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Your Book Activity - November 2019


Onion Budgie

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On 13/11/2019 at 4:13 AM, bookmonkey said:

 

The Steve Richard's book sounds interesting Willoyd.  I have an interest in political history so I'll have to see if my library has this. 

Reached the halfway point, and can still thoroughly recommend it: the chapter on Margaret Thatcher (surprisingly one of the shortest) I found particularly illuminating, maybe because she's the first prime minister of my adulthood, so am now into the time period I'm most aware of.

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On 13/11/2019 at 8:30 PM, Raven said:

I found The Hobbit to be a little Tolkien-lite, as you might say, when I tried to read it directly after LotR, and I put it down, but I went back to it several years later and didn't find it so bad (indeed, the last half of the book is quite a good read, but you have to get through the Dwarf singing in the first half first!)

 

Those songs were my least favourite part! The second half was very good though.

 

I'm currently reading Happy Fat by Sofie Hagen.

 

 

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I've just finished Notes From an Exhibition by Patrick Gale.  Eh, it was fine, I enjoyed it, but I felt it dragged towards the end, and I wondered why the author chose to end the book in that particular way.  It felt an odd place to leave it, and didn't close the narrative well enough for my liking.  I seem to remember you thinking the same, @Madeleine?

 

Anyway -- now on to a re-read of Dracula by Bram Stoker!  The font is teeny-tiny.  This is going to be squintalicious.

 

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Finished Steve Richards's The Prime Ministers a couple of days ago: fascinating insights, 5/6.  Steadily making progress through the absorbing Lonesome Dove (now up to 550 pages of the 850), but took a day off today to zip through Nicole Mowbray'sSweet Nothing, an account and discussion of cutting out sugar in her diet (something I've done for the past few months and will do for the foreseeable future).  OK, but too much repetition and a few errors and anomalies; 2 /6.

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Finished Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry yesterday -hugely  long but magnificent read 5/6 (don't often give a book a full 6 without a short interim period to see what impact it has).  Also reread a long-term favourite last night: The Harpole Report by JL Carr. Some of the humour is a little bit dated now - it's set in a primary school in the 1970s, and some aspects of education have changed a lot - but the core messsage remains absolutely nailed on. This was my 60th book of the year. Remains 6/6.  Have now started Jenni Murray's History of Britain in 21 Women.

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On 19/11/2019 at 1:18 PM, Onion Budgie said:

I've just finished Notes From an Exhibition by Patrick Gale.  Eh, it was fine, I enjoyed it, but I felt it dragged towards the end, and I wondered why the author chose to end the book in that particular way.  It felt an odd place to leave it, and didn't close the narrative well enough for my liking.  I seem to remember you thinking the same, @Madeleine?

I only managed a couple of chapters of Notes from an Exhibition when I tried it a few years ago, I'm glad I didn't keep reading to the end now!

 

I just started reading Help the Witch by Tom Cox.

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Failed to get very far with Jenni Murray's History of Britain in 21 Women.  Should have realised before but found it to to be rather superficial, and that I wasn't really learning anything much new or getting much out of it. 

Instead, read my first book of short stories for the year: The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whitaker, part of the Persephone range, and picked up in a local charity shop in pristine condition. The author was local to here, so of particular interest.  Not normally a fan of short stories, but needed to read some for a reading challenge being run by my local library. A decent enough read, but can't say they had much impact on my general indifference to this format.  3/6.

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