7/6/2023 0 Comments Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett![]() ![]() In this inventive and compelling novel, Dumas brings an extraordinary period of history vividly to life with much excitement and romance. ![]() The wedding brings noblemen from all over the world to Paris resulting in the notorious Saint Bartholomew Massacre, where thousands of Protestants are killed. Several important political events have led up to this marriage including the mysterious murder of Henri de Navarre's mother, cleverly plotted by Catherine de Medici. Henri de Navarre is a Protestant who later will become the beloved King Henri IV. Marguerite is King Charles' sister and the daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Medici, all firm Catholics. Queen Margot begins in 1572 with the marriage of Marguerite de Valois to Henri de Navarre. The last years of King Charles IX's reign in France were dominated by religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. ![]()
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7/6/2023 0 Comments Klara in the sun![]() ![]() ![]() At one point, she and another AF, Rosa, witness two taxi drivers getting into a fight. ![]() Egoless and naive, Klara believes that her mission is to make her eventual owner happy, and so she has to find out everything she can about human feelings. When the novel opens, Klara is in a store full of other AFs, gleaning what she can about the human world from the window, like a goldfish whose whole world is one room. Ishiguro's eighth novel, Klara and the Sun, is narrated by another kind of yoked creature, an AF, or Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot designed as a companion for children. In The Remains of the Day, a masterpiece of repressed emotion, a butler comes to feel he has wasted his life in subservience to a Nazi sympathist. Much of Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is told from the perspective of the ancillary, the dependent, the tangential and functionary: In Never Let Me Go, what begins as a boarding school novel gradually becomes dystopian horror, when we realize it is being narrated by clones being raised to have their organs harvested for the general population. "Is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?" asks George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch. ![]() ![]() So you can be this fly on the wall and hear these extraordinary debates over philosophy, over personnel. Form about 1969 through 1980 he just made hundreds of tape recordings, he taped all of the executive board meetings of the union from about 1973 through 1980. ![]() "The tape recordings are really extraordinary. On having access to dozens of tape recordings made by Chavez: He embodied an awful lot of contradictions and that's the full picture that I'm trying to convey." He was brilliant and he was nurturing, and he was ruthless at the same time and he was pragmatic and he was dreamy. He's been reduced almost to a very two-dimensional person and sort of sanctified in ways that I think don't do him any service because his complexity is part of what makes him really interesting. He was a very complicated guy. "The story has been told in very hagiographic terms. On Chavez the man versus Chavez the myth: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Liked best? Well, Joan Didion's writing, of course! Liked least? What a weird clash of writing style and narrator style. What did you like best about Slouching Towards Bethlehem? What did you like least? character-the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life-is the source from which self-respect springs.” ― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem "People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues. Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you? Nostalgia, her voice brings you back to 90's What does Diane Keaton bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book? My Misspent Youth: Essays by Meghan Daum is the 90's equivalent but this has dated less well What other book might you compare Slouching Towards Bethlehem to, and why? Maybe originally intended to bridge the void between hippy culture and there parents it somehow is equally relevant to a person who has come a good few generations later. ![]() To me the book was written by Didion to communicate over a generational gap. The Content of the book is so insightful as someone born in the 90's the story's contained really illustrate a generation of people. I love Diane Keaton's Voice and she felt like the perfect choice for this book. ![]() Where does Slouching Towards Bethlehem rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far? ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Tim snyder on tyranny![]() ![]() ![]() So I've spent the last 25 years writing, as you say, these books about how regimes change and about how political atrocities are committed. I'm a historian of Eastern and central Europe. I'm an American, but I'm not a historian of the United States. I would call it an arrival, an arrival back into the United States. SNYDER: Well, you just called it a departure. It is a slim, almost pocket-sized work subtitled "Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century." Snyder writes out of concern about the rise of Donald Trump, and his lessons range from such personal instruction as stand out and establish a private life to more common political fare like listen for dangerous words and beware of paramilitaries. So the Yale historian's latest book called "On Tyranny" is a departure. Timothy Snyder has written some sprawling, compelling books about war, genocide and the descent into dictatorship in mid-20th century Europe. ![]() ![]() ![]() In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. ![]() The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. The characters are so well drawn and the plot so well paced, I couldn't put it down.' - Daily Telegraph In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). It's rare that you get the opportunity to review a masterpiece, but To Paradise, definitively, is one. ![]() 'T hree stories far apart in space and time but each unique in their power to summon the joy and complexity of love, the pain of loss. From Hanya Yanagihara, author of the modern classic A Little Life, To Paradise is a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia. Signed first edition (First edition, first printing, signed by the author) The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller and one of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2022. ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman![]() ![]() There were a lot of lengthy info-dumps, though, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that I had problems with the world. There definitely was no shortage of action, and while the plot twists were fairly predictable, they were also enjoyable and interesting. I’d heard that the bondage fetishism doesn’t take over until the fifth or sixth book, and while it’s definitely there in Tarnsman of Gor, it wasn’t enough to make me put the book down.Īs a swashbuckling action-adventure tale, I thought this book was pretty good. I don’t swing that way, but I thought I’d give the first book a try. A typical marriage ceremony consists of the groom binding up his bride, carrying her off on a giant bird, and throwing off her clothes to “show her people what had been the fate of. ![]() On Gor, slavery is not only normalized, it’s romanticized. Come to think of it, I haven’t done a review of Princess of Mars yet, so that’s as good a reason as any to reread it!)īesides the association with Sword and Planet, the Gor books have also spawned a subculture of BDSM, and for good reason. ![]() ( Princess of Mars, The Dying Earth, etc. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, since I heard that it’s a classic of the Sword and Planet subgenre and I’ve really liked the other Sword and Planet books that I’ve read. ![]() 7/5/2023 0 Comments Stephen king hodges trilogy![]() However, many of the staff in the hospital where Brady now resides believe that he is recovering at an impossible rate, and that he may be faking his injuries to avoid facing charges for his crimes. ![]() Hodges and Holly thwarted Brady's plans and left the killer in a vegetative state from which he never regained consciousness. Mercedes who, six years ago, plotted to blow up a rock concert venue packed with teenagers. All the dead are connected by a common thread: each of them has, in the past, been in contact with mass murderer Brady Hartsfield, the notorious Mr. Given only months to live, he finds himself drawn into a recent spree of suicides. ![]() Retired detective Bill Hodges, who now with his sidekick Holly runs the private investigation agency Finders Keepers, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. ![]() Mercedes, King announced that the novel's antagonist, Brady Hartsfield, would be making a return in this book. At the 2015 Edgar Awards, while accepting the award for Best Novel for Mr. On June 10, the new title End of Watch was announced. Francis College on Apunder the title The Suicide Prince. The book was first announced at an event at St. End of Watch is a crime novel by American writer Stephen King, the third volume of a trilogy focusing on Detective Bill Hodges, following Mr. ![]() ![]() ![]() Her crossdressing ruse is not merely a physical inconvenience, but also mentally taxing and spiritually painful. ![]() Most powerfully, the main character's arc echoes the emotional experiences of many trans people. In addition, transgender experiences are acknowledged in the rules of the world's story: Eon has its main character perform a setting-appropriate equivalent of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), imbibing a substance that will help her emulate maleness in the same way that testosterone is used by real life trans men.* The book does this in several ways: first, transgender experiences are acknowledged by having the main character discuss gender issues with a transgender woman. This is a damn shame.Įon bucks the trend by accepting transgender experiences as central to its discussion of gender. While a lot of crossdressing adventure stories deal with issues of gender and sexism in some way, very few acknowledge transgender people, let alone engage with the trans perspective on gender. ![]() ![]() Her blue eyes are on my chest and before I know it, her hand is there, tracing the lines of my tattoo, brushing soft strokes along the outline, trailing down to my bicep where the tail curls around my upper arm. “Feels as if we’re the only people alive in the world right now.” I like it,” I say, tossing my shirt on the floor and turning back to her wide gaze. I watched a few episodes of that crazy-ass show. “Oh,” she says as she pats at her hair and throws a glance around the room, squinting as she takes in the time on the desk clock. ![]() She straightens herself, scooting her bottom up until our faces are closer. ![]() Her lashes flutter as she opens her eyes. “Your wish is my command,” I say, easing her out of the way to lift my tight black running shirt off over my head. “Take off your shirt.” Her hands tangle in my hair. “What are you snickering about, sleep talker?” I ask her. She sighs when I lean down to smell her hair.Īnother mumble and then she chuckles-actually laughs. I shift so the arm she’s lying on slides more fully around her. I won’t, and maybe, just maybe, I can get her to go out with me-for real, not any of this pretend bullshit. She’s probably going off on me in her dream. ![]() She mumbles something, and a little frown knits her brow. I feel entirely content and happy right now, and I’m not sure that’s happened in a really long time. “This is the most agreeable I’ve ever seen you,” I say in a hushed voice, not wanting to wake her yet needing to talk to her. She’s so gorgeous, all soft and pliant, but I didn’t come here for that. ![]() |