This Week I are mostly reading (contd)

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days, a quick read but quite heartwarming.

Next The Throwaway Children by Diney Costeloe, expecting a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

Finished the excellent The Given Day - loved it
Now it's on to Boston Noir also edited by Dennis Lehane

Callan57 wrote: »

Finished the excellent The Given Day - loved it
Now it's on to Boston Noir also edited by Dennis Lehane

The other two books in Lehane's trilogy are even better IMHO.

Mend The Living - Maylis De Kerangal

Ariel - Marina Carr

The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart - edited by Brendan Barrington

The Reich's Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933-1945 - Misha Aster

Callan57 wrote: »

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

Very enjoyable read if you suspend belief ... central character as difficult to kill as Rasputin but I did enjoyed it.

Next is a tiny little book Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba (translated from Spanish) and hopefully nothing to do with Mr Trump

and on a larger scale Ken Follett's A Column of Fire

LionelNashe wrote: »

The Time Traveller's Wife - listening to it on Audible. About 25% of the way through. So far, it's just relationship stuff, and the time-travel mechanism being explained (which is original). It's the kind of time travel that requires suspending your disbelief. It's not how time travel really works.

Trying hard to resist but... - how does time travel really work?

Primo levi 'If this is a man' , a jolting counter brace to the impending consumerism of christmas and without sounding like a priest , a moment for reflection on the real meaning of the season.

State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy

The Girl Fom Venice - Martin Cruz Smith.

The Blue Estuaries - Louise Bogan

Even The Dogs - Jon Mcgregor

Finished Naoml Klein's No Logo an excellent critique of the increasing influence and power of major transnational corporations and the issues that brings up.

45, Bill Drummond

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham - Another classic that left me feeling a bit, "Is that it? Bill Murray wanted to make a movie of this?"

One character seeks transcendent meaning in his life, as all around him his acquaintances face dissolution and ruin from their pursuit of earthly delights or balms to their vanity. Ah yeah; the poor things don't even know they are in a cage.

I appreciate the influence of the novel: it's explorations of Hinduistic thought must have seemed pretty damn out there at the time - even if they feel a bit dated and vaguely new-agey now. But there is a core of sincerity to the novel: he clearly wanted to right about something meaningful. But it's a more didactic experience than something you can really love as a reader - the characters are reminiscent of plot-points rather than living and breathing fleshed out human beings. No doubting it's influence though

I did enjoy some of the prose; Somerset Maugham has a bitchy perceptiveness about him and he has a style of great clarity and ease. Pity that this novel lacks it in the plotting and characterisation stakes - but it's rare you get everything.