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vodkafan

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Everything posted by vodkafan

  1. One of the best time travel books ever written is Up The Line by Robert Silverberg.
  2. Ah good answer! I think I must put Folk on my list then..
  3. If I Stay 1/5 Gayle Foreman A YA book I picked up from the daughter's bookshelf. I skim-read this, because the flashback parts were too sickly and twee for me to stomach to be honest, and I just concentrated on the parts where she was a disembodied spirit stuck in the hospital near her body. The ending was what I expected. I give the author credit for staying away from any religious content though.
  4. Normal People 2/5 Sally Rooney I was conflicted reading this one , and even now a month later I find it hard to know how to explain my feelings about it. I guess the most honest thing to say is it left me uneasy and unsatisfied. And yet, there are some things about the book I like, so I don't want to trash it completely. On the plus side, the early awkward teenage interactions of Connell and Marianne are quite charming and believable, I believe we could all easily put ourselves into their shoes. The flip that happens to Connell when they move away to university is the most interesting. We see that Connell is actually just as much "not normal" as Marianne, in fact he may be the weaker of the two. He was just able to disguise it in his familiar home surroundings. That kept me reading. The reasons for Marianne's treatment by her family wasn't really explained, so although that is sort of dangled as a reason for why she is like she is it is a bit clunky and left it up in the air for me. Maybe the author wanted it that way, because in real life it is hard to untangle and unpack a person so easily; so I give Sally Rooney that one. Although there is a sort of resolution for them both, I was unhappy for Marianne even at the end of the book.
  5. Wow Hayley you have got some interesting books under your belt this year, I want to read most of them! I have a question about Folk , would you say the style is similar to Angela Carter?
  6. It's been a long time since I did a review. I will do a couple tomorrow!
  7. vodkafan

    Hi!

    It's really very odd to be in the position that GRRM is in... people are going to moan whatever he writes...if he writes anything that is much different to what has now been on the TV show some are going to say "what???" and yet at least one of my friends who is a big fan of the books said that he didn't see any hand of GRRM in the last season, it didn't jive with where he thought the books would go... Martin is like a victim of his own success. But if he doesn't ever write the last two books, what can they do to him anyway? presumably they can sue him for any advance he has received, but he is an old man, what does he care?
  8. I did write for a while, It's been paused for a good bit though, I intend to get back to it..
  9. What kind of books do you like to read? Who are your favourite authors?
  10. Hayley, you bring up a good point about the editor's choice of stories if it is a pick and mix of different authors. It is worth mentioning that in passing when writing a review, I will try to remember that. I do like it when the editor writes a short note on each story and his/her mental connection to it (or the author)- that's always interesting. I think it is permissible to write the review about the whole collection as it is, because after all another person who picks up that print edition will get exactly the same mixture. But as Madeleine observed, you could give more mention to the short stories that jumped out at you . On the other hand, nothing wrong either with writing a separate review on a short story that really floated your boat ! I have never done that yet but I would.
  11. Hi Quinn, I remember you too. Glad that you are on the mend, hopefully your reading ability will improve and help make new neural connections along the way? Anyway glad you are still with us, welcome back
  12. vodkafan

    Hi!

    Welcome Eli, ever read any Jack Vance? He is one of GRRM's influences.
  13. Welcome! Why do you call yourself Loser, do you tend to misplace a lot of your books?
  14. Hi Angury, I put a comment on your blog. So sad about the old lady. I was a bit surprised that you were able to come to that understanding about her medication, but I guess you can't force a patient to take treatment they don't want. Paedophilia? You don't shy away from difficult subjects, do you?
  15. Oh yeah...it's a doorstop. About 800 pages. The author has made up several fictional families and it follows them through the generations (not every generation, sometimes it skips a couple of hundred years) but London itself is the real character . And it has some maps! I have already found out so much I didn't know. It is so exciting to a London geek! (In a way that an ordinary novel cannot be). For instance The Strand and Oxford Street are the two original ancient thoroughfares into the western wall of the old City, (passing through Ludgate and Newgate respectively). I didn't appreciate just how ancient they are and how wonderful it is that they still follow their original routes, unlike some other European cities that have been periodically replanned and rebuilt on more logical lines, so that evidence of their history is destroyed for ever.
  16. Three Things About Joanna Cannon sounds great! Also Our House sounds interesting.
  17. I think I must read The Darkness now after reading your review Brian and also Madeleine's reply. I didn't look at the spoiler either.
  18. Muggle not, I admire you for using the library and waiting in line for your turn to get particular titles! It reminds me of my parents, my little brother and I going to the library when I was a kid. The delayed gratification of having to wait all adds to making a book more enjoyable! Unless a book you expected to be great was terrible of course...
  19. I tried to go back to Oryx And Crake but the story is a tad depressing at the moment. Instead I am 150 pages into London The Novel by Edward Rutherford. My eldest son and his girlfriend found this for me in a charity shop. It is amazing! Right up my street.
  20. Truth Or Dare 2/5 Celia Rees What can I say about this book? Not to denigrate YA books at all (some are excellent) this one fizzled out for me quite quickly and it took an effort to finish it. The central message was that we should be more understanding and nicer to autistic people (and yes of course we should) It spent too much time talking at me and explaining and got a bit preachy. If I had read it when I was twelve I probably would have thought it was fantastic.
  21. Yes and the odd thing is that the last 3 books- Holes, Hot Milk and Her Fearful Symmetry all came from the same small shelf in the same charity shop, bought singly on different days....
  22. Her Fearful Symmetry 4/5 Audrey Niffeneger If I had read this first before Hot Milk I might have given it 5/5 , but although it was a very good book the writing itself didn't entrance me in the way that the other book's did, so I had to mark it a bit less. The plot was most interesting, I thought it was going to be about relationships, (which it was) but then it added a ghost story, (which reminded me at first a lot of The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry) and then added something else again. A satisfying read.
  23. Hot Milk 5/5 Deborah Levy This was an impulse purchase from a charity shop. The cover photograph was just a very far away shot of a girl on a beach and it looked like nothing I would be interested in. But I bought it because the blurb on the back gave absolutely no clue as to what it was about: which is surely the opposite way a blurb is supposed to work, right? But I was hooked from the first couple of sentences. The writing is amazing. Sofia has put her life on hold for years to look after her mother and her mysterious medical problems. Her mother has sold the London flat they live in - Sofia's inheritance - in order to fund a trip to Spain to become a patient of the clinic run by the equally mysterious Dr Gomez and his beautiful daughter. Dr Gomez's methods are unorthodox to say the least, and he may be a total charlatan . If he fails to cure her mother's condition, they have no further options (and nothing to go back to in any case). I say again, the writing was amazing. The author uses sentences that took my breath away and hit me around the head like an unexpected blow from a baseball bat. ( "My love for my mother is like an axe; it cuts very deep.") There are other things too that made this book a bit different, Every few pages there are short passages written by a different voice in the first person, and it is clear that Sofia is being watched by this person. (Who and why?) Several motifs appear again and again, for instance that of right and left hands doing different things; is it a clue that implies sleight of hand, deceit, or perhaps just of a split personality that does not know itself? Pain and feeling; Sofia actively goes out of her way to get painful stings and enjoys wearing the scars on her skin, whereas her mother insists that she herself cannot feel. Another clue is the way Sofia views other people. She notices physical details of women more; she always describes the way their clothes encircle or touch their bodies. Time also seems a little bit mixed up: there is a part where Sofia has a piece of glass in her skin but doesn't know how it has got there. The accident where the piece of glass gets embedded doesn't happen until a couple of chapters later. Does this mean that her whole narrative is somehow not objectively real? The ending is left a little bit open, but you feel that Sofia has resolved her dilemmas. As my first 5/5 book of this year (and I seem to be hard to please this year) I would say that I give most of the points for the quality of the writing and the way the words and sentences poke my emotions, surprise me with a jolt . I will look for some more books by this author.
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