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Post by darknessfish on Mar 10, 2020 13:25:31 GMT
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 11, 2020 3:24:32 GMT
I just finished Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (2016). This is an odd one to judge. I’ve liked Horowitz since I read Stormbreaker and the Diamond Bros. as a kid, and while this book is far from his best writing, it’s fine. Horowitz loves mysteries. The Diamond Bros. series has perhaps the best Agatha Christie pastiche ever written (sorry, Sophie Hannah), a gem called “I Know What You Did Last Wednesday” in which Horowitz plots an alternate solution to Ten Little Indians. He created the TV shows Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War and wrote multiple episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. So why did I get the feeling throughout this that he actually hates mysteries and wishes the whole genre would go away? To a large degree, he’s trying to deconstruct the genre, but it’s not by arguing that humanity can’t know anything for certain, as Jorge Luis Borges, Steven Millhauser, and Peter Straub ( Mystery) would have it. Instead, it’s by making the mystery inherently mean-spirited, cruel. By the end of the real book we’re supposed to see the very puzzle-based nature of the fictional book in a negative light. The puzzles end only in nasty twists played on the reader. Even the kindly detective is really an April Fool’s prank. At the end, the narrator says she’s given up reading whodunnits altogether. It seems as though Horowitz, who’s written whodunnits for years, wants us to do the same. The pacing and structure are odd, too: we spend too much time with the fictional book before returning to the main narrative. That might have been fine, but the fictional book reads like subpar Christie, not top-drawer. I guessed the “real” murderer without any real difficulty; I didn’t guess the “fictional” murderer, but the identities of both murderers were somewhat underwhelming. I want the glorious light of revelation, of Mr. Chadband’s Terewth (as Nick Fuller phrased it), not an “oh, so he did it” feeling. That said, I felt foolish for missing a whopping clue: I had actually noted it seemed “off” but didn’t put the pieces together. All in all, I feel like Horowitz bit off more than he could chew here: a book this “meta” needs an amazing writer, a Borges, a Calvino. Horowitz is not at that level, and his messaging is unfocused and unclear. I won’t deny, though, that I had fun while reading much of it—unusually enough, the middle sections most of all. The ending’s too cynical and self-mocking for a lighthearted thriller.
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gw
Junior Member
@gw
Posts: 1,519
Likes: 557
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Post by gw on Mar 11, 2020 5:11:00 GMT
Just finished off Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress. It is about Ijon Tichy as a futurologist who is staying at a large hotel in Costa Rica for a conference but violence breaks out including the use of psycho-chemicals that make people feel euphoric about themselves, other people, and even their worst enemies. The main character gets cryogenically frozen after severe injuries and is brought into a future where there's a chemical for just about everything and people learn by ingesting food that sends information to their brains. It's a book that's about ideas more than plot so it's not for everyone but I really enjoyed some of the ideas and if anybody who is sure that they won't read the book wants to hear about them I can shoot them a PM.
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Post by SuperDevilDoctor on Mar 11, 2020 5:26:33 GMT
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Post by OldSamVimes on Mar 11, 2020 12:56:09 GMT
I love Jon Ronson. ... his humor particularly. Always fun reads.
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Post by jackspicer on Mar 14, 2020 7:44:18 GMT
"Das Boot" by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim I'm 1/4 of the way through, but I can already tell that I prefer the movie. The book has a 4.31/5 rating on Goodreads though, which is very high for that site, so clearly most people don't share my opinion of this book. The book goes into too much detail about how submarines work. I think this is unimportant. Can't we the audience just accept that submarines work, without knowing exactly how? The 'humorous' banter between the submariners is a bit irritating. It reminds me of the locker room talk one would have engaged in at 14 years old.
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Post by Zos on Mar 14, 2020 11:58:34 GMT
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Post by CrepedCrusader on Mar 16, 2020 19:22:56 GMT
Thinner, by Stephen King. After this, I'll only have Gerald's Game, and I'll have read all of his novels.
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Post by Jep Gambardella on Mar 16, 2020 19:52:00 GMT
In the mood for a quick page-turner so I started Frederick Forsyth's latest, "The Fox".
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Post by SuperDevilDoctor on Mar 21, 2020 5:21:59 GMT
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Post by darknessfish on Mar 23, 2020 9:43:41 GMT
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Post by Jonesy1 on Mar 23, 2020 10:21:03 GMT
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Post by jackspicer on Mar 23, 2020 21:09:41 GMT
1984 by George Orwell I'm about 2/3 of the way through. I was assigned to read this book in high school, but I don't think I read past the first couple chapters.
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Post by Jonesy1 on Mar 24, 2020 0:41:44 GMT
1984 by George Orwell I'm about 2/3 of the way through. I was assigned to read this book in high school, but I don't think I read past the first couple chapters. That is a frighteningly prophetic book.
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TheSowIsMine
Junior Member
@thesowismine
Posts: 2,652
Likes: 1,684
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Post by TheSowIsMine on Mar 25, 2020 11:14:09 GMT
I just finished a terrible bok called Time Cursor by John David Krygelski. It has one dimensional characters talking stupidly about time travel. It has a psycho ex girlfriend, a new girlfriend who reads books by David Icke(makes you wonder who the real psycho girl is). Aliens come into the story, but oh wait, they are actually evolved humans who are time travelling. Its all so stupid, I dont even know why I continues reading it.
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Post by Lucy on Mar 29, 2020 3:59:22 GMT
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Post by louise on Mar 29, 2020 7:00:02 GMT
Mornings in the Dark, the Graham Greene film reader. His film reviews are very interesting.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on Mar 29, 2020 10:42:51 GMT
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Post by Zos on Mar 30, 2020 8:34:50 GMT
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Post by Zos on Mar 30, 2020 8:36:28 GMT
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