<3 Derek Paravacini. Amazing documentary

Just finished The Buried Giant which I would not have finished if I hadn't read about it itt. Started off very very poorly imo, but could not put it down once they got to the first village. Really amazing stuff.

Quick question

This is wrong.

Started The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami and Moon Palace by Paul Auster.

Finished The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. I don't recommend it.

whoa. thank you, that was fantastic.

have you read the biography I'm currently reading? it's very interesting.

I hate to trash a book, but Amazon offered me a free book called The One That Got Away by Simon Wood, and I decided to read it all the way through just for ****s-n-giggles. Absolute crap. Flat, unsympathetic characters, by-the-numbers plot, uninspired use of setting, poor descriptions -- this book has it all. There are plenty of horrible passages like:

The whole book is basically like that. There's not much good to say about this novel.

No, but I might. I'm a big fan of all things Paravacini.

I have now. Thanks for the recommendation.

American Lion-Andrew Jackson in the Whitehouse- As the seminal biography on PAJ and a Pullitzer Prize winner it was excellent as expected.

Just started Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Only a few pages in so far but I'm enjoying it. I've got a thing for books that concern the era of the Russian purges/ Gulags etc for some reason. I think it may be to do with a general admiration or awe for how the human spirit can endure such circumstances.

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, read by Fisher Stevens, is a fun read. Dark comedy where a thrift shop owner becomes a "death merchant" when he sees Death standing over his wife's bed after she's delivered a baby. The plot is pretty loose, but there are definitely quite a few laugh-out-loud moments.

I was in rural England for a month without consistent internet which meant more time to get some reading done, but I have been too busy to post about recent books since getting back. Here's a quick roundup of highlights (and not).

I had high expectations of Emily St. John Mandel's post-apocalyptic Station 11 (2014), which was this year's winner of the Tournament of Books, but thought it was solid but not outstanding.

Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988). This is the third Hollinghurst novel I've read and I continue to admire his fiction. This one is much more obsessed with gay life than the two recent ones. And since I'm old enough to remember the days when Lady Chatterly and Lolita were banned books, I kept thinking: "I could have been arrested for buying, selling, or owning this book when I was a teenaged reader."

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels (1990). The second of hers I've read and one of my favourite books of the past year. Romance at Cambridge early in the twentieth century. Every character, even the silly ones, is treated with fondness. On village life: “He knew … that the country was not a place of peace, and that it was difficult to tell what might give or have given offence, which made it a good preparation for life at a university.”

Andrew O’Hagan, Our Fathers (1999). Recommended to me for the power and beauty of the language by a poet friend, it did not disappoint. A powerful exploration of the Scots heritage in the modern world.

Michael Crummey, Sweetland. I see that I never got around to recommending Crummey's Galore, probably the best book ever produced about Newfoundland. (It's been called "100 Years of Solitude in Newfoundland".) This new one can't come up to that (not much can) but it's still a fascinating exploration of place and the life of a small community, increasingly moving into a (Murakami-like?) magic realism.

Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress. Though I found the first three, interconnected, stories fun, I thought this was second-level Atwood, interesting nevertheless for its explorations of aging and of the way genre fiction (fantasy, mystery, horror) cross over into serious consideration.

If you like this you should read Fool. I'm a big fan of Moore though I recognize he isnt for everyone, but Fool is just a hilarious, fantastic fun book.

I'm reading The Word For World Is Forest, by Ursula Le Guin. It's OK so far.

It's been a long time since I read it. I recall it as a great book, up there with 1984 and The Trial.

Looks good, I'll make it my next Christopher Moore book.

I just finished A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, read by Neil Hunt. It's kind of like if Atlas Shrugged was a good story. Strong female lead character who survives a brutal WWII POW ordeal and makes a better life for herself and the community she settles in. The back end of the story does lack a major conflict, but the inspirational characters carry it through nicely. Excellent reading by Neil Hunt, who alternates flawlessly between British and Australian accents.

Finished Station Eleven, which was awesome.

Also read Slaughterhouse Five, which was not. I feel like the fault must lie with me, and not the book. Two separate IRL friends whose opinions I value thought I would like it. But goddamn I hated that book.

Going to start The Martian tonight.

eyebooger, give Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle a try if you haven't already.

I read that years ago, it was ok but pointedly lefto. Might have easily been a thinly veiled condemnation of the Vietnam War.

Finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I liked it and found it to be a page turner, not as good as 1Q84, Kafka on the Shore, or Colorless Tsukuru, but better than his other novels.