Designer1 Posted January 12, 2017 VT Supporter Share Posted January 12, 2017 @leemond2008 Cheers for the First Law Trilogy recommendation. Halfway through the first book and it's excellent. Absolutely love the Glokta character and the whole thing has a tremendously wicked sense of humour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodders Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 The Plague is fantastic @leemond2008 My favourite Camus novel. Really well told. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leemond2008 Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 53 minutes ago, Designer1 said: @leemond2008 Cheers for the First Law Trilogy recommendation. Halfway through the first book and it's excellent. Absolutely love the Glokta character and the whole thing has a tremendously wicked sense of humour. Ha yeah Glotka is brilliant, wait until you meet the bloody 9 properly. I actually put it above game of thrones purely because the books seem to know exactly where they are going. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ginko Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 On 11/01/2017 at 16:55, theboyangel said: I quite enjoyed ready player one. Keep with it Oh it's not anywhere near so bad as I won't finish it, it's just a bit cringeworthy in places and a very slow starter. The narrative voice he writes through is very much blunt exposition rather than 'show, don't tell' and his writing style comes across as a bit simplistic but I've just got to the copper key part and things have finally got going. I'll see it through. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted January 12, 2017 VT Supporter Share Posted January 12, 2017 Great triple whammy there, @leemond2008. True Grit is magnificent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leemond2008 Posted January 13, 2017 Share Posted January 13, 2017 12 hours ago, mjmooney said: Great triple whammy there, @leemond2008. True Grit is magnificent. yeah as I say, one of my favourites, 3rd time I've read it I think, it's one of the few books that I think I will always go back and re-read every couple of years Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leemond2008 Posted January 13, 2017 Share Posted January 13, 2017 On 06/11/2016 at 12:45, leemond2008 said: I started re-reading this lst night, I've read it loads of times before but seeings as I'm currently watching the vastly underwhelming series (which completely disregards the exorcist 2) I thought I would re-visit the original (again) William Peter Blatty is dead now I know I said early that True Grit is ''one of my favourites'' but this is probably my all time favourite book this is, god knows how many times I've read it throughout the years. I only re-read it in November 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ender4 Posted January 16, 2017 Share Posted January 16, 2017 (edited) The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North was great! Nice original plot. Quote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a novel by Claire North, a pseudonym of British author Catherine Webb, published in April 2014. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel,[1] was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel[2] and was featured in both the Richard and Judy Book Club and the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Fifteen_Lives_of_Harry_August "The Gameshouse" mini-novels trilogy by Claire North was also fantastic and very original. i'd recommend both. Edited January 16, 2017 by ender4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ender4 Posted January 16, 2017 Share Posted January 16, 2017 On 12/01/2017 at 19:40, Designer1 said: @leemond2008 Cheers for the First Law Trilogy recommendation. Halfway through the first book and it's excellent. Absolutely love the Glokta character and the whole thing has a tremendously wicked sense of humour. I'll try this out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted January 17, 2017 Share Posted January 17, 2017 It's a bit dry and academic so far, but I want to like it.. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted January 17, 2017 Share Posted January 17, 2017 On 11/7/2016 at 07:44, MakemineVanilla said: early 20th century America as a brutal repressive society, A great (largely) untold history of that era was that huge swaths of the populace began rejecting capitalism and seeking out revolutionary alternatives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villa4europe Posted January 17, 2017 Share Posted January 17, 2017 tis good so far Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillyShears Posted January 18, 2017 Share Posted January 18, 2017 Just read 'If This Is A Man' by Primo Levi. All about his experience in Auschwitz, he tells it in a very balanced and enlightening way. He eventually committed suicide, but wrote 'The Drowned And The Saved' shortly before he died. I'm half-way through this, and really, I'm not surprised he killed himself. As much as I read about the Nazi plan and the Death Camps, I still can't fathom what the **** went on, and how humans can treat other humans like this. If anyone can recommend some good, well informed reading, I'd be much obliged. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted January 18, 2017 VT Supporter Share Posted January 18, 2017 45 minutes ago, BillyShears said: Just read 'If This Is A Man' by Primo Levi. All about his experience in Auschwitz, he tells it in a very balanced and enlightening way. He eventually committed suicide, but wrote 'The Drowned And The Saved' shortly before he died. I'm half-way through this, and really, I'm not surprised he killed himself. As much as I read about the Nazi plan and the Death Camps, I still can't fathom what the **** went on, and how humans can treat other humans like this. If anyone can recommend some good, well informed reading, I'd be much obliged. Well it's fiction, but Jonathan Littell's novel "The Kindly Ones" has a good stab at trying to understand it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodders Posted January 18, 2017 Share Posted January 18, 2017 @BillyShears I found memoirs are the most powerful way to engage with the experience. It makes it seem very present. But 'Night and Fog' the docufilm from the 50s also does this well. Other authors to read would be Elie Wiesel and Robert Antelme not to mention the graphic novel Maus. Charlottle Delbo too. They are all quite astonishing in their capacity to explain but also convey the underlying survivor's guilt that none of them can testify to the ultimate totality of the horror that is clearly suffered by all those that died. There's obviously lots on related stories such as saving Jewish children in France etc, but I will also recommend Caroline Moorheads two books on this. They focus on local stories rather than providing historicising overviews of the Holocaust. Austerlitz is another fiction book worth reading on it too. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leemond2008 Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 Finished this today, I have to say I wasn't thrilled by it, the characters all moulded into one and it was hard to care and at times even decipher one from another, the beginning of the book was much better than the middle/end, when the plague was slowly breaking out and they were deciding how to deal with it. I have head Cramus described as being Existential and I would say that is a pretty good **** way to describe him. He's also been compared to Kafka but I'd choose Kafka any day going off this book, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't my bag. Quote The compelling story of two outsiders striving to find their place in an unforgiving world. Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other and a dream--a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California’s Salinas Valley, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie, struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and feelings of jealousy, becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes such as the friendship of a shared vision, and giving voice to America’s lonely and dispossessed, Of Mice and Men has proved one of Steinbeck’s most popular works, achieving success as a novel, a Broadway play and three acclaimed films. I'm going to re-read this tomorrow, I last read it when I was 13/14 at school and got a bollocking because he told us to read the first 3 chapters and I finished the book, rather than encourage me and maybe recommend some more of Steinbecks stuff teacher lost his shit with me and went ballistic at me, it actually put me off reading for ages after that happened. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leemond2008 Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 also bought these today Quote On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence. never read it before, looking forward to it Quote Merricat Blackwood lives on the family estate with her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian. Not long ago there were seven Blackwoods—until a fatal dose of arsenic found its way into the sugar bowl one terrible night. Acquitted of the murders, Constance has returned home, where Merricat protects her from the curiosity and hostility of the villagers. Their days pass in happy isolation until cousin Charles appears. Only Merricat can see the danger, and she must act swiftly to keep Constance from his grasp. The haunting of hill house was brilliant, one of my favourite books, again I don't know why I haven't got around to this one earlier Quote "On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the earth. They all go." What if mankind disappeared right now, forever ... what would happen to the Earth in a week, a year, a millennium? Could the planet's climate ever recover from human activity? How would nature destroy our huge cities and our myriad plastics? And what would our final legacy be? Speaking to experts in fields as diverse as oil production and ecology, and visiting the places that have escaped recent human activity to discover how they have adapted to life without us, Alan Weisman paints an intriguing picture of the future of Earth. Exploring key concerns of our time, this absorbing thought experiment reveals a powerful - and surprising - picture of our planet's future. I had this on my kindle and only ever read the begining of it and it looked fantastic, I always prefer books so I have got the physical copy of it now and I'm really looking forward to it, I've got a feeling it'll be a pretty bleak and depressing read so I should enjoy this one Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 Good Omens, Liking it so far and wondering why it's taken me so long to pick it up. Have an absolute mountain of books on my kindle to get through, need to get out of the habit of reading one and adding two more. Smashed my 2016 reading challenge 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leemond2008 Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 9 minutes ago, V01 said: Good Omens, Liking it so far and wondering why it's taken me so long to pick it up. Have an absolute mountain of books on my kindle to get through, need to get out of the habit of reading one and adding two more. Smashed my 2016 reading challenge I don't understand how anyone can read that many books in a year, thats pretty much 1 book every 3 days, I'm a big reader and I think I did about 40 last year, don't you ever get stuck or have a busy week or hit a book that you struggle with? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V01 Posted January 26, 2017 Share Posted January 26, 2017 I read at work, 48 hours per week I can normally do 2-3 books each week. It takes me a while when I start a new book but if it's part of a series I can devour the rest pretty quickly. \it was a slog at times (Children of time was tough going because of the Spoiler Giant spiders and Long Price quartet was a lot more ponderous than my usual reads) Scaled back this year to 75 books, should be an easy enough target to meet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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