Books To Recommend ?

A little disappointing from the great man -
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This is an erronious premise to start with when discussing Irv W. He is an overrated media slut. Simmo is right.

I am in the middle of a book called '102 Minutes' by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn.
It is story of the fight to survive inside the Twin Towers following the attack on New York by Bush's government. It is harrowing, but extremely well written.
 
Originally posted by Shadow Leader@Oct 9 2006, 10:13 PM
Has anyone read The Lovely Bones? I'm struggling through it at the moment - it's distinctly average, very slow and not giving me much of an incentive to keep on reading! I really can't put down a book half read though no matter how boring I find it which is a very annoying habit....
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Try to read The Ambassadors by Henry James - that will soon cure you
 
I did struggle on and finish The Lovely Bones - it got slightly more bearable towards the end but I still wouldn't recommend it unless you like "Over written, self indulgent pseudo therapeutic Californian twaddle" as AC so beautifully put it! He missed out over emotional and ridiculously sentimental though in his description...
 
The Pickwick papers flagged a bit towards the end but I enjoyed it at lot .

Now for Night and Day by Virginia Woolf . Feeling a bit daunted as I have struggled with attempts on her work apart from The Voyage Out.
 
They might have been nominated already but I have finished "The Bookseller Of Kabul" which is absolutely brilliant, really recommend it. On a recent trip to the Middle East I was also advised to read "The Kite Flyer" and so far it has not disappointed. To wonderful reads.
 
At the airport last week while browsing the books in WH Smiths my eye was caught by Rowing Without Oars by Ulla-Carin Lindquist. Aged 50 she was diagnosed with a rare form of Motor Neurone Disease which progresses rapidly and kills sufferers within a year or so. She wrote this book during that last year of her life. I spent the first day of my holiday in tears reading it.

A very humbling and thought provoking book.
 
Just read Tess Gerritsen's Harvest which was pretty good - she's a decent enough author.

Now I'm onto another book by an author I like a lot for her historical novels - Margaret George. The Memoirs of Cleopatra; Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles and The Autobiography of Henry VIII were all excellent - now I am reading Mary, Called Magdalene. It's good so far!
 
I've just started reading Alice In Wonderland as its a book I've never read and felt I should. The Golden Bough is next in the queue. I'm not sure how I'll get on with that one. :what:
 
Am reading the unusual Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland, who also wrote Girlfriend in a Coma, Microserfs, Generation X, Shampoo Planet, God Hates Japan, Life After God, All Families are Psychotic and Miss Wyoming. Born in 1961, he's an interesting guy since he also exhibits sculptures, having studied Art & Design in Vancouver, at the European Design Institute in Milan and the Hokkaido College of Art & Design, and completed a course in Business Science together with Fine Art and Industrial Design in Japan in 1986.

He exhibited his sculpture first at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1987 and won Canadian national awards for excellence in industrial design: you can still buy the baby cribs he designed. By 1988 he was a contributing journo to Vancouver magazine.

His non-fiction writings are Polaroids from the Dead, City of Glass, Souvenir of Canada, School Spirit.

The book I'm reading is one of his novels and is fairly tightly based around the Columbine High School shootings, being told from the perspective of one (dead) victim, her boyfriend, and two other narrators. It's human, incisive, moving and objective, and Coupland manages to move through the characters - one a young, pretty, teenage girl, another a crusty, wildly-religious old man - with complete credulity. The writing moves from a dead-eyed description of the shootings to a lyricality of observation without striking any false notes or descending into moralising or mush.

I'm really enjoying the writing and I will definitely buy some more of his books.
 
I'm reading a good book at the moment - Michael Marshall's The Straw Men. It's written very well and has quite a few amusing observations in it - like

"I don't find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don't even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they'll meet someone cute in the small hours of Friday night or that their career is suddenly going to steer into an upturn and they'll wind up married to a movie star. They're out the other side of all that, onto a flat, grey plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about. I don't blame them for being a little out of sorts. I'm just surprised more oldsters don't take to the streets in packs, swearing and raising hell and getting drunk. With demographics going the way they are, maybe that's going to be the next big thing. Gangs of octogenarians, taking drugs and running amok. Though walking amok is more likely, I guess - with maybe an hour of dozing amok in the afternoon".

I also laughed out loud at an early line in the book "You know the rules. You sleep with a woman, she's got the right to be superior to you for the rest of your life". :D
 
Read three and a half books while on the week's jolly: two by an American author I haven't tried before (the others Patricia Cornwell, and Ruth Rendell's short stories): Gerritson (and I just forgot her first name!). What I didn't read was 'A Better Memory in One Week'! The books were 'Body Double' and 'Life Support'. Very brisk thrillers - she has a forensic scientist heroine in the way that Cornwell has, but I preferred Gerritson's dame as she isn't as pompously assertive as Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta. As long as you don't mind very detailed descriptions of every aspect of autopsies and crime scene investigations, they're a decent two-sitting read.
 
I like Tess Gerritsen too Kri - she's very good. I think her better ones have been The Surgeon and The Apprentice - they are the first two books in the series with Maura Isles & Jane Rizzoli in them. I prefer her to Cornwell too and her books are very easy reading.
 
Hadn't even heard of her before reading these, Shadz. As you say, easy readin' as they clip along well without wasting space on peripheral characters. And not without humour - which I find singularly missing from the over-intense, self-obsessed Cornwell books. I got so fed up with reading how Scarpetta was anxious, concerned, frightened, wary, angry, upset, etc. that I longed to give her a warm and caring slap. She just never laughs at anything, especially herself! I don't care how scary crime can be - crime workers have a good line in black humour, but she seems to be the dreary exception. I think it's Ms. Songsheet I have to thank for the Gerritsons - she left them for holiday reading, and I'm glad she did.

I got a few pages into a Jenny Pitman last night, Double Deal, before succumbing to Bo-Peep. It might be okay - written pretty straightforwardly, it seems.
 
Fudge's posting on his "Day in the Life of..." put me in mind of this book that's due to be published this month I think, I've been lucky enough to see it already and if you're interested in the world of Paramedics it's an interesting read.

Paramedic Book

It follows on from a successful blog from the same author:

Blog
 
Horrendous state of affairs.

What am I going to do now? I was planning on buying the book, reading it, and getting knocked up!
 
Best comment I've read about it:

"Damn. And I was so looking to reading the forward by Dina Lohan."
 
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