A reply to: @Barnz regarding QuoteLink
The sequel to Red Rising, Golden Son has come out, cannot wait to finish the current series im reading to dig into this, the first one was a ripper.
just finished this book and it was awesome, cannot wait for the 3rd instalment.
“My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema.”
Say what you like about Ali Smith’s “The Accidental” but that’s a killer first sentence.
The plot thickens and teases and mystifies and she writes like a dream, albeit a provocative and infuriating one. A typical dysfunctional literary family is turned inside out by a salacious free spirit who is part angel, part demon, part temptress, part pugilist and/or anyone you need in your life whether you know it or like it or not; a sort of post modern mutation of Mary Poppins. Be warned though, it ain’t necessarily going to end the way you think it should, or want it to, Ali doesn’t do conventional endings. Ace book, though.
I’ve read all her novels now but it’s a tinny milestone because that means there’s none left right now. And I’m well and truly hooked. Hope she’s currently typing like a fury.
So the Hugo Awards were presented today. Some guy called Noah Ward was on fire - he was winning it across heaps of categories…
The only Hugo category where I’d read/seen all the nominees was Long Form Dramatic - still think Winter Soldier was better than Guardians of the Galaxy though.
The whole Puppies thing made a pretty sad farce of the whole proceedings this year though.
The Hugo awards are for science-fiction, voted by the fans (or, at least they used to be). Think of them as SF’s version of the Nobby Clark medal.
The Hugo awards are for science-fiction, voted by the fans (or, at least they used to be). Think of them as SF's version of the Nobby Clark medal.
goodreads reviews are voted by members, they’re still prtty ■■■■■.
Is Hugo the movie with Ben Kingsley and a few others, including Sacha Baron-Cohen one of the few times I haven't wanted to shoot him?directed by scorsese? yeah.
both are ■■■■ so up to you.Is Hugo the movie with Ben Kingsley and a few others, including Sacha Baron-Cohen one of the few times I haven't wanted to shoot him?directed by scorsese? yeah.
But were they the awards?
Is Hugo the movie with Ben Kingsley and a few others, including Sacha Baron-Cohen one of the few times I haven't wanted to shoot him?
directed by scorsese? yeah.
Is Hugo the movie with Ben Kingsley and a few others, including Sacha Baron-Cohen one of the few times I haven’t wanted to shoot him?
Did a bunch of posts disappear?
Soccer autobiog for Liverpool fans to get their teeth into…
Working through Tom Clancy’s stuff again, up to Debt of Honour.
Interesting reading P D James’s obit the other day, saying she shunned the female writers of The Golden Age such as Agatha Christie just because the plots and solutions were so ludicrous. She preferred Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers.
I was always a Sayers fan myself. Haven’t read old Agatha since I was 16. I kept picking all the murderers early by the simple ploy of going for the least likely doer.
If you want to know what happens when you really do try to “shirtfront” Vladimir Putin, read “Words Will Break Cement. The Passion Of ■■■■■ Riot” by Masha Gessen, a Russian investigative journalist and author(hardly the safest occupation going). Gessen’s fascinating expose is broken into 3 parts, the protests, the trial and the prison sentences. The focus is on the 2 activists and mothers who were destined to spend 660 days in horrendous Russian prison camps for “40 seconds of lip-syncing” in an orthodox church; Maria, the more spiritual and legalistic of the 2 and an apparent optimist driven by an obligation to fight for the rights of the marginalised, and Nadya, the leader and hard edged ideological force - you know, the drop dead gorgeous one! They strike me as 2 of the more impressive individuals on the planet right now. The narrative is in turns eye opening, provocative and, especially when the focus is on the prison sentence, gut wrenching; Nadya’s final heartfelt but seering account of her experiences in the notorious prison camp in Mordovia is a fitting and damning coda for the brutal bullying of Putin’s Russia and its legal travesties. And since the book’s release the 2 protagonists have continued to try to “shirtfront” that prick Putin and fight for improved conditions for prisoners and in return they have been publicly whipped and paint bombed. More power to them and also to the courageous author who has also dared to reveal the real Putin previously in “The Man Without a Face”.
If you’re looking for a hero you can warm to, don’t read “The Stars My Destination” by the late Alfred Bester. It was written in the mid fifties and clearly provided the cyber punk themes and prototypes for so much modern sci fi. Gully Foyle, “the hero”, is your quintessential monomaniacal sociopath; conning, fighting, raping, murdering and teleporting or jaunting in his quest for revenge against those who chose to ignore his SOS from his stricken spaceship, leaving him to rot in space. It’s dated a bit but still packs a punch. It’s very episodic and packed with twists and surprises, not all of them convincing, and I wasn’t surprised to find that the author served his SF apprenticeship in comic book production.
I primarily read it because it was lauded by Thomas Disch as a work of genius and apparently it regularly appeared at or near the top of best ever SF novels polls; high praise indeed, and probably too high to be honest, but it is a rollicking work of pyrotechnical imagination and it’s easy to see why so many acclaimed sci fi writers consider it a seminal work.
I finished Martin Amis’ Zone of Interest (audiobook) a while ago. I am not a fan of Martin Amis; I liked his first novel, The Rachel Papers, years ago, but since then he’s got more and more satirical and I find it annoying, so it’s quite a while since I read one. I actually quite liked it. It’s told in the first person by three separate characters all connected with a Nazi death camp, never named but obviously Auschwitz. One is the German commandant of the camp, Paul Doll; one is an SS officer called Angelus who is a nephew of Martin Boorman and thus part of the Nazi elite. The third is a camp inmate, a Polish Jew, whose function is to assist in disembarking all the new arrivals at the camp from the trains on which they arrive, separate them into the able-bodied who are capable of doing some work for a while, and the rest, and then shepherd the rest into the “showers”, i.e., gas chambers.
Doll is stupid, a drunkard, and utterly morally blind. Boorman’s nephew has a brain and a conscience but realises that there is nothing he can do to alter the course on which Germany has set itself, so he lies low and tries to do as little harm personally as possible. The plot is really secondary to the examination of the mechanics of running an extermination camp, disposing of the bodies, dealing with the stench of burning flesh, etc., but what plot there is turns upon the fact that Boorman’s nephew falls in love with Doll’s wife Hana, who is also intelligent and utterly despises her husband.
It is actually the very blackest of black comedies, and there were a couple of times towards the end where I laughed and of course immediately felt guilty.
I don’t have any idea why Martin Amis, who was born after the war and has no real connection with it, felt compelled to write a holocaust book to add to the absolutely gigantic pile of such books. I don’t know how accurate his descriptions of the operation of the camp was: I suspect fairly accurate because otherwise what would be the point? One part is definitely accurate: one part of the camp was a “factory” established by the company IG Farben, which still exists, in which it. Was attempting to produce tyres for road vehicles from human corpses.
It’s worth a read if you think you might find it interesting.
I’ve read three books recently that I’ve read before. Two were audiobooks by Sarah Waters, Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet. The other was a print book, Possession by A S Byatt, which is available on audiobook but not in Australia.
Both of the Sarah Waters books were disappointing. Each of them was centred on a single woman, and each followed the woman through her young womanhood from about 16 to about 25. Both of the women are lesbian and they know it from a young age. What was disappointing was that when I read each of them for the first time I was knocked out by the twists and turns of the plots and the honesty of the portrayals of the women’s thoughts and emotions. This time I thought the plots were unbelievable and melodramatic and the thoughts and emotions, especially the romantic parts, rather over-sentimental. They’re not bad books, but they’re less good than I thought they were.
Possession, on the other hand, improves on a second reading. I first read it in 1990 when I was in Sydney for work and I used to eat alone and read it while I ate and it won the Booker Prize that year. It’s a very complex novel. There are four main characters. Roland Michell is an English Literature scholar who specialises in the greatest 19th century English poet, Randolph Henry Ash. Maud Bailey is an English Literature who specialises in an obscure female 19th century English poet (of French ancestry), Christabel LaMotte, and is in fact the great-great-great-niece of LaMotte. Roland comes across two drafts of a letter written by Ash to a woman who had obviously excited his intellectual, romantic and sexual interest enormously, and discovers by further work that the woman may have been Christabel LaMotte. He and Maud set out to discover whether there really was any connection between Ash and LaMotte, and the extent of that connection. It’s an intensely literary novel, told partly through the narrative, but also through the poems of the two Victorians, and the letters that they wrote. There are also several passages describing events directly during the lifetimes of the two poets, but they are short. All those things make it an extraordinarily complex and demanding novel; it has to be read with care and attention and quite a knowledge of literature and the academic work. It’s actually a book that cries out to be read out loud by a truly intelligent reader because of all the poetry, and there is in fact an audiobook version, but it’s not available in Australia. I loved it when I read it the first time and I loved it just as much the second time. It’s a masterpiece.
I’d give it a miss and reread the Laundry books instead.
