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BD

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Finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy this morning. Enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought the start was a bit slow, though perhaps that was just me getting used to the writing style. Once I got into though, I flew through it.

Has anyone seen the film, and is it worth a watch? I'm wary of watching films adaptations of books after I've read them, but I think this is one that could translate quite well?
 

forevrared

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Finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy this morning. Enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought the start was a bit slow, though perhaps that was just me getting used to the writing style. Once I got into though, I flew through it.

Has anyone seen the film, and is it worth a watch? I'm wary of watching films adaptations of books after I've read them, but I think this is one that could translate quite well?
Not quite as good a McCarthy film adaptation as No Country for Old Men, but still good.

For some reason they brought on Charlize Theron to play the part of the mother much more prominently than she featured in the book, but other than that, I think they did as well as they could to set the scene and keep it appropriately chilling without making it X-rated.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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Finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy this morning. Enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought the start was a bit slow, though perhaps that was just me getting used to the writing style. Once I got into though, I flew through it.

Has anyone seen the film, and is it worth a watch? I'm wary of watching films adaptations of books after I've read them, but I think this is one that could translate quite well?
If you want more McCarthy prose and don't mind a different type of novel then I highly recommend Suttree.
 

BD

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If you want more McCarthy prose and don't mind a different type of novel then I highly recommend Suttree.
Cool thanks, will have a look. Have Blood Meridian on the shelf too, will read that after the next book.
 

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Blood Meridian is in my top 3 all time favorite novels. I usually don't recommend it as a first McCarthy book, but if you've already read others and like the style, go for it the next chance you have.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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Anybody else read Salt: A World History?

I’m currently reading it for a graduate course. It’s fascinating.
I've read parts of it. My mom asked once over the phone if there were any books I wanted for Christmas. I said 'Neptune's Gift: A History of Common Salt'. So for Christmas I open her package and I get:

Since we have a fun relationship I tease her about that and she even said, yea that didn't seem like something you'd read. Then I found that Salt: A World History at the used book store.
 

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I've read parts of it. My mom asked once over the phone if there were any books I wanted for Christmas. I said 'Neptune's Gift: A History of Common Salt'. So for Christmas I open her package and I get:

Since we have a fun relationship I tease her about that and she even said, yea that didn't seem like something you'd read. Then I found that Salt: A World History at the used book store.
:lol: Yeah that’s not quite what you were hoping for.

Currently in the process of writing a book review of Salt. The author has some really cool fun facts in there, but he oversteps in his conclusions a bit with determining just how important salt was to certain things / events.
 

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Finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy this morning. Enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought the start was a bit slow, though perhaps that was just me getting used to the writing style. Once I got into though, I flew through it.
I posted more or less the same thing six weeks or so ago. Not looked into the film. Got a nasty feeling it would layer in more backstory or do something to ruin it.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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Finished Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, I know some of you here have read it so thought I'd share. Loved it. Really sad that we lost Bolaño at 50 :( would have loved to read where he would have gone in the last 16 years
 

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Finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy this morning. Enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought the start was a bit slow, though perhaps that was just me getting used to the writing style. Once I got into though, I flew through it.

Has anyone seen the film, and is it worth a watch? I'm wary of watching films adaptations of books after I've read them, but I think this is one that could translate quite well?
My freshman class had to read The Road the summer before we started college. I really enjoyed that book even though it was set in such a depressing world.

I enjoyed the movie as well. It sticks to the dark theme of the book very well and the acting is quite good.
 

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I am reading a cozy mystery called Booked for Murder by Tim Myers, and I just know that it is heading for a 5 star rating at Goodreads. The book has a great number of threads. I recommend it to you all. Give it a chance.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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So I just bought two books I am going to read this week, but I am trying to resist the urge of pulling the trigger on my 7 book cart on Amazon. Help me resist my addiction
 

celia

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What books are they so we know if we can say they are bad?

Except if they are at a cheap price or rare, the books will probably stay available.

--

I started a YA book and decided to DNF it because I dislike the tone. Not sure what to read now.
 

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I’m about 50 pages into a very long, old travel book about the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, and it’s absolutely fecking brilliant so far (although I know of at least one historian of the Balkans who despises it).
 

oneniltothearsenal

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What books are they so we know if we can say they are bad?

Except if they are at a cheap price or rare, the books will probably stay available.
Oh they are all good for what I need them for so its not that issue, its the addiction of buying books I have to resist haha

Flannery O'Connor - Stories
Ambassadors - James
Invisible Man - Ellison
Under the Volcano - Lowry
The New Life - Pamuk
Jerusalem - Alan Moore
Voice of the Fire - Alan Moore
 

oneniltothearsenal

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I have to vent. I purchased and read the book Cow Country based on this review in Harpers that describes it as "the closest to a Pynchonian experience one will encounter outside of a book actually bearing his name."

After reading Cow Country and feeling ripped off I can't articulate how much I disagree with that statement. It blows my mind that anyone that actually gets published to do literary reviews could call that book a Pynchonian experience. Its nothing like Pynchon to me. Pynchon is elegant, sophisticated meta-fiction. Cow Country is low brow humour hiding behind cultural references and literary satire. It's absolutely nothing like Pynchon. Its much closer to the I'm-so-clever-and-edgy satire in Confederacy of Dunces or Satanic Verses than it is to any of the masterpieces Pynchon wrote.

Some decent little literary tricks like both Toole and Rushdie employ does not make it even remotely Pynchonian in any sense. It's like comparing Macallan 25 to Olde English 800.

I experience metaphysical anger at the author of that article for horribly misleading me and wasting my money. I am so annoyed that I wasted time and money on a Toole/Rushdie type satire (not my preference at all) based on this inaccurate Harpers article that I am going to boycott Harpers for a long time for printing such garbage that wasted my time.

Sorry to vent on a topic most people would think is banal :lol:
 
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Luffy

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I have begun (and ended) the first chapter of the fourth book of the Cazalet Chronicles, Casting Off. I'm beginning to see how a great writer can keep churning out prose without it feeling like padding.
 

Mark Pawelek

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each interview essentially boiled down to him saying "why do you believe in God, when he obviously doesn't exist?", the interviewee trying to respond, and then Dawkins retaliating, with a smug, self-righteous smile, "well, you're wrong."
Dawkins doesn't understand that religion is a kind of politics too. A way of belonging. Yet a deeper belonging than mere language, skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or nation. Among elites, Cosmopolitanism is the new belonging (and has been since the Enlightenment). Yet it's not; it's more a not belonging. Smug elites don't understand that belonging is the identity in Identity politics. When one supports Identity politics in general, one can't really pick-and-choose which to allow. Yet Dawkins wants to.

Dawkins God Delusion is deluded. A bit boring too.
 

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"Julius Caesar The Colossus of Rome", by Richard A. Billows. I've only read a few biographies but all of them have been fascinating. Each in their own way. This explains Julius Caesar through history. Billows says the fall of the Roman Republic began many decades before Caesar was born. Beginning with the end of the 2nd Punic War.
 

BD

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About 150 pages into Catch 22, and not sure I'll finish it to be honest. I enjoy it when I'm reading it, but it hasn't quite grabbed my full attention yet. I'd finish it for sure if there was another 100-150 pages left, but I've the guts of 400 pages left. Also, maybe I'm just dumb, but I'm finding the narrative a bit hard to follow. At the moment it seems more like a book of skits that are all related, but which would also work well independent of eachother.
 

Luffy

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Dawkins doesn't understand that religion is a kind of politics too. A way of belonging. Yet a deeper belonging than mere language, skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or nation. Among elites, Cosmopolitanism is the new belonging (and has been since the Enlightenment). Yet it's not; it's more a not belonging. Smug elites don't understand that belonging is the identity in Identity politics. When one supports Identity politics in general, one can't really pick-and-choose which to allow. Yet Dawkins wants to.

Dawkins God Delusion is deluded. A bit boring too.
I agree with everything you have said. Yet, you haven't addressed the existence of a god.
 

oneniltothearsenal

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RIP Toni Morrison. I haven't read any of her books but Song of Solomon is on my list.
https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/toni-morrison-dead-at-88.html


From her Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here,” his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the “final word,” the precise “summing up,” acknowledging their “poor power to add or detract,” his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable."
 

BD

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About 150 pages into Catch 22, and not sure I'll finish it to be honest. I enjoy it when I'm reading it, but it hasn't quite grabbed my full attention yet. I'd finish it for sure if there was another 100-150 pages left, but I've the guts of 400 pages left. Also, maybe I'm just dumb, but I'm finding the narrative a bit hard to follow. At the moment it seems more like a book of skits that are all related, but which would also work well independent of eachother.
'Postponed' my reading of this for the moment, may go back in a few weeks.

Started on Cannery Row in the meantime, quite short which I wanted. Good start to it.
 

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Has anyone read any Gore Vidal? I saw a copy of Palimpsest in a second-hand bookstore but the cover was all sticky (maybe he's that good). Wouldn't mind delving into his stuff.
I've read Burr, really enjoyed it. Almost felt like sensationalised non-fiction - the historiography is evidently really, really strong, but he'll throw in some extra made-up salacious details or storylines for good measure as well. Very good writer though, tempted to pick up his Lincoln book sometime soon.
 

Luffy

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I've ditched a cozy mystery, and now will be reading Singapore Sapphire by A. M. Stuart.
 

Classical Mechanic

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About 150 pages into Catch 22, and not sure I'll finish it to be honest. I enjoy it when I'm reading it, but it hasn't quite grabbed my full attention yet. I'd finish it for sure if there was another 100-150 pages left, but I've the guts of 400 pages left. Also, maybe I'm just dumb, but I'm finding the narrative a bit hard to follow. At the moment it seems more like a book of skits that are all related, but which would also work well independent of eachother.
It starts to fit together the further into the book you get. One of my favourite novels. Haven't read it for years though.
 

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I just finished In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Brilliant read. Thanks to whoever recommended it on here.
 

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Finished Remembrance of Earth's Past few days ago, and still under impression. Reckon will be for quite some time.

There are probably some books that I like more than the ones in this trilogy, but as a series, it's absolutely the best I've read. Mind bending, with scope getting larger and larger until the very last page of the Death's End, the final book.

I want more.
 

Luffy

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I've decided to post a review of which I'm fond:-

The Name of the Wind 3/5 stars

Giving a book 3 stars can reflect any one thing. It may mean that the book is a harmless, fun filled story that never reached any high point. It may mean a good book with a long slow beginning. It may mean a heavily flawed masterpiece, or a book that was never meant for you to appreciate. The Name Of The Wind is not a masterpiece, is not heavily flawed, though it might be both for some readers. I think the way I see it, it's the type of book that's either not meant for me, or it's a book that falls - slightly - short of all its aims.

Take the problem encountered with creating such a hero as Kvothe, or the world where he lives. Creating a character who is a genius means a lot of hassle for a writer who is at the beginning of his career. Now that we all know that the book is a bona fide success, we know the author has won his spurs. But consider the humor of the book. The direct speech of Kvothe against, say, Ambrose. Where is the humor? There is none to speak of. Sure, the repartee is sharp, but the thrust lacks riposte. Being funny is not the same thing as being smart. As an apprentice reader for fantasy I've yet to cover ground, but looking at the horizon I see authors who do not sound funny, and I see a genre lacking in true wit. Is it an acquired trait of the genre? Surely it's tough to make jokes in a fictional world. Where's the window of opportunity for puns, nods, references? There is scarce room.

Also some authors can write up a genius character without ruffling the readers' feathers. Kvothe is a problematic child. If he is so smart, then why does he do stupidly rash things? If he survived his poverty struck childhood living on the streets, where are those instincts when he needs them? Why does his understanding of the world leaves him naive, wandering deserted streets at night without a care? Speaking for myself, I had a period in my life where I had to cope with dangerous variables. The resulted reflexes and temporary wisdom I gained from my experience stayed with me for more than 2 years after which I shrunk, intellectually, to my usual boundaries. The time period for Kvothe's story betrays the false note coming from the author. Kvothe, in short, got too dumb too fast. The book is littered with the phrase " if you haven't known that or that, if you haven't experienced such and such, then I can't make you understand". Well, I think the author has never learned to live by his wits, or he bent the truth or alloyed it with falser metal. I won't harp on Kvothe's stupidity in keeping replying to Ambrose to keep their enmity fresh or not managing his finances rightly or being surprisingly hot headed and impatient. This is because this is clear for all to see and also, well, the plot demands it.

I do so wish Denna hadn't gotten such a big role. I wish Denna, and Dinnah/Dianne etc, were separate people. The author wanted the past to come back, and I understand, wanted to surprise us with a trick of movement, and produce a flutter from his readers. But what purpose does Denna's continued appearances serve? I think Kvothe should have been allowed to forget and never meet his love again. As a result of Denna's role in the present, Kvothe never learns the lesson that the first love of a life is never the last love, or never an ever lasting one. That's a missed golden opportunity to make Kvothe mature and grow up. Producing Denna out of his hat, the author has also introduced romance and its bastard child, serendipity, into his book. Was it worth it?

For my conclusion I think that the supporting characters didn't get fully drawn. I know that the writer has a limited number of brushstrokes but would it hurt him to give Wil and Sim different voices? You can substitute that with Lorren and Elodin. I did however, appreciate the language employed by Patrick Rothfuss. It was a relief to read about the tangent of the hero instead of the bricks and mortar of the fantasy tinged world of the book. This is the dominating positive that came from reading The Name Of The Wind. Fantasy is an unexplored genre for me. To survive reading further of it, I must recognize which books I'm going to tolerate and which I'll bodily reject. This particular one got three stars from me, and that's the end of the story!

 

Luffy

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I was thinking of reading a famous five book, then decided against it.

Also today I finished the cazalet chronicles. 3404 pages. Gave myself a pat on the back. Elizabeth Jane Howard is better and much more mature than J.K. Rowling. Can't wait to read Howard's autobiography.
 

Jippy

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Just near the end of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Tough to score- enjoyable, albeit in a kind of meandering slice of life way- defo not action packed and it has quite gentle humour. Enjoyable read though.
 

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Just near the end of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Tough to score- enjoyable, albeit in a kind of meandering slice of life way- defo not action packed and it has quite gentle humour. Enjoyable read though.
I've not long started it. Not sure if I like the writing style at the moment.