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Author Topic: Book Suggestions  (Read 27192 times)
cish n fhips
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« Reply #105 on: February 20, 2020, 08:50:53 AM »

Couple of short but entertaining reads for you guys to try.
I am a little bias as hes a good mate of mine from school days.
Will Nett is his name and his first two book to be published are
Billy no maps and My only Boro.
Please give them a bash and let me know what you think.
Happy reading
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« Reply #106 on: February 27, 2020, 10:06:47 PM »

Thanks for this. I read Shadow of the Wind towards the end of Uni and remember enjoying it. Had no idea there had been follow-ups since though, so will check those out now.  thumbs up

Just finished book 4 and I was sad that I'd finished and happy that I could read it again. I can't remember feeling like that about a book.

I'm going to read the Prince of Mist next which is the first book in the Niebla series by the same order along with a Monty Don book and the autobiography  of Stan Ternent. I'll also begin the Cemetery books again at some point.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the series Jamier.

It's been so long i decided i need to go back and read the original first! Got some travel in a couple of weeks so all set for the flights.
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« Reply #107 on: February 27, 2020, 11:29:07 PM »

Been ages since I posted in here (I although I do keep a sneaky eye on you pesky kids still...)

Shadow of the Wind

I struggle to put into words how incredible this book is. The idea, the execution and, most importantly, the language. I have a weird relationship with this book though; on one hand I struggle to put it down, but on the other hand it is taking me forever to read. Why? It's too wonderful to rush. Sometimes, a paragraph grabs me so much that I just go back and read it over again.

Mr B is getting impatient with me. I have been banging on about this book for a year now but desperately don't want to get to the end to give it to him to read!

"Gustavo Barcelo was an old colleague of my farther's who now owned a cavernous establishment on Calle Fernando with a commanding position in the city's secondhand-book trade. Perpetually affixed to his mouth was an unlit pipe that impregnated his person with the aroma of a Persian market. He liked to describe himself as the last romantic, and he was not above claiming that a remote line in his ancestry led directly to Lord Byron himself.

Gustavo Barcelo was, technically speaking, loaded and his palatial bookshop was more of a passion than a business. He loved books - if someone stepped into his bookshop and fell in love with a tome he could not afford, Barcelo would lower its price of even give it away if he felt the buyer was a serious reader and not an accidental browser. He boasted an elephantine memory alied to a pedantry that matched his demeanour and the sonority of his voice.

Barcelo and his bibliophile knights of the round table gathered to discuss the finer points of decadent poets, dead languages and neglected, moth-ridden masterpieces"


Love.

Go read it.
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AlbusFawkes
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« Reply #108 on: March 03, 2020, 10:46:21 PM »

Decided to start reading novels on train to work (rather than listening to music on my MP3).

Most recently been restricted to Jack Reacher novels, but for Christmas I requested some David Baldacci books, having read and thoroughly enjoyed The Winner & Split Second many years ago.

I received 4 paperbacks and have just got started on the first, Memory Man. It's a shame that work gets in the way of my reading otherwise I may well have finished it by now. Will update once finished.

I would heartily recommend The Winner.

If there are any Dean R Koontz fans here, Dark Rivers Of The Heart is a great read and uncharacteristically does not involve the supernatural!
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Jon MW
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« Reply #109 on: March 05, 2020, 07:32:36 PM »

Been ages since I posted in here (I although I do keep a sneaky eye on you pesky kids still...)

Shadow of the Wind

I struggle to put into words how incredible this book is. The idea, the execution and, most importantly, the language. I have a weird relationship with this book though; on one hand I struggle to put it down, but on the other hand it is taking me forever to read. Why? It's too wonderful to rush. Sometimes, a paragraph grabs me so much that I just go back and read it over again.

Mr B is getting impatient with me. I have been banging on about this book for a year now but desperately don't want to get to the end to give it to him to read!

"Gustavo Barcelo was an old colleague of my farther's who now owned a cavernous establishment on Calle Fernando with a commanding position in the city's secondhand-book trade. Perpetually affixed to his mouth was an unlit pipe that impregnated his person with the aroma of a Persian market. He liked to describe himself as the last romantic, and he was not above claiming that a remote line in his ancestry led directly to Lord Byron himself.

Gustavo Barcelo was, technically speaking, loaded and his palatial bookshop was more of a passion than a business. He loved books - if someone stepped into his bookshop and fell in love with a tome he could not afford, Barcelo would lower its price of even give it away if he felt the buyer was a serious reader and not an accidental browser. He boasted an elephantine memory alied to a pedantry that matched his demeanour and the sonority of his voice.

Barcelo and his bibliophile knights of the round table gathered to discuss the finer points of decadent poets, dead languages and neglected, moth-ridden masterpieces"


Love.

Go read it.

Well damn, that sounds pretty good - my "too read" shelf is already getting pretty big even without getting new ideas of books to buy Smiley
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Jon "the British cowboy" Woodfield

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« Reply #110 on: March 05, 2020, 07:44:43 PM »

Just finished reading

Transcription by Kate Atkinson



and unusually I'm a bit dissapointed by it. Unusual because I tend to have pretty good judgement about what books I'll like and that I like a lot of books - in some ways  I have pretty low standards.

The book centres around an 18 year old girl and her work in WW2 for the intelligence service in Britain. Unusually the subject focusses very much on the homefront, all the groundwork is there for a good story and the writing is good.

The disappointing part is that with the good premise, the good writing and and everything going for it - the plot just fizzles out.

It technically has a climax and a resolution, but it just isn't very exciting. The author may have been hampered somewhat in only being able to write about things that broadly speaking might have happened - and this might be why you don't get a whole lot of WW2 novels focussed on the intelligence service at home; but ultimately the end just seemed pretty unsatisfying.

It also suffered a little bit because I'd read a number of the sources that the author had read for her research, so when something happened in the story I would get taken out of the narrative because I knew what real life event and which real people that actually happened to - but that's more of an unfortunate coincidence then a problem with the writing.

I might look out for other books by this author because the writing itself is great and I'd assume other books by her might not have the problem this one had - but I wouldn't recommend this book in particular of hers.
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Jon "the British cowboy" Woodfield

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« Reply #111 on: March 22, 2020, 09:03:18 PM »

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A-Gentleman-in-Moscow-800x321" border="0


I finally made it to the end of "A Gentleman in Moscow".

It tells the story of a Russian Count who gets put under house arrest, living his life in a grand hotel opposite the Kremlin. The story spans 40+ years as we follow Count Rostov's life in The Metropole.

The book is very good at making you feel part of Russia. I guess you would describe it as historical drama. If you have even a passing interest in the Soviet Union then this is going to fascinate you. It's really well written, at times a little too convoluted for my tastes. The main character is so well developed and likeable - there wasn't a lot of character development outside of that though. The backdrop of Russia, the Metropol Hotel and the individual restuarants and bars and almost characters themselves, they are so well fleshed out.

At it's worst, the book is plodding, lacking in any real drama, short on character development and too full of big words.

At it's best you get a truly interesting piece of historical fiction that fleshes out a world that I could describe in depth and I feel sad that I am no longer reading about.

It's a mixed bag, certainly not the critical acclaim from me that it has received almost everywhere else but interesting none the less.

6/10


I am parking The Poisonwood Bible for now and book 3 of the year, after all the reccs on here, is Shadow of the Wind (already whizzed through 130 pages this weekend).
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Jon MW
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« Reply #112 on: April 09, 2020, 11:16:04 PM »

Just finished another volume in a series so I might concentrate more on the gist of the series than this specific book

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch



This is the 8th Novel in the Rivers of London series (there are also novellas and graphic novels but they don't contain any story information that you need to keep track of, i.e. you can just read the novels and you won't get left behind on anything they reference).

It follows Peter Grant who is a policeman who witnesses some supernatural stuff, finds out the Met (and pretty much everybody) already knows that magic and the like exist but it's a bit embarassing so they try not to mention it.

This leads on to his permanent transfer to the unit of the Met police that deals with all the supernatural stuff where he learns how to do magic as well as investigate it, and the story leads from there.

There's a pretty big over arching plot to the first 7 novels but each one is a self contained book by itself. That story arc seems to be pretty much finished by this novel but the world exists now so the future of the series might be a series of stand alone stories or the author might start to create another over arching plot ... who knows.

The writing is very good, there's nothing too fancy about the plotting it's all very solid, the characters are pretty well developed and not surprisingly the more characters recur the stronger their development becomes.

It's a series which has developed a reputation for a very thorough grounding in reality - useful when you're writing about the supernatural and magic.

Every location is thoroughly scouted, every element of police procedure seems realistic and now that it has developed that reputation the author spends a lot of time checking details before committing even quite minor things to paper. Some bloopers slip through, but even the mistakes seem like they 'could' be real.

If you like police procedurals you should like it, if you like detetective stories in general you should like it, if you like magic based fantasy you're what they imagined the core demographic was going to be to start with.

All in all - highly recommended (the whole series)

This is the first book

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Jon "the British cowboy" Woodfield

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« Reply #113 on: April 27, 2020, 02:10:12 PM »

The lockdown has given me too a chance to take a look at my To Read shelf. Timebends - A Life is the 1987 autobiography of Arthur Miller, famously a well regarded American playwright (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible) but probably more known for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. He wrote the screenplay of one of her last, and arguably her best, films - The Misfits.

The son of a Polish Jew, he is a prime example of fulfilling uncapped goals in the land of opportunity that the USA has always meant to have represented. Born in the 1910s, he’s witnessed first hand all of the key events of relatively modern American history; the Great Depression, World War II, postwar Europe, McCarthyism, Vietnam and the rest, until his death in 2005.

Even if you have only the vaguest knowledge of, or interest in, American history of the last 100 years, you will be fascinated by the reality (rather than what the American media, or their average voter would have you believe) of the history, along with his personal interpretations & insights, and struck by his impressive wordsmithery. It’s not an easy read, but it’s certainly well worth the effort. Typically, he’s taken an unconventional approach to his autobiography: it’s not written as a strict chronology, as he allows himself to digress on themes and people, but always returning to the underlying timeline.

Perhaps I’m biased in my appreciation of this book, since I have always been a bit of a film nut, but there’s plenty of story-telling and social commentary in it to command a much wider appeal.
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« Reply #114 on: May 04, 2020, 05:52:39 PM »

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Finished The Shadow of the Wind last night. Thank you for the recommendations on here, I loved it.

Whizzed through the first 100 pages and the last 100 pages - took a while over the middle. It's a pretty complex thriller that lost me a few times in places but really pulls everything together in a way that was really satisfying.

The setting makes the book, it is so evocative and pulls you into the time period. It's pretty loose with genre - you get big doses of romance, humour, horror etc. That is usually a good thing but it definitely left me a little bored in places as the story meanders and gets a bit convoluted. The writing is just amazing though. I will definitely need to read it again in the future knowing how the story pans out - I suspect I will appreciate it more.

Going to do the rest of the series next.

8/10
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Jon MW
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« Reply #115 on: May 07, 2020, 07:40:54 PM »

I raided Science Wife's part of the library to come up with a contemporary appropriate read.

The End of Epidemics by Jonathan Quick and Bronwyn Fryer

"AIDS. Ebola. Bird flu. SARS. These and other epidemics have wiped out millions of lives and cost the global economy billions of dollars.
Experts predict that the next big epidemic is just around the corner. But are we prepared for it? And could we actually prevent it?"

This was published in 2018 and covers the modern history of pandemics and the theory behind how to prevent them.

It's well written and makes everything easy to understand. It doesn't cover some of the situations which we now realise are important like a worldwide shortage of PPE but it is pretty interesting to see the echos of past pandemics around us in the current one.

Worth a read but their is another pandemic book for me to read which my wife says is better. I shall get on to that.

Overall 8/10 now - maybe 6/10 when you're not in the middle of a pandemic. Interesting to read but written in quite a dry manner

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Jon "the British cowboy" Woodfield

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« Reply #116 on: June 05, 2020, 08:34:15 AM »


This is a fantastic piece of writing, with a great intro from Marina:

https://twitter.com/marinahyde/status/1268750361172549633?s=21

The sort of thing that might inspire a change of direction for a high profile blondeite, who doesn’t read fiction, although I understand he’s still incredibly busy atm.

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« Reply #117 on: June 06, 2020, 03:19:01 PM »

Continuing in Science Wife's part of the library, another book about epidemics is:

Spillover by David Quammen

This book much more focuses on epidemics rather than pandemics; but a pandemic is only an epidemic that gets spread to another country so basically the same thing.

I think this is a much better book than 'The End of Epidemics'; it's written much more in the style of telling you a series of stories (a story for each epidemic it covers) but while doing so it probably covers more factual information than the other book.

If you were usually interested in reading general non-fiction I'd imagine there's a good chance you'd enjoy this book - it definitely doesn't need the addition of current relevance to make it a worthwhile read.

A solid 8/10 - packed full of information but still managing to be really very readable

EDIT: also after reading about the first SARS pandemic in 2002-2003 I can really understand a lot more why the asian countries are so big on masks and have all systems ready to go for combatting 'the next one' Shocked

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« Last Edit: June 06, 2020, 03:21:06 PM by Jon MW » Logged

Jon "the British cowboy" Woodfield

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« Reply #118 on: June 08, 2020, 01:20:23 PM »

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Finished The Shadow of the Wind last night. Thank you for the recommendations on here, I loved it.

Whizzed through the first 100 pages and the last 100 pages - took a while over the middle. It's a pretty complex thriller that lost me a few times in places but really pulls everything together in a way that was really satisfying.

The setting makes the book, it is so evocative and pulls you into the time period. It's pretty loose with genre - you get big doses of romance, humour, horror etc. That is usually a good thing but it definitely left me a little bored in places as the story meanders and gets a bit convoluted. The writing is just amazing though. I will definitely need to read it again in the future knowing how the story pans out - I suspect I will appreciate it more.

Going to do the rest of the series next.

8/10

So pleased that you are going to read the rest of the series, fwiw it gets better and better and saves the best till last.
« Last Edit: June 08, 2020, 01:22:08 PM by Supernova » Logged

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« Reply #119 on: July 17, 2020, 03:54:50 PM »

I read this is one sitting.

I couldn't put it down.




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