woops

is not like other people
didn't really last though. it got a bit repetitive and went wierd near the end. also some of his Jokes are a bit annoying
to be fair to this book after thinking about it l later i thought of another interpretation which makes it more interesting so yeah id recommend this
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Frustrating trying to find time working among chaos to get a foothold on new reading. Hoping to make a dent or 2 on annual leave this week

Monument Maker - David Keenan. As per for The Good Times but wasn’t expecting a big old unit of a text. Fell asleep y’day on page 4 (fatigue), then had to play goalkeeper with the kids. FTGT was a hoot, certainly not Country or Pogue Mahone level of plot and language play, yet it still punched hard - an ode to Belfast. Monument Maker seems entirely different for scope, not an intro to expect either

Scored a battered and cellotaped copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle from a local secure unit who were clearing out books for recycling recently. Remember Mitchum as the lead aeons ago, too long to remember. Given it a new home regardless after a Dissensus reminder
 

jenks

thread death
Frustrating trying to find time working among chaos to get a foothold on new reading. Hoping to make a dent or 2 on annual leave this week

Monument Maker - David Keenan. As per for The Good Times but wasn’t expecting a big old unit of a text. Fell asleep y’day on page 4 (fatigue), then had to play goalkeeper with the kids. FTGT was a hoot, certainly not Country or Pogue Mahone level of plot and language play, yet it still punched hard - an ode to Belfast. Monument Maker seems entirely different for scope, not an intro to expect either

Scored a battered and cellotaped copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle from a local secure unit who were clearing out books for recycling recently. Remember Mitchum as the lead aeons ago, too long to remember. Given it a new home regardless after a Dissensus reminder
Monument is a big old bag of spanners but it’s got a great energy to it that means I forgive it for moments that might be considered self indulgent. I really liked his Memorial Device prequel that came out this summer - Industry of Magic and Light.
 

woops

is not like other people
now I've got readers block, which is part 1 of that this is not a novel i was on about, anyone know these books
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
ive done the George v Higgins we were talking about yesterday as well v good. the agent
Had a chance to read more today and almost finished this... very strange book that is totally different from any detective novel I have ever read, it takes the form of three or four monologues, people who work in the world of sports talking about their lives and philosophies and then illustrating what they say with a few anecdotes... and that's it. It's great.
 

version

Well-known member
I just read this short story of Clarice Lispector's.

The Fifth Story​


This story could be called "The Statues." Another possible name is “The Murder.” And also “How to Kill Cockroaches.” So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights.

The first, “How to Kill Cockroaches,” begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. She gave me this recipe for killing them. I was to mix equal parts sugar, flour and plaster. The flour and sugar would attract them, the plaster would dry up their insides. That’s what I did. They died.

The other story is actually the first one and is called “The Murder.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. The recipe follows. And then comes the murder. The truth is that I was only complaining about cockroaches in the abstract, since they weren’t even mine: they belonged to the ground floor and would crawl up the building’s pipes to our home. Only once I prepared the mixture did they become mine too. In our name, then, I began to measure and weigh the ingredients with a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had overtaken me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the secret curse that gnawed at such a peaceful home. But if they, like secret curses, slept during the day, there I was preparing their evening poison. Meticulous, ardent, I concocted the elixir for drawn-out death. An excited fear and my own secret curse guided me. Now I icily wanted just one thing: to kill every cockroach in existence. Cockroaches crawl up the pipes while we, worn out, dream. And now the recipe was ready, so white. As if for cockroaches as clever as I was, I expertly spread the powder until it looked more like something from nature. From my bed, in the silence of the apartment, I imagined them crawling one by one up to the laundry room where the darkness was sleeping, just one towel alert on the clothesline. I awoke hours later with a start when I realized how late it was. It was already dawn. I crossed the kitchen. There they were on the laundry-room floor, hard, huge. During the night I had killed. In our name, day was breaking. Up in the favela a rooster crowed.

The third story that now begins is the one about the “Statues.” It begins by saying that I had been complaining about cockroaches. Then comes the same lady. It keeps going up to the point where, near dawn, I awake and still sleepy cross the kitchen. Even sleepier than I is the room from the perspective of its tile floor. And in the darkness of dawn, a purplish glow that distances everything, I discern at my feet shadows and white forms: dozens of statues scattered, rigid. The cockroaches that have hardened from the inside out. Some, belly up. Others, in the middle of a gesture never to be completed. In the mouths of some a bit of the white food. I am the first witness of daybreak in Pompeii. I know how this last night went, I know of the orgy in the dark. Inside some of them the plaster will have hardened as slowly as during some vital process, and they, with increasingly arduous movements, will have greedily intensified the night’s joys, trying to escape their own insides. Until they turn to stone, in innocent shock, and with such, such a look of wounded reproach. Others—suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even the slightest inkling that some internal mold was being petrified!—these suddenly crystallize, the way a word is cut off in the mouth: it’s you I... They who, taking the name of love in vain, kept singing through the summer night. Whereas that one there, the one whose brown antenna is smeared with white, must have figured out too late that it had been mummified precisely for not having known how to make use of things with the gratuitous charm of being in vain: “because I looked too deep inside myself! because I looked too deep inside...”—from my cold, human height I look at the destruction of a world. Day breaks. The occasional antenna of a dead cockroach quivers drily in the breeze. From the previous story the rooster crows.

The fourth narrative inaugurates a new era at home. It begins as we know: I was complaining about cockroaches. It goes up to the moment I see the plaster monuments. Dead, yes. But I look toward the pipes, from where this very night a slow and living population will renew itself in single file. So would I renew the lethal sugar every night? like someone who can no longer sleep without the eagerness of a rite. And every dawn lead myself to the pavilion with the compulsion of greeting the statues that my sweaty night has been erecting. I trembled with wicked pleasure at the vision of that double life of a sorceress. And I also trembled at the sign of plaster drying: the compulsion to live that would burst my internal mold. A harsh instant of choosing between two paths that, I thought, are bidding each other farewell, and sure that either choice would be a sacrifice: me or my soul. I chose. And today I secretly boast in my heart a plaque of virtue: “This house has been disinfested.”

The fifth story is called “Leibniz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches.

(Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson.)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The Tombs of Atuan

I'm about five chapters in. This was hard to get into at first, very different from A Wizard of Earthsea, not the same sweeping setting and pacy narrative, but I slowly settled into the world of halls, tombs, walls and religious ritual/cruelty, and it began unfolding itself, semi-revealing — as with the first book — a complex, ancient world... And now (Spoiler alert) a wizard has turned up, so I can't wait to read the rest of it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Finished Tombs of Atuan, 5 out of 5 magelights

Going to read The Farthest Shore this week. I haven't enjoyed reading fiction like this in a long time, to be honest.
 

droid

Well-known member
Dont stop after the farthest shore, make sure you read Tehanu, The Other Wind and then Tales from Earthsea.
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
i just finished the dispossessed recently so maybe i should try those recommendations out. i enjoyed the dispossessed but i spose a lot of it felt like ruminations on society, which i enjoyed, but sometimes found them a bit long. couldn't wait to get back to Shevek's present on Urras

i've been reading a lot of books about societal/ecological collapse recently. just finished the disenchanted earth by Richard Seymour. was one of the best in its balance of sadness, pragmatic analysis, and, not exactly optimism, but maybe avoidance of doom is the best way of putting it. i really like his writing style and it's a collection of short essays so that probably helps avoid the doom-spiral.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Been reading "The Farthest Shore". Not sure if it's the mood I'm in but this seems a bit weaker than the first two Earthsea books.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I liked left hand of darkess more than the dispossessed. Tempted to get the earthsea books, they seem like they could be a good tucked up in bed on a wintry night kind of read.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's funny but I feel like the farthest shore is a bit weaker because she's got closer to the characters, Ged is a bit more likeable, she's even trying to make it funny

Which was what she moved towards in Tomb of Atuan after the somewhat surreal distance and sweep of the first book. The first book feels like an ancient legend recounted (albeit with superarticulacy).

Anyway maybe this is all bollocks and I'll regret every word once I've finished TFS
 
Top