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    Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
    The City and The City
    Is excellent. It took me a bit of time to get into the mindset, but once I did it was really mind bending twisty thriller stuff. Did you watch the BBC adaptation of it?

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      Originally posted by gt3 View Post
      Is excellent. It took me a bit of time to get into the mindset, but once I did it was really mind bending twisty thriller stuff. Did you watch the BBC adaptation of it?
      here you go gt3. Part of my one man failing campaign to make the Books forum an easier place to browse by having (imagine this) more than one thread! https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...china-mieville

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        Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post

        God Emperor of Dune was where I gave up on the series.
        This.

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          ad hoc, I fear that the weird stigma on starting nil threads may be inhibiting posters from following your lead.

          Might a genre-based approach be more successful? The football book thread seems to be doing ok.

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            Originally posted by ad hoc View Post

            here you go gt3. Part of my one man failing campaign to make the Books forum an easier place to browse by having (imagine this) more than one thread! https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...china-mieville
            JtS scotched everyone else's efforts by calling it Books [sic] Best Thread. Made every other thread seems like a bad idea....

            I'd support different threads for different books if you want to try again. Personally, I'd love a comprehensive non-fiction books thread. Or, you know, a bunch of separate ones. I'm easy.

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              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
              ad hoc, I fear that the weird stigma on starting nil threads may be inhibiting posters from following your lead.

              Might a genre-based approach be more successful? The football book thread seems to be doing ok.
              Yes I imagine a utopian future in which there are perhaps genre based non fiction threads and author based fiction threads. Some say it's an impossible dream but I will continue to strive for such a world

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                Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                ad hoc, I fear that the weird stigma on starting nil threads may be inhibiting posters from following your lead.

                Might a genre-based approach be more successful? The football book thread seems to be doing ok.
                That's sort of what I attempted to do by reviving the 'crime' thread, and starting the noir thread, also specific titles like the Lonesome Dove thread and others. They more or less seem to work, at least in the short term.

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                  I have to say, I do like the 'rolling conversation' style of this thread. Probably aided by my not liking to talk long or deep about books, but more enjoy saying that I loved it and you might too, or I hated it and you should avoid it. I get a lot of book recos from these pages, but I don't really want an in-depth review.

                  You know those public radio shows where they talk about a book for a whole hour? Or where they talk to the author of the book for a whole hour? Yeah....shoot me.

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                    That's all very well if you're short and pithy but the long-winded among us need more time and space to wool-gather. Personally I loathe short reviews, they tell me next to nothing so I rarely read them.

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                      And, as ad hoc noted, it makes it more difficult to "browse" the thread and find discussions of interest without a search (that may or may not work).

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                        I'm with WOM...I like the way I can just dip and out of this thread and the serendipity of coming across something I might not ever have thought of reading. I don't always know what I'm in the mood for reading, so I wouldn't automatically go to a genre thread as opposed to this...

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                          There are also threads for short story collections, graphic novels and music books. It's like in any library, you just have to root around a little to find what you want.

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                            my public library in my hometown had some notorious sex offender lurkers. As long as we don't get that among the periodicals....

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                              Just finished The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe. An interesting true crime story about a serial killer in Poughkeepsie, NY.

                              Kendall Francois is a massive, gentle-giant African American man who never quite fits in anywhere. In his late twenties, he kidnaps and murders 8 white prostitutes and stashes their bodies in the attic of the family home. It's a tale of murder obviously, but also of family dysfunction and odd dynamics. Told through 10 years' worth of conversations between Francois and Rowe - a newspaper reporter - it's a tale about each of them in turn; his life story mirrored against her own troubled one.

                              It's not a perfect book, and it has a few bumps along the journey, but it's a story worth knowing.

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                                Finished reading The Prize after nearly two months. Back to fiction for the rest of the summer I think. Started Laurent Binet's The 7th Function of Language.

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                                  Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post

                                  That ['Independent People' by Halldor Laxness] is a genuinely wonderful book. You should love it.
                                  God, how I did. It's shot in to my top 10 novels of all-time. What an incredible, epic, evocative, all-encompassing work of fiction. I really did not want it to finish.

                                  Since then I've read Jon Ronson's 'So You've Been Publicly Shamed', which was very well-researched, honest, funny and thought-provoking, and made me glad that, as far as I can remember, I've rarely or never piled in on anyone on Twitter who tweeted something stupid.

                                  Now I'm reading 'Iron Towns' by Anthony Cartwright, set to jump high into my list of all-time top 5 football novels. He's a superb writer, though barely known as far as I can tell. Met him last year at a literary event - modest, friendly, low-key bloke. No one else read this?

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                                    Finished Maps and Legends yesterday, and started The Golden Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching, which is a potted history of global exploration told through brief overviews of key figures in various periods, illustrated with loads of beautiful old maps.

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                                      Originally posted by RobW View Post
                                      Finished reading The Prize after nearly two months. Back to fiction for the rest of the summer I think. Started Laurent Binet's The 7th Function of Language.
                                      I preferred HhHH (or however it was stylised). This was a fun detective/spy caper but I couldn't help feel it was similar in style and tone to Glamorama (one of the recommendations does refer to Zoolander), but with philosophers and semiologists instead of models. Self-referential too, with the main character wondering whether he's in a novel. I guess I should read some Barthes/Foucault/Eco etc to appreciate it fully.

                                      Anyhow, i've started ready 'Dispatches'. Not sure why it's taken me so long to get around to it.

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                                        About 100 pages into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Americanah' - the best novel I've read in some time.

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                                          Originally posted by Tony C View Post
                                          About 100 pages into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Americanah' - the best novel I've read in some time.
                                          Oh yes, I loved this too. Prompted me to read her volume of short stories, and put the rest of her books on my to-read list.

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                                            Have been reading JG Ballard's The Terminal Beach a collection of his early short stories. I'm not always a big short stories fan. Some have been really good, others less interesting to me. I didn't know much about Ballard before starting this, I haven't read any of his other stuff before and I only really knew about Crash.

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                                              Originally posted by imp View Post

                                              God, how I did. It's shot in to my top 10 novels of all-time. What an incredible, epic, evocative, all-encompassing work of fiction. I really did not want it to finish.
                                              I'm only 60 pages into this and I'm already in love with it. [Independent People, that is.]

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                                                Put a hold at the library on Underland by Robert Macfarlane after I read some rave reviews of it. It's a new book, so I only get 2 weeks for it, and I was a bit afraid that I wouldn't be able to finish a 425 page travel/nonfiction book about exploring places underneath cities and natural places...god, how wrong I was. It's fascinating, gripping stuff. My palms were sweating and I was short of breath as he described squeezing through some passages in the Paris catacombs, and I just finished an astonishing chapter about a river that starts in Slovenia then goes underground as it passes into Italy near Trieste. He's a really gifted writer, I'm putting all of his previous books on my to-read list after finishing this.

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                                                  I love Ballard and have been gradually buying/reading his early stuff. My most memorable experiences, borrowed in my teens from public libraries, were High Rise and Concrete Island

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                                                    Seconded on High Rise, which I thought was utterly brilliant. Concrete Island too.

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