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Just finished As I Lay Dying - Faulkner’s most accessible and perfectly written novel imo. I found it a striking story about a family who have trouble communicating, a story about community, personal relationships and dealing with grief both inwardly and outwardly. A really beautiful and sad story.
 
Falling Down said:
If you want something exquisitely written and much, much gentler then I can really recommend The Offing. A coming of age novel set around Robin Hoods Bay.

I finished this encyclopedia of littoral, bucolic, and interpersonal clichés this morning. It was very very good.
 
That's interesting, I really didn't get on with the Offing. Just found it irritating from start to finish. I loved the grittiness of his other stuff and wanted more!
 
spidermonkey09 said:
That's interesting, I really didn't get on with the Offing. Just found it irritating from start to finish. I loved the grittiness of his other stuff and wanted more!

I'll bet you didn't like The Offing because there was only 1 death in the whole book and it wasn't described in horrific visceral detail :lol:

I have to say that as someone who doesn't really get poetry (sweeping statement, I know), I did find it pretentious at times.
 
Yeah, Blood Meridian it is not.

I did think it was pretentious, yes. I also thought the female character (whose name is escaping me) was massively overwritten and intensely annoying as a result. I didn't really warm to the protagonist either. But that's the fun of fiction isn't it!
 
Glad you enjoyed it Will, and Spider, yeah that’s the fun of reading. We can’t like everything. The film is out next year with Helena Bonham Carter as Dulcie. Good casting I think.

I’m currently a third of the way through Roger Lewis’s ‘Erotic Vagrancy’, his bio of Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. Very enjoyable, funny and interesting.
 
andy popp said:
I've just finished a book I think a lot of people here might enjoy (indeed, might have read already). In 1950s Togo, a young boy has a nearly deadly encounter with a snake, recovering he reads a book about Greenland and becomes obsessed with travelling there. In 1958, aged 16, he ran away from home and spent the next eight years working his way through Africa and Europe before eventually reaching Greenland in 1964. In Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland Tété-Michel Kpomassie tells the remarkable (true) story of that journey and, in particular, the eighteen months he spent living among the inidigenous Greenlanders, by whom he seems to have been welcomed without question. It is a rich, vivid, and humane portrayal both of the author as a young man and of a culture even then coming under immense pressure (Denmark does not come out of this particularly well). A highly unusual and very worthwhile piece of travel writing. First published in English in 1981, Penguin reissued it last year.

I’m halfway through this at the moment - its a nice book.

The guy was on Radio 6 today at 12:00 til 12:30 (maybe started at 12:05 or something).

I didn’t actually catch it due to changing nappies, but it’s on BBC sounds. The author is 80 now and wants to retire to Greenland.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001v1rq?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
 
I’m also halfway through it right now and really enjoying it, thanks to the recommendation from Andy!
 
In December I got an email out of the blue from the BBC radio producer of the World Book Club who’d been searching on Twitter.

I’d tweeted back in 2020 about this brilliant novel that I’d read. “In the Night of Time” by Antonio Munoz Molina (mentioned a few pages back in this thread). She wanted to know if I’d record a couple of questions for an interview they were doing with him in Madrid in December. It got recorded and my two questions made it in. It’s a good listen regardless of whether you’ve read the novel.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct4xlp?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
 
A few of the books I've read recently:

we are bellingcat Elliott Higgins: fascinating insight into open source investigation and a positive example of someone with good ideas and technical expertise who hasn't decided to do something mercenary with their talent like work for Facebook or cambridge analytica.

a winter's grave Peter May: crime thriller set in a near future dystopian Scotland. Compelling and fun, though not exceptional.

the whalebone theatre Joanne Kerr: highly recommended novel about children growing up between the first and second world wars . I thought it had believable and appealing characters who developed in interesting ways through the course of it. I'd imagine it would be made into a film at some point.

the devotion of suspect x: although I'm only part way through this, I think I'd probably recommend it- Japanese crime thriller with a distinctly interesting edge to it. It's certainly highly enjoyable so far.
 
TobyD said:
we are bellingcat Elliott Higgins: fascinating insight into open source investigation and a positive example of someone with good ideas and technical expertise who hasn't decided to do something mercenary with their talent like work for Facebook or cambridge analytica.

I enjoyed this too, amazing mix of ingenuity and journalistic graft on some of the most significant stories of our time.
 
TobyD said:
the devotion of suspect x: although I'm only part way through this, I think I'd probably recommend it- Japanese crime thriller with a distinctly interesting edge to it. It's certainly highly enjoyable so far.

Having now finished this, I'd definitely highly recommend it. It's an easy read, as it is a straightforward premise with relatively few characters; but it is nevertheless satisfying, and thought provoking in parts.

I was initially annoyed that the cover blurb says it has a 'killer twist ' in the end, but I couldn't have guessed what it would be anyway.

It's by Keigo Higashino if anyone is looking for it.
 
Wellsy said:
Finished Chasm City, great read! Brilliant stuff
Correct! Quite a lot more where that came from.

Absolution Gap, Century Rain and House Of Suns all favs of mine (only AG is in the same universe tho).
 
Amusing scenes at this year's Hugo Awards, at the WorldCon held in China, where it was suddenly announced that a few highly voted for works were "not elegible", the most surprising maybe this years Nebula-winning "Babel" by Kuang. Now, I did not particularly care for Babel, even if it should tick all my boxes, but a lot of people did. I assumed it was a shoe-in for this year's Hugo award for best novel.

Canadian writer Xiran Jay Zhao's popular novel Iron Widow was also declared inelegible for eh... reasons? (I've not read this).

The way WorldCon runs the Hugo Award is that anyone who pays 50 bucks can vote for anything that is judged to conform to the genre etc. They have some form of system in place to stop block-voting, because eh... sci-fi fandom is ... almost as problematic as gaming. Nonetheless, if something wins both the Nebula and the Hugo it is a good sign that it is worth reading.
 
To be pedantic, the amusing scenes were not at the WorldCon itself -- they are currently occurring on social media, after the voting numbers were released three months later, which is when everyone found out about the various works which were declared "ineligible" for reasons which are both unknown, and, apparently, unknowable, since Dave McCarty (vice-chair of the Chengdu con and co-head of the relevant committee for handing out the Hugos at this particular WorldCon) keeps repeating that they weren't eligible but refusing to explain on what grounds they were ineligible.

Also, I have zero understanding of statistics, but various people who do have relevant expertise seem to think that the pattern of voting stats looks dodgy in ways suggestive of tampering.

Useful summary from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/24/science-fiction-awards-held-in-china-under-fire-for-excluding-authors
 
For anyone who wants a deep dive:

https://corabuhlert.com/2024/01/21/the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-have-finally-been-release-and-we-have-questions/
 
I'm used to hear complaints about the Hugos every year, and never paid attention, because ... meh... I like some sci-fi and fantasy just fine, but I'm not enough of a stan to care, but this is at least slightly more amusing than usual.
 
I'm mildly adjacent to that scene (I know a few authors and various people more involved than me), so have been hearing about this for a few days and rubbernecking at the clusterfuck.

Personally I don't care about the Hugos per se, but awards and such certainly have a sales impact for writers, and this sucks for everyone -- both the people mysteriously deemed ineligible, and the people who won in those categories.

T Kingfisher won Best Novel, but her book would have been up against Babel if the latter hadn't been deemed ineligible, and now not surprisingly she feels her win's been tainted:

https://bsky.app/profile/tkingfisher.bsky.social/post/3kjgqijeu7w23

Which has to really suck.

My favourite commentary so far:

https://bsky.app/profile/what-eats-owls.bsky.social/post/3kjlvia6qv726
 
If anyone's looking for new SF/F to read, Locus's 2023 Recommended Reading List is out:

https://locusmag.com/2024/02/2023-recommended-reading-list/

It's got some books I've already enjoyed and a bunch more that I've been hearing exciting things about, so very promising!

I just picked up a copy of The Saint of Bright Doors after being hooked by the free sample.
 

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