Zed
I am crap at chess. I spent a lot of money on books that I thought would at least make me competitive. Nothing worked. I think these chess books will all sit in a box gathering dust and one day I might get the urge to rejoin the local club and get butchered by 12 year olds so then may have a further look. (Generic review for all half finished chess books I will never finish)
FWIW I recall this one was of some use.
I am crap at chess. I spent a lot of money on books that I thought would at least make me competitive. Nothing worked. I think these chess books will all sit in a box gathering dust and one day I might get the urge to rejoin the local club and get butchered by 12 year olds so then may have a further look. (Generic review for all half finished chess books I will never finish)
I am crap at chess. I spent a lot of money on books that I thought would at least make me competitive. Nothing worked. I think these chess books will all sit in a box gathering dust and one day I might get the urge to rejoin the local club and get butchered by 12 year olds so then may have a further look. (Generic review for all half finished chess books I will never finish
Superb read. Found this on my late Fathers bookcase and read the 1st few pages out of curiosity. Could not put this down as it was jam packed with fascinating information.
I kinda of liked it. It is a bit repetitive at times, and I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with Carr though that should not matter.
A superb read. Who needs the rich and/or infamous in the music world to tell a good story. Most of them in fact don't. This is easy to read and is about the most underrated music scene in the entire biz, that being the Dunedin Sound. I have read this about 3 times now and will do so again in the future. All hail the little blokes of the music scene.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/14/top-10-modern-epistolary-novels
I read this when I was 18 - 19 not long after release and can hardly recall it but do remember liking it. The link posted reminded me of it.
No footnotes etc make this book a target for the critics. Being such a controversial subject and to not back ones sources is a huge mistake.
No I have not read this book but I am intrigued by the title. I am presently enamoured by an album of the same name by Kiwi come Melbournite Sarah Mary Chadwick. The book is a children's book and no doubt superb. I am considering trying to get it for friends young lass who has become like a grandchild to my wife and I.
The song on the other hand! The angst, the atmosphere, the agony, that brittle voice and that organ!
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/12/sarah-mary-chadwick-the-queen-who-stole-the-sky-review-a-terrifying-loud-masterwork
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Rxt_ce5rE
Interesting what comes up on ones GR feed. I was reminded that a good decade ago I was invited to a party by some friends and met the host, a lady whose ex was something to do with Madonna. The host had many copies of this book packed in boxes, all very heavy, as it was the edition with a metal cover and a CD. It looked to me like the entire Australian distribution. I had a quick look at a copy she had and recall thinking it was not that much to rave about. Oh well!
A very very good book indeed and as much as I disagree with interventionism personally I cannot fault Powers well reasoned points of view.
Only a few pages into this Sci Fi satire is an excerpt from the fourteenth edition of A Child's Cyclopedia of Wonders and Things to Do. Was Douglas Adams influenced by Kurt Vonnegut Jr I asked myself? A very quick internet search said yes, with specific reference to this specific title. Well done Kurt, I thought to myself. In my a long time ago readings of both authors, I had never noticed. But then my youthful readings may have been wasted on me in some cases. And though I did not read this one in my youth, I know it would have been “just” a Sci Fi read with little understanding of its concepts.
As a now ancient person this was for me this was a fantastic read that I took as comment on the lack of an interventionist god, the intervention of others in one's life on the other hand? There is plenty of that.
The plot I found is rather convoluted but came together beautifully at the end. The point of the story simplistically is that a super-rich man thanks the lord above for his constant luck but gets his comeuppance, (or does he?) by an all-knowing, of both the past, present and future, time traveller stuck in an odd time loop. It makes for a wonderful satire on why we might do what we do and might think what we think.
At least I think that is what it is all about haa haa!
A bit like Kurt Vonnegut Jr's first book, the technical ideas are of their times but so what. Conceptually, this is great stuff. As to the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent? Brilliant.
My 2nd read in my attempt to read Kurt Vonnegut Jr's oeuvre from first to last.
My review of number 1 here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6205354368
Onwards to the next.
Kurt Vonnegut's 8th novel and he reaches new levels of niche weird.
The introduction is “Dedicated to the memory of Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy, two angels of my time.”
This reader sees no Slaptsick per se in the story told, but he sure reads about being Lonesome no More.
Vonnegut gives the game away in the intro. He writes that “THIS IS THE CLOSEST I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it “Slapstick” because it is grotesque, situational poetry—like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. It is about what life feels like to me. There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They go on and on. The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account. • • • There was very little love in their films. There was often the situational poetry of marriage, which was something else again”
Let's leave Kurt there and just say that to this reader this is genuinely strange but audacious fiction. Very niche. The passing Slaughterhouse Five readers was going to wander by this one, surely.
The plot includes;
The collapse of his relationship with his sister.
His none relationship with his parent's.
Family schisms in general.
Any rich idiot can be the President of the US.
The coming of the Chinese as a world power
Pandemics.
And much more that I can hardly think about such is this mixed up muddled up world of the life of Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain. This is his memoir and as the President of the United States.
And this is how Kurt Vonnegut Jr felt when this strangely compelling mélange of oddness that is, to repeat him, the closest he “will ever come to writing an autobiography”?
If this is the case then he had one oddball of a relationship with his parents and his sister and all those around him.
One for the Vonnegut reader in my opinion and recommended as such.
My review of number 1 Player Piano.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6205354368
My review of number 2 The Sirens Of Titan. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6267103559
My review of number 3 Mother Night.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6287961968
My review of number 4 Cats Cradle.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371451
My review of number 5 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371734
My review of number 6 Slaughter House Five
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231370983
My review of number 7 Breakfast Of Champions.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371515
The tale is based around petty crim Lucas who starts from lowly beginnings with watch thieving and then gets caught up in extortion rackets among the Chinese mafia in Buenos Aries. The reader gets a fairly gritty description of the life in an economically struggling Argentina with all the other problems that come with that, such as intercommunal issues.
Not being into crime fiction particularly, I enjoyed this more than I thought I might. Being short in length it did not overstay its welcome. Also, crime in Argentina is not a subject I had ever really thought about. Ideal reading on a rainy Saturday morning here in usually sunny Brisbane, a city that seems a world away from the trials and tribulations of South American crime.