books
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Read: JPod by Douglas Coupland
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1 min read
What is it with writers putting themselves in their books? Brett Easton Ellis went from being a kind of bored god to me to totally frickin insane (in a bad way) in Lunar Park, and Douglas Coupland did much the same by sauntering into JPod in an exercise in twee pointlessness. It’s a sequal of…
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Read: White Teeth by Zadie Smith
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1 min read
This was kind of like reading Michael Chabon for the first time – I couldn’t wait to finish so I could rush out and read everything else she’d done. Set in London, White Teeth bucks its way over a hundred years or so to tell the story of three London families. But that’s kind of…
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Read: Flesh and Blood – Michael Cunningham
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1 min read
American family from immigrant background live an increasingly desperate life. Cunningham has an extremely skillful turn of phase, and despite several hard twists and turns in his story (there’s several ‘oh shit‘ moments), the characters’ path seems grimly inevitable. Thoroughly enjoyable. Link
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Read: To Have And Have Not – Ernest Hemmingway
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1 min read
Wikipedia says Hemmingway reckoned To Have And Have Not is ‘a bunch of junk’. I reckon he’s right. It’s a mish-mash of a couple of short stories. One’s about Harry Morgan, a hard on his luck fishing boat captain forced to take increasingly desperate measures to feed his family. The other’s about a bunch of…
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Read: Grapes Of Wrath – John Steinbeck
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1 min read
I’m doing a quick, one paragraph review of novels I read this year – so I’ve got a record, apart from anything else. Like a roller coaster, the first bit was a bit flat, but when it started picking up speed… I haven’t had a *physical* reaction to a novel like this in a long…
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Fav reads of 2008
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1 min read
I read embarrasingly little that was *new* in 2008. But I did get lots read – thanks, bus commuting and baby-enforced early nights. My best were: – East of Eden, with a surprising amount of sex and violence for a book written in 1952 and set at the turn of last century. – In Cold…
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Heavy going
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1 min read
David Foster Wallace killed himself at the weekend. I should really attempt Infinite Jest again – I stalled at about the 600 page mark. It’s probably not one for the bus, in fairness. Dave Eggers reckons it takes a solid month. Two links – Roger Federer as religious experience. And one from The Onion.
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Sick. But I like it.
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1 min read
Here’s the paragraph that made me snort on the bus today: I noticed a stuffed spaniel poised by the fireplace with a yellowed newspaper rolled into its mouth. Madeleine said ‘That’s Balto. The paper is the LA Times for August 1, 1926. That’s the day Daddy learned he’d made his first million. Balto was our…