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    Anyone read anything by Iris Murdoch? For me she was sort of a background "highly respected contemporary author" of my teens and early adulthood, I think she became a Dame eventually. On my bookshelf I've copies of something called Bruno's Dream (?) and Acastos, "Two Socratic Dialogues," she had an academic philosophy background. I've never read either, but that may change. I downloaded "The Sea, The Sea" a couple of weeks ago, and it's become my current go-to read. I'm not absolutely sure why, if I'd realised it was over 600 pages long I might have changed my mind! Murdoch is, however, a very smooth writer, by that I mean this book is very easy to pick up and put down. The first person protagonist is a theatre director who has retired to an semi-remote, quite basic old house — no gas or electricity — on the coast. In fact it's right on a rocky shore. Deliberately as far away from London as he can get. It's his intention to write about his life, though definitely not produce a standard theatrical memoir. The trouble is that his past, and the people in it won't leave him alone. Perhaps the reason the story appeals to me so much, is that it's basically an old-man's tale. Murdoch was getting on when she wrote it too. So there's a lot to identify with, similarities that resonate quite loudly, though with chimes rather than clangs I'm happy to say.

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      Afraid I can't help you there, AdC.

      I can now say I have read something by Mariana Enriquez, though. Los peligros de fumar en la cama is a very good collection of modern-day* horror stories, which as one of the reviews quoted on the back cover puts it 'doesn't imitate [old] horror stories but writes new ones from zero'. As I mentioned when I started it last week, the English translation – The Dangers of Smoking in Bed – was nominated for the International Booker last year, so I presume it's good. The longest story, Chicos que vuelven ('Kids who return') reminds me more than a little of a wonderful (and rather shorter!) short story by Julio Cortázar called Casa tomada ('House Taken Over').

      It's been two fiction books in a row, so I'm going to do one more before another non-fiction one, I think. Snap decision: when I go to bed in a little while I'm going to start Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You. Bought it on a whim as a way of providing a bit of solidarity when there was that fuss about her turning down a Hebrew edition a couple of months ago, so I hope it's good.

      *Modern-ish, anyway. I'm a bit confused about exactly when it first came out. I found 2009 as the first date of publication online, and that's the date it's copyrighted to the author in my copy, but my copy also says the first edition was published in 2017.

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        I’ve just discovered (or rather my daughter has just discovered for me) Lucia Berlin’s book of short stories A Manual For Cleaning Women’ and I’m really enjoying it. Not a writer I was familiar with previously, although the foreword of the edition I have was written by Lydia Davis whose short story work I have enjoyed before so her endorsement interested me immediately.

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          I've started reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Hadn't realised it's meant to be a comedy.

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            Originally posted by Tony C View Post
            I’ve just discovered (or rather my daughter has just discovered for me) Lucia Berlin’s book of short stories A Manual For Cleaning Women’ and I’m really enjoying it. Not a writer I was familiar with previously, although the foreword of the edition I have was written by Lydia Davis whose short story work I have enjoyed before so her endorsement interested me immediately.
            That's because you haven't been reading the short story thread, young man.

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              Originally posted by imp View Post

              That's because you haven't been reading the short story thread, young man.
              Ha, apologies. Still, it seems I’m only five years off the pace so that’s an improvement.

              I’m really enjoying it, not least for the kind of passage you quoted in the short story thread. I can’t recall a writer who writes better similes and metaphors.

              Curious to hear that Pedro Almodovar is apparently creating a film version of the collection. Not sure how that will work.

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                Originally posted by Tony C View Post
                Ha, apologies. Still, it seems I’m only five years off the pace so that’s an improvement.
                That's how we roll in Books - I approve.

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                  Originally posted by The Bean Counter View Post
                  I've started reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Hadn't realised it's meant to be a comedy.
                  That renders the term 'comedy' almost meaningless to me. Stevens' realisation of the importance of 'banter' keeps coming back to me whenever I think of the novel though. The word hasn't dated well since it was written.

                  I have to admit I profoundly disliked The Sea, The Sea, though it was really the main character, who I wish had fallen into the sea about 20 pages in. An entitled, egotistical prick if ever there was one.



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                    Can't disagree with your view of the narrator. I was probably kept reading by the appearance of his cousin James, who is easily, and intentionally, the most interesting character in the book. A fact, even our anti-hero can't avoid, and comes to realise by the end. It's actually a story I'll think about for quite some time. Though there were occasions I picked it up with a sigh of despair rather than pleasure, there's much to ruminate over there.

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                      Originally posted by Sam View Post
                      Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You. Bought it on a whim as a way of providing a bit of solidarity when there was that fuss about her turning down a Hebrew edition a couple of months ago, so I hope it's good.
                      There's an awful lot of humping in this book. Described (as are non-sexy actions) in rather a lot of detail.

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                        Started reading Oliver Bullough's Moneyland which seems quite apt. First chapter begins with detailing Viktor Yanukovych's corruption.

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                          I finally got around to reading the much talked about and apparently widely loved A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles.

                          My feeling is that the admiration might be slightly unjust. It's totally readable, and enjoyable as light fluff. But it's really no more than that.

                          Also, it feels politically a little dodgy to me - it's like reading an English novel from between the wars, perhaps John Buchan or something, in that it seems to fetishise the charms of the aristocracy, and make it appear that if you have the right breeding and upbringing you can develop the charm to overcome everything. And that all the proles really want to refer to old aristocracy by their title, and so on. Now, this might have been a deliberate style choice, alongside what feels like a very mannered way of writing. But it still grates.

                          And... for a book which purports to have the protagonist see the post-revolutionary changes in Moscow from his hotel window, it feels like it's 85% airport novel historical romance, 15% pretty shallow observations on the actual history.

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                            Beautiful World, Where Are You is not going to make it onto my list of favourite books of 2022. Quite aside from the fact that I didn't enjoy it much, I'm not even convinced it's that good a book in an objective sense (if such a thing exists). The characters are mostly rather dislikable and the narratorial voice is oddly robotic for most of the first (roughly) two thirds of the book, as if the narrator's looking at humanity from outside and trying to describe what the characters are doing without understanding it ('She looked at the glowing screen on the front side of her handheld device and typed a message. An animated ellipsis appeared, indicating that the other person was typing ...', that sort of thing) and the fact that there are a couple of chapters that cast it all aside and are quite beautiful just made it more irritating that the rest of it was a bit of a drag to get through.

                            Also – and this isn't Rooney's fault at all – there was a fault with my Kindle copy, and it wouldn't let me read the last (I'm guessing) two or three pages. Amazon are refunding it and have removed it from my Kindle, and I can repurchase in order to finish reading it. I'll probably do so, because I hate leaving a book unfinished (especially when I've slogged through 98% of it!) and because it was in any case purchased out of solidarity for Rooney's stance on Palestine.

                            I've now started The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. It's a history book which tells the stories of the lives of each of Jack the Ripper's victims.
                            Last edited by Sam; 07-03-2022, 06:45.

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                              Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
                              And... for a book which purports to have the protagonist see the post-revolutionary changes in Moscow from his hotel window, it feels like it's 85% airport novel historical romance, 15% pretty shallow observations on the actual history.
                              I didn't dislike it, but it slipped from my memory almost as soon as I put it down. I think he is a decent writer, and I've nothing against easily digested airport novels, but I much preferred Rules of Civility his earlier book, perhaps because NY in the late 1930s and 40s interests me more than post-revolutionary Moscow from a hotel window. Also I'm a fan of Walker Evans who's work is parenthetical to the story. I've even tried to find a copy of the sequel, Eve in Hollywood without success.

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                                Originally posted by Sam View Post
                                Beautiful World, Where Are You is not going to make it onto my list of favourite books of 2022. Quite aside from the fact that I didn't enjoy it much, I'm not even convinced it's that good a book in an objective sense (if such a thing exists). The characters are mostly rather dislikable and the narratorial voice is oddly robotic for most of the first (roughly) two thirds of the book, as if the narrator's looking at humanity from outside and trying to describe what the characters are doing without understanding it ('She looked at the glowing screen on the front side of her handheld device and typed a message. An animated ellipsis appeared, indicating that the other person was typing ...', that sort of thing) and the fact that there are a couple of chapters that cast it all aside and are quite beautiful just made it more irritating that the rest of it was a bit of a drag to get through.

                                Also – and this isn't Rooney's fault at all – there was a fault with my Kindle copy, and it wouldn't let me read the last (I'm guessing) two or three pages. Amazon are refunding it and have removed it from my Kindle, and I can repurchase in order to finish reading it. I'll probably do so, because I hate leaving a book unfinished (especially when I've slogged through 98% of it!) and because it was in any case purchased out of solidarity for Rooney's stance on Palestine.

                                I've now started The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. It's a history book which tells the stories of the lives of each of Jack the Ripper's victims.
                                Five is very good. Dont want to give any spoilers but makes you realise how the victims mainly came from respectable backgrounds and even when slid through cracks imposed by Victorian society they not the whores or prostitutes that history has defined them.

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                                  Oh, that's not a spoiler at all; the author says that's what she's going to do in the very first chapter (and, of course, in most of the publicity blurb I read before buying it). I'm enjoying it so far.

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                                    Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. A cheering account of Hans Asperger's work at the University of Vienna Children's Hospital.

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                                      I've 'discovered' Maxim Biller and right now can't read anything else, aside from my short daily dose of Simenon/Maigret. And a wedge of a book that I'm reading to review, about the Rochester Lancers...

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                                        Moneyland was very good and fascinating given what is going on in the world now.

                                        Back to fiction and reading Don Quixote for the first time.

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                                          Oh, enjoy, RobW. I read a pretty archaic translation (published shortly before the highly regarded Edith Grossman one came out) and don't think I'll ever attempt it in Spanish, but part 1 is wonderful. Part 2 somewhat less so, for my money, but still good.

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                                            Originally posted by RobW View Post
                                            Moneyland was very good and fascinating given what is going on in the world now.

                                            Back to fiction and reading Don Quixote for the first time.
                                            There was a Don Quixote thread, or a thread about classic books, round about 2020, I think. I only remember that because I know that's when I finally read it, and raved about it too. Hope you're enjoying it.

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                                              Yeah it's wonderful, one of the true classics that lives up to its reputation.

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                                                Just finished Patrick Gale's latest, Mother's Boy, a sort of fictionalised biography of Cornish poet Charles Causley. Probably not going to challenge for the Booker or anything like that, but a nice read, with all the usual themes you'd expect in a Gale. The main characters are fleshed out nicely, particularly Causley's mother who you really end up rooting for. It's a little disappointing how some seemingly key characters just sort of disappear out of the book, but then I guess that probably was the nature of war-time relationships. An interesting depiction of life in the first half of the 20th century nevertheless – probably a good book to blast through on holiday.

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                                                  Finished The Five a couple of nights ago, and jolly cracking it was too. Highly recommended.

                                                  I'm now continuing my intermittent in-order read-through of the Sherlock Holmes canon (the Canon Doyle, if you will) by diving in to The Valley of Fear, which I realise, now I've started it, is the first Holmes thing I've come to since starting this little campaign a few years ago that I've neither read any of nor indeed really heard anything about before reading this time around.

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                                                    Moneyland was very good and fascinating given what is going on in the world now.
                                                    I thought I'd posted about that book, but apparently not on this thread. Yes, it's very good, and I learnt a few things from it. The one slightly irritating thing about it is the strong implication in one of Bullough's early chapters that offshore tax avoidance and evasion (and the squirreling offshore of dirty money) barely existed before the 1960s, which is total bollocks. Yes, the scale of the problem worldwide, and the scale and territorial spread of the industry, grew massively from the 1960s onwards, as well documented in the book. But there was plenty of it for many decades before that (as the most cursory look at the history of UK tax law would have made obvious for example - there was major UK legislation in the 1930s to combat offshore avoidance by UK residents). On the earlier, more colourful history of offshore financial shenanagins, I'm currently enjoying a new translation of Alain Vernay's classic Tax Havens ("Les Paradis Fiscaux") from 1968 (a bestseller at the time and translated into many languages but never into English until now, as an English translation at the time was shelved due to litigation threats). Very entertaining about the various adventurers and high-rollers who made things happen in the Tangier free zone, Monaco etc. Vernay was incredibly well connected, as well as having been almost as big a hero of the Resistance as his wife.

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