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Books
Apr 13, 2023 21:06:25 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Apr 13, 2023 21:06:25 GMT
Yesterday I finished a novel I'd only begun this week--it wasn't long, the weather has been beautiful for outdoor reading, and I enjoyed it, and so I raced right through-- Euphoria, by Lily King. It was apparently well regarded when it was released in 2014, but I hadn't heard of it. It was the fictional story of three anthropologists in 1930s Papua New Guinea, a married couple and another man. Professional competition, a love triangle, colonialism, it had it all. Apparently it was based partly on some real situation involving Margaret Mead. Today I've just begun Alan Hollinghurst's 1998 novel The Folding Star. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense, but I find warmer weather great for reading. I prefer to read outdoors, which clearly is not a good option from roughly mid-October to mid-April in Minnesota. But during those warmer months, it's a delight to read in the backyard on the patio.
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Books
Jul 25, 2023 14:16:48 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Jul 25, 2023 14:16:48 GMT
Our "how did you miss this?" discussion in the Hot 100 thread as related to me and Ricky Nelson struck me as relevant in another arena: literature. I've been a book nerd almost as long as I've been a music nerd. Maybe longer, if more intermittent. But just as with music, my literature obsession has taken deep, narrow dives--which leads to a lot of blind spots.
Along those lines, I saw two books rubber-banded together in a nearby Little Free Library a week or so ago: "Olive Kitteridge" and "Olive, Again" by Elizabeth Strout. My first admittedly sexist thought was, "ugh, looks like chick lit, probably some oh-so-dramatic romances." (The term "chick lit" was not actually in my head; I don't think there was a specific term in my head. But I thought the term was suitably stupid and offensive to get across what was in my head.) But when I pulled out the books to have a quick look, I saw that the author won a Pulitzer for the former novel. And I'd never heard of her or it!
I suppose it is because in 2008, when it was published, my head was somewhere else. I think that's when I was just getting into Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example. Diving deeper into Knut Hamsun and Dostoevsky. Some new American fiction wasn't on my radar.
Well, the novel is something like a modern version of Sherwood Anderson's early 20th century classic "Winesburg, Ohio," although a bit more connected in terms of characters. But it's a collection of short stories often featuring and sometimes referencing the title character, along with other people from her small Maine town, largely in modern times but also going back a few decades. It's really good, and now I look forward to reading that second book in the series (though I'm also a little hesitant, guessing it was done for the cash more than anything).
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Books
Dec 21, 2023 21:54:01 GMT
jk likes this
Post by Kapitan on Dec 21, 2023 21:54:01 GMT
I read in Per Pettersen's novel "I Curse the River of Time" a little bit about Tom Kristensen's novel "Havoc." The protagonist in the former had been haunted by the one in the latter. "Havoc"--"Haervaerk," I guess, in the original Danish--is a novel published in 1930 that is apparently about a literary man's spiral downward into self-destructive alcoholism. Pettersen's protagonist said the book made him swear off drinking for some time.
Well I'm 150 pages in, and I have to say that while there is frequent drinking, there isn't anything cataclysmic about it so far! It's long, though, so there are at least 300 more pages through which our hero can ruin his life... But so far, he's not nearly such a mess as, say, Hans Fallada's protagonist in "The Drinker," written about a decade later, or Jim Harrison's Brown Dog character. It is a good book, though. And I'd never heard of Kristensen.
It's nice, getting a book recommendation from a book.
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Books
Apr 6, 2024 17:47:29 GMT
Post by Kapitan on Apr 6, 2024 17:47:29 GMT
They're usually not my style, but for some reason lately I've been reading dystopian and/or postapocalyptic sorts of novels. I'm not into zombies or anything, but more the possibly-real-world scenarios. In the past month, I've read Waubgeshig Rice's "Moon of the Crusted Snow," Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," and Tatyana Tolstaya's "The Slynx." And then all of a sudden, what should appear out of the blue but a Minnesota author I've loved for about 25 years, Leif Enger, with his new novel "I Cheerfully Refuse." And I'll be damned if it wasn't a postapocalyptic novel, or at least a story set in a postapocalyptic kind of world.
The book, just released this week, is a good one in the way that most of Enger's books are good: it's a good story. In a way, Enger is like a highbrow Stephen King, a guy who knows how to keep you turning the pages. (Not that Enger is a horror writer ... though he does occasionally touch on the supernatural, especially in his debut "Peace Like a River.")
I'm not sure his postapocalyptic world is especially believable, though. Enger never gets into the details of when the story takes place, and whatever happened to tear the fabric of society apart is only hinted at, or told in small, small details. We don't know the big picture. I wish we did.
Instead it's really an adventure/travel story. A good one: I read it in just a few days. But it's not a great novel. I keep waiting for Enger to top "Peace Like a River," but none of his subsequent three novels has done it.
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