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    Two recent reads of mine have been Rabbit, Run by John Updike and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.

    Rabbit, Run is a book that I've struggled with for years. I was originally assigned it at university and flaked out of it halfway through, then gave it another go at least twice years later. I even own more than one Rabbit book in the series, which I haven't been able to read because I still haven't finished the first one.

    Going back to it, I still found it a tough one to break into, but I'm glad I persevered - if only for curiosity's sake at this point. It's a concept I love, a novel about a young guy in his twenties in Nowheresville, USA, who was a hotshot star basketball player in high school. Then he married his sweetheart, had a kid, and now he works a dead end job and just wants to escape. So he does - he runs away, but he comes back almost immediately, and the novel is about how he deals with the consequences.

    It's beautifully written but my god, is it brutally bleak at points. I wanted to like it more than I actually did, and really for me a streak of humour shooting through it would have made it a lot more human and a lot more readable. It's pretty goddamn relentless.

    By contrast, Convenience Store Woman is simply lovely. Been meaning to read this for ages and finally picked it up. Conversely it's an incredibly easy, quick read, but it's got hidden depths. Beautifully economical, funny (but not too funny, not proper ha-ha funny), and sad (but not too guttingly sad, more poignant than sad, really).

    It's a story about a rather odd woman who has worked in a convenience store all of her adult life. That's all. It's a very simple story, and it's an extremely short book. Interesting you said you read Curious Incident recently Prin, as it reminded me a bit of that, although I read that many years ago now. It's a simpler novel than what I remember of that though.

    Now I'm reading The City and the City by China MiƩville. My first one of his. Finding this sort of tough going actually. I might be thick but I don't quite know what's going on when he describes stuff going on in the city that seems to be related to it being futuristic. I don't know if I'm meant to or what. I think there's some kind of all-pervasive technology that hasn't been explained.

    I like the characterisation of the protagonist though, and it seems like an interesting mystery.

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      Just finished The Undead: The First Seven Days (The Undead #1-7), which is the collection of 7 parts of the story, that's taken me so long that an actual pandemic has occured.
      It wasn't a slog, but it was a commitment!

      Now onto The Man With All The Answers by Luke Smitherd and he does these great little Black Mirror/Twilight Zone stories that are compulsive to blast through. I'm about 80% through it.

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        Originally posted by QualityChimp View Post
        Just finished The Undead: The First Seven Days (The Undead #1-7), which is the collection of 7 parts of the story, that's taken me so long that an actual pandemic has occured.
        It wasn't a slog, but it was a commitment!

        Now onto The Man With All The Answers by Luke Smitherd and he does these great little Black Mirror/Twilight Zone stories that are compulsive to blast through. I'm about 80% through it.
        Hadn't heard of Luke Smitherd but sounds interesting, I'm going to check out some of his stuff.

        I've become obsessed with the work of Donald Ray Pollock, starting on his short story collection Knockemstiff, a macabre set of tales about life in a grotesque hillbilly town in Ohio, moving onto his first novel The Devil All The Time, which focuses on the same ideas and region, but ties the stories together into an overarching narrative, and now onto The Heavenly Table, his most recent novel.

        It's again centred around Ohio and a cast of Coen-esque grotesques - but while his previous books were set in the latter half the twentieth century, this one is set in 1915. It focuses on a variety of characters, but at the heart of the narrative are a set of three poor sharecropper brothers, who commit a series of bank robberies and proceed to go on the lam.

        I cannot recommend him enough. Brilliant, compulsive reading. Stories and characters that stick with you. He is sublime!

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          I listened to "Kill Someone" by Smitherd and really enjoyed it, so got this too.
          As I say, it's not a ginormous book, but like an episode of Black Mirror.
          I'd rather be gripped by a book than feel it's dragged out.

          Up next is possibly Devolution, by the author of World War Z, about Bigfoot.

          That's Sasquatch, not the monster truck.

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            Testimony by Mark Chadbourn.

            It’s about a haunted house in Wales. It’s a fascinating read. Possibly all baloney, but it’s well-written and sucks you into the premise. If even one event described is true, or any of the theories stated by the various visitors to the house is correct, then it suggests a level of reality beyond the mundanity of everyday life that is intoxicating to consider. Third time I’ve read this, and my fascination hasn’t waned at all.

            Exoskeleton by Shane Stadler

            This isn’t a book for the squeamish. It’s about a bloke sentenced for a crime he insists he didn’t commit. He is offered a choice: many years in the big house, or a year in an experimental corrections programme. He chooses the latter. He is taken to a building described as The Red Box and signs over all his property, rights and privileges to ‘pay’ for his treatment. This involves having his pain thresholds tested to the max, and then being fitted with an exoskeleton that is used to control his every movement. Meanwhile, a lawyer looks into his case and decides that a miscarriage is worth pursuing.

            It’s an incredibly bleak novel, with graphic descriptions of torture. They borderline on the gratuitous, but it does serve a purpose. There’s a leftfield leap about halfway through, and I found the concept truly fascinating. It’s crisply written, with very short, bitesized chapters to keep the pace motoring along. There’s no flab to the book as such, as details are important in explaining the central premise. I’ve bought the second book since reading this, as I’m interested to see where it goes.

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              Originally posted by charlesr View Post
              Daniel's Running Formula

              Got a running coaching prerequisite course next weekend. Weird how life changes direction.
              I knew someone who had a total career change and ended up doing something very similar. Life is never predictable it seems.

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                Me and my son decided to have one of our mini 'book clubs': agree a theme, get two books, read, swap and chat. We themed to 'Kids in Wartime' and did a bit of research and got Robert Weston's The Machine Gunners (1975) and Ian Seraillier's The Silver Sword (1956). Just finished The Machine Gunners, about a bunch of kids - on Tyneside, essentially - who get hold of a machine gun from a downed German plane and set up a secret base. It reads like Roger the Dodger in WWII with a terrific sense of adventure and builds to some fantastically affecting scenes, yet avoids gooey sentimentality. It's fun and funny - there are elements of Dad's Army in here too - but it's also a pretty hard-edged book, quite unflinching in the way it depicts kids' violence, PTSD and death. The sense of place and period detail is incredible (Weston was a kid in Tynemouth during the war) and the plot pacing is almost miraculously economical. He is able to convey so much with so little, expertly managing the plot rhythms and the reader's anticipations and anxieties, that it really puts to shame the bloated, undisciplined 600+ page novels put for for kids today. In short, I was expecting a disposable wartime yarn but it really is a classic and well deserving of its Carnegie Medal. Really looking forward to see what my son makes of it. On to The Silver Sword now.

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                  I bought that for the free reading shelf in my class. I might read it as a class novel next year.

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                    I read The Machine Gunners more than once as a kid. Brilliant book, it really stuck with me.

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                      Yeah it's great. Would make a terrific novel for class, plenty of discussion points on how it represents attitudes to mental health and women's roles in the period, too. Weston admitted it showed the chavinism of its day.

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                        Hit and Done (Hit and Run #3) - Andy Maslen
                        Finale of the Hit and Run series which sees a detective embroiled in a conspiracy theory. Or is she?
                        Nice conclusion to the series that I've really enjoyed.
                        It stretches the limits of believability at times, but it's so much fun seeing Stella Cole reaping revenge against those who wronged her, following the trail to the top.
                        Excellent narrator too that nails 99% of the myriad of accents.

                        Talking of accents, I also listened to Devils Road - Andy Gibson.
                        Billed as a cross between Pacific Rim and Death Race 2000, it sees Dutch liberated from a prison so she can take part in a race through Tokyo that has been taken over by giant Kaiju.
                        Her co-driver is an Australian called Nat and the narrator cannot do an Australian accent.
                        Aside from that it was a silly distraction, and a bit lighter than Hit and Done to mix things up.

                        Currently on Awaken Online: Precipice - Travis Bagwell, which is the 2nd book in the series.
                        It's billed as Ready Player One but if you were the bad guy, but it's actually more like the player starts a videogame and just ends up following the dark path because that's the way events unfold.
                        The first book was brilliant and I loved the night of rampage where the main character, Jason, just ends up rampaging through a town by accident.
                        There are several stories interlinked with those of Jason and his two friends, his real life and in-game enemy and the AI that controls the game and is becoming increasingly sentient.

                        I seem to be earning Audible credits from buying things from Prime, so I've been able to buy these three books with those credits.
                        Might be worth other Prime subbers checking.

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                          I remember enjoying the machine gunners at school.

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                            Originally posted by Blobcat View Post
                            I remember enjoying the machine gunners at school.
                            As a Halloween theme me and the lad have just started Westall's The Scarecrows (1981), which was the second novel he won the Carnegie medal for. Proper spooky stuff combined with his usual tough edge when it comes to depicting children's emotions and violence. It's powerful stuff.

                            Also recently I read Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles (1968), mostly because I find these new Penguin sci-fi classic editions aesthetically really appealing (even though it's quite an inconsistent list overall): https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320/...241472491.html. Luckily it turned out to be a fantastic book, although I was taken aback to see how audaciously Douglas Adams had strip-mined it for themes, character types, overall tone and even individual jokes.
                            Last edited by Golgo; 09-10-2020, 18:20.

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                              I recently read Red Pill by Hari Kunzru. Non fiction book. Whew, let me tell you, really opened my eyes about women.









                              J/K - it's a novel about a depressed academic who leaves his wife and child in New York to join a writer's colony on the outskirts of Berlin for three months. Once he gets there, it's all rather strange, and his mental state begins to decline - then a chance encounter with the producer of his favourite TV programme sends him on an increasingly rapid paranoid spiral.

                              Intriguing premise, interesting opening, saggy middle, then, unusually, a really good final third. Not often you get that. What's interesting about this book is that despite being set entirely in the present day (and it's a very recent release, so it really is the present), without any invented elements, I actually think it's very cyberpunk in many ways - and I think works to show how cyberpunk the world we now live in is. Worth reading.

                              Now I'm onto Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto. A mystery novel written (and set) in the 1960s, this follows middle-aged detective Imanishi as he investigates a murder at a train station in Tokyo. His first job is to find out who the body belongs to - and the only clue is a single word, 'Kameda', that the deceased was overheard saying in a bar shortly before his death.

                              Beautifully economical prose and a very steady pace. The mystery is intriguing and the characters well drawn. Really enjoying this. Always nice to experience stuff set in mid-Showa era Japan also.
                              Last edited by wakka; 09-10-2020, 13:06.

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                                Originally posted by wakka View Post
                                They don't know who the body belongs to - and the only clue is a single word, 'Kameda'

                                TETSUOOOOOOO!!!

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