Milo MInderbinder

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.

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.

You are right Bree. I shouldn't encourage suppression of emotion. My apologies to everybody.

I love my books and my writers Bree but I have never felt strongly enough to loathe a book. that was my point.

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.

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.

I loved reading Catcher. One of the most original novels I have ever read.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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!

Thanks Aruki. I shall have a look at those. Thanks for posting them.

I can't think of any for teens, but for adults I can recommend 'Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson'. Its a great biography about the first black world heavyweight boxing champion. From his slave heritage through his rise to success. Johnson fought racism from street level to government. An inspiring read.

Thanks for posting Chalie. I have never seen that website before. Looks like a good guide. Much appreciated.

Hi Aruki The main attraction for me is the landscapes he paints with words. I have said it before on here about him but with his vivid descriptive narratives he puts the reader IN the book. I love writers who make every sentence count but McCarthy makes every word count. His stories are mainly set in the Southern states of the U.S. and cover the good the bad and the ugly of human nature. I loved The Road but it was a big departure from his usual themes. At the moment I'm reading CM's Blood Meridian and its one of the most poetic novels I have ever read.

My favorite character is Saul. Ice cold but still waters run deep. I think he's been patient up to now because if Claire Danes was one of my agents I think I would have shot her. Both for insubordination and bad acting.

I'm on my seventh CM novel at the moment but there aren't many left to go at. I love McCarthy's writing and I would appreciate it if anybody could point me in the direction of authors of a similar style and quality. Thanks in advance! M

I haven't read it Bree but thanks for the pointer.

Funnily enough he isn't VF. But he does get mentioned with regard to the various political factions involved with India's independence. I thought he may feature more if I'm honest.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (the prefix of the word Mahatma meaning ‘Great Soul’ came later in life) was, it could be strongly stated, the last great leader of people in the world who never raised a hand in anger, but still managed to debilitate and remove from his country one of the most powerful empires in the history of the planet. Louis Fischer’s biography was first published in the early 1950’s and still reads brilliantly. In a rather exotic career as a foreign correspondent for newspapers such as the New York Times in the first part of the last century he reported on the new communism in Russia, the Spanish civil war, the rise of the Nazis, but out of all of those things and many more he covered it seems the thing that really inspired him was interviewing and becoming friends with a small old man from India. The book is in short very readable chapters. We start from day one of the Mahatma’s life and then Fischer describes how the young lawyer first became active in civil rights for his immigrant countrymen in South Africa and then we are brought back to India and the beginning of Gandhi’s Satyagraha (civil resistance) movement in which by peaceful means he mobilised hundreds of millions of Indians against the illegal occupation of the British Government. Gandhi’s power is the like of I have never read about before. He bridged divides between religions, politics, nations and was sought out for advice by artists, royalty, peasants, and politicians. I could go into more detail but that’s for the future reader to find out for themselves and its hard to include in a review the many interesting aspects covered in the book. Gandhi’s life makes for a great read, most notably because the events in it are so extraordinary but at the same time real. Fischer details the history of India and the occupation of the British, the good and bad of the two most prominent religions of India (Hindu’s and Muslims), and how the infighting of Indian against Indian delayed Independence for their nation as a whole. In the middle of it all was a man who believed in the good of people and had an unyielding faith in humanity and for people to realise the error and horror of oppression and violence towards their fellow human beings. Gandhi’s beliefs are as relevant today as they ever were. I could go on and on but I won’t. What I will say is this is a great biography of a truly great man. For me personally this has been a life changer of a read and has given me a few new designs for my own life and the way I look at the world. This book has altered my head.

Hi Hugg I agree that they must have missed the intent of the book. Another thing that the critics of TMID you mentioned should consider is that at the time of writing the full horror of what was happening to the Jews of Europe wasn't common knowledge. Yes, Jews who had seen the writing on the wall had been fleeing Europe for a decade before the outbreak of WW2 and people in the allied nations were aware of it, but what was known of the Nazi ethnic cleansing machine was from sources in heavily Jewish populated cities like Warsaw, and not in small Norwegian towns like the one featured in this book. I agree with you. It is a great piece of literature.

I have picked up Rutherfords books in shops before and have heard many great reports about them. One thing that has stopped me reading one is that with the huge amount of countries and cultures he covers, is he actually a reliable authority on all of the places and historical events he writes about? Or is it the well written fictional aspect rather than the correct reporting of events that readers enjoy? Or does he do both brilliantly? As a fan of all things Gotham I would be keen to read the New York book.