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This Week I are mostly reading (contd)

Sammy Jennings

...continued from this thread

A Good School by Richard Yates

Slight, but some great moments

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B_Wayne

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, it's probably having the wrong effect.... I now want to do an adventure holiday....

minnow

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey

Joe_ Public

B_Wayne wrote: »

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, it's probably having the wrong effect.... I now want to do an adventure holiday....

Reading Into Thin Air gives me a great desire to hike to Everest Base Camp but absolutely no further. Even watching guys crossing those crevasses on ladders is enough to give me the willies! Absolutely great book, though, first rate climbing disaster porn.

crannbeag

I've just read Sebastian Barry's 'Days without End'. I really enjoyed it.

Callan57

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

ahlookit

Enjoyed Do No Harm by Henry Marsh, he's able to write as well as perform brain surgery. It's a very honest account of his doubts and operations that went wrong, he doesn't try to portray himself as a super hero.

Next up is Dreamland by Sam Quinones. Heard the author on the Marc Maron podcast a while ago, he sounded very interesting. His book is about "Americas opiate epidemic".... big pharma (oxycontin) and heroin from Mexico sweeping through smaller US cities and towns.

Fathom

Vicious Circle
by C.J. Box

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Jut finished Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett.

Set in Tasmania it's about 2 young brothers and their relationship with their alcoholic fisherman father. Harry, the youngest, is left to his own devices while Miles is forced to work on his fathers boat during the day. Their older brother Joe is estranged from their father and when he decides to leave town to sail around the Pacific, Miles is forced to take on the responsibility of looking after Harry too.
It reminded me a lot of Tim Winton but that may just have been the rural coastal setting. It's quite a short book and only covers a couple of days in the lives of the characters but it still manages to create a very vivid world and the characters feel more fleshed out and real than some I've encountered in books five times the length. It packs quite an emotional punch too and I was actually surprised by how it ended.

Callan57

Hillbilly Elegy by J D Vance (hopefully it will cast a light on Trump country)

Arghus

The Power of The Dog by Thomas Savage - Excellent psychological drama set during the 1920's, amidst the prairies of the American Mid West. George and Phil are two brothers - and studies in contrasts - who own a successful ranching business together. While neither are old men, their lives seem to have fallen into set patterns that speak about the deadening comfort of routine. George is plodding and placid. Phil is a genius, but also a domineering bully, who inwardly or outwardly scorns anything or anyone of pretense or lacking in what he perceives as virtue. When George unexpectedly takes a young widow as a wife, all established rules and roles of power are put under threat.

This is a taut and powerful novel. Savage possessed a rare skill for taking you into the minds of his characters and even if the novel is not an especially long read, it runs deep, containing densely packed broiling emotion and moments of fraught tension, complete with a shocking conclusion. You really get inside the heads and hearts of the characters and learn about the way they view the outside world. You become privy to their half spoken or thought feelings that they - can't or simply won't - always articulate with precision, most of all to themselves, because to tell the truth or to put words on it could bring their self images crashing down. The style of the novel made me think slightly of a mix between Henry James and John Steinbeck, by way of Cormac McCarthy. It's Jamesian in the sense that a great deal of the action of the plot is "heady", concerned with the happenings in the mind and filling every seemingly minute interaction between characters with layers of significance and weight. But, thankfully, unlike a lot of Henry James it can actually be enjoyed, not just admired. And that's why I think of Steinbeck and McCarthy - not just in setting - like them, Savage's prose is dry and clear, precise, but also filled with amazingly detailed and evocative descriptions of natural beauty or raw emotional honesty and some of the novel's themes of what makes a "true" man or an authentic life chimes in with their overarching concerns also.

Perhaps I'm making this sound a little dry. I'm really not trying to. It is a page turner of a novel, with a growing sense of tension been ratcheted up steadily throughout. Cliche that it is - I couldn't put it down. Supposedly when it was first published in the 60's it struggled to find an audience and I can slightly understand why - it is a strange beast. In one sense it's a tough, rugged read, with a straightforward momentum - manly stuff. On the other hand it's powerfully emotional and complex, with a conclusion that'll stay with you for quite some time. First rate stuff really.

Prenderb

"Failure is not an Option" - by Gene Kranz, mission controller and flight director for much of NASA's Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programme. A fascinating view from the horse's mouth of the cutting edge, pioneering work done in the space exploration programme at that time. Human endeavour at it's "purest" maybe? Exploration for its own sake. Worth looking up if that floats your boat. Also, worth it if it doesn't.

heathledgerlove

Read quickly Jennifer Johnston's debut The Captains and the Kings, she was one of my favourites but I have to say this put me off her a bit! I think the central friendship was supposed to be touching but to be honest squicked me out! And quite a strong streak of misogyny.. Not a gram of sympathy was given to any female character; rather like in How Many Miles where the mother character was the Big Bad, even more so than the War.

Mind you she described the ravages of old age brilliantly; she was weak in portraying a believable young character though; I'd hold The Butcher Boy as the best mad Irish adolescent in that regard

Birneybau

'The Spinning Heart' by Donal Ryan, catching up before I see him in conversation on Monday. Free tickets, if there's any left here:

https://cruinniu.rte.ie/event/eithne-shortall-in-conversation-with-donal-ryan/

I may end up having a spare come Monday so keep those peepers open!

Callan57

Finished Hillbilly Elegy .... superbly depressing

Now it's on to Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

Joe_ Public

I've heard good things about Hillbilly Elegy, on my list for the next couple of weeks.

Didn't really take to Beatlebone (not that that should put anybody off!). Think it would have helped if I was a Beatles or Lennon fanatic, but I've never really been much of a fan.

[Deleted User]

Just this lunchtime, I finished 'Here Are The Young Men' by Rob Doyle. I found the whole thing depressingly anticlimactic, in contrast to some rave reviews that lauded its philosophical insights. Although the writing is quite lovely, and there are occasional flashes of excellence (usually involving Rez and his frustrations with contemporaneous Dublin), the book somehow manages to be both implausible and cheaply predictable. I think if I could sum it up in one word, I'd describe it as 'laboured'.

It's not an awful read, but it certainly didn't live up to the Dublin critics' gushing praise for it.

Callan57

The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

I can't really say what this is about. There's a young girl whose mother dies and she gets taken in by a lighthouse keeper and then there's also a guy who lived in the same town but maybe a century before and he's had an affair and is a bit of a loon. I think maybe the lighthouse keeper (and then the girl) are telling the story of the other guy.... or something.
Anyway, despite not having a clear grasp on what the point of it all is, I quite like it. The way it's written I could just keep reading and reading, even if it was about nothing at all.

Fathom

The Black Book
by James Patterson

Callan57

The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth

heathledgerlove

City of Friends by Johanna Trollope, just a light read after The Secret History. Next am going to do Slam by Nick Hornby. My 5th favourite writer so excited !

heathledgerlove

Joe_ Public wrote: »

I've heard good things about Hillbilly Elegy, on my list for the next couple of weeks.

Didn't really take to Beatlebone (not that that should put anybody off!). Think it would have helped if I was a Beatles or Lennon fanatic, but I've never really been much of a fan.

Would it appeal to someone who is a big Beatle fan?

B_Wayne

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, nearing the end and it's a masterpiece. It gives a broad idea on how utterly warped the system of slavery and why it remained so strong particularly in the south. Pretty relevant to the present day in many respects. Would highly recommend.

Swiper the fox

heathledgerlove wrote: »

Would it appeal to someone who is a big Beatle fan?

I can speak from experience here and say that it's unlikely. It's a very poor book imo, Barry is a superb short story writer but hasn't yet written a decent novel.

Joe_ Public

Swiper the fox wrote: »

I can speak from experience here and say that it's unlikely. It's a very poor book imo, Barry is a superb short story writer but hasn't yet written a decent novel.

Agree regarding the short stories, really tight and very well crafted. Havent read City of Bohane which a lot of people seem to like, but Beatlebone I just found him showing off his own cleverness to no real purpose or meaningful end. A writer of some talent for sure, but that felt like a waste of it.

Fathom

The Lost Order
by Steve Berry

marienbad

The State Of Africa - A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meridith .

It is quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read . There have been hundreds and hundreds of leaders in Africa at this stage and less than 10 of them have given up power voluntarily - it is just one long corruption gravy train and despite my long standing left leaning liberal bias the biggest villains are not the MNC's ,The World Bank and the other usual suspects - though they are not innocent either .

Waiting For The Barbarians - Essays From The Classics To Pop Culture by the always entertaining and informative Daniel Mendelsohn .

eire4

Finished The Famine Plot by Tim Pat Coogan a very moving and evocative account of An Gorta Mor. Some very moving individual stories throughout the book give a very good picture as much as is possible of how terrible and cataclysmic an event An Gorta Mor was.

Callan57

My Name is Leon by Kit DeWaal

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

eire4 wrote: »

Finished The Famine Plot by Tim Pat Coogan a very moving and evocative account of An Gorta Mor. Some very moving individual stories throughout the book give a very good picture as much as is possible of how terrible and cataclysmic an event An Gorta Mor was.

I read this a while ago and while it had some interesting stuff in it I couldn't shake the feeling that he set out with a very specific aim and wasn't going to let facts get in the way.