vodkafan
-
Posts
6,056 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Books
Posts posted by vodkafan
-
-
I already have The Odd Women on my wishlist after your last review so i guess i'll be adding this one as well
Lol that's the way Kidsmum you must just read the books I pick out for you
-
On the strength if your review I've just downloaded The Unclassed!
You won't regret it Alexi! I can't wait to read what you think of it.
-
The Unclassed 5/5
George Gissing
This is the second George Gissing book I have read and like the first I also awarded this one top marks. The characters were just so good and the dialogue and plot both strong. I don't think there is a very strong moral to be drawn from the book (unless it is that the strongest will survive) it seems to be more of a slice of life.
Beware review contains plot spoilers!
The story starts with young fiery Ida Starr, who is excluded from her school for wounding Harriet Smales, who called Ida's mother a prostitute. This is actually the truth, although Ida has been kept innocent of what her mother does to feed them both; she knows only that her mother is loving and good. Ida's mother knows that she is dying from a combination of malnutrition and weak health; she writes a letter to appeal to her stern father Abraham Woodstock for forgiveness and to look after Ida when she is gone. This Woodstock tries to do, but Ida is scared of the old man and young as she is, refuses his help.
We also see into the houses of two other girls the same age : Harriet Smales, who is growing into a nasty piece of work but has a kindly half Italian cousin Julian. The other girl is Maud Enderby, Ida's friend, who has been abandoned in strange circumstances by her parents and is being raised by her religious aunt who sees sin in any kind of enjoyment.
Years pass. We first see Julian again, who is trying to make his way in the world. Julian makes a friend , Waymark , who wants to be a writer and a poet but is working at a miserable private school. Maud Enderby comes to the school to teach as a governess and she is the cause of an incident where Waymark loses his temper with the son of the headmaster and quits. That night he meets Ida Starr in the street and is captivated by her nobility in the face of her grinding poverty, which fascinates him from a poet's point of view. They start a strange friendship with Ida dictating the terms, but Waymark also pursues a more conventional courtship with Maud Enderby, who is now of a religious bent herself and is hard work. One cannot really blame Waymark; he sees something good in both women and is not after anything from either.
Julian is tricked into marrying his truly awful cousin Harriet and is soon very unhappy.
Waymark goes to work as a rent collector for old Abraham Woodstock, Ida's grandfather. Waymark is the link holding everything together, although the three women are unaware of each other. At this point the stage is set and everything is in place for the ordure to really hit the fan. Oh man I hate Harriet so much.... and not everyone survives till the end.
On the strength of this book and The Odd Women I just downloaded all the George Gissing I could find on Amazon.
-
Lol it would be difficult for my books to be any cheaper....off Amazon I usually hunt out the second hand ones which are 1p......in my usual charity shops my paperbacks I usually get for 20p or at most 50p if its something I really want.
-
A New Zealand accent is pretty cool...
Coming back to the topic of London Fiction I just finished The Unclassed by George Gissing....it was great and the whole story set in London. -
I read an article that said a huge number of dialects and even languages are disappearing at a very fast rate.
-
I do feel sorry deb has gone from the forum.....we conversed quite a bit by PM and talked about 19th century novels. But she sent me a PM to say goodbye about a month ago and said she enjoyed it on here but wanted to live internet free.
-
Pleasure ... can I persuade you to start
OK where should I start at ? Any must read recommendations? I must say although I did enjoy that poem I don't usually do poetry....would prefer a story.
-
http://www.skinnygossip.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1542
http://celebsweightgain.com/kaley-cuoco-weight-gain/
http://www.shape.com/celebrities/saddle-kaley-cuoco
http://celebweightgain.com/kaley-cuoco-weight-gain/
Some of the sources and a quote from one of them. Just to show that I didn't invent the whole thing. Personally I don't care how big anyone is as long as they are healthy and happy. But I resent the implication that I made it up. Emphasis in bold is mine.
"her body started to change. Around 2010, when CBS started airing the fourth season of Big Bang Theory, the media started buzzing about Kaley Cuoco weight gain.
For most of her admirers, who were used to see Kaley’s slim figure in such movies as Debating Robert Lee, Crimes of Fashion, Cougar Club, Killer Movie and The Penthouse, the changes in her body come as a shock. However, for the ones who have followed her professional career more closely, Kaley Cuoco weight gain is not a surprise. The young actress has publicly admitted that she has always had problems watching her weight. While giving an interview in early 2010s Cuoco revealed that she has recently gained additional pounds. " -
I agree with your post.
Fact is, there "is" no U.S. media blitz of kaley and a weight gain. If you notice there was no credible source listed for the info. Obviously, it was just several posts "bashing" the U.S.
Also, it is absurd to think that gaining weight is healthy, only in very rare circumstances would that be the case.
btw, my GD met Kaley when GD was working on a movie starring Kaley and the late Dennis Farino. GD said that Kaley was a very nice person.
I was the one who originally brought up the weight gain thing. I was not trying to bash the US. At the time I wrote the post there was a multitude of internet articles (I read at least four) about Kaley's weight gain all originating from the US. And one of an interview of her saying that she had got back to fitness through spinning classes. That's why I remarked on it and wrote the post. I did not make anything up.
If you will notice I was totally on Kaley's side in all my posts. I am sure she is a vey nice person. Who has said she isn't?
-
Hi Angury all those books you mentioned sound interesting. The only book I have read that comes close was Another Day In The Frontal Lobe by Katrina S. Firlik. She is a neurosurgeon.
-
Never read any Dahl but that's a great poem Thanks CG.
-
Hi Virginia, well we grew up hearing the different dialects, and as Britain is not that big and people travel so you get to hear them quite a lot so we can quite easily identify roughly where someone is from ....and as for the local dialect of where one lives your ear gets very attuned to it so you can easily tell if someone is from only a few miles away....I am sure South Carolina has dialects too and you could probably tell someone from one end of the state apart from someone at the other end?
-
Hmm.. a murderous grudge? Was there more to it than that?
I've bought the first McCaffrey dragon book, as I don't mind a bit of fantasy, and The Ship Who Sang is on the wish list. A reviewer described Restoree as 'chick lit in space' which wouldn't be my thing. Is that fair?
The Blue World might be worth a look, I've certainly heard the author mentioned a lot.
The Margarets also looks intriguing.. but why so many feminist recommendations for me? Do I give off feminist vibes or something? hehe
Well I just bought those up because those authors had aleady been mentioned and they jogged my memory....to be honest it's a very long time since I read Restoree but the premise it is based on (why she is a restoree and what it means-I don't want to give it away) really caught my imagination when I was a kid. It's not anymore chick-litty than say, Hunger Games.
to the Jack Vance, I would add To Live Forever (aka Clarges)
-
Hi Michelle- here would be my choices for you.
Anne McCaffrey: Restoree and The Ship Who Sang. Both great books and very much female SF, quite radical back in the 60s. No fantasy elements.
Jack Vance : The Blue World Vance's best stand alone novel IMO (Poppyshake has read this one)
Sherri S Tepper : The Margarets again very feminist SF. Multiple versions of Margaret.
-
Seen a few last few days:
Apocalypto (again)
Gravity (again)
Catching Fire. I felt this last dragged on interminably and was without any freshness or vitality. Jennifer Lawrence just looked miserable and moody the whole time and Peter was even more pointedly useless than he appeared in the first film, he had to be saved loads of times and started to look quite ineffectual when compared to the physically taller and tough girls like Katniss and Joanna.
-
Ah thanks. I suppose that must also sometimes happen here but I haven't ever heard of one. What usually happens here is that a firm (company) who specialises in house clearances will be contracted to clear the whole place out with removal vans and that firm will typically either own an auction saleroom or have links to one and the stuff will be sorted into lots and sold at auction.
Of course this is only after relatives have been through the posessions beforehand or items handed down in a will have been dealt with.
I guess it makes thngs a little easier for a grieving family to have the stuff gone in one go.
-
I have read a couple of Henry James books, but haven't come across this one; it sounds interesting, I will need to look out for it
Hi Ooshie I think it was free on kindle; I don't know if it is in print anywhere.
-
Hi Kate I also look forward to reading your reviews. What is an estate sale?
-
What a shame it wasn't more interesting. When I think of the flak he probably received for the entire thing, I'd wish the book could have proved to be more readable.
I think he probably did more than OK out of it. I tried hard to like the guy but there was something intangible I could not pin down about him that I could not take to. For one thing he used a lot of bad language even before he got into the army and that didn't impress me. Yes I know soldiers swear a lot but for someone who prides themself as a writer it doesn't take much to edit f words out. After all, Robert Leckie went all through Guadalcanal and he didn't swear once in his written account.
Also, like a lot of bloggers who feel their words are right on the pulse, in fact his observations were rather banal. Fair enough , he was there and I was not. But there seemed to be no insights to be gained , no lessons learned or any useful purpose to any of them being there. It was just we did this , then we did that. Nowhere near as interesting as Chickenhawk or Platoon Leader (Vietnam memoirs).
-
Just back from seeing Divergent. Not sure what I think yet. One person I went with liked it a lot, one just liked it.
Reviews and audience reaction is a bit mixed, I fear
-
Wow I started on another George Gissing book- The Unclassed- and we are straight into some abject poverty and human misery in Victorian London with some wonderful characters. It's so good!
-
Habits Of The House (Book 1 of the Love and Inheritance trilogy ) 3/5
Fay Weldon
It is probably well known that Fay Weldon wrote the very first episode of Upstairs Downstairs all those years ago so I surmised that I was onto a winner when I discovered this series.
In this first book we are introduced to the rather financially incompetent Earl of Dilberne , his sharp wife Countess Isobel and their grown children, the playboy son Arthur and the feminist Rosina. Also we meet the servants, most notably in this story Grace the Lady's Maid.
Already having run up huge debts trying to keep up with his friend the Prince of Wales, the Earl faces complete financial ruin when the Boer War devalues his investments in Africa.
As this type of humiliation is unthinkable, the only solution is for the son to be sacrificed on the altar of marriage and marry someone with a lot of money to save the family honour. The most likely candidate is an American girl with an unfortunate past...but Arthur has some secrets of his own.
I enjoyed this book, it was an easy read and Weldon weaved a good story around the characters.
However, the reviews of the following two books are so consistently bad- and the price still so high (the whole series was written in 2013) that I have decided I am not going to read the follow ups as I have plenty of genuine 19th century authors to get through.
-
My War Killing Time In Iraq 1/5
Colby Buzzell
I only picked this book up to make up a batch of 5 in a charity shop because they were offering 5 for £1.50. The author did a year in Iraq in the infantry and became slightly famous for writing an unofficial blog from the soldier's point of view, which later attracted the attention of the High Command, as it was often in opposition to the official sanitized news reports.
I can't say that I enjoyed reading it that much though, it was mostly boring.
Gay Marriage legal today in England
in General Chat
Posted
I was going to post this in the "what's up in March" thread but thought it was important enough to have it's own thread....the first proper gay marriages are legal today in England and Wales. I don't have any close gay friends so don't know anybody who is tying the knot or has plans to....it will be interesting to see how many couples get hitched seeing as tthe marriage rates in general are falling.
Up until only a few years ago I was completely against the idea of gay marriage but have now completely reversed my opinion. One of the reasons is my own marriage experiences....I have been married twice (to women) and tried really hard both times but they still failed. So I think marriage is hard. So if two people want to commit and get married then I say good luck to them and nobody should have the right to say they cannot.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26793127