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Starting my #doublespin on a lazy Saturday morning. @TheAromaofBooks
My October TBR for #Bookspin, #HauntedSelf, and #CasttheDie (first 13 with the tagged as my Lucky Book), plus several alternates since I have so many newer titles on my TBR and those are sometimes difficult to acquire in a timely manner without breaking the budget. (And because I was too excited about spooky reading to stop at 20.)
And here's Camille, making sure I'm doing it right.
@thearomaofbooks @puddlejumper
Books were their drugs, the magic carpets onto which they flung themselves in order to be borne away somewhere else, books lifted them up like powerful caressing hands and cradled them like mothers do, as though they were babies to be held and fed, they fell asleep, sated with reading, then woke again, into pages of words, unknown, beckoning, a new world, and started another book.
Pic from the Hardmans' House, Liverpool.
Spiralling this week. Full of regret and confusion and sadness.
Going to submerge myself in the surreal, experimental narrative that Cărtărescu has created here.
pickFor the first couple of chapters, I wondered if the form of this novel was going to become overdone and affected - a POV narrated by a book, disagreeing at times with the boy at the center of the story. But then i relaxed and just let the story wash over me - and I loved it.
This isnt an easy story. Benny and his mother Annabelle are having a very hard time, traumatised by the death of their father/husband, ⬇️
pickI loved this book and the quiet Wednesday to finish it, spent waiting for my dishwasher repair person ( easy, not expensive fix) and the no show repair person for our non-working landline which I want to get rid of but my husband is continuing to be ridiculous about parting with things, but I got this lovely day so I won‘t part with him. Yet. 😉
pickLow pick. The writing as always with Hollinghurst is gorgeous, but he has an old fashioned way of writing that makes me question what decade or even century we are in.
This is deeply a character study. It feels very slow moving but you go through most of this man's life He is bi-racial in England, a student an actor and a writer
It was a big too slow for me but I appreciate the beautiful writing.
"...seeming to know him, or at least to recognise his face, from where or from when they would surely recall if only they could concentrate hard enough. But they couldn't. No one can, in this world that Godley wrought. Something keeps getting in the way, keeps turning their thoughts aside, keeps blunting them, or absorbing them altogether, and soon something else comes along to engage their ever-waning attention."
pickI read this too late for the book club meeting for which it was selected, and although I can't claim to understand it, I did enjoy it. I think Banville is saying something about the nature of truth, creation of reality, the author/story relationship, and perhaps the short attention spans and anti-intellectualism of our times. A lot of it is over my head, but I like how he portrays the characters.
