’s fairly typical for a mixed-substance addict as Bergwall to lie to gain privileges,” says Josefsson. “He started telling the psychologists what they wanted to hear, and he was rewarded with drugs and encouragement.”

The therapeutic model that dominated the Säter facility at the time held that crimes could be inspired by repressed childhood memories. Allowed library access, Bergwall began reading up on famous, unsolved murders and claimed responsibility for them, fabricating justifications for those horrible deeds by citing repressed memories of sexual abuse as a child. He soon became the clinic’s star patient, reveling in the attention and comparing himself with Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic character in The Silence of the Lambs. Even worse, his so-called repressed memories were given enormous weight in the criminal investigations and trials that followed.

Bergwall frequently misstated details regarding the victims’ appearances, the murder weapons used and the sequence of events. Yet, those statements were taken as proof of his repression of painful memories, and Bergwall willingly played along. At one time, when asked why he said a victim had blonde hair instead of black, he replied that the agony of his recollections had made him reverse the colors as a kind of psychic self-defense.

“Police and prosecutors were completely into the idea too, even though it lacked scientific credibility,” says Josefsson. “It became a sect-like phenomenon where every piece of information was twisted to confirm their belief.”

Throughout the years, several commentators have published their doubts, but it wasn’t until 2009 that an appeal process was commenced. By that time, Bergwall had been convicted for eight of the more than thirty murders he had confessed to. However, he had also began to recover his mind, thanks to a doctor who began reducing Bergwall’s extremely high doses of medication. On Nov. 26, Bergwall was declared not guilty in the last of the eight cases, and will from Mar. 19 continue with an outpatient program at the clinic.

“The real victims in this systemic collapse are the relatives of the murdered,” says Josefsson. “They had to sit through the trials and listen to this man orate about the heinous things he supposedly did to their children – it’s practically psychological terror. At the same time, the real murderers have been able to breathe out.”

The Swedish government has appointed a commission to investigate what systemic failures led to this judicial catastrophe, although it won’t look into individual culpability. Bergwall, now 64, has said that he will write about his experiences at Säter. He already released a book in 2011, together with his brother Sten-Ove, called Thomas Quick is Dead.


In case you were still interested DD, the book is now available in English (not the best review below but anyway)

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/o ... son-review




There's an interesting post-script to this whole story, by the way, which doesn't really belong in Now Reading but I'll share it here either way. There has been another jawdropping judicial scandal since the Quick debacle. If Quick is as if Dahmer or Bundy (or whatever) was actually found to be innocent this whole time - now imagine if the killers of Jamie Bulger were also shown to be innocent. This is what has happened in Sweden in the last few months - back in 1998 Sweden had it's own version of Jamie Bulger, where a little boy (Kevin) was murdered by 5- and 7-year-old brothers. Or so we thought - they were "convicted" of the murders, but there was never a trial as they were too young. There was never any technical evidence to tie them (or anyone) to the crime - and the whole case rested on their confession.

Josefsson - the investigator who tore apart the Quick conviction and who wrote the book above - discovered about a year ago a little known fact - that the same psychologist who was instrumental to Quick's "confessions", also played a key role in the confessions of the brother. So Josefsson set about investigating the circumstances around the Kevin murders, and if anything, the resulting 3-party documentary that he has produced is even more shocking than the Quick story. They show the actual interrogations of these 5- and 7-year old boys, and I'm not sure anything has ever made me more angry - it's bad enough with Quick, where you see a clearly barely conscious, heavily drugged up, vulnerable man being persuaded to tell the police the "right" answers to the murders...now imagine a 5-year-old boy going through 30 interrogations of 2 to 5 hours long, where the police are refusing him access to his mother until he tells them the "right" answers...inlcuding a horrific sequence where they ask him 150 times the same question: "what happened to Kevin's throat?" to which the poor boy keeps guessing wrong, until he finally, sort of, gets it right (ie. that Kevin died through strangling) - and that is what counted as a "confession", nothing more. No lawyers or parents to be seen.

Although the boys never faced jailtime and i don't think ever a youth offenders institute (Sweden doesn't allow this for children that young), the family is clearly destroyed by all this (both parents having been pulled into psychiatric institutes due to breakdowns from the investigation). With this documentary, the family have now come out for the first time with their names etc - and there are several extremely powerful moments where they (now as adults in their 20s) are filmed watching their own interrogations 20 years ago for the very first time - they were of course so young that they barely remember anything of their own, and no parents were there so nobody had seen any of this - and their reaction to watching all this is some of the gut-wrenching TV I've ever seen. With my own son aged nearly 5, it's impossible not to think of him in the same circumstances, and the thought of them so helpless, so worried, so confused, in the hands of investigators like this, it's just, well, unthinkable.

Don't know if they'll translate this documentary - it has some pretty high production values (in fact a bit too much - sometimes the credits feel like a generic attempt at a Nordic Noir thriller) so I guess it's possible...but either way, as much as I doubted that Josefsson could be onto something yet again when rumours emerged that he was investigating the Kevin case (I mean c'mon, surely there can't be another judicial scandal of this magnitude...) it's pretty clear that this, if anything, is an even greater injustice. And just like Quick, the case has now been reopened, and I can't imagine any other outcome than a complete exoneration.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Tactful Cactus » 10 Jul 2017, 09:51

Grey Error wrote:I've just finished 'Open Up and Bleed' which was pretty extraordinary. I thought I knew a lot about Iggy Pop, but I think the extent of a lot of it surprised me.
Now I'm starting Hemingway's 'Across the River and Into the Trees', which is already quite beautiful and I'm only 30 pages in.


I loved it -- especially his crazy Haiti hiatus in the 1980s

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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 10 Jul 2017, 15:01

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A refreshing take on the oft-told tale of Syd Barrett. Meticulously researched and thoughtful, it's quite a good re-cap.

Also some short stories by Dennis Lehane, whom I've never read before. Pretty engaging.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Minnie the Minx » 10 Jul 2017, 15:09

Tactful Cactus wrote:
Grey Error wrote:I've just finished 'Open Up and Bleed' which was pretty extraordinary. I thought I knew a lot about Iggy Pop, but I think the extent of a lot of it surprised me.
Now I'm starting Hemingway's 'Across the River and Into the Trees', which is already quite beautiful and I'm only 30 pages in.


I loved it -- especially his crazy Haiti hiatus in the 1980s


That was INSANE. I was crying with laughter.
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 13 Jul 2017, 09:34

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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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