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[medjuck]

MacDonald's last book.   I read it because it's the one where it is most obvious that Santa Teresa is Santa Barbara.  Good story but as far as I can see two murders in it are never actually solved. And I think that the epithet for every Lew Archer story should be Faulkner's "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."  

Edited March 13, 2019 by medjuck

[GA Russell]

33 minutes ago, medjuck said:

MacDonald's last book.   I read it because it's the one where it is most obvious that Santa Teresa is Santa Barbara.  Good story but as far as I can see two murders in it are never actually solved. And I think that the epithet for every Lew Archer story should be Faulkner's "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."  

Joe, I read most of his books in the late '70s, one after another.  It seemed like he wrote the same book over and over!

[medjuck]

27 minutes ago, GA Russell said:

Joe, I read most of his books in the late '70s, one after another.  It seemed like he wrote the same book over and over!

As Lew Archer says:  "It's all one case."    https://smile.amazon.com/Its-All-One-Case-Illustrated/dp/1606998889/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1M9OJOI0KBWHI&keywords=it%27s+all+one+case&qid=1552468915&s=books&sprefix=It%27s+all+one+%2Caps%2C477&sr=1-1

[GA Russell]

3 hours ago, medjuck said:

As Lew Archer says:  "It's all one case."    https://smile.amazon.com/Its-All-One-Case-Illustrated/dp/1606998889/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1M9OJOI0KBWHI&keywords=it%27s+all+one+case&qid=1552468915&s=books&sprefix=It%27s+all+one+%2Caps%2C477&sr=1-1

Thanks for that link!

[ghost of miles]

A question for fellow John le Carre fans on the board:  over the years I've read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (twice), recently finished the next two books in the Karla trilogy (The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People) and am now about 75 pages into A Perfect Spy.  I also have Adam Sisman's recent biography of le Carre on order.  What other le Carre novels would you recommend?  And how is The Secret Pilgrim?

[Brad]

18 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

A question for fellow John le Carre fans on the board:  over the years I've read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (twice), recently finished the next two books in the Karla trilogy (The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People) and am now about 75 pages into A Perfect Spy.  I also have Adam Sisman's recent biography of le Carre on order.  What other le Carre novels would you recommend?  And how is The Secret Pilgrim?

Did you read the recent one where he revisits The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Smiley makes a brief appearance. I didn't read a lot of the early books and have started to read them found them very good, such as Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality. Among the ones I have read over the years, Little Drummer Girl and The Russia House stand out. 

[paul secor]

The Ensemble is a novel about a classical string quartet over a period of years. I expected and hoped for more, but it was a disappointment in that it ventured into soap opera/chick lit territory and the writing was over explanatory.

[ghost of miles]

[kinuta]

Quite good, entertaining fast read.

Edited March 19, 2019 by kinuta

[kinuta]

[kinuta]

Finished. A very good book.

Recommended.

Edited March 23, 2019 by kinuta

[ejp626]

About halfway through Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds.

Have to admit I don't like it very much for several reasons, but the primary one is that you rotate inside the heads of three characters, including a dog(!), but they all have the same narrative voice.  Different perspectives and concerns to be sure, but basically identical vocabularies and pretty similar phrasing.  If you're going to do this, do it right...

 

[paul secor]

Martin Walker: The Resistance Man

My wife and I are reading this for a book discussion at a local library next week. It's the first Bruno, Chief of Police novel that I've read, and I'm not at all impressed. A weak plot (which has little to do with the French resistance) , too many characters, and too much talk about food and wine. I'll pass on reading any other books in the Bruno series.

[Matthew]

Money and Possessions: Interpretation by Walter Brueggemann. A very interesting study of how scripture views money and possessions by Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, and it challenges they way most people views these matter in today's political world. If a person is interested in an alternative way of looking at these topics, this is a good book to look into.

Edited March 21, 2019 by Matthew

[kinuta]

On 2019年3月21日 at 9:48 AM, ejp626 said:

About halfway through Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds.

Have to admit I don't like it very much for several reasons, but the primary one is that you rotate inside the heads of three characters, including a dog(!), but they all have the same narrative voice.  Different perspectives and concerns to be sure, but basically identical vocabularies and pretty similar phrasing.  If you're going to do this, do it right...

 

I read it too but found it a struggle to finish. I was seduced by the blurb.

[ejp626]

3 hours ago, kinuta said:

I read it too but found it a struggle to finish. I was seduced by the blurb.

I just finished and found it a total waste of time.  Very sorry I started it.  (I'm supposed to be getting better at dropping unrewarding books...)

At any rate, I am now launching into vol. 2 of Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  My goal is to be done by mid-April, though I suspect other things (particularly taxes) will be too much of a distraction.

[Brad]

[kinuta]

4 hours ago, ejp626 said:

I just finished and found it a total waste of time.  Very sorry I started it.  (I'm supposed to be getting better at dropping unrewarding books...)

At any rate, I am now launching into vol. 2 of Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  My goal is to be done by mid-April, though I suspect other things (particularly taxes) will be too much of a distraction.

New books are a hit and miss gamble more often than not. I'd say one in five are pointless.

The trick is to abandon the thing and move on. I sometimes stick it out the the end but usually regret it.

[kinuta]

Finished. 

Great.

Extraordinary tale of a remorseless femme fatale and her giant medical scam.

Recommended.

 

Edited March 26, 2019 by kinuta

[soulpope]

On 20.3.2019 at 11:07 PM, kinuta said:

Finished. A very good book.

Recommended.

Looks intriguing ....

[Shrdlu]

In case anyone hasn't read it, check out Robin Kelley's bio of Monk. I only became aware of it a year ago.

It is the finest bio of a jazz musician I have ever read, though I hasten to add that Diz's book is also outstanding.

We all enjoy Monk's recordings, Blue Note, Prestige, etc., but Monk's life (apart from his loving family and friends) was a misery until his Columbia contract in 1962. Of course, that damned Manhattan cabaret card issue is well-known. No need to go into that again here.

One sample: Monk was delighted to start recording for Columbia. He found a freshly-tuned piano and some sandwiches at 30th Street. Very nice. Then, he was billed for the tuner and the tuna!! Disgustingly cheap of a huge company that made tens of thousands off his albums. Meanwhile, struggling Blue Note provided free food and Rudy never charged the musicians for tuning his piano.

Anyway, get the book. This might have been mentioned before, but I'm not going to go through 292 pages hunting for it.

[kinuta]

Finished. I can't imagine a more comprehensive account of the scandal. I found the lengthy and detailed descriptions of the multiple aspects of the fraud hard to follow.

When the story switched to the post sentencing attempts to retrieve money and compensation of some of the victims , it got very complex and admit a lot of it was too much to take in. 

It was interesting , especially the character descriptions, the arrest and court case and the sheer scale of the financial damage. Praise due to the author for pulling the incredibly complex strands together.

Recommended with a bit of judicious page skipping.

Edited March 30, 2019 by kinuta

[jazztrain]

[ghost of miles]

Fitzgerald beautifully evokes the magical charge and the vicious, temporal economy of adolescent relations in these stories:

[Bluesnik]

On 07/03/2019 at 3:02 AM, kinuta said:

Have you read Keef's biography ?

Do you mean his autobiography (Life)? Yes, I've read that and enjoyed it a lot. And about what I said in my former post, I'm only repeating what the book says, though it sounds reasonable to me. But it might be a bit overstated, that's true.