Anyone Read Any Decent Books Lately?

Pathetic, Shadow: I read 'Jock of the Bushveld' at 10, 'War and Peace' at 12, and 'Notes on the Definition of Culture' by 13. I wasn't allowed any Enid Blyton - 'far too infantile' saith the mater. Oh, and I could spell 'specification' at 6. (Cue very smug emoticon.) What's the biggest word any of us could spell when woz ickle?

The only problem is, I couldn't tell you the seven times table for a million dollars! :(
 
I also remember discovering Enid Blyton at an early age and then spending all my birthday money on the Famous Five series. Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy and the various secret passages and private island. Are they still as popular now though? None of my young cousins seem to have read them.
 
When I was at home I read Mike Gayle's new book, His N Hers, it was very good. He is a very funny author, even though this latest one is still very funny it can be heartbreaking in parts, I sat there reading the end with tears streaming down my face. I also dug out one of his old books, Turning Thirty, & read that - it is very, very funny & scaringly accurate!!!

Now I'm reading Boris Starling's latest book Vodka - it is exceptionally good. It's the tale of an American banker brought into Russia post-communism to help privatise the country & put them back on their feet, with the story of the gangland warfare in post-Communist Russia running alongside it, & a serial killer on the loose. It's very, very good.
 
Ha ha......I'm actually a big fan of the author which is why I bought it - I read (& loved) Messiah long before it was made into a seial for the BBC & I liked his 2nd novel, Storm, too. :P :D
 
Heck, i'm reading Vodka now - it appealed to me for £2.97 in Tesco a couple of weeks ago. Only got about 60 pages read so far mind as been very busy.
 
"Cloud Atlas" got a very good review on Richard & Judy this evening, from Griff Rhys Jones, Ian Hislop, a small book group, as well as the eponymous duo. It's a series of novellas which interlink to create the whole. The book group felt that it was tremendously well written, with some more than others being preferred. Problem is, I caught only this portion of the programme, thus missing the author's name - they referred to 'he' so it's a man! :confused:
 
The author is David Mitchell, Jon.


Here's the Amazon review

It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?)
Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism.
 
Another b: blimey! Thanks, DG and Pee, for the info. I'm always buying books 'for later', but, as we know, tomorrow never comes... Shelves full of enticing titles like 'Solomon Time' beckon to me, and yet I sit transfixed by the 3.30 seller from Southwell instead of rekindling my past ardour for things literate. I might pop into Waterstones, just a minute away, and spy a paragraph or three, and see if it's something I might take to. It sounds intriguing...
 
Ive just re-read the "Heir to the Empire" trilogy by Tomothy Zahn and they are stunningly good books, anyone who likes Star Wars will love them, my copies are practically read to pieces but i will gladly buy another copy to keep me entertained for many a year
 
I am a bit late starting but just before Christmas I started reading the Harry Potter books, really enjoyed the first 3 but the 4th and now 5th have just blown me away. Simply superb, the step up from the first 3 is remarkable.....the Goblet Of Fire will make a cracking film. A late starter but thoroughly recommend them if there is anyone else out there on the planet that have not read them.
 
I'm reading 48 by James Herbert.
Absolute quality and beautifully written, I couldn't recommend it highly enough.
 
Not everyone's cup of tea, but I am currently enjoying tremendously "THe Rise and Fall of the British Empire" by Lawrence James. Surpisingly for a book of this nature it is extremely readable.
 
:lol:

Arguably , Ireland went backwards for about 50 years after 1922 - a ghastly repressive Catholic theocracy run by de Valera for many years . It is not too long ago that the Irish courts sought to stop a raped teenager from obtaining an abortion in England .

Had Connolly and the other leaders of the Easter Rising not been murdered by the British in 1916 it would have been very interesting to see whether Ireland might have become a very different state- the same applies perhaps unlikely considering his political views to the killing /murder judging by which viewpoint is taken of Collins in the Civil War .

Ireland is now of course a thriving pluralist modern democratic state - Dev would hate it
 
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