On the first chapter of... The Devilfish.., for them who dont know who he is, a old school poker player, telling stories of the old days in poker, before it became popular, great read x x
Can't get enough of Robert B Parket's Jesse Stone novels at the moment although I'm a big fan of John Le Carre's work.
Re-reading Orwell's Animal Farm. Someone game me a book voucher for Christmas and I've been meaning to get it fort some time. One of my favourite books.
Charity shop book ....... Girl With A Dragon Tattoo .... £1, I have seen the film, 2 versions, the American and Swedish so reading the book should give me some idea what has been left out of the films.
Re reading - for the umpteenth time - Bill Brysons " A short history of nearly everything " . Thoroughly recommend it.
Now moved on to The Girl Who Played With Fire and I have to say its the first time I think the book is better than the films, the books are a good read and even though the films are good, I've seen the trilogy, the books seem to be me more absorbing.
I'll second what I have written above as I have now finished the trilogy and what a good read I found it to be. It went from a thriller to a kind of spy story and although drawn out, the descriptions of the areas of Sweden didn't mean a thing to me as I have never been and could never pronounce the places, the overall effect of the trilogy was to not want me to put the books down although I read until the early hours of the morning. Stieg Larsson is no long with us which is a pitty as I think this Blomkvist/Salander franchise could have carried on for a while yet, but none the less I enjoyed all 3 books.
Jo Nesbo is a new name to me Charlie but there again there are a lot of established writers whose work I have yet to read.
The Secrets Of Station X : How The Bletchley Park Codebraker's Helped Win The War. A fascinating insight to what went on in the biggest concentration of brilliant minds of the generation, not all about Alan Turing either. There was fun and frolics as well as some genius displayed throughout the war, Bletchley is a fascinating place to visit as well I would like to go back again one day.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky The "underground" of the mind is the treacherous terrain into which Dostoevsky here delves deep, exposing its most buried fears and desires. I really love this book!!!
One Stranger to Another by Edwin E. Smith Very Good!!! A small review: Edwin Smith talks about revision, false starts, what poems will last and why it is important to write not just for contemporary publications but for the audiences of Frost, Whitman, and even Keats and Shakespeare. He discusses the value of finding your own voice. And he tells very movingly, how he “often left my warehouse job after a fourteen-hour shift and wrote a sonnet the same way another man might drink a beer or watch a ball game.” Since I felt so connected with the poet, I was surprised that I had trouble getting into his poems. One that Smith considers his best, “Springtime Come,” contains this verse about a seven-year old in a school yard: “…tired from the recess and tarrying there, / giving no thought or fancy to the day / long years later when heavy with days / solitude would be in itself complete,” which to me seems lifeless and excessive. The images of the first poems are good enough, but the poems seem over-written and reaching for meaning and importance they don’t earn. Then in “Aquarium” we are treated to a rich vision of the moon as “some big fish / swimming blunt, / slow and deliberate” and we are suddenly through the doorway of words into a world of surreal beauty. “Dark of the Moon” speculates about what would have happened if they had left Buzz Aldrin stranded on the moon, “separated by more than time and space / from even the rain and the wind.” The moon seems to be a touchstone again revisited in “Café Satellites” “Other planets have many moons, / is ours a spoiled brat only child / twisted insane by loneliness / bound to us not by love but desperation?” Wow! One of my personal favorites is “Never the Jailer” though I wish Smith would have inverted the two final words “like something worn upon the brow / that isn’t a crown quite.” There is such a nice thing going with the “worn” ”brow” “crown” sounds that the vowels and consonants of “quite” sidetrack. Besides the inverted word order strives too much to be poetic. Getting published in small literary journals may be of questionable benefit, but reciting poems before an open mike helps iron out things the eye may not see, but the ear hears. The people who write poetry and those of us who read it are not “One Stranger to Another.” In fact, we may feel we know each other more intimately than we know our spouses or children. We share an experience, and more significantly, the challenge of grasping that experience in words…
