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Old 02-23-2011, 01:24 PM   #61
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Being turned into a movie by Ang Lee, currently being filmed here in Taiwan

The story would make a good movie, but much of his spiritual journeys would be lost. I found that theme the most compelling.
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Old 02-27-2011, 12:58 PM   #62
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I'm just about halfway through Kafka on the Shore by Murakami. It's excellent. I read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and loved that, but Kafka on the Shore is even better.
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Old 02-28-2011, 12:57 AM   #63
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Just finished "A Separate Peace." I was very intrigued by the book after it was mentioned in school and read it within two days. It had some of the most intense insight into the dark competition between human beings I've ever encountered. After I finished the book I watched the 2005 film with a friend and we both enjoyed it. Very true to the book! Toby Moore did an amazing job as Finny.
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Old 03-11-2011, 07:55 PM   #64
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I've just started "The Time Traveler's Wife". Seems to be a very interesting read so far...
I can only hope its initial momentum doesn't fizzle out to just a gimmicky love story.

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Old 04-20-2011, 09:58 PM   #65
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The Count of Monte Cristo

I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo.

Interesting story, but it is long.

Takes place during the early 1800s. Primarily in France and to a lesser extent in Italy.

At times the story gets bogged down in details, but over all I thought it was a good story.

I would recommend this for others to read. I think I may see the film and see how it compares to the book. The story could be streamlined without losing much of the essence of the story, although it would lose much of the richness of detail and background material.
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Old 04-25-2011, 12:38 PM   #66
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i just finished reading Tiger, tiger by Margaux Fragoso. i hadn't heard of it before i bought it, but it sounded promising when i read the back - and it certainly delivered. it's her own memoir of her relationship with the man who sexually molested her. it's written in an incredibly intelligent way, and doesn't give way to the image of a paedophile being the predator, the pure evil that we want to make them look like, to fit into our black-and-white world. she does in no way defend paedophiles or cast them in a good light - after all, she has suffered the mental harm from growing up with one herself.

i tried to look at some reviews after i read the book, and i'm amazed by the things people react on. this is her story, the way she remembers it. she has amazing clarity of thought when she writes it and tells of her relationship. all people seem to react on is the fact that she describes some of the sexual acts. a new york times reviewer said that the first act described is 'perhaps the most indecent thing published in any major book of the last decade'. well, i don't think the situation was very decent.
to me, it seems like she wants to tell the story as truthfully as she can, showing how this kind of relationship can be in reality. to be able to do that, i'm happy she didn't take into account the prude reviewers at the new york times. it isn't a pleasant read, but it's a great read.

it has lead to a lot of good discussions already (me and s read it at the same time) and very interesting insights. this is what the synopsis says (and what caught my interest):

"I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time.

At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at seven p.m., when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour; in the despair again at nine p.m. when we would go for a night ride, down to the Royal Cliffs Diner in Englewood Cliffs where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream.

We were friends, soul mates and lovers.

I was seven. He was fifty-one."

it's worth a read, if you think you can handle it.
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Old 06-05-2011, 09:52 PM   #67
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Packing for Mars

I read Packing for Mars by Mary Roach this weekend. It's subtitled "The Curious Science of Life in the Void" and filled with facts derived from interviews, her personal experience with simulations, and published studies and not a page was boring to me. Lots of information about the effects of space on human bodies and how to deal with human body functions while in space.
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Old 09-12-2011, 06:42 AM   #68
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Just read a very interesting book called 'The First Fossil Hunters' by Adrienne Mayor. Interesting (and to me totally new) concepts and well researched. I thought the first chapters about gryphons were the most interesting, and the book made a good case for tying the emergence of the myths about gryphons to protoceratops fossils.

The rest of the book was an eye-opener too, I never knew the Mediterranean area had that many bonebeds and megafauna. And to see those tied so cleverly to local myths and legends made some very good reading.

Awesome book. If you like mythology and paleontology, this is a good book to see the two fields intertwined.
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Old 09-16-2011, 06:36 PM   #69
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RED ORCHESTRA by Anne Nelson. It is an account of the resistance to Hitler by Germans linked by their political communism. I find it a fascinating account. I have been reading of resistance to Hitler since high school (graduated 1973) when I first read the Resistance of the White Rose. But this is the first account of the communist resistance I have read. The authoress does not pull punches and shows Stalin for the beast that he was. Nonetheless, the the brave resistance cost folks their lives and properties and families. A truly interesting and absorbing read.
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Old 09-18-2011, 08:34 AM   #70
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RED ORCHESTRA by Anne Nelson. It is an account of the resistance to Hitler by Germans linked by their political communism. I find it a fascinating account. I have been reading of resistance to Hitler since high school (graduated 1973) when I first read the Resistance of the White Rose.
Ah, you kids... Class of 72 (though I didn't actually, technically, graduate- or even show up most of the time... ).

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But this is the first account of the communist resistance I have read. The authoress does not pull punches and shows Stalin for the beast that he was. Nonetheless, the the brave resistance cost folks their lives and properties and families. A truly interesting and absorbing read.
Haven't read much of that either- the whole official Communist Party behavior in that time was simply so disgusting, desparately trying to follow every twist and turn of Stalin's policy, as shown in Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia".

Have you read Koestler's "Darkness at Noon"? There's a bit about the (pre-war) betrayals of the German Communists by Stalin in there.

Another interesting group were the Eidelweiss Pirates, basically working-class youth gangs who resisted the Nazis out of counter-cultural reasons, and enjoyed getting into street fights with the Hitler Youth.
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Old 09-18-2011, 08:40 AM   #71
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Also just finished "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Booker Award, about the rise of Thomas Cromwell, and his relations with Henry VIII and Ann Boelyn.

Excellent, and a great change from the post-Modernist stuff that usually wins- just good story-telling.

One complaint is that Cromwell is a bit too perfect- a bit of a moderate modern man dropped in a very passionate age.

OTOH, she definitely takes sides- strongly pro-Protestant, and many unkind things to say about Thomas More.
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Old 09-21-2011, 09:48 AM   #72
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Thanks for the leads, GM.

Also read CHURCHILL'S WAR LAB by Taylor Downing, a remarkably fun read of all the hard science promulgated by the visionary leader.
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"Aslan is not a tame lion." CSL/LWW
"The new school [acts] as if it required...courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism." GK Chesterton
"And there is always the danger of allowing people to suppose that our modern times are so wholly unlike any other times that the fundamental facts about man's nature have wholly changed with changing circumstances." Dorothy L. Sayers, 1 Sept. 1941

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Old 10-02-2012, 03:46 PM   #73
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Just finished a book called Darkwing. Picked it up totally by chance in the library (was studying, looked at the shelf across from me, stood up, walked over, and pulled out a book at random) and it was SO GOOD!

It was by Kenneth Oppel, and it was set in an anthropomorphic prehistoric time. It was about these things called "Chiroptors," and they were supposed to be the predecessors of bats, and one of the characters had "evolved" into the first bat.

Really interesting because there's lots of surprise story twists, thrilling moments, and some exciting "political" stuff where some of the animals are fighting for power.
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Old 10-06-2012, 07:07 AM   #74
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Currently reading Le Spinx des Glaces by Jules Verne. I'm halfway through it and it's interesting, if slow to build. It sort of feels like I'm reading one of the very first fan fiction stories, as the characters in this book are in search of characters lost in the Antartic in a book by Edgar Allen Poe. Must be weird, buying and reading a book you believe to be fiction until you get to the chapters where the main character suddenly meets your lost familymember and only then through that finding out how he disappeared in the first place. The effect is rather curious, but working so far.
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Old 10-07-2012, 05:41 AM   #75
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Gwaimir, Middlesex was AWES0ME. I love Eugenidies & so far, this is my favourite of his novels. LOVE.
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Old 10-07-2012, 06:05 AM   #76
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One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Twice in a row, literally back-to-back. I'd begun the book several years ago when my life & mind were too fractured & scattered to really pay attention, & so set it aside, indefinitly. But this time, I very literally could NOT put it down until I'd devoured it all, and the very next day, read it once again, cover to cover, without interruption, first page to last. An absolute literary masterpiece work of art.

My Life in France, Julia Child with Paul Prud'Homme.

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (third reading)

Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl

A Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovitch, Alexander Solszhenitsen. Read this book. And then quit bitching about how awful your life is. A page-turning, eye-opening masterpiece.

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner. He's a weird mf, but boy howdy he got the spirit & truth of the deep south right, & his mastery of poetic realism is crazy-real.

O, Pioneer!, Willa Cather. A. Freakin. Mazing.

Run River, Joan Didion. Her first novel; another amazing pageturner whose characters & their stories will stay in your permanent consciousness long after you remember you'd read the book. Brilliant.

I did an awful lot of reading this summer...
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Old 10-08-2012, 09:21 AM   #77
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One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Twice in a row, literally back-to-back. I'd begun the book several years ago when my life & mind were too fractured & scattered to really pay attention, & so set it aside, indefinitly. But this time, I very literally could NOT put it down until I'd devoured it all, and the very next day, read it once again, cover to cover, without interruption, first page to last. An absolute literary masterpiece work of art.
Yes,it's hard to adjust to the style- it's been called one of those books "more bought than read"- but once you get into it, just wonderful.


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A Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovitch, Alexander Solszhenitsen. Read this book. And then quit bitching about how awful your life is. A page-turning, eye-opening masterpiece.
Again, absolutely- that final sentence just kicked me in the gut; when you realize everythig he's gone through has been just one day, with so many more to come.

Quote:
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner. He's a weird mf, but boy howdy he got the spirit & truth of the deep south right, & his mastery of poetic realism is crazy-real.
Appreciate the genius of his longer works, but takes a lot of concentration.

I actually enjoy the Yoknapataphaw short story cycles more- easier to follow
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Old 10-08-2012, 09:37 PM   #78
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Ciao, GrayMouser! Yes, that's absolutely true about the experience of reading 100 Years of Solitude. When I first picked up the book, I guess I read about a third of the way through & it wouldn't "stick," for whatever reason, it wasn't resonating with me and I couldn't get inside the fantasy at all. Now, several years later, it DID stick, and then sucked me so intensely intside the fantasy that I couldn't leave it & had to instantly re-read it. Marquez, what a writer!!what a GENIUS!!



I read a book about Julia & Paul Child and a few close friends of theirs during the early days of their work during the early War Years (WW2) with the CIA's predecessor the OSS, & then later through the McCarthy era & a long Cold War. Wonderful, engaging writing and an absolutely fascinating true story. Plus, many great photos. 2 thumbs up!

~A Covert Affair, by Jennet Conant
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Old 10-10-2012, 04:22 AM   #79
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers.
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Old 06-17-2014, 06:12 AM   #80
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A couple world war 2 novels...

The Willing Flesh by Willi Heinrich
Wheels of Terror by Sven Hassal
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