Heaven: Books we're reading in 2022
Trudy said it very well a year ago, so I'll use her words here in the new thread! I'll update the years noted to go with our present reality.
Happy New Year! I've just locked the 2021 book discussion thread but it remains on the board so that if people want to pick up threads from that discussion, they can continue here. This is the place to share reviews, recommendations, and random thoughts about what you're reading. (Note for those unfamiliar: this is different from the 2022 Book Club thread, which is for an organized monthly reading and discussion of a specific book. This here is a more general book discussion).
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Don't bother with the follow ups. I have read one, and it isn't a patch on the originals.
I've just finished reading "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt. I had no idea what to expect and was reading it as an e-book. It was a good enough story but was told in a way that made it good for putting me to sleep rather than keeping me up at night. Far too long, as well. I'm glad I read it but I won't read it again.
At the same time I amd watching the tv episodes. The tv episodes have many changes to the books but I guess that it gives two stories instead of just one
In the books, isn't Morse a sh!t!
Ohhhh yes - I read the Deptford Mice trilogy as a child, two of the three accompanying spin-offs, and his Whitby series.
I think Jarvis said he was inspired by traditional folklore and wanted to get back to that kind of 'unsanitised' storytelling. I think I must have liked them, considering how many I read, but they were definitely very dark. I preferred Redwall for my anthropomorphic mouse-needs.
I also read 'Careless' by Kirsty Capes for a book group - my heart sank at the suggestion (and sank again when I read all the hype) but it is extremely good.
I discovered Andrew Taylor last year and devoured the Lydmouth Series (all the more fun for being just down the road from where I used to live). Occasionally read one of his William Dougal series for thrillingly dark-edged light relief and recently enjoyed 'The Second Midnight'.
And I remain a huge fan of Tana French - please don't judge her by the TV series - both 'The Which Elm' and 'The Searcher' were terrific.
Muir later wrote that for him, the gulf between his early home and industrial Glasgow was as if he had been born in 1751 and suddenly found himself wrenched through time into 1901 and the horrors of urban poverty (his account of working in the stench of a bone factory is shocking). Out of the idyll and what came after, he made his poetry -- I read The Horses again with new eyes.
Right now I'm slowly going through her 2001 poem Say: "Parsley", and watching/listening to a video of the performance of this work. She explores the innocuous-sounding word "parsley" as a modern shibboleth.
In the OT, shibboleth, meaning the part of a plant bearing grain, an ear of corn or a stalk of grain, was the Hebrew word that Jephthah (Judges 12: 4-6) used as a password or test to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites from his own people, the Gileadites. Those who failed to pronounce the sh correctly were massacred. In the OED this concept of the speech act as gatekeeper comes under the definition of shibboleth as ” a word or sound which a person is unable to pronounce correctly, a word used as a test for detecting foreigners by their pronunciation”.
During the dictatorship of Trujillo in 1937, thousands of Creole Haitians working in the Dominican Republic were hunted down and shot dead in what was known as the Parsley Massacre because they could not roll their r’s as the Spanish did when pronouncing the Spanish word for parsley, perejil. Their faulty or different pronunciations became a death sentence. The title of Caroline Bergvall’s installation work Say: “Parsley” refers to this infamous test.
For her performance poem and video, Bergvall recorded a range of people whose accents represented some of the linguistic diversity of spoken English in the United Kingdom in 2001. In asking these people to repeat various phrases, Bergvall recalled the repetition of words under duress in the systematic exclusions of shibboleth. She also implicated her audience in this system of exclusion and prejudice. The gallery installation was audio- engineered so that these voice recordings elicited “mishearings and personal associations.” Those who attended the installation described how their mishearings revealed their own linguistic backgrounds and unconscious prejudices. As someone who doesn't live in the UK, some of the recorded words aren't clear and convey nothing about class or location (though I did go back and look at the thread on British language usage on the Ship) but the discomfort and surprise was revealing. We all have fixed ideas on what is our 'mother tongue' (so gendered a term) and how everyday words should be used, but those fixed ideas vary hugely even between people from the same part of the world. Suppose our lives depended on how we pronounced a word?
Hanya Nanigahara's To Paradise is a highly-anticipated new release which is really 3 novellas in one very long book. They are very loosely linked to one another (some common themes, recurring character names) but one story doesn't really affect or impact the other at all. I read the first two and liked them well enough (liked but didn't love) but the third story is set in a dystopian year 2093 where the world has been ravaged by a series of pandemics and society has crumbled. I'm very leery of dystopias anyway -- I find them really disturbing -- and plague-centric dystopias feel particularly bad for my brain right now. Since it was clear (from the first two stories and reviews I'd read of the whole book) that nothing that happened in that third story was going to shed anymore light on, or tie back to, the first two stories, I gave myself permission not to read the third book.
I warm to the Ds more than the others. Nancy is a wonderful character but in real life I would find her very wearing. Did he try The Big Six the other book with the Ds set on the Broads?
In the current (UK) political situation, this makes for very difficult reading. The society that Orwell wrote about (he was talking about the rise of Communist Russia, but the same applies for any totalitarian state) is reflected in many ways in our current society. Differently - 80 years of technology make a big difference. But in principle, very much the same.
So don;t read if you don't like dystopias (Trudy!). And it is a far more disturbing book than many of the memes and tv shows that come from it suggest. But also, highly pertinent.
But I sure am overdue for a good novel. I’ve been sending myself off to sleep with Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary for a very long time and am missing the rush of feeling the hook get so firmly set that I lose sleep gulping down a good story.
Interesting, I started watching them on TV, would love to read the scripts.
I haven't posted my book reading for a while, inertia I suppose. But the most recent book I've finished has galvanised me into posting again. It MUST be read in the immediate aftermath of lockdown: 'Hurdy Gurdy' by Christopher Wilson. The Faber bookshop says of it: 'A bitingly funny historical novel, following Brother Diggory on an eerily prescient journey through fourteenth-century England'. Imagine Covid back in the day when no vaccines are available, no grants to enable you to lockdown instead of working, much superstition and belief in devils and demons, and you can see the crazy parallels between Coronavirus and the Black Death. Oh, how I laughed.
Mind you, if you want to get away from fictional pandemics, I'd recommend To Say Nothing of the Dog, more time travel but this time to the Victorian Thames immortalised by Three Men in a Boat. It's very funny.
The central character's adaptation to the 14th century is probably my favourite part of the book. I think things become unnecessarily grim in the final section. It does have something interesting to say about how it might still be worthwhile to give yourself in a futile cause' and that is also the theme of her short story "Fire Watch".
Very funny.
Modiano, who writes in French won a Nobel Prize for literature, But this book, though mercifully short and reading smoothly in the English translation (by Euan Cameron) , did not give me any reason to rate it that highly. I found it a rather puzzling story , as it wandered back and forth from the present to the narrator's childhood, and (I think) a few points in between.
Not me! I like to read free Kindle books. You have to kiss a lot of frogs!
This week I began five, five! books and all were badly written or otherwise very unappealing. I give them three chapters then give up.
My problem with the book is just that it isn't very well written. Oh, the research seems sound and accurate (and it does sport a chapter by chapter bibliography if you want to fact-check). That is fine. No, my problem is with the writing itself. The book is a series of small essays, each averaging about 3 or 4 pages. Some shorter, some longer. As I say, there is a podcast (which I have never listened to) and I cannot shake the impression that these essays are either literal transcripts of the podcasts (which only run for 3 or 4 minutes) or are heavily based on the transcripts. The thing is that writing for an oral presentation (such as a podcast) is not the same thing as writing for a reader. The audible version can have tone, inflection, pacing that are not present in reading on paper. It is a poor read, even if it might make a decent listen.
But even beyond that, there is some of the writing that is just trite, like the oft-repeated trick of starting an essay with an anecdote, which leads to the main substance of the essay and then finishes with a final line that references back to the anecdote. That might seem effective if you are dealing with a single essay, but when it is done in 5 out of 10 essays, it becomes tedious.
In short, the book is not a pleasant read.
Another oddity about the book actually intrigues me. Like I said, it is about common everyday objects that are in the world we live in. And yet the book has ZERO photographs. Instead of photographing actual objects, the book provides an artist's drawing of the objects or locations (in greyscale). I don't quite know why they did that. I admit this does provide a consistent look throughout the book that you probably could not achieve by the use of photographs, but it just seems odd, for example, in a section about highway markers (marking route numbers and the like) to provide a drawing of a marker rather than just show a photo.
So, overall, I would say that it is an interesting and informative book...and I don't recommend it.
And I have now moved into Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon. Very difference but again utterly gripping.
So happy as I had a run of books that I felt I had to finish and were a bit of a struggle but these two are a massive treat.
Have just finished a comfort reread of Elizabeth Goudge's "The Castle on the Hill." Set in wartime it felt more uncomfortably close to home than it might have done in past rereadings.