Amph What book are you reading right now?

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

I'm 716 pages into the 1037 page tome. It is a compelling story.

 

Not the End of the World (2002) – Kate Atkinson



Just like that, no reason, no explanation – she had her life back, day after day as precious and as delicate as a rope of pearls.

This Atkinson book is a collection of short stories and I have to say that I was pretty disappointed. It isn’t that the book is awful or anything; at times, it’s pretty good. But I’ve been routinely giving Atkinson’s novels four-star ratings and this is quite a bit below a four-star book. A lot of the stories are high-concept tales of weird, unnatural happenings. There’s often some magical realism sprinkled through Atkinson’s novels, but when it takes center stage in a story, it feels flat and uninteresting. A couple of the stories are genuinely wonderful. Sheer Big Waste of Love, about a boy born out of wedlock and the complicated relationship he has with his father, is Atkinson at her bittersweet, multi-layered best. Temporal Anomaly, about a woman who dies but finds her spirit trapped on earth for reasons she can’t quite understand, is melancholy. Evil Doppelgangers is the funniest story in the book, the tale of a boring office drone who discovers that he has a doppelganger who isn’t evil really, just way more fun and way more interesting than he is. But on the whole, I felt the stories here just didn’t really land and usually felt pretty pointless when they were over. Atkinson seems more successful in the novel form. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – Atkinson’s short stories are sometimes pointless and flat; there are a couple masterpieces here, but for the most part, nothing here lives up to her brilliant novels. 2 ½ stars.

More Book Reviews!

 

Star Wars: Last Stars by Claudia Gray. After hearing good things from it, I decided to finally read it.

 

I'm reading the book adaption of Star Wars:TFA right now. I plan to buy more books sometime in the future.

 

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.

 

Empire Strikes Back novelization

 

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

 

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It's my second time reading, but the first time was a number of years ago, really enjoying reading this series again.

 

I write what I like Steve Biko.

 

Gonna be a tv series

 

I will be tentatively excited about that development, I suppose. It strikes me as the sort of property that would be easy to screw up, but also could easily improve in adaptation since, y'know, TV shows don't feel obliged to fastidiously describe every bit of clothing ever the way Robert Jordan apparently did and you can avoid pacing issues with the benefit of hindsight. Hope it's the latter.

 

Tales of the Bounty Hunters

 

That was a really fun read, especially the one where IG-88 almost Skynets the galaxy with the Death Star.

 

A joke headline today said "With enough material for 182 seasons.."

 

Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows by Michael Reaves

 

Im taking a break from reading a book but recently this month for about 2 weeks ive been buying some of the Marvel Comics black and white Essentials for original Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine series Volume 2 of the 1990s.

I got alot of catching up to do for the original Uncanny X-Men and the Wolverine series

 

Case Histories (2004) – Kate Atkinson



What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live your life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a kind of courage that most people didn’t have.

Case Histories is the first novel by Atkinson to feature Jackson Brodie, a retired police officer struggling to deal with his ex-wife, form a bond with his young daughter and run a private detective agency. This book opens with a series of seemingly disconnected violent acts and then leaps ahead to the present to let us see how the survivors of these violent moments have moved on (or not) with their lives. And then Jackson finds himself involved with all three of the cases that opened the book. Atkinson creates a series of really indelible characters here, not least of all Brodie, a compellingly weary and tragic figure. The book is both an in-depth literary novel and a gripping mystery-thriller. There are surprises aplenty in the plot twists, but the book cuts deeper than a typical genre read. The book unflinchingly explores grief and the way it can stay unresolved and unhealed for years or decades even. It’s a book rich in theme. In one of the cases, a young girl vanishes in the middle of the night, without a trace to be found, even decades later; in another a young woman is brutally murdered in what appears to be a random act of violence. In another, a young girl disappears and then reappears dead. The book is very much about violence against women, but it’s also about the failure of masculinity. Jackson is a good man, a man tormented by tragedy in his past and driven by that torment to dedicate his life to trying to save these women or find them, whatever they need. There’s the grieving sister of the vanished girl, the murdered woman, Jackson’s own daughter, his own sister and so many more. This isn’t the book for you if you demand that your novels have neat and tidy endings, but it’s a masterpiece in my opinion. It’s a deep and rich book in theme and character study, but it’s also an immaculately plotted mystery. Atkinson’s done it again, bouncing back from her weak foray into short story writing with a magnificent, haunting, deeply sad, deeply beautiful novel about the people we lose in life and the efforts we put forth to fill those voids. 4 stars.

tl;dr – Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series starts with a masterpiece in this beautiful and thematically rich exploration of loss that functions brilliantly as a mystery-thriller as well. 4 stars.

 

The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

 

I am taking my first plunge into Discworld. Now reading The Colour Of Magic.

 

Two fair warnings: one, that book is part one of the only two part story in the entire series so don't take that as typical, and two, said two part story is considered maybe one of the weakest parts. If you don't like it, try Mort.

I mention all of that mostly because I wish someone had told me that on my first attempt and not, like, five years later.

 

i made it about five pages into a terry pratchett book before my eyes had rolled so far back into my head that i had to feel my way along the walls on my way to return it to the airport bookstore. first and only time ive done that

i gave up on sword of shannara as well, but didnt return that one to the store as it was a hand-me-down. i have a bad track record with terrys

 

But Death is supposed to be a beloved character and I wish to experience this.

 

do what you gotta do, breh. ramza probably has better taste than me anyways

 

I am like 99% sure the JCC Watches Movies thread would disabuse you of that notion.

 

American Scary by Michael Monahan. It's pretty much a text update of the DVD documentary of the same name on TV horror movie hosts. It's a fun read, though I regretted to find out how much of these hosts' shows were ditched or lost over the years.