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Post by marksherbert on Apr 9, 2009 10:14:56 GMT
I love that book, I try to lend it to everyone I know. They all love it too. The film comes soon.
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Post by GR on Apr 9, 2009 16:38:23 GMT
Just finished The Road by Cormack McCarthey. Powerful,lean and bleak. Easy to read though. Often the prose is like poetry. Isn't it, though? This past week I've been reading a book my mother recommended to me called Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, the true story of Dewey Readmore Books, a stray kitten that was adopted by the Spencer Public Library in Spencer, Iowa in the late '80s after he was left in their returned-books slot one freezing January morning. Not great literature by any means, but sweet and heartwarming stuff; plus the authors, library director Vicki Myron and professional book editor/writer Bret Witter, offer some decent insight into small-town life in Middle America.
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Post by Bill Edwards on Apr 9, 2009 19:47:11 GMT
I love that book, I try to lend it to everyone I know. They all love it too. The film comes soon. Mmm. Will the film show the same stripped back restraint that the Coen's adaptation of NCFOM did though? As I read the book I thought about the film every now and then and wondered how it could be made to be watchable if sticking to the spirit of the book? We'll see I suppose...
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Post by marksherbert on Apr 9, 2009 22:42:56 GMT
I think there's a good chance it'll do the book justice, going by the director and cast. Also, there are some pictures up on the IMDB page, and it looks pretty much as I imagined it: www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/
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Post by amy on Apr 17, 2009 11:22:34 GMT
Just finished Day of the Triffids, brilliant book! The writing was so good I really felt as though I was there... I will never be able to look at plants the same way again!!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2009 1:08:05 GMT
I'm reading Slave Girl by Sarah Forsythe. Sarah was on the Cook Report a few years back. She had been abducted somewhere in Europe and forced into sex slavery. On top of that her father used to abuse her as a child. When she was on the Cook report she was just a broken mess. She barely looked human. I remember praying for her when I saw that report. She's been through the kind of hell that no human being should have to go through. Anyway, a couple of months ago I saw the book on the shelf and I remembered her from that report, so I felt compelled to buy the book. Obviously, it's not exactly the most uplifting read, but I would say that it is absolutely essential. Since escaping slavery, thanks to Roger Cook, she has somehow managed to get some sort of a life for herself. She is just such a brave woman. Liam Neeson apparrently does a lot of charity work to fight against sex slavery and it is a far greater problem than most people even realise. So, until people start to take notice of it, our government will continue to do very little to fight it. Find the book! Read it! Tell other people about it!
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Post by GR on Apr 18, 2009 22:21:39 GMT
I just finished Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. Part romantic-comedy parody (the main character, a young aspiring author in 1920s England, keeps coming into some money only to lose it shortly afterwards, and thus keeps having to put off marrying his ditzy sweetheart), part social satire (endless parties, gossip, scandal, and the ever-threatening specter of boredom among the young idle rich), Waugh's breezy prose holds these two threads together and carefully avoids heavy-handed moralizing as absurdities pile up and the story winds toward a rather dark climax. A witty and enjoyable read! ;D
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Post by GR on May 2, 2009 1:01:23 GMT
Right now I'm about halfway through John Grisham's The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. It tells the true story of Ron Williamson, a washed-up athlete who was battling substance abuse and mental illness when he was wrongly accused of murdering a young woman in 1980s Oklahoma. Though thoroughly researched, gripping and fast-paced, this is awfully infuriating stuff -- indeed, Grisham himself can barely hide his outrage (shown in occasional flashes of irony and sarcasm) toward the corruption that marked the murder investigation and Ron's trial.
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Post by marksherbert on May 2, 2009 9:56:42 GMT
I wanted something easy-going to quell the post-dissertation brainfog, so I read Tony Cascarino's autobiography. It was a step above most of the shallow crap that you get from the likes of Ca$hley Cole. For those who don't know he was a slightly above average striker in the late 80s/early 90s for Millwall/Chelsea/Villa etc... but it focuses as much on his faults and fuck-ups than it does on the game itself. Each chapter is introduced with a quote from the likes of Beckett, Vonnegut and Orwell which you might think is a bit pretentious, but I thought it set the scene and gave a context nicely. Very honest and refreshing.
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Post by GR on May 24, 2009 22:30:28 GMT
I'm about a third of the way through David McCullough's John Adams. As a biography, it reads a lot like historical fiction; and so far, I'd say it works well as both a portrait of an exceptional marriage (John and Abigail), and as an in-depth look at America's founding fathers -- their conflicts, the questions and issues they had to deal with in the fight for independence and in establishing a system of government, etc.
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Post by shindig on May 30, 2009 7:21:31 GMT
Tempted to get some more Le Carre after listening to Call for the Dead on Radio 4. A Murder of Quality is on today at 2:30pm.
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Post by Bill Edwards on May 30, 2009 8:57:21 GMT
Tempted to get some more Le Carre after listening to Call for the Dead on Radio 4. A Murder of Quality is on today at 2:30pm. Yeah I heard that. Very engrossing and well played. Looking forward to the next ep. Not read any Le Carre before...
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Post by shindig on May 30, 2009 12:58:01 GMT
I didn't read him until I got the two Smiley BBC adaptions. I bought The Most Honourable Schoolboy to plug the gaps between the two series' and then grabbed A Most Wanted Man. I prefer the latter as I managed to get through it easier.
Took a week of reading it whilst I was mostly on a manditory doley course, whereas the former seemed to lack a bit of pacing until the last few chapters took it up a notch. TV le Carre is very well-treated. The jury's still out on Film le Carre but I thoroughly enjoyed The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Pity A Murder of Quality clashes with the cup final. Good job for the iPlayer.
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Post by GR on Jun 16, 2009 23:38:00 GMT
Right now I'm about halfway through A Passage To India, E.M. Forster's classic about English-Indian relations and tensions at the height of the British colonial era, set in 1920s Chandrapore. Quite a pleasurable read so far!
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Post by marksherbert on Jun 17, 2009 7:26:39 GMT
David Mitchell's Bllack Swan Green - Great.
I'm currently halfway through Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which isn't easy reading, but it's very original.
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