Ersatz TLS discussion

Hello, everyone

Welcome to the new thread.
Happy reading to all!

Thanks for that! I hope all are having better luck reading this month than last, if -like me - October was a disappointment.

scarletnoir wrote: "Thanks for that! I hope all are having better luck reading this month than last, if -like me - October was a disappointment."

why so scarlet, nothing stuck or stimulated you?

In the last thread, Bill wrote:

Yeah, I admit that the crime novels I listed are pretty much devoid of humor, as are some of the other shorter novels I've enjoyed, like Fat City....

I haven't read that one, though I disliked the film adaptation by John Huston - a singularly overpraised director IMHO - someone with little 'feel' for what can be achieved in cinema. I suppose that my negative reaction to the film makes it unlikely that I'll read the book.

I do think Nightmare Alley has something of a ludic element to it, if not exactly humor, in its relating individual chapters to the Tarot and its sometimes audacious transitions from chapter to chapter. But my admiration for it was cemented by the section describing the psychic test the protagonist undergoes involving a scale - a perfect demonstration of the virtues of "show, don't tell".

As I have no interest in Tarot or any other form of the absurdities inflicted by illusionists on their more or less willing victims, that didn't keep my attention. The 'audacious transitions' you mention are what I took at the time -correctly or otherwise - to be clumsy writing. I don't think I got as far as the 'psychic test' but again, it would not have interested me in itself.

As you indicate, in the crime books I've read, the "hardboiled" genre seems the most capable of incorporating humor into an otherwise serious narrative - I think of Sam Spade's put-downs or Marlowe's similes. I can never remember for sure which M[a]cDonald was married to Margaret Millar, but I think it was Ross, whom I've never read.

It was Ross Macdonald - real name Kenneth Millar - a fairly recent discovery for me. A very stylish and clearly well-educated writer, whose sole major weakness seems to be a tendency to over-complicate his plots or (at worst) to dive into absurdity. I didn't know of Margaret Millar before she was recently mentioned by AJ or yourself; I've put one of hers on the virtual TBR pile for future consideration. Thanks.

In the last thread, CCC wrote:

Still dipping into the Book of Disquiet Pessoa , which is uniquely wonderful in tiny doses because there is so much to think about.

CCC - keep us updated on that one. I'd never heard of him (or perhaps his name hadn't 'stuck') until fairly recently I began to read the wonderful novellas by Antonio Tabucchi, who is clearly a huge admirer - indeed, one of his books is posited on the notion that he has arranged a meeting with the (dead) poet/author - Requiem: A Hallucination. The Pessoa is on my virtual TBR list, and advice on whether to stick or twist will be appreciated!

AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Thanks for that! I hope all are having better luck reading this month than last, if -like me - October was a disappointment."

why so scarlet, nothing stuck or stimulated you?"

I read two books - slowly, because they failed to entertain - the very disappointing Harlem Shuffle and the too slow to develop Exiles.

I am now cheerfully swallowing some of Ross Macdonald's noir ouvre wholesale! Great fun and tonic for the soul.

In the last thread, MK wrote:

Do you want funny mysteries? Put Donald E. Westlake at the top of your list.

and Bill wrote in reply:

A number of years ago a co-worker tried to get me to read Brothers Keepers, but at the time I couldn't get into it.

By coincidence, the only Westlake I've read was , being attracted as much by the wonderfully tasteless 50s pastiche cover as anything else. I must have reviewed it somewhere here... it wasn't bad, but had too much padding for my taste - how you get from A to B in NYC - so, though I would not rule out reading more by Westlake, neither am I running to the bookshop to stock up on them.

Thanks for the new thread G. We do appreciate your efforts.

Due to lousy weather and the wonky hip I have been binge reading over the last few days. In particular the Rhys Dylan series:

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/rh...


Am pretty well up to date with them. The only one I wasn't keen on was Gravely Concerned which seems a bit unfocused and rambly. I have loved the others, particularly Lines of Inquiry. The story is good even though I did guess one of the culprits,

As I have mentioned before, it is set in South Wales and up to Aberystwyth and the places are real. The only problem is that my reader does not have a Welsh dictionary!

Since I have already mentioned Ross Macdonald several times, I suppose it is time to write a review of the latest book of his I've read - the third, and the best so far.

is a very entertaining hard-boiled detective book. Our narrator and protagonist is Lew Archer, a gumshoe with a conscience - a little like a nicer Philip Marlowe, or at least, a 'tec more inclined to collaborate with the law - up to a point. The author (and by proxy, his protagonist) is well educated and it shows in occasional verbal finnesses... he is also witty and self-aware. Early in the book, he is approached to look for a missing woman ( being this sort of book, she is young and beautiful... she'd hardly be old and ugly, naturally!). The offer is made by the missing woman's mother. This is the setting for the transaction:

She pulled out a chair from the heavy refectory table in the middle of the room. It was a small room, and it was as crowded with coffee-and end-tables, chairs and hassocks and bookcases, as a second-hand furniture store. The horizontal surfaces were littered with gewgaws, shells and framed photographs, vases and pincushions and doilies. If the lady had come down in the world, she’d brought a lot down with her. My sensation of stepping into the past was getting too strong for comfort. The half-armed chair closed on me like a hand...

I love the way in which this description makes it feel as if Archer is being enclosed and trapped by the furniture, and finally by the chair. It's not description for the sake of filling in space, but to create a specific atmosphere. And then, when Archer feels unconvinced by the story he is being told and feels on the verge of rejecting the commision, the mother seals the deal thus:

After a stretching moment of silence, she reached from her chair and took a framed photograph from the top of the bookcase. “Look at her, you’ll understand what I mean.” I took the picture from her hand. There was something slightly shady about the transaction, a faint implication that she was offering her daughter’s beauty as part payment on my services.

Thus, it is the girl's beauty which convinces Archer to get involved against his better judgement.

From then on, it is mayhem - a whirlwind of false trails, gangsters, bodies, and danger - all delivered in a very stylish manner. My one minor criticism of this book is that the plot gets very convoluted towards the end. Since Macdonald writes so well, his books would have been superbly entertaining even without such twists and turns - he should have kept things a bit simpler. There isn't anything outrageously ridiculous here, though - just 'far-fetched'. One of his others did go a bit too far... I think it was probably 'The Drowning Pool'.

From frustration at October's disappointments, I have now dived into another Macdonald - - and am already more than half-way through.

giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for the new thread G. We do appreciate your efforts.

Due to lousy weather and the wonky hip I have been binge reading over the last few days. In particular the Rhys Dylan series:

https://w..."

I hope you are all prepped for your hip to be as good as new. Later this week?

I am doing things like washing the kitchen (it's eat in size) floor as I will be having some treatments that may mean less housework and more reading time.

MK wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for the new thread G. We do appreciate your efforts.

Due to lousy weather and the wonky hip I have been binge reading over the last few days. In particular the Rhys Dyla..."

Not quite, operation scheduled for 8th December.

scarletnoir wrote: "In the last thread, MK wrote:

Do you want funny mysteries? Put Donald E. Westlake at the top of your list.

and Bill wrote in reply:

A number of years ago a co-worker tried to get me to read Br..."

I am seriously into snark and Westlake fills the bill, mostly. I've stirred clear of The Ax and a few others which are on the darker side - that's not my cup of tea.

A bright, clear and dry day in the shires, the first without rain for a good 7-8 days. Rivers are high but no flooding

Reading continues to be rewarding in this exceptional 2023, Vanish In An Instant(1952) by Ross Macdonalds other half, Margaret Millar, offers a lot more than i expected as a crime novel. Having a lawyer rather than a cop as the main character is an interesting approach, he isnt necessarily reliable but seems to gauge what is going on well. Set in snowbound Michigan, west of Detroit, it seems a strange location for a canadian who lived a lot of her life in California but it works

In Hong Kong: Epilogue to Empire, Jan Morris is educating me in the history of the famous British colony, offering the past and the present (1988 anyway), about a decade before it was handed over to the Communist Chinese, who have basically broken every rule they agreed to. The early days in the 1840s are brilliantly described, a kind of wild west of empire, where opium was the source of much £££ for its merchants and traders.

In Surviving by Allan Massie (1990), we have a group of alcoholics suffering in Rome, an ex-pat community linked by addiction. Its printed by Vagabond Press and is a strange novel, bits are annoying, larger bits are fascinating and i wonder where it stands as a Massie novel, his first i have read.

giveusaclue wrote: "MK wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for the new thread G. We do appreciate your efforts.

Due to lousy weather and the wonky hip I have been binge reading over the last few days. In particular th..."

Sorry, I had it in my head it was early this month.

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Thanks for that! I hope all are having better luck reading this month than last, if -like me - October was a disappointment."

why so scarlet, nothing stuck or stim..."

do you only read crime novels Scarlet?

scarletnoir wrote: "In the last thread, MK wrote:

Do you want funny mysteries? Put Donald E. Westlake at the top of your list.

and Bill wrote in reply:

A number of years ago a co-worker tried to get me to read Br..."

My memory is that the reason for the recommendation was founded on my dislike of travel and I had the impression that the monks in the book engaged in a similar avoidance. (Another co-worker recommended The Accidental Tourist for similar reasons, though I didn't get around to reading that until years later.)

I wonder if I would have been more likely to read the novel with that cover (or, if my female co-worker would have recommended it in that case).
My edition:

MK wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "MK wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for the new thread G. We do appreciate your efforts.

Due to lousy weather and the wonky hip I have been binge reading over the last few da..."

No apology needed MK

scarletnoir wrote: "In the last thread, CCC wrote:

Still dipping into the Book of Disquiet Pessoa , which is uniquely wonderful in tiny doses because there is so much to think about.

CCC - keep us updated on that on..."
It is such a strange book, not a story as such, but as if one wanders through a dream thinking about this and that and why.
I don’t know what you would make of it. I treat it like a dipping in collection of thoughts and read tiny passages at a time. Here’s another passage that I read today where he consider how to learn to dream

The best way of beginning to dream is through books. Novels are very useful for beginners. The first step: learn to surrender totally to your reading and live alongside the characters in a novel. It is a sign of progress to feel that your own family and its griefs are insignificant and repellent compared with those fictional characters. Best avoid literary novels where your attention is distracted by the form of the novel. I am not ashamed to admit that I myself began like that. And yet oddly enough, I was instinctively drawn to detective novels.

CCCubbon wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "In the last thread, CCC wrote:

Still dipping into the Book of Disquiet Pessoa , which is uniquely wonderful in tiny doses because there is so much to think about.

CCC - keep u..."

i was so looking foward to reading it about 15 years ago but i found it too inconsistent, it never seemed to match what i expected and in the end i gave up. Oddly some novels based on Pessoas alter ego's were better reads, especially Saramagos The Year In The Death of Ricardo Reis.

Portugal has same great writers, the best is Eca De Quierioz but despite Pessoa having such an interesting life, (spending time growing up in Durban and apparently writing some english poetry), i really havent warmed to his writing

I think i expected "Kafka on the Tagus", Lisbon depicted in the style of the great Czech but instead it was more like "some interesting passages amid much meandering nothingness nowhere near the Tagus" lol

scarletnoir wrote: "After a stretching moment of silence, she reached from her chair and took a framed photograph from the top of the bookcase. “Look at her, you’ll understand what I mean.” I took the picture from her hand. There was something slightly shady about the transaction, a faint implication that she was offering her daughter’s beauty as part payment on my services."

Sounds kind of like the beginning of Die Zauberflöte, "Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön".

I remember liking the two Donald Westlake books I read as kid in the early 1970s, The Hot Rock and Bank Job, but don't remember much about the books themselves.

The Hot Rock I had heard about because there was a popular movie version of it out around that time: I missed the movie, being too young to go to the cinema by myself, so I read the book instead - something that happened to me with several other popular movies of the late '60s and early '70s. Off the top of my head, I can think of Serpico, The French Connection, The Godfather, ... 2001 would count too, though I did get to see that when it was re-released in I think 1974.

Then there are the movies from that time that I feel like I've seen and sometimes even start talking as if I really have seen them until I remember that I only read the Mad magazine parody. The Poseidon Adventure is one that always catches me that way.

I'm reading 2 books at the moment:

. I'd had Sarah Winman's Still Life quite a while and started it twice without getting into it in spite of remembering Russell's warm recommendation of it. However, the 3rd time it "took" and I absolutely love it. It starts with a meeting towards the end of WWII and I'm at the point where the 2 people concerned have met again in Florence at the time of the devastating flood.

I need something else to read in parallel with this 2nd book, eg in bed, when I don't want gruesome (this is not a book/series for you, MK) The English title and the original Swedish title is NEW-Stalker.
Lars Kepler, like Nicci French, is the pseudonym of a couple and this book is #5 in the Joona Linna series, a maverick Finnish cop in the Swedish police. I've been getting these from the library and haven't read them quite in order. I began to wonder if I'd read this one before, because there was an incident I remembered well in spite of not recognising anything else, but on reflection, I think it must come up again in a subsequent book.

So, I am posting a review I placed carefully in the Guardian pages (pasted here below) of a prize-winning book called a Minor Detail by Adania Shibli.

Unfortunately, any combination of the words "Minor Detail" "Shibli" and/or "Palestine" will get you modded out of existence in the Guardian and any viewpoint not in lock step with the current Zionist expansionism will got you labelled an anti-semite (which roughly included 80% of the dozens of Jewish friends and acquaintances I grew up with in NY).


I read a book. A brilliant one. A gut-punching, imbalancing, wrenching book. Its title: doesn't matter, best not discussed. It's a detail, a minor one. The author: we'll leave that open. Its setting: unmentionable.

So, it's a book that illustrates brilliantly the viewpoint of the bombarded, and squeezed and long-erased normal citizen in that area that is simply living some scant semblance of a normal life in an area where no shades of gray are permitted to exist for many years now.




It was a beautiful, haunting book concerning the self-imposed circumscription that comes with the modern day state of constant emergency. How normalcy is so far away when living in a state of forever war. How the topology, the climate, the density fo the air is so subject to sculpting and terraforming by wrecking ball. How colonizers first and most effective weapon is the suffocation of native culture, whether that's in Canadian villages or Irish schools. How a small step outside of the self-imposed box of safety opens your eyes up to the extraplanetary sense of otherness and erasure. How a wartime rape, mentioned in passing can have decades-long ripples, upending and drowning unsuspecting victims. How even the most banal of objects, a stick of gum, can have wide-reaching consequences. About how nuance and balance and empathy are unattainable dreams in a state of besiegement and how every perceived difference can label you as an enemy.

A brilliant, horrible, unsettling tragedy of a book. To be read, unquestionably.

Paul wrote: "So, I am posting a review I placed carefully in the Guardian pages (pasted here below) of a prize-winning book called a Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. ... will get you modded out of existence"

I didn’t understand your piece in The G at all. Now I get it completely. Thanks.

Gpfr wrote: "I'm reading 2 books at the moment:
... I'd had Sarah Winman's Still Life quite a while and started it twice without getting into it in spite of remembering Russell's warm recommendation of it. However, the 3rd time it "took" and I absolutely love it. ..."

That’s great. I looked back to see what I said and found I called it “a scrummy read” – which it is!

Paul wrote: "So, I am posting a review I placed carefully in the Guardian pages (pasted here below) of a prize-winning book called a Minor Detail by Adania Shibli.

Unfortunately, any combination of the words ..."

Once upon a time when I was allowed to.post on the G's website I noticed you got modded for using the M****m word.

Gpfr wrote: "I'm reading 2 books at the moment:

. I'd had Sarah Winman's Still Life quite a while and started it twice without getting into it in spite of remembe..."

I very much liked the book as well, though not the book exactly, but a radio 4, book of the week, retelling of the story. I do sometimes wonder about what they have left out, as I guess quite a large proportion of books get edited in terms of available broadcasting time available. Anyway the story was sufficient of itself, and I really enjoyed it, whether edited or not...

When I heard the news about the Hamas attacks on Israel, they made me think of descriptions I'd read of Indian attacks on settlers on the American frontier - women and children killed, extreme mutilations, the taking of captives.

I decided to read a bit more in this area of US history. I was originally thinking this would be about the American West in the post civil war period (The Searchers coming to mind), but looking through my accumulated books, I found one that dealt with the subject in the 18th century, concentrating on Indian/colonist relations right here in Pennsylvania: Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America.

So far I'm finding it very interesting. The first chapter dealt with how sectarian religious differences between the colonists (all different Protestant sects: Quaker, Lutheran, Irish Presbyterian, and Moravian being the main groups) created separate communities mutually suspicious of the each other. Subsequent chapters deal with the Indian wars and their effects, one of which, the author claims, was to impose a common self-identification as "white people" on the separate groups.

Bill wrote: "When I heard the news about the Hamas attacks on Israel, they made me think of descriptions I'd read of Indian attacks on settlers on the American frontier - women and children killed, extreme muti..."

Far away in what was to become WA state 1889, was a couple who came to the area as missionaries were killed by local Indians - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitman... The Whitmans were lionized for many years to the extent that there is a college named after them (probably really him), and he became one of the state's two allocated statues in the Capitol's statuary hall.

Only recently has the narrative changed - Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West and Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West tell a different story. So much so that the Marcus Whitman statue will be replaced by one of Billy Frank, Jr. Billy Frank, Jr. was a Nisqually who was arrested a gazillion times for fishing. Here's his story - https://billyfrankjr.org/.

Without his tenacity, there probably would not have been the Boldt decision here in the state. It was a huge victory for the tribes.

This is probably much more than readers here want to know, but the ideas that interlopers (mostly White colonists) knew best is slowly being corrected.

I have been modded too Paul, It's useless to try any criticism of Israel in the G. isn't it? Even the mildest comment that doesn't follow the line won't be accepted so thank you for your comment and I will read the book.

Does the experience of reading get richer as we age?

my question is posed as this forum offers a great many experienced readers who have read far more than i have in my 23 yrs of serious reading. I'm probably the youngest here, maybe, and i wonder what your thoughts are?

I am certainly finding more in novels that at 26 or 36, i would have said "nah". Less novels disappoint me, though i do find different reasons for dropping novels too. (One that hasnt changed is that book reviews can be very unreliable, i wouldnt be reading the excellent Margaret Millar novel right now if i believed the selection of reviews i googled beforehand!)

as for moderation on the G, its shameful that the entire Gaza situation has been off limits for me , as a "two state solutioner", basically a moderate

Excellent Marliynne Robinson article in NYRB, on Iowa and its pride in becoming the Florida of the North. The Republican interference in education as an anti-woke drive is alarming

AB wrote; "its shameful that the entire Gaza situation has been off limits for me , as a "two state solutioner", basically a moderate"

Greenfairy wrote: "It's useless to try any criticism of Israel in the G. isn't it? Even the mildest comment that doesn't follow the line won't be accepted..."

The articles aren't all pro-Israel ...
I was going to say that none of them are open to comments, but I see that the latest by Simon Jenkins (whom I don't like in general) was open and there are comments which criticise Israel's actions.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...

about time.

Love and Mr Lewisham by HG Wells is an interesting novella whose genesis, one feels, is to be found in one short phrase. Mr Lewisham discovers that love is “something more ancient and more imperative than reason.” Coming in a late passage of sad rumination it leaps out.

Early on Mr Lewisham is intent on his science studies at the Normal School in Kensington, following the course that Wells himself followed, and has a distinct plan for his Career, perhaps involving a Professorship, and certainly a commitment to promoting Socialism. But all is thrown in doubt when love intrudes, rather beautifully.

The writing on the whole is more workmanlike than fluent, and for stretches the arguments about imposture and truth take precedence over the narrative. The honeymoon is also very soon over. There are quarrels and harsh words before the couple find their path. It is a book for anyone looking to explore further the Wellsian world of lower middle-class strivings.

This reader couldn’t help noticing that Wells has a liking for the legs of young girls. He admires a shapely calf in Mr Polly (astride a wall) and in Tono-Bungay (astride a wall) and again here (astride a gate). What can it mean?

AB76 wrote: "Does the experience of reading get richer as we age? ..."

The answer in my case is a qualified Yes. I certainly think that a broader experience in life helps in understanding what an author is driving at, and a broader experience of books helps in assessing the merits of an author’s style. You gain confidence in your own judgment. I also find that writing reviews, which I started contributing to TLS about ten years ago, and now here, makes me form my ideas more clearly, but I suppose that could have happened at any age.

The qualification is that, at least in my case, I have lost some of the wild enthusiasm I had in my youth. If in my late teens or early 20s I loved a book I was almost ecstatic (I’m thinking Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Proust, even some non-fiction). Today I still find books to love, but the response is more measured.

AB76 wrote: "Excellent Marliynne Robinson article in NYRB, on Iowa and its pride in becoming the Florida of the North. The Republican interference in education as an anti-woke drive is alarming"

Robinson tends to be a “hate read” for me (it’s mainly her tendency to inject her Calvinist faith into whatever she writes about), but I do read her articles nevertheless (though I couldn’t make it to the end of her last NYRB piece on “religion and science”, or a previous one on “a shining city on a hill”). Her NYRB piece is up next for me, but first I’m relishing Jed Perl’s article on Picasso. Preach it, brother!

This line of thought, embraced by art critics and historians since around the time of the MoMA retrospective, has now reached the United States Supreme Court, in the form of Justice Elena Kagan’s long dissenting opinion in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, which was decided in May. At the core of all artistic activity there is an act of transformation, and by Kagan’s lights one of the great masters of transformation is Warhol, a figure she compares to a couple of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. The confidence with which Kagan makes her argument, a layman’s assertions bolstered by a half-century of art criticism and art history, only demonstrates how horribly debased the general understanding of artistic processes has become in recent years. A generation ago members of the educated public may have found themselves daunted by the fractured forms of Picasso’s Cubism—or the babel of language in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or the astringencies of Stravinsky’s Agon—but they accepted the titanic transformations those works involved as a challenge to be explored, debated, approached with a healthy skepticism. For Kagan and other members of the educated public there may be some relief in the immediacy of Warhol’s effects, which a museumgoer can grasp without thought, reflection, or struggle of any kind. After Warhol, confronting Picasso’s enigmas may seem as retro as taking a car trip without GPS. …

What Kagan salutes as “the dazzling creativity evident in the Prince portrait” amounts to nothing more than the recropping of a photograph and the replacement of the modulated grays of the original with some bright, hard-edged color shapes. She’s on firm ground when she asserts that there is “expert evidence” to support her assertion. But Kagan isn’t content to demonstrate that some sort of artistic process has taken place. She wants to make sure that Warhol has a place in the Great Tradition. She complains that the majority, by concluding that Warhol has indeed infringed on Goldsmith’s copyright, “stymies and suppresses that [transformative] process, in art and every other kind of creative endeavor.” She’s not making an argument for Warhol as some sort of modernist or postmodernist. She’s saying that he does what all the great artists have done. She compares him with Giorgione, Titian, and Manet, artists who “engaged with a prior work to create new expression and add new value,” as if that were what Warhol was doing when he slapped some bright colors on a photograph of Prince. Wasn’t there anybody around the Supreme Court willing to warn Kagan that she risked absurdity when she mentioned Giorgione and Titian in the same pages as Warhol?

Russell wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Does the experience of reading get richer as we age? ..."

The answer in my case is a qualified Yes. I certainly think that a broader experience in life helps in understanding what an ..."

very interesting Russell, my grandfather had been a reader from his teens to his death at 93 and had so many good observations about the reading life over time, i greatly respected his open mindness with new novels even in his 80s. Though having lived through two world wars, he wasnt keen on anything German....

Russell wrote: "This reader couldn’t help noticing that Wells has a liking for the legs of young girls. He admires a shapely calf in Mr Polly (astride a wall) and in Tono-Bungay (astride a wall) and again here (astride a gate). What can it mean?"

That he was a fairly normal heterosexual male?

AB76 wrote: "Russell wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Does the experience of reading get richer as we age? ..."

The answer in my case is a qualified Yes. I certainly think that a broader experience in life helps in unders..."

Not sure about this AB. I cannot remember not reading. The library was my haven once I came back to London after the war. Children moved around on their own much more than today. I read all kinds of books and loved Enid Blyton - rather frowned on today. My reading worked it’s way through most of the classics and detective stories though the years, Sayers, Rex Stout, to name a couple on to Dickens, Tolstoy but generally fiction. Later, in my twenties I discovered poetry and non fiction books particularly archaeology, nature, jewellery design, art, needlework, cooking…..
Perhaps I am more critical now but can usually tell within a few pages if I shall finish something and I use non fiction books like dictionaries -look in the index for what I want.
Remember liking artwork to go with stories when young and still appreciate someblock printing and illustrations.
I read history books but not twentieth century war stories, don’t read cowboy books, get irritated by sloppy writing and loath anything that appears illogical to me.
Hope this answers your question

Re; modding
I have got away with a couple of quite critical poems on Poem of the Week but a prose piecewas modded.

CCCubbon wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Russell wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Does the experience of reading get richer as we age? ..."

The answer in my case is a qualified Yes. I certainly think that a broader experience in life he..."

good answer CCC, thanks

Bill wrote: "Russell wrote: "This reader couldn’t help noticing that Wells has a liking for the legs of young girls...What can it mean?"

That he was a fairly normal heterosexual male?"

You would think (and I was only semi-serious), but one fact I didn’t mention is that in two of the three instances the girl is pretty clearly under age, which I think today would mean he was inviting trouble. Those instances lead to nothing In either story, and the girls do not reappear, so his purpose is unclear.

I‘ve just finished reading Cressida Connolly‘s After the Party (2018). The novel moves between 1979, when Phyllis Forrester relates her story, and 1938 and the following years. A third person narrator tells how (naive) Phyllis, her (upper middle class) sisters and their families became involved with the Party at this time, leading up to the arrest and imprisonment of Phyllis (and her husband). That’s not a spoiler — we hear about this in the first line of the novel. The focus is on Phyllis and her family and social life, then on her experiences in Holloway and on the Isle of Man. It fascinated me.

Gpfr wrote: "Hello, everyone

Welcome to the new thread.
Happy reading to all!"

Thank you!

Sorry but I cannot find the post about Janice Hallet, how someone found tpThe Appeal too irritating to read.
I ploughed on but it became increasingly difficult and I got muddled up, skipped to the end. Goodbye Janice Hallet.

I was just reading in Our Savage Neighbors about colonial Pennsylvanians resentment against Quakers for their charitable efforts to feed and clothe Indians. "Many executive-appointed authorities were happy to encourage the forging of an intuitive link between violence in the countryside and Quakers in the assembly".

Then I open the daily email from The New Yorker only to find a link to Masha Gessen's article on the current crackdown on free speech in Israel:

perhaps the greatest example of the society-wide chilling has come in the form of a lockdown on free speech and expression that has targeted Palestinian and Israeli citizens voicing dissenting views on the war with Hamas. This has come in the form of arrests, interrogations, job losses and suspensions, and public doxings that have led to violence. Israeli peace activists, Gessen writes, have been “targeted by right-wing mobs with what appears to be the tacit approval of the government.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals...

Diana wrote: "I‘ve just finished reading Cressida Connolly‘s After the Party (2018) ..."

I found it excellent. I see it was one of my "best books of 2022" and that Anne really liked it too.
I've got her Bad Relations, but haven't read it yet.

After the lovely Still Life, I've started Casablanca Circus by Yasmine Chami. As far as I can see her books haven't been translated into English.

A young Moroccan couple, an architect and a historian, after studying and working in France, return to live in their home town of Casablanca before the birth of their 2nd child.

Gpfr wrote: "Diana wrote: "I‘ve just finished reading Cressida Connolly‘s After the Party (2018) ..."

I found it excellent. I see it was one of my "best books of 2022" and that Anne really liked it too...."

Not a book I was aware of, but you all make it sound v tempting. It's now on my TBR list.

AB76 wrote: "do you only read crime novels Scarlet?"

Er... no.

From 2023:
True Grit and Dog of the South by Charles Portis - though they do have crimes in them. Depends how wide you interpret things!
French Braid - Anne Tyler (a favourite author - I've read all her novels)
Little misunderstandings of no importance, Indian Nocturne, and Requiem: a hallucination by Antonio Tabucchi
The snares of memory - Juan Marsé (another favourite)
No fond return of love - Barbara Pym - definitely full of gruesome murders - not!

And there I was, thinking that you actually read my reviews! I am hurt - deeply hurt (not - I'm joking as usual).

No. But crime is my 'go-to genre' if all I want is entertainment. Life has been stressful and difficult lately, and so Ross Macdonald fills that need perfectly. Plus, of course, I don't and can't read 'any' crime novel: it has to be at least well written, and preferably contain both some humour and some social and/or historical commentary. My current Macdonald - The Galton Case - contains a fine parody of a 1950s poetry reading set to music of the sort with which Allen Ginsberg might have regaled his acolytes.