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    Due to the failure of FC Mammolshain Reserves to get a team together tomorrow, my jaunt to Burgholzhausen has been called off. One life experience I'm just gonna have to fucking forego. This did mean, however, that I could drink several pints of smooth dark Urbräu with impunity tonight, and now all I have to do is decide what to do with 12 hours of free time tomorrow, assuming I can get out of bed before the police tannoys prompt me to escape the historically problematical heavy knock on the door of the Polizei. So, if I get my hungover arsch out of bed I will make some sandwiches and head out to the hills on my bicycle with a few newspapers. Is that not interesting? I mean, it's not exactly a fucking Bangladeshi monsoon I'm having to cope with here. A day out cycling without having to referee a bunch of fat-headed, dick-headed choleric wankers could be just what I need. Current reading: my own post on OTF.

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      Like!

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        Last time we were in North Carolina, I picked up a book called My Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery, edited by Belinda Hurmence. This time I picked up Before Freedom: When I Can Just Remember by the same author/editor.

        These are fascinating volumes, comprised of first person interviews with elderly African Americans who'd grown up slaves and been freed, usually around ten or twelve years of age. The interviews were conducted mainly in North and South Carolina, sometime around 1935 as part of a WPA scheme to employ writers/authors. Most subjects were in their late '80s and early '90, and had generally fond memories of their life as slaves and of their owners. As the editor points out in the preface, this was common. Childhood was idyllic, and the later struggles they faced as freemen were far greater than the abstract concept of being 'owned' as a child.

        Also, the subjects universally remember 'the Yankees' as savages who looted, burned and pillaged as they spread the message of freedom to the slaves.

        The language is raw, beautiful and in many ways, foreign in both time and dialect. I'll eventually have the whole set of these, I find them so fascinating.

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          Originally posted by RobW View Post
          Reading Alex von Tunzelmann's 'Blood and Sand', about the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Enjoying it immensely.
          Did it stand up to the end? If so, I'll give it a go. I really enjoyed her Indian Summer but I wondered if she'd paced it right. About to re-read it to check.

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            Just finished "A Short History of the Boxer Rebellion" by Diana Preston. I had no idea in the 21st century that you could write a book about a major event in Chinese history without reference to any chinese sources whatsoever. Impressive, in a really non-impressive kind of way.

            Also reading Yuri Slezkine's "House of Government" which is - don't be fooled by the packaging and the book flap - essentially a 1000-page social history of the Old Bolsheviks who became big shots under NEP and Stalin. It is not without interest - the stuff on architecture and urban planning is fascinating (how do we build houses and neighbourhoods if we don't know if parents or the state will have the primary responsibility for raising children?) - but the insistence on viewing everything through the lens of "communism-as-religious-sect" is really annoying and the 100-page meander through Axial-age religions and early-modern millennial sects was unnecessary and painful.

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              Got to make a choice between books to start. Meet Me in the Bathroom or 2023 - A Trilogy. Having been reading all the craziness about the Toxteth Day of the Dead I am not sure I am ready for the latter.

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                Finished The Girls, by Emma Cline. A coming of age novel told in flashback by a woman who was a teenager in the late 1960s in the Bay Area and fell in with a group that is a thinly veiled version of the Manson family. The similarities are extremely obvious and unsubtle, but the plot is not as important as her writing style, which I really enjoyed. She has some great sentences and turns of phrase, and the book is more about the relationship of women of different ages among each other and what it is like to be a woman and seen by others. I really enjoyed it.

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                  Yan Lianke's Serve The People is OK. Not in anything like the league of the Explosion Chronicles or Lenin's Kisses though. Actual sex scenes, though, which is pretty rare in Chinese lit (the stuff that gets translated anyway)

                  Ian McEwan's The Children Act is fantastic. Now that Iain Banks is gone he may be my favourite British writer. You know every story is going to have a horrible ending but the suspense he builds in exactly how horrible it is going to end is fantastic. And the pacing: characterdrivencharacterdrivencharacterdrivenchara cterdrivencharacterdrivencharacterdrivenHOLYFUCKIN GPLOTcharacterdriven is unique.

                  Still chugging through House of Government. It gets better, but Christ it could have used a tougher editor.

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                    Just finished reading Bob Wilson's autobiography (see football books thread). I've overlapped and am a couple of chapters in to Jackie Robinson's autobiography that had two "fucking hell!" moments before I got to him being court martialed for talking to a white woman on a bus.

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                      150 pages into the Jackie Robinson autobiography. I was surprised to learn he campaigned for Nixon against Kennedy in 1960.

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                        Finished Golden Apples of the Sun - lovely stuff. I have now started Swing Time by Zadie Smith, which so far I'm very much enjoying, having not read anything by her before (apart from probably the odd article).

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                          Finished the Jackie Robinson book. Very sad reading about his son.

                          This was published in 1972 and although some of the scenery has changed evidently not much has improved in American attitudes to race in the past 45 years.

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                            Started reading India Conquered; Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire by Jon Wilson this morning.

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                              I'm now halfway through The Outback Stars by Sandra Mcdonald. It's spacey sci-fi based on Australian aboriginal myths. Mcdonald served 8 years in the US Navy so the space navy set up seems very authentic. Perhaps too authentic - it's the first space opera book I've read with an emphasis on how much paperwork needs to be done in a space navy.

                              A quick Google reveals this is the first in a trilogy so I might try and find the next 2 books while I'm here in Hay on Wye.

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                                Finished the book. It's not set up so you have to read the sequels which is pleasing.

                                Not sure what to read next. Not got any others started so will have to see what is lying around. I remembered yesterday that I still have Danish Dynamite about the mid 80s Denmark team in the to read pile. So I might do that next.

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                                  It's less interesting than you'd think.

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                                    I am currently reading the fascinating 'Final Solution' a masterful overview of the Holocaust by one of the leading exponents of modern Jewish history and now passed Daivid Cesarani - olevashólem 'lit

                                    The voice of clarity and dignity silenced, the voice of classical realism - a shining light has gone out, but his books live on.

                                    'Final Solution -The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949' a lucid synthesis of scholarship, 1000+ pages, I'm 70% through it (kindle) an absolute massive read. It is impossible to be reading such testimony and not to be overwhelmed by the events themselves. Reinstating the singularly Jewish character of the tragedy like no other book I've read on the subject.

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                                      "American War" by Omar El-Akkad. Utterly unsubtle but readable novel about the US crumbling into a vicious Second Civil War (sponsored by resource rich Middle Eastern states) with biological warfare, refugee camp massacres, suicide bombers, rogue drones, against the backdrop of cataclysmic global warming and fossil fuel depletion.

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                                        Unsubtle is putting it mildly. I get the sense Omar was pretty traumatized by leaving Toronto and dealing with life in the states (you may have read this piece of his in the Graun recently). Interesting as a vision of a remarkably low-tech future.

                                        Now, my wife just bought me The Chinese Typewriter: A History, which looks utterly fascinating and i may have to stay up all night to read it.

                                        (edit - a third of the way through now. It's very good if sometimes heavyhanded. Technolinguistics is a fascinating field - for instance, as yourself how morse code works in Chinese. I think many on here would like it, though maybe Ginger Yellow more than any.)
                                        Last edited by Anton Gramscescu; 01-10-2017, 15:15.

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                                          Originally posted by Anton Gramscescu View Post
                                          Technolinguistics is a fascinating field - for instance, as yourself how morse code works in Chinese.
                                          I swear to you...he's interesting and engaging in person. He really is.

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                                            Oh hush. This book is fabulous.

                                            For instance, did you know that the Input Method Editor system now used on every Chinese, Japanese and Korean phone and computer was actually first developed for a typewriter built in 1947? Imagine the work that goes into making something that complicated work mechanically as opposed to electronically. Amazing.

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                                              I'm about 2/3rds through The Nix by Nathan Hill.
                                              Boy, this is quite a read. All the criticisms about it being overlong and overstuffed are correct, and yet... What a ride. Reminds me of later period Pynchon (when he'd got past the need for endless digressions) and a bit of Tom Woolf's knack for unpicking an absurdity.
                                              Seriously, this is up there with A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki as my book of the year.

                                              Before that I read Idaho by Emily Ruskovich which was brilliantly evocative and fist-gnawingly dull at the same time. And also How Not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb. Surprisingly engaging if overly obvious. It often uses a sledgehammer where a nutcracker would do, but had a lot of easily recognisable and relatable situations for me and I assume any bloke around my age.

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                                                I really liked the Nix too even though mildly annoyed by the one obvious, glaring problem of timing, (the Democratic convention happened in August so for classes at the uni to have been in session they would have had to start term in July which I'm pretty sure has never been the case at American colleges).

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                                                  Ah, I hadn't twigged that. Yes, I can see how that would grate.

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                                                    I'm about halfway through reading Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son right now, and it's very good, very entertaining and readable. I think somebody years ago on this thread commented how well it was written given that it's an American author writing with a North Korean's voice.

                                                    Before that it was The 100 Year Old Man, which is entertaining fluff but would have been better if I knew less history

                                                    And before that it was Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, which was actually really very dull for a book that short.

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