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Milo MInderbinder

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About Milo MInderbinder

  • Birthday 11/07/1973

Profile Information

  • Reading now?
    Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
  • Gender
    Not Telling
  • Location:
    Leeds, England
  • Interests
    Big fan of American writers from the last century, horseracing, 60's soul music and rock n' roll in general, walking (the country kind, not the going for a newspaper kind)

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  1. Happy Birthday! Have a great day. X

  2. Good news for you Janet. I have just emailed one of your admin lot with a request to delete my forum membership and profile. I think when people don't know each other personally a lot can get lost in translation with regard to forum posts. And to be quite honest I don't need the hassle of trying to explain myself to a stranger.
  3. Hang on. I wasn't being patronising. You have totally misunderstood the post. I was saying that I thought the term "loathe" was a bit heavy to be used in describing feelings towards a book. That was all.
  4. You are right Bree. I shouldn't encourage suppression of emotion. My apologies to everybody.
  5. I love my books and my writers Bree but I have never felt strongly enough to loathe a book. that was my point.
  6. The most switched-on thing I have read in this thread is when somebody compared CITR to Albert Camus 'The Outsider'. Those who think this book is just about teenage angst have totally missed the bus. The teenage angst and Holden Caulfield are only a vehicle for Salinger to use to put across his existentialist view on the world. Which I think he does very well. Its clear this book has its fans and it knockers which is fine but I think we need some perspective here. I have liked or disliked many books but I have never "loathed" a book or wanted to "slap" a character in a book. Novels are in the final analysis works of fiction. Try not to take them so seriously.
  7. Hi MB. I can't think of any that are currently banned. Off topic: Any chance of a short review of the Adams book (mentioned in your profile) when you have finished it? I always wondered if he was a good writer.
  8. I loved reading Catcher. One of the most original novels I have ever read.
  9. Hi Tim Re: Character connection. I think out of all the McCarthy stuff I have read I have only connected with a couple of his characters. Mainly the two boys in his 'Border' trilogy books and Lester Ballard in 'Child of God'. I find his novels are more about human morality as a whole than seperate individuals.
  10. By Cormac McCarthy. "You can find meaness in in the least of creatures, but when god made man the devil was at his elbow." This book is a Western. But it isn’t. To me what the term Western has come to mean is the loveable, corny, and historically revisionist films that were big in Hollywood in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In most of which the leading man (usually replete in a white shirt and brand new Stetson) will at some point walk into a saloon, the saloon will fall silent/the piano player will stop, the leading man will fix a steely glare and address a blackly clad gunslinger at the end of the bar with a line like “I’ve come for you Jed McGrew” or some such nonsense, and then there will be a fist fight between the two (usually leading to the collapse of a card table), and then the leading man shoots the gunslinger and gets the girl and they sojourn to the nearest sunset, The End. None of the aforementioned happens in Blood Meridian. Although I have since reading the book read on the internet that there is a luke-warm film project to get BM to the big screen. The film could only ever be a very loose adaptation of the novel because of the human destruction depicted in the book. The story is set in the Texan and Mexican border country of the 1840’s and tells the tale of a group of mercenaries who set out to earn some money by delivering to the authorities the scalps cut from some of the members of the native American tribes in that area. The story starts in Tennessee where our central character (referred only to in the book as ‘Kid’) is recruited into the hunting party of cutthroats. The book is typical of McCarthy’s style. He depicts the deserts, skies, mud, and mountains of the south-west states of the U.S so vividly that you can almost hear and not just feel the heat. The story is littered with exchanges between the transitory gang and the strange and colourful characters and situations they find themselves in. This is probably the most violent book I have ever read. Its set in a place which wasn’t just lawless, but a place where evolution and reason have no hold over anything. The savagery in the book is from both the native Americans and the white race but mainly from the whites who saw the prehistoric aboriginals as nothing more than animals. I often spot similarities between the art of Bob Dylan and Cormac McCarthy. Each of them offer up imagery in either lyrics or prose in which they trust the reader or listener to take what they have offered up and lock into it. What McCarthy gives you in his books is a panorama of a bygone America and its people which will not be found on the History Channel. Blood Meridian is heaven and hell, man and woman, wilderness and human, sky and earth, and good and evil. One of my favorite Dylan lyrics is "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face". I'm sure Bob wouldn't mind if I stole and amended the line but with McCarthy: The ghosts of America howl from every line of his page. His is an original and ageless poetic style for those who jump head first into it. PS: Re: Lyric. Sorry Bob.
  11. Love the theatre. Apart from books I still rate it as the best value for money entertainment out there. I'm lucky living in Leeds as we have The Grand, The West Yorkshire Playhouse, and the Carraigeworks Theatre. We also have the yearly Shakespeare Festival at Kirkstall where they put on two plays over the period of a fortnight in the ruins of the old abbey. The last thing I saw was Waiting for Godot at the WY Playhouse. Beckett at his best.
  12. Hello and good luck with the search Phil, I suspect there is a glut of badly written books coming out with this being the anniversary year. Can't help you with any recommendations, but I have heard of t-shirts that can be bought from Harland & Wolff. On the front it says 'Harland & Wolff, Makers of the Titanic' and on the back it says 'She was OK When She Left Us'.
  13. The first episode of this blew me away. Very original twists. I watched the second episode and I think I'll wait for a few more episodes to see if it has legs or not. Enjoying it so far though.
  14. A very kind relative took a chance and bought me a book called 'Worst Case' by a writer called James Patterson a couple of years ago. Easily the most formulaic rubbish I have ever read in a book. Don't get me wrong, I love a good page-turner of a thriller, especilly the Lee Childs books, but this was awful. My first and last read of a James Patterson novel.
  15. Hi Sue/Mrs. Freeman I hope the thing with BT works out for you. It seems no matter how you try and protect your privacy some shyster company always manages to get hold of your details. I suppose its the price we pay for living in a digital world. Sometimes technology sucks!
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