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Talk not with scorn of Authors- it was the chattering of the Geese that saved the Capitol. Coleridge
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Monday, June 30, 2025
3 By Irving by John Irving
Re-reading SETTING FREE THE BEARS after a million years: I may have read it in high school? None of it rings a bell. Pretty absorbing if overstuffed with physical landscape/sky/weather descriptions. But many of the picaresque Irving qualities are already in place. He published it when he was 26, after a couple years of writing. So good on him! The other two early novels included here are shorter, I'll try to read them again too.
Monday, June 23, 2025
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
Another winner. Postwar 1920s London, a night-club empress and her six children navigate a world of crime and wealth, a sub-plot of several young women making their way to the big city, and a detective investigating the night club corruption scene and disappearing women.
Wouldn't have thought it was my cup of tea, but Atkinson is just a delicious storyteller, un putdownable.
Monday, June 02, 2025
DEath at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
First of Atkinson's mysteries I've read, first 100 pages well written as always but I'm mystified at the three strands interconnection so far.
"A Jackson Brodie Book" - for the recurring detective at the center of the case.
The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines
Meh. No huge insights afte last year's deep dive. Obsession with Brian Epstein which does not move me. The music is the very last thing considered here.
I remember it as being an "important book at the time" as Peter Brown was an insider and first to share widely about the Beatles. But it comes off as tacky now - with all of his "revealed for the first time here" and "said to me, Peter Brown, the author" posturing.
And again, the lack of insight about the music is appalling. Though the Beatles inventing the rock music industry (among everything else they invented) and the business/industry side takes up an oversized space here.
Monday, May 19, 2025
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
Marvellously imagined retelling of the story of Agammemnon and Clytemenstra, from the viewpoint of Cassandra's slave.
Thoroughly modern voice and attitude, with no "classicalisms" used to make it seem like Ancient Greece.
A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam
A 12 year-old girl knows she is different and somewhat exceptional and wants to be a writer. Amazing as usual.
Monday, May 12, 2025
The Hollow Land by Jane Gardam
Charming "children's book" that is much more sophisticated than that term implies. A London "town" family has a summer/vacation house in the Lake District, under the Cumbrian fells. They begin a long-lasting relationship with a "country" family. Beautiful landscape after beautiful landscape: abandoned silver mines, fields of icicles, menancing sheep and sympathetic gypsies. Another stunner from Gardam, who never wrote a bad or lesser book.
Monday, May 05, 2025
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
Novel where one story (the birth and life of the narrator (in mid-20th-century) takes places in the chapters and her relatives' back-story appears in the lengthy footnotes (which are often as long, or longer than the chapters.)
Another winner from Atkinson. I'm totally impressed by her - and had read nothing before the short stories last month.
The backstory in footnotes seems tedious at first, and confusing, but soon takes over in momentum, as the narrator's mother's generation and grandmother's generation are pulverized by the World Wars.
Unhappiness could be relied upon in a way that happiness never could. [86]
Friday, April 25, 2025
Ancestral Vices by Tom Sharpe
The usual hi-jinks, but at a slower (longer) pace. Malevolent evil old English lord hires a strident ally of the working class, a college professor, to write a tell-all history of the lord's equally evil relatives and ancestors. So far there's been a "suckling pig" entree at dinner that was created out of a normal size pig that was cut into three pieces, two of which were sewn back together to create the shorter meal. Funny but effortful.
I did like it in the end but the pace was slow. The accidental death of a dwarf in front of a tractor, and his slow-witted buxom wife, complicate the professor's story when he boards with them. The usual clueless police appear.
Sharpe really does remind me of Joe Orton. I find Sharpe addictive and but not always that keen.
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
Sorta remember reading this when it came out. Unimpressed so far. Too many half-funny jokes dampen the effect of some good sentences.
Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson
Loving this so far. My first Atkinson experience. Funny and twist-y.
Really like the threaded characters who appear in several stories, Franklin and Connie, whose doomed relationship starts with Franklin winning a bundle off via talking horse at a racetrack, and ends with her framing him for murder.
"Spellbound" - the fairy tale that arrives roaringly back in the present day
Less successful was the Toy-Story lite tale, "Existential Marginalization."
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My son and I saw THE HIDDEN FORTRESS at AFI Silver yesterday afternoon, what a masterpiece! The 21-year old Misa Uehara as the Princess was ...
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May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella. [p. 13] Finally reading this after owning it for almost 40 years. Collection of short ...