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Lukeozade100

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About Lukeozade100

  • Birthday 02/23/1990

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  1. It's been a while since I wrote a review here or anywhere but i'll start with the blurb from Amazon; 'Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly.' So this book is something i've often looked at in book shops but never bought, mainly because Iain Banks also writes sci-fi as Iain M Banks and i've read one of those books and it was alright but not really my sought of thing and also because frankly i've always seen other books that i'd prefer. But I was in a small village that had a very small bookshop and I wanted something to read on my journey home and this was the only thing in there not about the village or one of those paperbacks you see in bins that always have the overly elaborate front covers and cost two quid (basically the books my mom reads). So I settled down to read this not really having any idea what to expect other than that it was meant to be pretty dark. And that might be an understatement. It's not dark to the point it's egregious, it is in fact incredibly well written, but I found some parts hard to read (mainly there's a lot of burning dogs and I got a puppy in Easter and I think it's made me overly sensitive to that) and I don't really get uncomfortable ever so that was a real surprise. It's also a very interesting exercise as almost a coming of age style book but with someone who is clearly not a good person, or at least someone who doesn't have the moral boundarys that are required to not be put in prison. It is definitely a page turner and the ending was very clever, but it is a dark dark book and so I hesitate to recommend it to anyone. It won't scare you, it's not like that, but it will make you uncomfortable, and if it doesn't I really expect you to have a wasp factory of your own.
  2. I wish he thinks, spoken words could be captured in a locket. 'My pronounce,' Miss Aibagawa asks, 'is not very good?' 'No no no: you are perfect in every way. Your pronounce is perfect.' The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
  3. Happy Birthday Lukeozade! :balloons: Have a good day :D

  4. I don't know if my tuppence of thought counts here so much because I do love some poetry, really, some of it is amazing, it's just that so very very little of it is. At least in my view. I know how to read poetry, I know how to write it, I know published poets (albeit ones who have never been paid for this honour), I know someone who reads poetry as if it might dissapear tommorow, and I know that in my eyes 9/10 poems I read will elicit no emotional response from me, not even a negative one. It almost seems to me that the saying 'Everyone has a novel in them' goes for poetry, everyone probably does have a poem inside them, but unlike a novel even the people who are considered our greatest poets only ever tend to have one poem that i'll like. I have only ever bought two poetry books in my adult life. One called Crush by Richard Siken is wonderful, I would say for anyone who loves to read but has never got poetry, this might be your way in, at the very least it was my way in. And the other is Called A Martian Sends A Postcard home by a poet whos name escapes me, but was apparently very good, and the first poem is fairly good, and the rest, well what did I say... Everyone has ONE poem in them...
  5. I second The English Patient, and I raise you The Constant Gardener, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney version), LOTR Trilogy & One Flew over The Cuckoos Nest. Though all but LOTR I saw the movie first so that might bias my view somewhat.
  6. Thought i'd add a couple more on here; Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivcha Galken. This is some serious waste of tree right here, the premise is so good, a man sees his wife and instantly 'knows' that's not my wife, it's a doppelganger, there's potential for a wonderful book there in almost any genre you can think of, but the execution is really really terrible. & The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo I went travelling round Europe this summer and took this book thinking it might be fun to read whilst I was in Paris, it was not, it ends well but man did that guy like writing about architecture, and when you've been there looking at the thing he's talking about you don't need 4 or 5 pages of description that is never poetic and more something a civil engineer who feels theres a bit of a poet in him might write. Though as an adult the ending here probably is better than the Disney one, if a lot less feelgood.
  7. If you go into a bookshop, pull this off the shelf, and see the front cover, orange shadows about to kiss, you might instantly feel this is a quick read, a nice book but not memorable, certainly nothing more than a Saturday night in with a warm drink, the sought of book you happily read a chapter of before going to sleep, but probably no more. But what's that old saying, I think it goes something like 'Never judge a book by it's cover?' Now i'm going to go right out there and say it, this book is truly amazing. It has everything I want in a book like this, wonderfully written characters, wit, beauty, sadness, love. I truly adored it. And so i'm going to give it the honour of me writing the blurb rather than a quick amazon copy and paste job (wish me luck, those people get paid to do that A book spanning twenty years, but only one day at a time? Surely this will be something to match War and Peace in size, but no, we only get One Day a year, and what days they are. The two main characters Emma and Dexter are at university when they meet in 1988 and there lives appear intertwined from then. I'll stop there, I don't want to spoil what is frankly a rollercoaster of generally a feeling of annoyance towards Dexter, but the kind that forces you too keep reading because you want it to go away. But even here I feel I say too much. All I can say is read this, read this and maybe if your still thinking about not reading this, read this. I don't care if you don't like it in the end, you can scream and shout at me all you like for wasting your time, but i'll be happy, cuddled up in bed, in the knowledge that my life is just a little bit sweeter for the enjoyment this book bought me. And if only a few of you feel this way too, then my job here has been done well. Overall 9.5/10 because if this book teaches you anything, it's that life is and never will be perfect. (Though there is one book I would give 10/10 too, maybe one day i'll write you all a review about it...)
  8. I feel I oughto start by saying that I saw the movie first, it's something I tend to try and avoid, and for the reason that I always feel what comes first is better, and a book is so much more of a commitment than a movie, if you already know the plot, the story, the intracacies, the ending. Hell, why bother? But this is one of my favourite movies ever, so as with The English Patient, Captain Corellis Mandolin, Trainspotting and a few other rareraties I sat down to read it knowing what would happen. And i'm sort of dissapointed I did. The English Patient has been the only book i've ever read that I thought worse than the movie till now. I don't know, maybe I have a man crush on Ralph Fiennes, but the pacing comes off wrong here, for all you who have no idea about this novel heres the amazon blurb; There were those who feared that the end of the Cold War would deal a fatal blow to the creativity of many first-rate thriller writers who specialised in this territory. In the case of John le Carr
  9. When I was younger I had dozens of bookmarks scattered about the place handy, but then one day I just gave in, and... folded the corner of the page! And oh, ladies and gentleman, the freedom! to be able to never lose a page when theres nerry a bookmark in site, to be able to close your book in a millisecond. I am afraid I may be addicted to dog-earing books. Though of course, only if they are my own, the care I take with other peoples books (especially after reading this forum!) I would like to think is second to none.
  10. 1- Who was your favourite character and why? I find this a really hard question for this novel, at first I thought I didn't have one, that maybe, though a superb book it was the writing style and the plot that made it so. But with a bit of reflection I think that maybe it's the peripheral characters I enjoyed the most, Luke (not just because he's my namesake:tong:), there daughter, Offreds mom, Nick, it was the fleeting descriptions and there actions that really kept me reading, it really humanised a book that could easily be considered implausible by some and kept me reading just because I wanted to know more. 2- Was there a particular part you enjoyed/disliked more than the rest? I didn't dislike any of it, though I think the most enjoyable part was in a very odd way the parts where Offred was at her lowest, such as when she receives a picture of her child for a fleeting moment. Not enjoyable in a conventional sense, but the writing just conveyed the sort of repressed despair and emptyness better than many novels manage to convey any emotion. 3- Was this the first book you've read in this genre/by this author, has it encouraged you to read more? Though my first Atwood novel, it is far from my first dystopian future novel, I really cannot get enough of those, well at least when they're done well. Anyhow, I think I will definatley have to read more Atwood eventually. 4- Were there any parts/ideas you struggled with? I sometimes found it hard to believe that people would go with it so willingly, I think having no suppresion in my life makes it hard for me to believe people would let it happen as easily as Offreds descriptions of it seemed, but then the way people act in some African countrys to the latest military coup, or how religion leads some Muslim women to dress, or to a much greater extent the rise of Naziism and how very much whilst it was happening, people just ignored what was going on means that it really isn't impplausible enough for me to stop reading, or even for it to detract from the reading experience. In all honesty by the end it was probably more thought provoking than anything else. 5- Overall, was reading the book an enjoyable experience? Yes, yes it was.
  11. Happy birthday!! :)

  12. Happy Birthday Luke! :D

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