Reading Books in 2021

I can handle that in stuff like Frederick Forsyth where the whole point is just a plot but WUBC didn’t really have a strong sense of that either.

I appreciated the eerie atmosphere but the casual use of rape as a plot aspect and just the fact even the narrator was a character I found dull made me just leave it.

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I liked The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but I felt it could have benefitted from some choice editing. Does meander a bit too much, losing focus in places.

I would argue that Murakami doesn’t really do characterisation full stop, be it male or female. He creates characters so that (crazy) things can happen to them. His characters lack depth and he doesn’t really develop them. He’s not someone like Tolstoy or Ishiguro or Austin. Murakami is not a character writer. But he’s good at what he does, creating vivid, fantastical scenarios in everyday settings.

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That describes bang on what I enjoy about him!

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just finished Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh. I didn’t get it. i couldn’t understand why someone would spend the time to write something so bleak and unrewarding. i wondered a bit if it was trying to say something about children and childlessness, but all i could really hear was a lot of stuff about children being a kind of innate and animalistic desire of women. might have missed the point.

Finally finished this bumper book of Stefan Zweig short stories/novellas. He’s very descriptive, so it took me a few weeks to read it’s 700 pages, but there were some good stories in there.

And then to reward myself for having read that big book, I have just read this tiny 70 page book by Clarice Lispector that I recently bought. I think I read an interview from Angelica Gorodischer who had praised her, and so thought I’d give her a go. It was so strange, but such beautiful amazing writing. Finished it in one day and have now ordered a couple of more books by her.

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I’ve read the Water Cure and really loved it, very atmospheric, very woozy and uneasy, and just enough “plot” to keep me going. Need to read Blue Ticket and see how it compares.

assuming you’ve read her Wayfarer series, it looks like the 4th and final book has just come out! Paperback due in October - v excited for that, what a great series it’s been

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Read the first one. I’d managed to get it in my head that To Be Taught… was the 2nd (bought on Kindle and not paying enough attention!). Enjoying it though :slight_smile: . Might go straight into A Closed and Common Orbit after.

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Does it include bits of Oxfordshire that used to be in Berkshire? As a Berkshire revanchist, I would be interested in this sort of thing.

No it does not. Those bits are in the Berkshire edition of this history. The reallocation of ‘south oxfordshire’ from Berkshire is a historical crime.

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Oxfordshire is anywhere “below” the Thames. It’s quite straightforward, and I will recognise no Berkshire authority that is not based in Abingdon, or possibly Wallingford.

Thanks for bringing her to my attention. I have a real thing for South American writers and she seems right up my street! Got my birthday coming up so I’ma binge using all the inevitable vouchers!

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I came across this article writing about some of her books, when I was trying to decide what next to read, so it might be helpful for you too!

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Brazil’s greatest modern writer…didn’t she die quite a while ago?

Anyway I’ve read a couple of her books- she’s very distinctive and abstract. I found them intriguing rather than satisfying.

I think Machado de Assis is considered one of the best Brazilian writers- very different but more accessible.

Here’s a few books I read recently.

  1. Daisy Johnson - Fen. This is a book of short stories set in one town/village (I presume, because many characters work / frequent the same pub) Absolutely loved it. From the first story, I was hooked. There’s so much to unpack, a lot of disturbing imagery regarding animals, blood, feminity and it has this weird vibe. I immediately ordered her two novels, which, frustratingly, still haven’t arrived.

  2. Tim Sultan - Sunny’s Nights (or ‘Sunny’s Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World’ to give the full title. I heard about this book because I googled ‘books set in New York’ and I fancied a nice New York tale. This is a non-fiction account of one guy and his relationship with a dive bar on the Red Hook peninsular in Brooklyn over a period of a decade or so, starting the the 90s. The author starts off just being a barfly at the bar, despite having quite a well-off life in NY, and eventually ends up bartending there and the bar taking over his life. It also works as a biography of the bar owner (the ‘Sunny’ mentioned in the title.

  3. Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend. I imagine people here have read this, and the whole Neapolitan quartet, so no spoilers about the remaining three, please. I thought this was great, although it took my a while to find the ‘groove’ if you know what I mean. I had to print a copy of the list of characters because it was so overwhelming at first, but once I understood the different families, and how they differ, I was thoroughly engaged. I love the fact that it’s told in the first person, so all the events that take place away from the narrator are understood based on who is telling her the story. I’m going to read the rest of the series.

I’m now reading ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’, which is a novella by Elizabeth Strout, which I’m absolutely racing through, and I keep wondering if I am missing things and I have a feeling that I’m going to have to re-read it immediately afterwards to catch up on the elements I might be missing. It’s hard reading such a short book in fractured elements, I wish I could just sit down and read it in one sitting, but I can’t do that :frowning:

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I enjoyed Convenience Store Woman, really brief but it captured that feeling of feeling out of sorts with the rush of social norms and expectations and things really uniquely and nicely. Has anyone read any of her other novels?

While I wait for the Memory Police to be available at the library, I’m rereading the Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. It’s so ridiculously breezy, coming from a writer with such a “difficult” reputation (still haven’t read IJ - it’s still on my to-read list)

Been meaning to read some of her stuff for ages! While you’re waiting for her other books to arrive, have you heard her BBC Sounds series The Hotel?

I was at Sunny’s the other day. Had no idea there was a book.

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Only Earthlings, which treads the same thematical ground of alienation and subverting social conventions in Japanese society but is so left field. Stayed with me longer than Convenience Store Woman.

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I’ve only read one thing by Clarice L and I really wanted to like it but struggled with it a bit. really beautiful prose though. will read something else by her at some point