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    Originally posted by imp View Post
    'Winter' by Ali Smith. The cover is smeared with praise from all the right places. It's fucking awful - pretentious, clunky, way too pleased with itself, and I only read it to the end because I had nothing else with me in the airport/plane the other day and got so far I thought I might as well finish it off.
    Just read the review of 'Spring' in the last-but-one issue of Private Eye - a perfect take-off of her terrible style. Glad to know it wasn't just me thought it was shite.

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      Boom Town, by Sam Anderson, which doubles as a standard season-with-a-sports-team (OKC 2012-23) and a history/biography of (and love letter to) Oklahoma City is everything a sports book should be.

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        Currently ploughing my way through the epic Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer, at the behest of the Second Captains book club. DiMaggio comes across as thoroughly awkward and unlikable, yet at the same time fascinating, and the book in general is actually pretty interesting as a document of life in America at the time. I'll give Cramer the benefit of the doubt over the liberal use of some rather unsavoury terms of phrase, assuming again he's just trying to capture the reality/language of the time (indeed, DiMaggio's nickname is a racial slur). As sports biographies go, it's not a quick or easy read, but I'm persevering and still feel highly engaged with the story, even though the end of DiMaggio's playing career arrives about halfway through the book.

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          I have just started Independent People by Halldór Laxness. I only state this because 'Books' is uncharacteristically buzzing with activity today and I want to maintain the literary momentum.

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            Alright then, I just finished Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, and absolutely loved it. It's about a teenage brother and sister after World War II in London. Their parents have to 'go away' on business, and they are left in the care of two strangers who are clearly trusted, but also clearly up to no good. Later in life, they piece together exactly who their parents were and what went on during and after the war, when things were murky and peace was uncertain. I won't say more, but it's marvelous. (3.7 on Goodreads, natch).

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              Originally posted by imp View Post
              I have just started Independent People by Halldór Laxness. I only state this because 'Books' is uncharacteristically buzzing with activity today and I want to maintain the literary momentum.
              That is a genuinely wonderful book. You should love it.

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                I have indeed loved the first 30 or so pages, but am handicapped by the usual habit of falling asleep after two pages very time I have some actual free time to read. Should be finished by August.

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                  Read Erik Larson's The Devil in The White City couple of weeks ago and finished Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles yesterday.

                  The Larson is a remarkable true story of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The challenges faced by those behind it - in particular Daniel H Burnham the chief architect - before and during its completion. Incredible it ever happened...The story is then used by Larson as the backdrop to the true story of HH Holmes who built a hotel to house the crowds flocking to Chicago for the fair. It contained various hidden torture chambers and its own crematorium. No one knows how many he killed.

                  The writing gets a bit sensational in places but you come away from the book wondering "how did I not know about this before now?!" If architecture and true crime are your thing, it's worth a go.

                  The Song of Achilles actually came before Circe and I'm glad I read Circe first. Whilst TSofA is well worth a read, I'm not sure I would have rushed to read Circe. TSofA was Miller's first book and isn't as polished or assured in its storytelling as Circe. But I still wanted to pick it up and read it. The love story of Patroclus and Achilles is beautifully told. Achilles' anguish at the end [SPOILER ALERT] when Patroclus is killed by Hector and his treatment of Hector's body is excruciating (in a good way).

                  Moving on to much lower brow concerns now - The Girl In The Spider's Web...

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                    The World's Columbian Exposition is indeed fascinating in multiple respects.

                    It essentially gave birth to the city we now know (including its long history of institutional racism).

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                      DITWC is brilliant. As is Dead Wake, about the sinking of the Lusitania. Put that high on your list.

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                        Agree with WOM about DITWC.

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                          Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post

                          Would be interested to hear yr opinion on God Emperor.
                          God Emperor of Dune was where I gave up on the series.

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                            Originally posted by WOM View Post
                            DITWC is brilliant. As is Dead Wake, about the sinking of the Lusitania. Put that high on your list.
                            Done.

                            And thanks for that link ua.

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                              Started Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" series. Was skeptical from what I've heard of it, but I've been grabbed by the mundanity so far.

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                                Stephen King's latest potboiler "The Outsider" which I picked up discounted, after a period of almost 30 years of not reading him.

                                I've almost finished it in a day. It's hokey, and has the usual King unpleasantness in parts (and has a weird fixation with bosoms) but I really can't put it down.

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                                  In fact, I've finished it in less than a day. I can't recall the last time I did that.

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                                    Originally posted by elguapo4 View Post
                                    After my recent toe dip into more highbrow literature I'm back at my level, I recently finished THE HITLER DIARIES by Robert Harris. I had a vague recollection of the whole affair but reading it was an eye opener on how stupid,vain and greedy people in positions of power really can be,it takes stupidity of the highest order that cunts like David Irving and Rupert Murdoch come out of whole affair as the sensible ones.
                                    Is that the same book as Selling Hitler? Read it a few years ago and really enjoyed it.

                                    Actually, while we're discussing Rupert Murdoch, another vote for Bad Blood. Although he'd sunk a load of cash into Theranos, he also refused to kill the Theranos investigation at the WSJ because he trusted his journalists.

                                    Currently reading Hitler's Monsters, a history of occult beliefs in Germany, with a focus on Nazism. In the late 19th / early 20th century, there was mainstream belief in some very odd ideas indeed.

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                                      Just read Apples are from Kazakhstan by Christopher Robbins, mostly because I've never read a book about Kazakhstan before and it sounded interesting and half decent. Not bad, a bit amateur travels really. But a lot of it reads like a hagiography of Nursultan Nazarbayev who the author gained access to, so it left a bit of a sour taste.

                                      Now onto With Their Backs To The World by Ĺsne Seierstad, a book written either side of FR Yugoslavia/Serbia's October Revolution, and formed of a series of vignettes of Seierstad visiting and revisiting Serbs she made contact with, contrasting their experiences and lives before, during and after the fall of Milosevic. Not her best book but definitely worth a read.

                                      I really do need to read Bad Blood though. So many people have recommended it to me, not to mention OTF which is a reliable source of good reading material.

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                                        Deciding I fancied a light read, and seeing as she checked out recently, I alighted on Anita Shreeve’s The Pilot’s Wife, which my wife romped through on holiday last year and it’s on our shared kindle account. To be fair, it’s a decent enough diversion with a plot that rattles along, but it’s very much in the “popular fiction” category and has no depth or much sign of decent literary content.

                                        Looking for a review, I found this from the NY Times, which just about sums it up as a frothy irrelevance. Ouch.
                                        http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/...07jamisot.html

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                                          Originally posted by Toby Gymshorts View Post
                                          Stephen King's latest potboiler "The Outsider" which I picked up discounted, after a period of almost 30 years of not reading him.

                                          I've almost finished it in a day. It's hokey, and has the usual King unpleasantness in parts (and has a weird fixation with bosoms) but I really can't put it down.
                                          Almost the same as you from the early 80s to the mid nineties I was a King obsessive, now I only buy his short story collections, like you I bought THE OUTSIDER but I thought it was awful dreck and, as you say, unpleasantly nasty.

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                                            I wanted to find out how it ended. The ending was, in typical King fashion, unsatisfying.

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                                              No surprise he was ok with the GoT finale.

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                                                One thing I have found with proofreading work now coming in on a fairly regular basis is that my reading books for pleasure has slowed right down. So since my last post I've actually read two other books, in quite some detail, as well as a 50,000-ish word thesis and some other shorter ones, but I only finished Half of a Yellow Sun on Tuesday when waiting in the new flat for the people who never turned up to give us TV and internet. I'm following it up with Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, which is a collection of essays, and which I'll get through much more quickly, not least because it's at most half the length.

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                                                  Just to show how much I value the collective OTF opinion, I've just started two books which I've bought solely on the basis of the discussion on here: China Mieville's The City and The City and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood.

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                                                    Originally posted by Toby Gymshorts View Post
                                                    I wanted to find out how it ended. The ending was, in typical King fashion, unsatisfying.
                                                    Yep, the shit endings was one of the reasons I gave up, the last one I read before I dumped him was INSOMNIA, I nearly lost the will to live reading that one, but at his best he could be brilliant.

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