Phil James
I must firstly state that Cloud Atlas is one of my all time favourite books so there was going to be the risk of comparison from the beginning. But having read and been impressed by Doerr's “All the Light We Cannot See” I knew to trust a master storyteller and try to put comparisons to one side.
For maybe until half way through the book the storylines and characters weren't compelling and the comparison was deadly. How to compete with David Mitchell's satire, mystery and gothic horror/Science-fiction, but I should have trusted Anthony Doerr.
IT IS WORTH IT!
Characters deepen, storylines connect up and it is not at all predictable. By the end he took me somewhere else from the experience of Cloud Atlas, more optimistic even with the horrible realities, and fully winning it's place on my shelves not far from David Mitchell's works.
This was an excellently entertaining read, but I suppose even then it's one for the fans. The stylistic choices work really well and should be repeated in other band biographies. A mixture of discography, timelines, album breakdowns, interviews and the all important essays putting the band in context(s).
Hawkwind are seen in relation to Science-Fiction, hard-rock, end of/or continuation of the counterculture, post-punk, krautrock/electronica and as an alternative to mainstream music business.
Now something on Gong and family?
I started this book 45 years ago and just finished it now!
I got myself this magnificent edition of all the novels, with a few short stories and the author's comments , to finally catch up from where I left off in Mrs. Cooper's primary school class.
At 10 I was avidly reading anything that looked interesting in the little book stand in the corner of the classroom. “ The Wizard of Earthsea” blew my mind, but although in later years I re-read it I never read the others.
Funnily enough I'm glad I waited, because I can see now how the experience and wisdom of Ursula K. Le guin developed over a lifetime as she carried on writing of the world I loved so much.
I can see also how my taste in books and even my world-view was informed by that one book and how my philosophy and politics have evolved in parallel with the following books.
Thank-you Ursula.
Without doubt the best version of the I Ching I've come across. The author clearly explains where the images originated in the the ritual and political history of ancient china and still makes them relevant to the modern reader. I especially liked the drawings showing the evolution of the chinese characters.
Obviously this long, complicated book is immensely worthy, for the way it pushed the boundaries of post-modern writing. It used all the taboo breaking energy of the seventies to include as many fetishes and sexual inclinations as it could, and it is also occasionally brilliantly poetic and heart-breakingly beautiful...BUT...
the way it felt for me was mostly a slog, through a turgid marsh, where I was frequently lost. There's too many characters in too many plot-lines that jump about seemingly at random, leaving me not really caring. I made the mistake of continuing beyond the point where I could easily give up.
Congratulations to the author for the ManBooker Prize.
Although I liked this book very much it did keep reminding me of Neil Gaiman's “The Graveyard Book”
Just to find out if I was the only one who thought so I went googling. Here's a link to a short critical article from someone else who liked the book and drew parallels to Gaiman and several others.
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-lincoln-in-the-bardo-by-george-saunders-1-4393571
I was given a copy of this book. It intimidated me with a heavy subject but was a lot lighter to read than expected. Think Jon Ronson's Psychopath Test written from someone with a track record of serious journalism. It didn't exactly make me laugh but as the author gets deeper and deeper into the bizarre beliefs of ISIS recruiters and their teachers, the experience becomes intensely surreal.
He also is stubborn enough to ask awkward questions to Islamic scholars and listens carefully to the answers.
This is a book that many people would benefit from reading. He shows the ways our misperceptions are playing into exactly what these apocalyptic cultists want and how they are on a spectrum of religious beliefs that have already shaped our history.
It's becoming a personal tradition to undertake a winter brick challenge. Around the time of the shortest days I'll try and distract myself and semi-hibernate with a book that's either very long or otherwise forbidding by it's reputation.
This one fulfilled these requirements: it's very long and complex. The first third is many short views from individual lives lived in Northampton at different times. There's a connection with William Blake, Jerusalem and Angels but this only becomes clear (er) in the second third. Some other readers on this site didn't make it this far, but the vision and philosophy makes it worth it.
There are some emotional story pay-offs in the end of the last third but by that time they're a bit of an anti-climax. Alan Moore, the author of “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta” graphic novels is to be applauded for his ambition, but he would have benefitted from a fiercer editor.
Ground-hog day is over, now onward to lighter days.
Wonderful nature writing that brought me back to all the books I loved as a child: Gerald Durrell, James Herriot, Richard Adams and Joy Adamson.
He writes about the year, from month to month, of the intimate life of one meadow on the border of Wales and England, not far from where I grew up and rambled around in the countryside.
He has the eyes of a child, the inclinations of a farmer and the patience of a old-time naturalist.
This isn't at all fluffy; sometimes nature “is red in tooth and claw”
All in all a very satisfying little book.
This is the second book by Gabor Maté I've read. The first was about stress and the immune system. He has a way of using himself as a very human example of his subject so that the people he tries to help are human too, before they are seen as “cases”
This is not a self-help book for anyone in the depths of addiction but a plea to all of us to realise we're probably all on a spectrum of addiction. A plea for compassion in our lives and in government policy.
Recommended.
I rarely re-read books because there are so many, and so little time. I made an exception here because I read it it first in a delirious whirl of Murakami books. I was falling in love with a writer and was giddy with his peculiar mix of the banal and surreal.
For some reason I didn't see beyond the oeuvre to the exceptional nature of this work so I only gave 4 stars. I fixed that now with 5. I was so totally absorbed in each section that I didn't see how all the parts were played out as a whole.
I recently listened to Patti Smith's “M train” where she becomes enamoured with the book so I knew I had to go back and give it the time it deserved. I'm glad I did.
A great work of immense subtlety and elegant ironic humour but unfortunately mostly boring.At the age of 14 I read Herman Hesse's [b:Narcissus and Goldmund 5954 Narcissus and Goldmund Hermann Hesse https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1374680750s/5954.jpg 955995] at 18 I read [b:The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan 57913 The Illuminatus! Trilogy The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan Robert Shea https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386923913s/57913.jpg 813] I see now that both were perhaps inspired by this book or at least the same interplay of opposing ideas, currents of philosophy influencing major world events, but both were a lot more exciting to read.I think I could appreciate the beautiful writing and start to appreciate the dialectics, but I need to be drawn back everyday to read as a pleasure not as a chore.In other words I won't be recommending this one.
Review after receiving book as Giveaway.
I really liked this even though it wasn't quite like my usual styles or genres. i.e. no post-modern trickery, magical-realist fantasies or ironic humour.
With the title “All true not a lie in it” I was expecting the opposite, a bunch of tall tales from an unreliable narrator, but instead Alix Hawley has set herself a harder task. How to tell the exact history, from the facts of Daniel Boone's life, and also make it vividly new and interesting.
She succeeds by giving us the thoughts and impressions of a man dragged into a mythical life almost as a spectator in his own tale, surrounded by the ghosts of people he has survived.
Remarkable.
Totally superlative. I loved every bit of this, as much or maybe more than “Cloud Atlas”
There are his usual hints and references to his previous books but here is a suggestion that they are all included in one overall meta-fiction or indeed all organically grown from one central idea— The reincarnation or transmigration of souls.
Although it took me a long time to read, (this is a very dense book, well written but full of examples of statistics) I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.
Steven Pinker proves that our world is getting less violent. This is flatly contradicted by our senses and experience every day. Any person alive now will be inundated with news of terrible violence around the world and believe that it's getting worse.
All the proof is here. Examined from all sorts of angles, with doubts and attempts to disprove thrown in, as in all good science. But the proof still stands.
It doesn't shy away from reality and includes all the atrocities and massacres but puts them into a greater context of all of humanity's history.
This is one book that truly has changed my life, and it continues to protect me from tendencies to total cynicism and pessimism.
Received as Goodreads Giveaway.
“A literary descendent of Roberto Bolaño...“
I didn't really like the Robert Bolano I read; I felt it was pretentious and deliberately obscure. I just finished “Infinite Jest” by David foster Wallace, and that could be similarly accused, but with the key difference, I was drawn in by the characters.
This book is an intricate puzzle, a glittering jewel of compact post-modern techniques that is admirable but ultimately empty because I wasn't attached to any character.
There is no time to develope the characters in 90 pages, but anyway the main theme is the mutability of identity,so maybe character wasn't the point and in the end I was glad it was as short as it was.
Not bad but not really for me.