Hello all. Enjoying the Olympics?
Here's a selection of some of your comments from last week's thread.
I've been reading three books in the last week; Snow by Orhan Pamuk – it was a slow and hard read but I felt I understood a region (and culture) better than before and was genuinely pleased to have finished it. I enjoyed the subtle humour and vividly bleak scenes it painted for me.
The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett – having loved Bel Canto I was excited to read another of her novels, however, despite enjoying the easy of writing and interesting plot I found it rather "light" and I didn't really invest in the characters. I felt a lot more could have been made of the premis and I wanted to be given more.
I finished North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell the other day. It took a while for me to get in to it (I blame the stupidity of trying to start it during Wimbledon. I can do nothing but watch tennis during those two weeks), but once I did, I found it very powerful. It gave an insight into the ways the owners think about wages and strikes, and also what the workers think about their situation in life which causes them to strike. The Margaret Hale/John Thornton love story was dealt with very well. It could have been incredibly tedious, but the fact that it was intermixed with the struggles of workers in the North made it very interesting. The contrast between the vacuous Southern people (Edith is just annoying) and the hard-working but tough Northeners is very clear
I finished Clock Without Hands last week. Carson McCullers confirms her place in my pantheon - at first I was unconvinced, but my god it was a devastating book by the end. Just beautiful, and once again the message that seems to come so strongly is that all we can do with our lives is to keep living them, to carry on.
I'm also in the final stretch of Vedi by Ved Mehta. I don't want to finish it - it's such a wonderful book, and it really makes you inhabit the mind of the child he was
R042:
On reading more of The Teleportation Accident I'm coming to get a firmer grasp on what makes it so rewarding; it's not simply absurdity for its own sake, or sniping at low-hanging fruit to mix my metaphors. It's the rare case of a book or piece of writing which sets out to poke fun at the literary avant-garde, the trendy set and so on - and does it in a funny and at times unpredictable way.
Our review list for this week, as always, subject to last minute changes.
Non-fiction
• Ryszard Kapuscinski: The Biography by Artur Domoslawski
• The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final by Richard Moore
• The Spy Who Loved: the Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain's First Female Special Agent of WWII by Clare Mulley
• New Selected Journals, 1939-1995 by Stephen Spender
• The Fabled Coast: Legends & Traditions from Around the Shores of Britain & Ireland by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood
Fiction
• A Trick I Learned from Dead Men by Kitty Aldridge
• Empty Space by M John Harrison
• Mo Knew She Was Quirky by James Kelman
• Night Dancer by Chika Unigwe
• Habits of the House by Fay Weldon
