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    Started reading Ready Player One, having missed the film, partly expecting to stop fairly quickly and give it back to Oxfam.
    It wears its 80s geek references fairly lightly and, being old enough, I get many of them anyway and I’m certainly staying with it/giving it a go.

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      Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
      I'm currently reading Danubia: A personal history of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder. I'm not sure if I like it. It has some very funny bits, and I am learning a lot, but effectively it is a travel book in which the travel is "through the ages" rather than geographical, and frequently he drops in something that sounds interesting but then proceeds to not mention it again. . I think on balance I'd give it a recommendation.
      Finished this some weeks ago and meant to come back and say that I thought on balance it was good, and I'd recommend it. The history itself is good, and interesting, the issue lies with the writer. He writes a lot like I do, which is to say lots of parenthetical (or other, differently punctuated) digressions which add very little to the narrative and instead lead you up a garden path which is occasionally interesting (not to say that when I write liken this it is interesting, but I hope you get the picture) and other times is not, but inevitably leads you to forget what he was on about when you get to the end of the sentence.

      The Habsburgs though, what a messed up bunch of inbred freaks. I read somewhere (not in this book, which leaves aside the Spanish wing of the family/dynasty), that the Spanish Habsurgs had a higher mortality rate than the actual people they ruled over in the 17th century because they were so genetically fucked up through incest

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        I also recently completed (Matthew) Engel's England, which I enjoyed very much. He visits England county by county* and talks about the different character of each. It's a tad green and pleasant lands ish, and he tends to talk fairly little about the urban bits as much as he probably should. From time to time I'd like him to a bit more left wing and a bit less soft-Guardian, but then again occasionally he does show some teeth (like when he describes the "successive right wing governments" that the UK has had since 1979 to the present day). Plus with dropping in regular mentions of cricket, it's a bit like what you imagine a more unstressed older version of Tubby would write

        (*Counties as defined pre-1974)

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          Finished Ready Player One. 1st half set up better than


          ****POTENTIAL MINOR SPOILER


          'can he beat the high score?' 2nd half. Now deciding whether I can be bothered sitting thru 140 mins of the film, as this'll be its last week on screen around here. Still, it beats marking 1st year essays...

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            Originally posted by Gangster Octopus View Post
            Heh, it's fifty years ago that I first remember hearing the "CRS SS" chants in the news on telly...
            Quite so, hence my "Quelle surprise" comment. But, as I wrote, we don’t know for certain yet what the CRS did in Calais (what features in this yet-to-be-released documentary I mean), who did what, to what degree etc. (could have been the ordinary police, the Police Municipale or even the Gendarmes) so a little caution is of the essence, this is why I wrote "quelle surprise - looks like it although this doc hasn't been released yet so who does what, how involved the CRS are etc. no-one really knows yet but it looks like the CRS are quite central."

            Plenty of people I know were on the receiving end of the CRS' brutality several times during the 1986 students’ demonstrations and have been hit by them in other circumstances too. I briefly mentioned it here, in particular in relation to Malik Oussekine, bludgeoned to death by the CRS "Voltigeurs" in those demonstrations, I was only a few streets away that night.

            I, personally, was never hit in these demos, "just" tear-gassed and chased but I saw at close quarters how the CRS operate, in particular in the Latin Quarter and on the vast Esplanade des Invalides, huge students-CRS battles there as the students tried to get to the Ministry of Education or something (can’t quite remember), which was on the other side of the Alexandre III Bridge IIRC. They can be frighteningly brutal, even with bystanders.
            Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 30-04-2018, 20:20.

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              Originally posted by Anton Gramscescu View Post
              These are great suggestions, thanks loads!

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                Fiction I've quite liked recently:

                Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach holy fuck what that guy can do in about 180 pages is unbelievable. Novel after novel. Amazing.
                The Strugatsky's Brothers The Doomed City. I think I've written about them here before but my God what a fascinating way to use sci-fi to critique communism (was written under Brezhnev, not published until Gorbachev). Great stuff.
                Min Jin Lee's Pachinko. Three generations of a Korean family living in Japan. It's like a Michener novel only not dull as fuck (gets weak in the final third, though)

                Non-fiction I've quite liked recently:

                The Long '68 by Richard Vinen. A comparative overview of the uprisings of 1968 and their consequences. Good for US, UK, France, weak on Germany, non-existent for everything else (a chapter on Mexico would have been useful, I think).
                The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalianen. This. Is. Fantastic. Will make you think about the history of North America in a completely new way. Don't think I've ever read anything better on indigenous history.
                The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexeivich. This, book, about women fighting on the eastern front in WWII, is not as brilliant as Second-Hand Time, but it's still pretty brilliant

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                  I quite enjoyed China Mieville's October, his account of the events leading up to October 1917. A little overdramatised in places, but very readable considering the vast cast involved. Although I'm now slightly uneasy about him despite being one of my favourite writers, after a friend pointed me to some fairly unpleasant allegations made about him by another writer.

                  Simon Ings' The Smoke was a very readable but slightly odd alternate history, where humanity has been fractured into different subspecies, and the protagonist is an architect in a London divided between them while the rest of the country is desperately building rocketships in a space race. The ending felt a bit abrupt, mind. Some of his other works are also fascinating - particularly Dead Water (sort of David Mitchell with more shipping containers) - and The Weight of Numbers (also a bit Mitchell-esque).

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                    Just finished Kate Atkinson’s God In Ruins novel. She’s a good writer who displays enough literary flourishes to differentiate her work from the Aga Saga set, but still tells a funny & thoughtful story.

                    The weird thing is I read her Life for Lifenovel last year, but it was only looking at the author’s notes at the end of God In Ruins that I twigged that these are companion pieces featuring the same cast of characters and setting. I’m now worried senility is starting to set in! Anyways, both recommended. I need to give here Case Studies crime novels a spin at some point.

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                      In 1992 my late Auntie and Uncle gave me a Dick Francis novel for Christmas.

                      I've started reading it recently. It's tosh, but interesting tosh and sometimes I just want to read something unchallenging just before I go to sleep. This book is ideal.

                      It's called 'The Edge' and is set on a train travelling across Canada. The travelogue bit is more interesting than the mystery story.

                      Edit: Finished it. Somehow it managed to be both preposterous and pedestrian at the same time.
                      Last edited by Patrick Thistle; 23-05-2018, 07:17.

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                        Finally read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and loved it. What a fascinating book in many ways. You've all read it, so I won't go on about it, but yeah....very cool.

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                          Originally posted by Felicity, I guess so View Post
                          Finished Ready Player One. 1st half set up better than


                          ****POTENTIAL MINOR SPOILER


                          'can he beat the high score?' 2nd half. Now deciding whether I can be bothered sitting thru 140 mins of the film, as this'll be its last week on screen around here. Still, it beats marking 1st year essays...
                          Just read my daughter's copy of this. For someone my age and nationality it's a slightly frustrating run through "not my 80's" and I suspect I might really have enjoyed it in a nostalgiac wallowing way had the author been British. But I would guess for an American between the ages of 45 and 55 it would be great.

                          My 18 year old Hungarian-Romanian daughter enjoyed it though so it shows what I know.

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                            Originally posted by WOM View Post
                            Finally read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and loved it. What a fascinating book in many ways. You've all read it, so I won't go on about it, but yeah....very cool.
                            It's excellent, I love Vonnegut. If you're planning on reading another I'd heartily recommend Player Piano.

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                              Oh, good. I was wondering what to do next. I'd heard Breakfast of Champions. Any thoughts?

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                                Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                Oh, good. I was wondering what to do next. I'd heard Breakfast of Champions. Any thoughts?
                                Can't really remember it if I'm honest. I'm sure you'll enjoy any book as his style of prose is very similar in most of the books he wrote. A Man without a Country is also excellent as his commentary on post 9-11 USA.

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                                  I recall being a bit dissapointed with it when it came out, but that was at least in part because I expected a great deal.

                                  Player Piano is his first novel, and very good. I'm also a fan of God Bless You Mr Rosewater, but it isn't to everyone's taste. Mother Night is arguably the closest to Slaughterhouse Five, though not as personal (since he didn't live that).

                                  Personally, I've always preferred his meta-fiction to his more science fiction oeuvre, but that certainly isn't the case for everyone I know.

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                                    Excellent. Thanks gents. Some egghead has a blog where he tells you which five books to start with, and then the next five, and some also-rans. I'll pick around. I've ordered Player Piano.

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                                      I have little memory of Vonnegut, though I did read several. Maybe I was being deliberately contra — as everyone seemed to be raving about him at the time. Or it could be an aversion to sci-fi in general. Or maybe I'm just a narrow-minded jade.

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                                        Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                        Excellent. Thanks gents. Some egghead has a blog where he tells you which five books to start with, and then the next five, and some also-rans. I'll pick around. I've ordered Player Piano.
                                        Hope you enjoy it WOM, if you don't I'll accept full responsibility.

                                        I'm curious about the blog, could you post a link to it.

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                                          Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                                          I have little memory of Vonnegut, though I did read several. Maybe I was being deliberately contra — as everyone seemed to be raving about him at the time. Or it could be an aversion to sci-fi in general. Or maybe I'm just a narrow-minded jade.
                                          I've never felt Vonnegut was sci-fi, but understand where the label came from, and never read it as such. I can understand when everyone is raving about a book or an author how much of a turn off it can be.

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                                            Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
                                            I'm curious about the blog, could you post a link to it.
                                            https://whatwouldbaledo.com/2016/11/...neguts-novels/

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                                              Cheers WOM .

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                                                There's also another list that puts Breakfast of Champions dead last, so....

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                                                  I liked Breakfast of Champions

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                                                    See, a total shit-show. It's as if different people have different tastes or something...

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