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    Currently reading the Orlando Figes' "A People's Tragedy; The Russian Revolution" and trying to recall what i've forgotten since university (lots). Finished Simon Sebag-Montefiore's 'The Romanovs' before Christmas, which is a superb tome. I hope to read more this year, so should probably give up the massive non-fiction volumes for a while and concentrate on fiction once i've finished this.

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      Just finished Gogol's Dead Souls, which is as bleakly funny as you would expect from a classic of Russian literature, a comparison with Dickens would not be out of order, not in terms of literary similarity; more in terms of the major appeal of the work is his description and depiction of the various characters. The ending of it is very strange, especially significant portions of the work were lost and/or never written in the first place, which is not something that I had been initially expecting and marks it as fairly unique in my experience of the classics.

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        Originally posted by RobW View Post
        Currently reading the Orlando Figes' "A People's Tragedy; The Russian Revolution" and trying to recall what i've forgotten since university (lots).
        I read that when I was in Cuba about twenty years ago. Left it with our tour guide.

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          Recent reading: Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers, a satire of little Englander politics, social media and opinion columnists. I really enjoyed it at the start, although by about halfway it started to feel a bit unsubtle - the targets weren't exactly challenging to satirise - and the end fizzled out. Worth a week of your time though.

          Before that it was The Town by Shaun Prescott, which is hard to categorise - a novel about a nameless writer travelling through melancholic Australian towns that are figuratively and literally disappearing (see review here). It felt a bit like Bret Easton Ellis - his doomy, hopeless side rather than his garish, ultraviolent side - rewriting Welcome To Night Vale.

          And before that it was Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett (steampunkish fantasy, excellent); Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson (the last in an oddly compelling trilogy about a near-future Europe of competing mini-states, facing a cold war with an bucolic 1930s vision of England that exists in a separate dimension); and Severance by Ling Ma (semi-satirical end of the world novel narrated by a self-obsessed millennial office drone).

          Actually, I may have mentioned these on a previous page already. Sorry.

          Currently on a geopolitics kick - working through Vietnam, an Epic Tragedy (the Max Hastings tome), then next is Road to Disaster by Brian Vandemark (which apparently looks at the personalities involved and decisions made in the Vietnam War with more emphasis on psychology and organisational theory), and finally The Caucasus: an Introduction by Thomas De Waal because, basically, I know fuck all about the Caucasus.
          Last edited by Crusoe; 15-01-2019, 13:02.

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            Just finished No Claim To Mercy by Derek Finkle. Non-fiction story about a (presumed) murder, investigation, trial and wrongful conviction that happened right in my own backyard. It's a story that I've followed with more than passing interest since I was about 23 or 24.

            Hereafter be Spoilers of all kinds:

            A pretty University of Toronto student goes missing from a big park near my home. Her boyfriend becomes the suspect, and two bent cops and a biased judge put him away for life. It's clear all along he's innocent, but obviously 'we' didn't know that at the time. Speaking of 'at the time', the Scarborough Rapist was still operating in the area, and hadn't progressed yet to kidnapping and murder. He of course would turn out to be Paul Bernardo, rapist and murderer, and he both lived and studied nearby. Thirty years on, the boyfriend has been long exonerated after doing 8 years of his minimum 17 before parole. Bernardo is in jail for life and will never see freedom. And the girlfriend at the heart of the case is still missing. Her body is presumed to be in or around Lake Scugog, about an hour outside of Toronto. All around gripping for me because of proximity: I went to school with Bernardo; I served the boyfriend his last 'free' meal before his long incarceration; and at least three of the witnesses / trial participants are people I went to high school or university with - most of whom were people I had no idea were connected to the case. And, as I say, it all happened just miles from my home, on streets and in parks that I know by name and layout. And the families of the main actors all live in the same houses they did 30 years ago. So much has changed, but very little at all.

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              Okay, change in plan: just picked up John Lanchester's new book, The Wall. Sixty-odd pages in and it seems a fairly straightforward dystopian isolationist Britain novel. Hoping it goes somewhere interesting.

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                Currently flying through I'll Be Gone In The Dark by Michelle McNamara. It's the book about the Golden State Killer before he was apprehended. McNamara is the wife of Patton Oswalt, and sadly died before she saw the book published or the killer apprehended. But it's a gripper.

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                  Finished The Good Mothers, by Alex Perry. It's about a central group of women who essentially risked their lives to try to bring the criminal actions of the 'Ndrangheta organized crime families in Calabria to justice. A lot of it is pretty rough and disturbing, but the change that they were able to make is inspiring. Perry does a good job of contextualizing this mob's place in Italian culture and hints at how global their reach has become.

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                    Co'incidentally, I've also just read a book featuring the 'Ndrangheta. It's a Slovak book, Umlcani (Silenced) and it's about the Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova, who were murdered in February last year. It's a fitting and very necessary book ; part biography, part tribute, part explanation of the cases Kuciak was working on. Both text and pictures are intensely moving at times, and there are some bewildering graphics showing the links between various corrupt institutions and individuals.

                    It will need a reissue in time though, because, although the police have arrested, and have compelling evidence against, four people suspected of being directly involved in the killings, the links to whoever the bigger players are remain unestablished. Kuciak's final, unfinished article, certainly showed the extent of Ndrangheta connections with people at the top of the Slovak government. Yet his murder might still have its origins elsewhere. The text of a threatening phone call made to Kuciak by one of the people he exposed, 'controversial businessman' Marian Kocner, is also in the book and is impossible to read without experiencing strong emotion of some sort. That the police didn't act on this when Kuciak is complained to them is yet another sinister aspect of the case.

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                      I think I've overVietnamed my reading. The Hastings book was comprehensive and felt even-handed in its opprobrium. The Vandemark one is an interesting overlay of the personalities on the US side (and sets the scene nicely with the US decision-making on the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis), although in places it feels like a university essay ("describe the 1963 South Vietnamese coup using what you have learned so far on behavioural psychology") and occasionally the author comes across as not wanting to badmouth any of the individuals involved.

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                        Two days ago, I was in a second-hand shop and saw the book "Trinkgläser für Freimaurer" for €1.00. It wasn't a novel; it really was a book about drinking glasses for freemasons.

                        The only reason I didn't buy it was that I only had a €50-note on me at the time. But, next chance I get, "Trinkgläser für Freimaurer" is mine.

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                          Treibeis should explain that trying to pay for a €€1 Euro item with a €€50 Euro note in Germany is akin to standing there with a pistol and demanding they hand over the contents of the till, and then dance naked on the counter-top. German shopkeepers are obsessed with having enough change. Even if you pay for items with a €€10 or €€20 Euro note, there's a good chance they'll ask you if you've got "something smaller". Thank God they're finally coming to terms with the concept of cashless transactions with the wave of a card for amounts under €€25 Euros.
                          Last edited by imp; 25-01-2019, 09:56. Reason: why won't the bloody Euro sign show?

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                            Karla paused, It was bad enough using the little minigolf hut in the Hamburg suburbs as a letterbox despite the aggressive proprietor whose noxious farts reminded him of the changing room at the Stasi Ruderverein the day after a hard nights drinking. Now he was expected to learn a new code- he was too old for this lark. He went through the glasses again. - prune schnapps in the compass glass down in one meant a defection. Jägermeister - in the square glass - how he hated the stuff -meant the police were around. That was an attempt at a joke from Kurt at head office - but at least he could connect the virulent green and the policeman's uniform. Himbeergeist in the glass with an etched cross. was that something to do with the church. He looked at his list again and very slowly toppled off his stool.
                            Last edited by Nefertiti2; 25-01-2019, 21:45.

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                              *applause*

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                                Beautiful.

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                                  Very good, yes.

                                  Although I'm not sure whether The Lady I Walked To The Registry Office With would appreciate her farts being described as "noxious".

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                                    Finished Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips. To think he once only had his blog as an outlet for his writing, where he wrote probably the best Football Manager story of all time (with some input from ursus). The British royal family essay didn't grab me, and I only skimmed that, but his Iditarod and tigers in India pieces are masterpieces of modern first-person essays.

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                                      And....bought.

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                                        Glad to hear

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                                          Yeah, it's definitely brilliant, that. I'm waiting for the price of the Kindle edition to come down because although proofreading's going well, I don't yet have loads of money to just throw around on anything I want (which is why I only make sensible purchases like £300 pool cues or digital DJ controllers).

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                                            Just finished TH White's The Goshawk which I mentioned a few pages ago. Reading H is For Hawk beforehand made sense. It really opened up the subtext of the White book - his repressed sexuality and self-loathing.

                                            Having just finished s5 of the Vikings I'm now reading Seamus Heany's translation of Beowulf...I'm sure if I applied myself I could read it in an afternoon. Next up are The Once and Future King and The Girl In The Spider's Web...Would welcome any views on those.

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                                              Once and Future King is astonishing . Fascinating and wise about nature and England. loved it as a teenager. Would like to read it again.

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                                                Spent the weekend in Lancaster and arrived home yesterday to find my order of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland waiting for me. It's had great reviews so I'm expecting the harrowing story to have been written and researched very well.

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                                                  Just finished The Kite Runner, yeh I'm just 16 years behind. Stunning book though.

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                                                    Time to relax, just finished Alan Moore's Jerusalem, all 1200 pages of small type. An amazing experience that defies description. My best attempt would be part proletarian history of Northampton, part dark children's tale and part philosophical exploration of pre-determinism. For many of the chapters a different narrative style is employed making it an exhausting but still very rewarding read.

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