What are you reading now - and then

[slave2u]

brian keene - ghoul. reasonable horror, a little bit stephen king meets light weight splatterpunk.

[Stavros]

Becoming Michelle Obama (Viking, 201

This is an eloquent, often moving, and I hope inspiring book for those who feel they don't have the capacity to improve themselves. The book is in three parts, a childhood and youth in Chicago, marriage and maturity with Barack, and in the third, the experience of being the 'First Lady' of the USA. The first part is the strongest and most interesting, setting an important background in the 'just coping' end of Black Chicago with a very strong family infrastructure and two parents who were always firm but gave Michelle and her brother the space in which to grow on their own terms. Her career at Princeton and as a lawyer in Chicago gives the reader a strong sense of her belief in social justice, while her courtship with her husband has some delightful moments. So strongly woven is the first and to a lesser extent the second phase, I felt the third and last was a bit rushed and mostly concerned with the difficulties of raising two children in the White House. There is little gossip about Washington politics, some recollections of meeting Mandela and Queen Elizabeth but few other politicians make it into the book, the one exception being some negative comment on the man who succeeded her husband to occupy the White House.

A good read and recommended.

why does the digit eight become an emoji? How to stop it?

[Laphroaig]

why does the digit eight become an emoji? How to stop it?

Put a space between the 8 and the bracket, 8 )

[Stavros]

Many thanks, I thought there would be a simple way of doing it!

[tacocorpv2]

Dark Tower series by mister King, quite a read if you like this type of literature.

[broncofan]

The 7 and a half deaths of evelyn hardcastle-this book is described as Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day and it's a good description. It involves a murder at a high profile event and the main character wakes up each day inhabiting the body of a different person at the party.

It was well reviewed and though the ending is good because it explains what is otherwise a strange premise, it gets tedious in the middle. The author is very pleased with his ability to bury dozens and dozens of clues in the middle of the book that the main character sees pieces of from the perspective of each person at the party. This makes for interesting reading at first but the novelty wears off.

In conclusion: I found it exciting at the beginning, tedious in the middle, but wrapped up surprisingly well at the end. Might be worth a look.

[Nick Danger]

Currently re-reading War and Peace for maybe the 5th time. I used to read current fiction and some alleged non-fiction, but now I just stick to the classics - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Nabokov, et al.

Modern fiction is occasionally entertaining. Mostly it's formulaic and dull, and that's not merely an opinion. I strongly advise anyone who feels patronized by modern fare to get off the media tit and suckle instead at the ever-flowing fountain of classical thought.

[broncofan]

Currently re-reading War and Peace for maybe the 5th time. I used to read current fiction and some alleged non-fiction, but now I just stick to the classics - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Nabokov, et al.

Modern fiction is occasionally entertaining. Mostly it's formulaic and dull, and that's not merely an opinion. I strongly advise anyone who feels patronized by modern fare to get off the media tit and suckle instead at the ever-flowing fountain of classical thought.

I've read at least one work from each of the authors you mention above but three of them only because I took Russian Literature in college, so I also read Turgenev and Lermontov. I also find most of the popular fiction to be pretty bad and I don't have high standards. I've already said this in the thread but a decent compromise I think are detective novels from forty or fifty years ago. Jim Thompson, Ross Macdonald, John D. Macdonald, Donald Westlake, etc. The writing was simply better but the subject matter every bit as dark. I think I've read pretty much everything from these four. I also read Dashiell Hammett's The Red Harvest and though it had some bright spots was not my favorite. A bit convoluted if I'm honest.

Occasionally I'll go outside that genre and read sci fi or spy novels. Read The Stars My Destination recently which I enjoyed a lot and A Coffin For Dimitrios by Eric Ambler which was pretty good. This helps me avoid having to grapple with the big ideas while I'm reading for enjoyment but doesn't force me to read a lot of the absolute garbage that makes the bestseller lists (ie. James Patterson, Stuart Woods, even Harlan Coben….occasionally a decent plot but awful prose and embarrassingly bad ideas).

[Stavros]

Kevin O'Rourke, A Short History of Brexit (2019)
Although a biased account, as the author has Irish/Danish roots and lives part of the year in France, the book is a well-written view of what Brexit means and how it happened, tracing the UK's relationship with the EU from the detached views of the 1950s through the 1960s rejection by France to membership and beyond in 1973. O'Rourke is particularly good on Anglo-Irish complications and the extent to which the notorious 'Backstop' in Northern Ireland reflects age-old suspicions and enmities for geographical as well as political reasons.
The book does not really address some of the issues around sovereignty and 'ever closer union' but is recommended for anyone not exhausted by Brexit who wants an insight into what it means.

[sukumvit boy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/b...el-maddow.html