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    Songs For The End Of The World-Saleema Nawaz. Prescient novel detailing a coronavirus epidemic to which author adds a postscript that her research has been undertaken reaching back several years. Its scale however is small & intimate rather than sweeping & grandiose. In the main revolving around the members of a provincial academic community the novel dips between developing the characters prior to the pandemic & their actions during it. A lineal family tree is provided at start of novel-but in truth it was easier just to follow the story and pick up the web of connections from this direct source. Generally the story works well on this basis-the one sub-plot which is less than interesting is the one which accords the book its title but this may be just my prejudice against fictional bands being introduced into tales. Always come across as stereotypical & lacking in fresh insight. Dont think it counts as spoiler alert to advise the story is left without a resolution but that doesnt detract from it.

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      Lucky:How Joe Biden Barely Won The Presidency.-Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes. Read as much to fill in plentiful gaps of own knowledge in last year US election & also as alternative to the seemingly more plentiful accounts of the Trump campaign. So much of what new to me will not be to a lot of posters on here. And as it turns out Trump still gets main billing in a book detailing the Biden campaign. Probably not unexpected given Biden once nominated spent rest of campaign in his basement rarely venturing onto a political trail of any kind. Premise of authors is that the tortoise won the race & with great dollops of breaks along the way. An establishment candidate throughout with inexhaustible goodwill from a Democratic party with only 2 overriding priorities-(1) stop Trump winning & (2) stop Bernie Sanders gaining the party nomination. With all these advantages Biden still made heavy work of the early primaries & was as low as 4th place at one point. His campaign team were riven with fighting factions & competing claims on his policy-though he remained impervious to most advice that took him out of his self-stated comfort zone of steering a middle course built on decades of Senate experience. He was in touch with the electorate on the pandemic which so unsettled voters views of Trump & the only challenge he had to contend was the response to the murder of George Floyd. The book ends not with any great satisfaction in Bidens triumph rather a litany of misgivings as to how close it really was & has not changed the course of US politics to any extent. Just over 10,000 votes spread around 3 battleground states being the deciding factor. And I didnt come out of the book having any more understanding of Joe Biden as a person than when started reading or even whether there is actually a Joe Biden to know.

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        A Shock-Keith Ridgway. A circular & circuitous trip around a Camberwell community loosely hanging together at the local boozer. Their interactions are not immediately obvious and a cast of disparate characters emerge sometimes never to be seen again. Throughout is a Greek chorus of comment again some of which is extended & enlarged on while some trails off into the ether not to be repeated. Theres plenty of politics though mainly of resignation rather than anger & all directed at disillusionment with how the left side of political spectrum offers no incentive or enlightenment. Theres plenty of symbolism involving rodents-rats stalk the housing while mice run riot in the watering hole including a truly surreal invasion in one chapter. And theres plenty of men engaging in sex with other men-explicit and with no thought of compromise to the readers sensitivities. Though own impression was that it more of gratuitous nature than actually developing or moving forward the tale-to be fair one of the best chapters actually concludes with a gentle tease after all the in your face couplings that immediately precede it. Overall a strange curio of a book-unrestrained & subtle in more or less equal measure & while the more major characters play their roles well there is no imprint left as to motivation or understanding for their actions.

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          Walking The Great North Line-Robert Twigger. Or the author account of walking from Hengistbury Head to Lindisfarne in search of a primitive past in which shamen had all the right ideas about how society should be shaped. Twigger wants to develop his thesis during the walk that although this country has as its basis the various codes & strictures implemented by successive invaders it is in fact a country with a rich and varied history pre-dating Vikings Normans Romans etc. And built and peopled by those who had imagination foresight & ability to build it on a straight line running the length of England. There is a great love for henges,barrows,circles all of which conveniently populate the Line in abundance. And he is a serious walker so tips are plentiful as to how to make a 6-7 trek as comfortable as possible with regard to boots,tents,poles etc-naturally the vagaries of English weather come into play. And having a great love for the country in the centuries immediately following the retreating ice obviously means not such a great love for the country in its 21st century guise. Still its engaging and in the main avoids large scale repetition. As with most travelogues the more familiar the reader with the location the more the interest and this is no exception-that he is warm towards the areas he travels the further north he gets only adds to the enjoyment.

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            ale had you read Ridgway's previous books? Hawthorn & Child was incredible.

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              I havent. And it was the book from reviews that attracted me to try one of his novels. Just never seen it at a price that is justified by its length. Can of worms maybe-if a novel is less than 200 pages long but doesnt waste its words where does one draw a line?

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                I was a big fan of Irwin Shaw in my teens and sorting some books out yesterday found I've lost/lent/mislaid some of the early short story volumes, so I treated myself to nice hardback copies from eBay and abebooks. Not current reading yet, but I will revisit them

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                  Originally posted by ale View Post
                  I havent. And it was the book from reviews that attracted me to try one of his novels. Just never seen it at a price that is justified by its length. Can of worms maybe-if a novel is less than 200 pages long but doesnt waste its words where does one draw a line?
                  Assuming 'it' here is Hawthorn & Child, I've just looked it up (having not heard of either it or Ridgway before this page of the thread) and might have to get it for my Kindle. Sounds fascinating. Although according to Amazon it's 288 pages long, and £7 for the paperback / £6.64 for the Kindle doesn't sound wildly overpriced. But how does one quantify a book price anyway? If a book is short and costs £20 but you're fascinated by it and still think of it and see echoes of it in other books two decades after first reading it, that's good value, isn't it? The mystery of course being that we don't know which ones are going to grab us that way until after we've read and spent money on them.

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                    Amazon UK has it at 189 pages

                    https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0081S7B...ng=UTF8&btkr=1

                    No problem with any of your comments.

                    Just think if a tome is as slight as that it is a novella rather than a novel & should be priced as such irregardless of the quality within. Which as you acknowledge is often retrospective-not to mention subjective. Synopsis does sound good though.

                    Though just explored further & note the book versions are 288 pages. Dont recall the different versions showing a difference in scale of this size before.
                    Last edited by ale; 02-09-2021, 16:22.

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                      Quite! I was looking at the paperback version when I posted that last night. One of those must be a typo, given that they're both reported as 'print length' (page numbers not meaning an awful lot in ebooks) and there's a difference of almost exactly 100 pages between them. A print length of 189 pages would come to roughly 42,000 words whereas 288 pages would be about 70,000.

                      The dimensions on the paperback listing say it's 1.78cm thick. I've just grabbed a paperback at random (guessing that it looked about the right thickness) off my bookshelf: it's 1.8cm thick and has 285 pages.

                      I know what you're all thinking, so before anyone else does it I'll do so myself: I hereby nominate this post as the most boring in OTF history.

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                        In other news, I finished The King of Pirates last night, and have started my first football book in quite some time this afternoon: one that I bought ages ago and that has been on my To Read list ever since. It's called The Quiet Fan, by Ian Someone-or-other.

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                          Originally posted by Sam View Post
                          Quite! I was looking at the paperback version when I posted that last night. One of those must be a typo, given that they're both reported as 'print length' (page numbers not meaning an awful lot in ebooks) and there's a difference of almost exactly 100 pages between them. A print length of 189 pages would come to roughly 42,000 words whereas 288 pages would be about 70,000.

                          The dimensions on the paperback listing say it's 1.78cm thick. I've just grabbed a paperback at random (guessing that it looked about the right thickness) off my bookshelf: it's 1.8cm thick and has 285 pages.

                          I know what you're all thinking, so before anyone else does it I'll do so myself: I hereby nominate this post as the most boring in OTF history.
                          Far from it. The attention to detail is exemplary. Just need someone to purchase the novel to confirm.

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                            Frankly We Did WinThis Election-Michael C Bender. Am now getting into the rhythm of the 2020 US election. Which may explain why found this the most restrained of accounts read to date. Introduces the Front Row Joes who would willingly follow Trump into whatever lunacy they were asked to participate in -most specifically the assault on the Capitol. Though never explores the reasons why. Trump isnt portrayed as the ogre or ignoramus of popular belief-just as somebody who lost control of an obvious re-election due to the pandemic crushing the economy & a chaotic bloated campaign team far removed from that of 2016. Like the 2 previous books have read on this subject it ends up post-mortem election at Mar-a-Lago with the author s happy to be convivial with ex-president & acknowledging the fealty in which he is held.

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                              Billy Summers-Stephen King. Billy is a veteran of the Iraqi war whose talent is as a sniper. Hes found a post-war career as an assassin killing bad guys on his moral compass even though it is clear that those ordering them are hardly the good guys. Just as he is having doubts about his profession he gets request for job way above usual financial payout & allows for one last finger on the trigger. Naturally however hinky the deal sounds he takes it. Job is done 25% into tale-which being SK means a few hundred pages have already been written. And being SK we been here before-echoes of lone gun men 22/11/63 & Dead Zone. There even a homage to latter novel with fairground scene that just lacks a supernatural element. Billy is also a writer on the side as he sits out the job (just about any SK novel you care to mention but the back tale of his early life & time in Iraq work well ) and the Outlook hotel with animal maze along with Hemingford Home are referenced.
                              The change in direction quarter of way through is hit & miss-Billy exacts justice on gang rapists & paedophiles as well as easing his conscience on the bad guys who have hired him. Yet it somehow works in the end which is not the most obvious thing you can say about about a recent SK novel.
                              Last edited by ale; 04-09-2021, 17:36.

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                                The Hitler Conspiracies: Third Reich & Paranoid Imagination-Richard J Evans. Takes an in depth look at 5 tales perpetually linked to Third Reich that wont go away. Which allows the opportunity to firmly posit the view that each are as proven by evidence & historical paper trail. Any alternative views that conspiracy theorists provide can never provide evidence to the contrary. But that not meaningful anyway. Such is warped view of the conspiracy mindset that nobody can do so. So in context of book-the Nazis knew the Protocols of Elders of Zion were forgeries & never sought to make capital of them. Nor did they make much of the stab in the back theory that permeated Germany following the collapse of the country in 1918. Neither does the author believe the Reichstag burning is anything but the historical records establish-a lone Dutch anarchist. Hess did not fly to England with Hitler blessing to orchestrate peace deal with UK ahead of Operation Barbarossa & Hitler never lived beyond the Berlin bunker in April 1945. A splendid book that debunks the increasingly delusioned views that are all depressingly proliferate without a shred of credibility in support

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                                  Fucking hell ale, I'm pleased with how much I've managed to pick up the pace since I started noting down my titles by hand at the beginning of lockdown, but you're absolutely steaming through them. Do you still have to commute, or something?

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                                    Heh. Far from it Sam. Its called retirement

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                                      Something I'll probably never get to experience.

                                      Anyway: finished The Quiet Fan this afternoon, and I know we're obliged to say this and I know we're obliged to say 'I'm not just saying this because I have to,' but it's dead good and I heartily recommend it for everyone's reading pleasure. Thanks very much for writing it, imp.

                                      Later on I'll be getting stuck into The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.

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                                        In my late twenties and early thirties I read maybe six or seven Thomas Hardy novels and thought he was a genius. Currently re- reading The Mayor of Casterbridge and remembering why.

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                                          I'm halfway through the second of the Barchester Chronicles. It's not caught me quite as much as the first one. The new characters are just a little too grotesque.

                                          The first one has an incredible section about newspapers.

                                          They're about real sorts of people, and about real sorts of events but handled so lightly and with so much fun.

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                                            Finished Parable of the Sower and onto Parable of the Talents because what we need in life is more apocalyptic doom.

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                                              Chasing The Boogeyman-Richard Chizmar. The author is well known in horror circles through his creation of Cemetery Dance magazine which has led to collaborations with Stephen King. Throughout the book deliberate comparisons are also made to Ray Bradbury. The cover firmly proclaims the book is a novel which in retrospect acts as too big a spoiler-Chizmar almost manages to convince that his tale of a serial killer in his small town is true crime fiction. Authenticity is further provided by a series of photographs dotted throughout detailing victims,crime scenes & familiar town locations. Chizmar places himself at the centre of events as they unfold in the summer/autumn of 1988 and until the final denouement the blur between fiction and non-fiction is maintained. While the conclusion feels hasty and tacked on overall there is enough style to recommend a reading.

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                                                https://twitter.com/rid9way/status/1436290027462463490

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                                                  The Great Mistake-Jonathan Lee. Got this on basis of admiration for author novel High Dive based on IRA assassination attempt on Thatcher at Brighton. Understood from blurbs that again it a novel based on historical events though not one this time familiar with-Andrew Green being the protagonist or historically The Father Of New York. As it happens the great historical events of which he is associated which while alluded to-creation of Central Park,NY public library among others-are not the fulcrums on which the book balances. Likewise the introduction of Samuel Tilden into the narrative. A google search is required to establish the full story of his standing in US history. As is the murder that opens the story and runs throughout the narrative. It therefore a character driven story & one in which the novel works better when it is not Green himself but those who float around the events of his life-the detective working his murder, the madam who inadvertently causes his murder, his housekeeper,his brother,even his father.

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                                                    Throw Me To The Wolves-Patrick McGuiness. Another novel read on basis of admiration of earlier work-Last Hundred Days detailing collapse of Ceausescu Rumania. And this is an excellent tale. A mish mash of buddy cop partners Gary & Alexander/Ander dealing with their age differences (9 years but that matters. Gary sings Brexitland to tune of Soft Cell Bedsitter while Alexander wonders how he could have could have heard or known it being a baby when it released) and class differences (Alexander went to public school and is therefore Prof. Gary didnt. Alexander relates tales of iniquity including a truly haunting recall of trial by classroom peers conducted by a teacher along with standard bullying & sexual abuse both open and covert. Gary muses that despite for all that his school never produced ministers of state, captains of industry etc). It all coalesces around a murder for which a teacher of Ander school becomes the prime suspect & develops into a state of nation novel which satisfies neither of them. Ander is part of the British Light Entertainment generation which had a hand down the nations paints. Gary has seen hipster bars and food shops expensively replace the lifestyle he is familiar with. Social media also takes a battering although in end secures justice is done. Sort of.

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