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    Grandmother comes in early?

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      I don't want to give too much away.

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        Recently read Helen Dunmore's The Siege. Very immersive/enjoyable read. I did feel it was bit short, but powerful enough on the emotional front.

        So then a charity shop find: Exposure. Didn't realise it was one of her late/last books. I was awake very early the other morn and it was within reach, whereas the Jonathon Wilson book about Eastern European football i've been dipping into was not...and I am fully gripped. love it.

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          Reading Alex von Tunzelmann's 'Blood and Sand', about the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Enjoying it immensely.

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            Started Garth Risk Hallberg's "City on Fire". I think this review is pretty fair, so far - it's beautifully evocative and a bit clunky at the same time, and the dialogue feels like it's all been pulled from one pot.

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              I paused "City on Fire" to read Charlie Jane Anders' "All the Birds in the Sky" (I have a library ebook app and the reservation came through so I wanted to read it first - only 21 days for each book). Seemed to be fairly average YA fiction to start with - magic vs science, nerdy bullied kids with A Big Future portended - but became something much darker, more adult and enjoyably compelling. Near future, world ending through war and famine and environmental disaster, a clash between magic and science to save the future. Very readable. Now back to Hallberg, which is shaping up to be a bit of a potboiler (albeit a very nicely written one).

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                I am considering officially dropping The Unvanquished and picking up something else. It's a week since I read any of it. It's not difficult (the back cover blurb, a little patronisingly, calls it 'Faulkner's easiest novel'), it's just rather dull, to me. Also I really don't want to take any paper books to the UK with me on Monday, because I want to bring back a few from my library at home. Something more enjoyable on the Kindle would be much more amenable for the flight.

                I'll see whether I manage to crack on with it at all during Friday, and then make a decision.

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                  Bollocks to it. I'll think about picking it up again when I get back from holiday, maybe.

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                    I just finished 'An Unnecessary Woman' by Rabih Alammedine - beautiful book, about books, and aging, and life, and living in a war zone and, more specifically, living as a woman in Beirut.

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                      Gave up on "City on Fire". An entire chapter describing a character getting up with a hangover left me, somewhat annoyingly, with a headache.

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                        A History of the Arab Peoples Albert Hourani

                        I feel I'm being a bit ungracious in only thinking it was ok. It's 470 pages of writing (plus maps, glos, index etc) covering 1500 years of history from the Atlantic to the borders of Iran. Of course it's going to feel a bit brief and sketchy in places and naturally it's going to have to leave out the 'why' a lot. It really does cram a lot in and I'm very appreciative of it being an intellectual and social history as much as, if not more than a history of wars and powers.

                        It does seem to struggle with it's self imposed geographical and racial limitations at points and they do feel rather artificial, especially when talking about intellectual history of islam.

                        But it's not at all bad when your final thought is that you'd have preferred for it to be a lot longer.

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                          On the plane, I started - and indeed got a good third of the way into - Ray Bradbury's short story collection, Golden Apples of the Sun.

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                            some fiction of late:

                            The Seventh Day by Yu Hua. Have decided eastern books about the afterlife are a lot more interesting than western ones (see also Human Acts). Basically all the injustices and inequalities of the present world get carried over into the next one. I really enjoyed this.

                            The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan. I find Indian literature frequently pretty annoying for reasons I can't put my finger on. That said, I enjoyed this more than any Indian novel since Arvind Adiga's "The White Tiger". Possibly a low bar. But not bad.

                            Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov. This was a really big book in late 80s, when it was first published after originally having been surpressed in the early Brezhnev days. It's pretty good. Beats the crap of solzhenistyn. The early scenes with Stlin in therm are very good in giving a sense of how his paranoia developed; that said, they get a bit didactic towards the end. But overall a very good take on Moscow in the 30s (read with Karl Schlogel's Moscow 1937 for full effect).

                            Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman. Well, you know. Holy Shit. War and Peace but in Stalingrad. Some of the scenes - the ones he obviously witnessed himself - are as vivid as anything you've ever read. And sure, anything over 1000 pages will drag, and sure, it probably reads better if you don't try too hard to remember who all the characters are. But still - very much worth the time

                            Ties by Domenico Starnone. Amusing. I can see why people thought he might be Elena Ferrante (he's actually her husband).

                            The War at the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. This is some brilliant shit, about a real-life insurrection by mystic Christians in northern Brazil in the 1890. As usual with Vargas Llosa, it probably has one too many rape scenes, but it's impeccably researched and filled with memorable characters.
                            Last edited by Anton Gramscescu; 13-08-2017, 12:34.

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                              Solzhenitsyn is a miserable bastard. And Ivan Denisovich is overrated. But Cancer Ward is superb.

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                                Have you read Selection Day, AG? I've liked White Tiger and Man In Tower, but I could just not get in to Selection Day at all. I don't know if it was all of the cricket, or the changing narrators (the e-book I got from the library seemed to have some formatting problems, which made that even more tricky), but I gave up pretty quickly on it.

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                                  No, i haven't. And to be honest the only thing I remember about White Tiger is that the narrator hated Sting, which is why I recommended it to the board (I must have liked it for more than that, but that's all I remember)

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                                    In the middle of Zeynep Tufecki's "Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest". It's an analysis of how twitter (and other social media) have changed the nature of protest - in particular, that it largely does away with a lot of the formal organizing that used to occur. This has one big advantage - speed -and one main disadvantage - nobody's in charge, so that if a situation changes (for instance, if a government wants to negotiate, or offers concessions, or if you get kicked out of Zuccotti park and need to figure out what to do next) there is no way to make collective decisions. There's a really interesting chapter contrasting this to how the civil rights movement in a sense "built muscle" by the actual tasks of printing flyers, delivering flyers, organizing car pools to transport people during the bus boycott in Montgomery or making transport arrangement to the March on Washington. But also interesting for the way it depicts the kind of permanent "global activist network" and how that group has grown and evolved since Seattle nearly 20 years ago.

                                    I think I'd enjoy discussing it with E10, in particular, though he might not like it - IIRC the organizational stuff was the part of Paul Mason's book that I liked the most and he liked the least.

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                                      All I know of Zeynep Tufecki is that she was one of the people lending their support to raising money to give to the North Carolina GOP after one of their offices was firebombed. Given that the party gladly accepted the money and never really seemed too interested in finding out who damaged their office, I think it's obvious (as a lot of people suspected at the time) that it was likely self-vandalism. Her book might be great, but that made a bad impression on me.

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                                        Yeah, I remember that. She had a good back-and-forth on twitter with Audrey Watters about it, I thought (in the sense that both were eloquent and respectful in putting their cases forward). Not her best moment, I agree.

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                                          Having finished the Margaret Salinger memoir, I've got a bone-on looking at my 'To Read' pile, the only problem being that I can not at all decide what to read next. Might just read Private Eye and 11 Freunde for a day or two before I make a decision.

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                                            imp, are you having to evacuate because of this UXB?

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                                              Finding a UXB would make me evacuate, that's for sure.

                                              Anyway, A Spy Among Friends about Kim Philby. Man, if there's an OTF book it's this one. Excellent in every regard. Spies, KGB, England, the war, sex, death, betrayal.

                                              Go read it.

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                                                Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                                imp, are you having to evacuate because of this UXB?
                                                Yep, and it's a pain - not for frau imp, who's in Dresden for the weekend, or for my remaining at-home daughter who can stay at a friend's. But I'm reffing at 3pm in a village 20km out of town, so have to leave the house well before 8am in my reffing gear and somehow occupy myself until then, on a Sunday morning when there's nothing open but a few breakfast/brunch places. Was planning to get fairly well oiled on Saturday night with a friend too, and then sleep it off. And they're not guaranteeing anyone can return home before 8pm.

                                                Cue headline: Hitler and Churchill Ruined My Sunday Lie-In Plans, Rages Frankfurt Ref

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                                                  Sorry to hear that

                                                  We have another FFM friend who also has to work, and is trying to figure out where to go between 7 and noon, when her office opens. I expect that the station and airport are going to be mobbed.

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                                                    But at least we got to take Current Reading waaaaaaay off topic, ha!

                                                    Tell your friend if she spots a middle-aged ref having breakfast and reading the weekend edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to come and say hello.

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