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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 29, 2015 22:41:05 GMT -5
Funny, our girls were asking Kim what she wanted for Christmas. For some reason I was included in the email. Not being able to think of anything, she asked for some brand of hand lotion. The other day she said to me "Oh my God! I've turned into the old lady people buy hand lotion for!"
You reach an age and you really don't want anything. I told the girls that if anything, I'd like some books. After actually buying A Constable's Tale and All the Light You Cannot See (the former by Chesapeake and the latter highly recommended by godotwaits and boy was he ever correct), I'm enjoying reading what I want instead of scrounging or trading with my Dad.
Howard's dad has a book, Anton the Dove Fancier and Other Tales of the Holocaust, which is on my list since he was kind enough to send the title to me. There have been all kinds of book suggestions on this forum, and stupid me never kept at list.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Anything I read will be duly donated to the Garrison library when I am done.
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Post by Rob Hanesworth on Nov 29, 2015 22:53:52 GMT -5
Anton the Dove Fancier is well worth your effort.
Others:
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
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Post by kenlarsson on Nov 29, 2015 23:20:49 GMT -5
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng or The Garden of Evening Mists by the same author.
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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Nov 29, 2015 23:22:05 GMT -5
I hear you VI. I don't really want or need anything for Christmas either.
Mike
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Post by james on Nov 29, 2015 23:22:34 GMT -5
The Summer Book - Tove Jansson. Humane, life affirming, touching, amusing and all that sort of stuff but quite short too.
Masterpiece. Makes you feel better. Women (and some men) often relate to it and it is entrancing and escapist as well as subversively deep.
I'm fifty-two now and have read hundreds of books since but this one has never been out of my top three. It has magic.
I have been meaning to send a copy to C., Mrs Letson for too long. I think she might like it.
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Post by RickW on Nov 29, 2015 23:54:42 GMT -5
I don't really NEED anything, but there are always a few things that I WANT. But at this point, they are getting too expensive.
My wife and I drive each other crazy, actually. We should just stop buying presents. But at the same time, it is a good, fun thing to share.
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Post by Russell Letson on Nov 30, 2015 0:27:19 GMT -5
Three of my favorite books about music history: A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry, by Charles Wolfe (late brother of my friend Gary K. Wolfe); Klezmer!: Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, by Henry Sapoznik; Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom, by Mike Zwerin.
I'm almost through Jason Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire--he has a series of mystery novels set in Constantinople in the 1830s (The Janissary Tree is the first) that are as exotic as any science fiction. Lords is as much an appreciation as a history, and it's clearly the wellspring for the novels he wrote later.
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Post by epaul on Nov 30, 2015 2:44:11 GMT -5
I like everything (almost everything) Bernard Cornwell has written, but I am amazed at just how good his Arthur series is. This series pushes a little (lot) deeper into the human condition than his other fine books(ok, I'm not sure what that means), but this book touches some buttons that the others don't (ok, I'm not sure what that means either). It was what was best in Arthur led to everything that went wrong for him. And Guinevere, and Merlin, and Nimue ...what wonderful characterizations. This is the first Arthurian telling that has left me liking, and respecting, Guinevere. And there is no Druid anywhere as interesting as Merlin, at least in this telling.
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Post by coachdoc on Nov 30, 2015 7:00:59 GMT -5
Just finished Janet Evanovich's 22nd Stephanie Plum novel. Such frivolous fluff, and so much fun. Started Freddie Presto, and 20% in, it is fun and thought provoking. Next on the list, the Lizbeth Slander, The Girl in the Spiderweb. The series survived on author change. Can it survive two? Hell's Super was also enjoyable. Plumbing history for characters and putting them in absurd positions as part of their hellish existence. The Shepard's Crown, the last Terry Pratchett novel has an adolescent witch, coming of age. Good stuff. I will miss Pratchett forever. Great author.
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Post by Doug on Nov 30, 2015 7:04:35 GMT -5
Just finished Janet Evanovich's 22nd Stephanie Plum novel. Such frivolous fluff, and so much fun. Ain't Lula a riot.
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Post by coachdoc on Nov 30, 2015 7:09:15 GMT -5
Just finished Janet Evanovich's 22nd Stephanie Plum novel. Such frivolous fluff, and so much fun. Ain't Lula a riot. Yup. Lula makes it. And Trenton is just as portrayed.
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Post by millring on Nov 30, 2015 8:12:32 GMT -5
Uncommonly well written chick book: Most consistently good crime drama novelist published today: An oldie but always overlooked goodie: Never met the woman who didn't enjoy this one:
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Post by drlj on Nov 30, 2015 9:06:05 GMT -5
I read a lot of fiction. Favorite authors are Jonathan Kellerman, Dennis Lehane and any of the Daniel Silva Gabriel Alon novels. If you have not read Silva, start with The Kill Artist and read them in order. There are 15. An older book, fiction but based on true events, that is a favorite of mine is The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks. If you have any Civil War interest, you might like that one.
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Post by dradtke on Nov 30, 2015 12:33:33 GMT -5
Thanks for starting another book list thread. I always write them down but by the time a read a couple I've lost the list of the rest of them.
I promise I'll keep track of the list this time. (No, I won't.)
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Post by Chesapeake on Nov 30, 2015 12:40:34 GMT -5
Lots of good ideas. Epaul, thanks for the insights about Cornwell's Arthur series. I'll never tire of Arthurian lore and look forward to seeing it with the Cornwellian touch, especially if he dives a little more deeply into his characters.
Anyone interested in bluegrass music probably already knows about Robert Cantwell's Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound, a really fine and authoritative telling of the story, right up there with Richard D. Smith's Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass.These two books will make you pretty near an expert on the genre.
A little less well-known, and more recent, and more broadly targeted, is Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South. Specifically, this is how the form sprang from the Southern cotton-mill culture after the defeated rebs achieved a form of payback by hijacking the New England textile industry in the years after the Civil War. (One of those mill hands was a scrawny young gap-toothed picker by the name of Earl Scruggs.) Among other things Stomp dispels the shibboleth that the music America started hearing over the airwaves and on phonograph records during the '20s and '30s came from little isolated cabins in the mountains.
And, for those who can't get enough of the banjo - and who can? - there is Karen Linn's That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture (University of Illinois Press). This explains how the instrument went from an icon of slavery on Southern plantations to a fashionable item in Victorian parlors and on Ivy-League campuses in the decades following the Civil War; and, finally, a staple of music often associated with hard-core, tattooed, truck-driving, camo-wearing, battle-flag-waving gentlemen of the forest and field.
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Post by TKennedy on Nov 30, 2015 12:52:53 GMT -5
If you are into music bios "Straight Life" (Art Pepper) and "High Times Hard Times" (Anita O'Day) are gooduns.
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 19,742
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Post by Dub on Nov 30, 2015 13:03:31 GMT -5
Good fiction invites our minds to wander through new and uncharted territory. It can help us dream new dreams. I need to read more good fiction and there seem to many opportunities suggested here. Thanks.
If you are interested in non-fiction, I'm currently rereading one I think everyone should read. I'll probably read it a time or two more before I cash in. It's T.J. Stiles’ book “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.” Stiles is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner (Vanderbilt bio.). In his Jesse James bio. he spends nearly half the book on the run up to the Civil War as it played out in Missouri. This part of the book offers, I think, great insights into our nation, not only in that period but its impact on current issues.
Stiles likes to take a character we think we know and show us what we've missed. He doesn't just present another good biography, he shows what his subject was really about and why it's important to our understanding of modern America
Try it, you'll like it.
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Post by epaul on Nov 30, 2015 13:39:12 GMT -5
Uncommonly well written chick book: Never met the woman who didn't enjoy this one: Interesting (telling?) that John recommended a couple chick books for Todd. And Todd thought getting a Jeep would help with that image thing of his (just paint it pink, VI, and come clean. And in so doing, you will open up a world of new and appropriate gifts...new outfits, hair supplies, cosmetics and mirrors, shoes, scented candles and creams, pirate books).
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Post by dradtke on Nov 30, 2015 14:12:12 GMT -5
Real men drive Jeeps that match their shoes.
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Post by epaul on Nov 30, 2015 18:11:59 GMT -5
And John, we are an advanced, sensitive new age guy, type of forum. We don't refer to "certain" books as "Chick Books". While, admittedly the shoe fits quite often, there are some women, if not many, who do aspire, with varying degrees of success, to struggle beyond "Chick Books" and read the same fine literature that is generally associated with men, such as "John Carter of Mars" and "The Moon Maids of Barsoom". So, while there are "Chick Books", we don't refer to them as such. At least not clearly. When they do need to be referred to, it is best to mumble quickly and then move on to safer topics.
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