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rwmg

rwmg

Joined May 2017

Mainly mysteries, SF, history (fact and fiction)
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Hunger by Knut Hamsun
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rwmg
Hunger | Knut Hamsun
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Leftcoastzen I remember loving this but I read it long ago. 10h
14 likes1 comment
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rwmg
Hunger | Knut Hamsun
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Tamra I just saw someone on Booktube praising this one; I‘d never known about it before. Looking forward to your thoughts on it. 23h
20 likes1 comment
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Pickpick

Percy Jackson journeys to the Bermuda Triangle in a quest for the Golden Fleece.

Another enthralling adventure. I hope it's not the last we see of Tyson.

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Pickpick

In the guise of concern for their welfare, DICOMY makes use of another inspection to try to take control of the children in Marsyas.

More heavy-handed and preachy than its predecessor but this doesn't quite overwhelm the whimsical tone which kept me reading.

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Introductory Statistics | Barbara Illowsk
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My March Storygraph stats - though they don't seem to have the same definitions of genres as I do.

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Untitled | To Be Confirmed
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Pickpick

Linus Baker, a DICMY (the Department In Charge of Magical Youth) inspector, comes to Marsyas Island to inspect the orphanage there.

There were times when I thought the AUTHOR'S MESSAGE was getting a bit heavy-handed, but the characters worm their way into your heart enough to overcome that and make this book a delight.

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Baked to Death | Dean James
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Pickpick

When a group of re-enactors turns up for a week-long festival one of the candidates for their leader is murdered by eating a poisoned fig pastry. Meanwhile Simon has his own problems with the arrival of his academic and vampiric mentor as one of the suspects

Nice final novel wrapping up various plot lines, though some threads are still left hanging. I'm pleased to say I got the who right even if i didn't get the why.

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Bookwormjillk Both the lunch and the book look great! 6d
32 likes1 comment
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rwmg
Baked to Death | Dean James
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I haven‘t been dead all that long, but I‘m getting used to it.

#FirstLineFriday
@ShyBookOwl

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Pickpick

Interesting and thought-provoking essay by Ursula K. Le Guin which deserves a PICK but accompanied by a foreword by Donna Haraway that I didn't understand at all and would have been a BAIL if it hadn't been so short.

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Decorated To Death | Dean James
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Mehso-so

A very unpleasant TV home makeover star comes to Blitherington Hall and is not surprisingly murdered. Unfortunately the only person without an alibi is Lady Prunella.

It had its amusing moments but the ending was a bit too Agatha Christie-ish, with a denouement as the suspects gather in the drawing room to hear the detective solve the case. Why read a pale imitation when you can read the original?

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On The Enemy's Side | Hamour Baika
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Pickpick

Two gay men find love during the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

Difficult to read at times because the stakes if they were caught were so high. Another thing that stuck out to me in the flashbacks to the men's earlier lives was what a violent society Iran was even before the Revolution. The author has a playlist for the book on YouTube with some surprising choices, which was interesting to listen to while reading.

Reggie Sounds fantastic. Stacked! 1w
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Posted to Death | Dean James
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Pickpick

Simon and Giles (still not a couple) attend a literary conference where an imposter turns up claiming to be the person behind one of Simon's pen names. When the imposter is murdered, Simon and Giles investigate.

Fun, but I'm continuing mainly because I want to know when Simon and Giles will get together and when Simon will tell Giles the truth about himself.

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Faked to Death | Dean James
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TheSpineView 💜📖☕️ 1w
23 likes1 comment
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rwmg
Posted to Death | Dean James
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A US vampire moves to a small English village. Because medication reduces his “condition“ to a mild allergy to garlic and eliminates the need to drink blood he can fit in with his new surroundings. Then the local postmistress is murdered and he is drawn into the investigation.

It had its moments, but not as good as the author's books set in the American South. Perhaps you need to be part of a culture yourself for this kind of humour to work.

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Posted to Death | Dean James
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maich Great choice🥰 2w
30 likes1 comment
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Childhoods End | Arthur C. Clarke
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Pickpick

The Overlords take over Earth, ushering in a golden age. But what is their purpose?

Classic SF novel. Obviously dated in some respects, but still a great story.

@RamsFan1963 @ClassicLSFBC

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Childhood's End | Arthur Charles Clarke
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RamsFan1963 I hope you're enjoying the lunch and the book. 2w
TheBookHippie Looks so yummy! 2w
26 likes1 stack add2 comments
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Pickpick

Novella about an Icelandic trader who travels to Mongolia in the 8th century and returns with a herd of horses led by a white mare.

A fascinating story and great fun exploring the people and places referred to.

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Fixing to Die | Miranda James
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Pickpick

The Ducote Sisters are asked to investigate spooky goings-on at a friend's home. When a fellow-guest is found dead in his bed, was his death caused by the spirit world or something more mundane?

This seems to have been the last in the series, but I have questions about what happened later. Did the Sisters adopt Benjy? Did he go to study at Athena College and meet Charlie and Diesel? (Or were we told in the main series and I've just forgotten?)

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Fixing to Die | Miranda James
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“Do you mean to sit there and tell me you think Cliffwood really is haunted?” Miss An‘gel Ducote regarded her sister with a frown.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

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Digging Up the Dirt | Miranda James
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Pickpick

Soon after Hadley Partridge inherits the family home from his brother Hamish, a skeleton is found in the grounds. Could it be Hamish's wife, Callie, who disappeared about the same time Hadley left the neighbourhood, and allegedly ran away to join him?

Yet another breathtakingly handsome man causing chaos. We do get to meet a certain feline and his human after being teased with the possibility through most of the book.

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Dead with the Wind | Miranda James
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Pickpick

The Ducote sisters (and Benjy and the animals) visit their cousin whose granddaughter is getting married but the girl dies during a storm the night before the wedding.

There was a totally unexpected twist near the end but also a trope repeated from the previous book. I'm curious to see if it appears again in the next book.

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Digging Up the Dirt | Miranda James
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Pickpick

An old friend turns up on the Ducote sisters' doorstep, convinced her family are trying to kill her. Unfortunately, the family soon figures out where she's gone and follow, straining the sisters' hospitality to its limits, and that's before the deaths start.

First in a spin-off series. I could definitely have done with a family tree to keep Rosabelle's family straight in my mind.

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Panpan

While Darren and Alana are on holiday in Italy they get a call from Aggie, whose girlfriend is working on a dig where the archaeologist in charge has been found dead in a trench. Did he fall or was he pushed?

The author obviously has not done his homework about pre-Roman Italy. A relationship between Etruscan and Turkish is a stretch, to put it mildly, and what are wild turkeys doing in Italy some 2000 years before Columbus?

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The Vienna Connection | Dick Rosano
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Mehso-so

Darren Priest, formerly an elite interrogator with the US Army and now a writer for a wine magazine, is asked to look into nefarious goings-on connected with a bank in Vienna.

For almost every bite of food and sip of a drink we are told where Priest was eating or drinking, who the server was, and the precise origin of the wine, beer, or coffee. Even allowing for a drug having been slipped into his morning espresso, this verged on the obsessive.

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The Vienna Connection | Dick Rosano
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The Vienna Connection | Dick Rosano
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“Hey.” I heard the voice from a foggy distance. “You can‘t sleep here.”

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

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Mehso-so

Since celaphods like octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish are about as far from us as you can get in the animal kingdom, Peter Godfrey-Smith uses the differences between them and us to explore the nature of sentience and consciousness and how far back in evolution they can be traced. ⬇

rwmg I must admit I found the Precambrian and Cambrian a bit of a slog to get through but other parts were fascinating and thought-provoking.

However, there is no excuse these days for an ebook not providing links between the endnotes and the portion of the text being discussed further.
3w
30 likes1 comment
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Balibee146 I just added this to my wishlist at the weekend. Hope it is as good as it looks! 3w
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Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt
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Mehso-so

Marcellus, an octopus exhibited in an aquarium, is bored, while Tova , the aquarium's night cleaner, is working as a form of grief therapy. Together they may be able to resolve each other's problems.

I didn't hate it. I thought it was too obvious too soon who Cameron was, and I wasn't convinced by Marcellus. An octopus POV should be a lot stranger than Marcellus's musings. The story was cute enough to keep me going but it didn't enthuse me.

CSeydel Exactly! 4w
32 likes1 comment
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rwmg
Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt
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TheBookHippie Such a lovely read. 4w
29 likes1 comment
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The Gone-Away World | Nick Harkaway
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Pickpick

The unnamed narrator is a firefighter in a post-apocalyptic world. In the first chapter he and his crew are called out to a fire, but then change to a flashback for more than half the book.

Up until the big reveal about 2/3 of the way through, we followed some very, very funny detours but I don't think the actual story was enough to carry the reader on by itself, particularly as I kept losing track of who was who.

PICK with reservations.

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The Gone-Away World | Nick Harkaway
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The Gone-Away World | Nick Harkaway
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too busy battling the Evangelist‘s blazing determination to ban on religious grounds several of the texts students are required to study that year. Gulliver‘s Travels survives the scissors, as does A Christmas Carol, but Modern Short Stories in English is consigned for ever to the forbidden zone. Sadly, it is so dull that not even this recommendation can make any of us read it more than once.

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Pickpick

Building + Culture = Architecture.

The author takes some buildings he sees as iconic (emphasising this is a personal choice which would be different for somebody from a different cultural background) and how the cultural meanings they accumulate make them architecturally significant. An interesting book which could be improved with better pictures as the photos don't really illustrate the points the author is making.

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The Kalevala | Elias Lnnrot
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Pickpick

Finnish national epic telling the story of Väinämöinen, a shaman-type figure, Ilmarinen, a smith, and Lemminkäinen, whose defining feature is his promiscuity, and their trips to the Northland seeking wives and fighting wars.

Thank goodness for the Wikipedia summary of the story because I spent a lot of time trying to work out how the episodes all fitted together. It was interesting and I'm glad I've read it but I don't think I would do so again.

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Wrap-Up List | Steven Arntson
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Untitled | To Be Confirmed
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Arcadia: A novel | Iain Pears
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Honourable mentions to "Under The Whispering Door" and "The Masquerades of Spring"

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The Kalevala | Elias Lnnrot
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Happy Kalevala/Finnish Culture Day.

“Kalevala Day (Finnish: Kalevalan päivä), also known as Finnish Culture Day (Finnish: suomalaisen kulttuurin päivä), is celebrated on 28 February in honor of Finnish culture and the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.“

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevala_Day

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rwmg
Arcadia: A novel | Iain Pears
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Pickpick

In 1960s Oxford, Henry Lytten, a younger colleague of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, is amusing his friends with the worldbuilding for Anterwold, the setting for the Story. Then his cat sitter finds what looks like a portal in his cellar. Meanwhile in the 2220s a research station on Mull has made a discovery but is it a way to travel back in time or a way to travel to alternative universes?

rwmg Good mental workout following the discussions about the nature of time travel and/or alternative universes and keeping track of all the narrative threads. Even when you think it's all come together there is still one last pleasing revelation. 1mo
Ruthiella I loved “The Instance of the Fingerpost” by Pears but haven‘t picked up anything since. This sounds good! 1mo
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rwmg
Dead Until Dark | Harris Charlaine
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Pickpick

#coffeeandabook

Sookie Stackhouse is a telepath. When a vampire comes to town she finds his company very restful because she can't hear his thoughts. A lot of not quite prostitutes are turning up dead and the police's main suspect is Sookie's brother. Somebody also seems to be stirring up anti-vampire prejudice so Sookie and Bill the Vampire team up to find the culprit.

The whole thing is quite ridiculous and I loved every trashy moment of it.

Reggie lol 1mo
21 likes1 comment
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rwmg
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Mehso-so

A biography of Marcus Aurelius interspersed with thoughts of a modern Stoic psychotherapist.

The historical parts were interesting, the self-help ideas of the author less so. The author REALLY doesn't like Hadrian and seems to read the Historia Augusta less critically than most historians.