chlorine wants to read in 2015

I'm French and I want to say for my defence that I picked up my nickname on the site before I knew it was an English word. :p
I read mostly novels, both in French and English, including a lot of science-fiction and fantasy (mostly science-fiction).

I have no set goals for 2015 but I would like to spend more time reading. I would also like to read more nonfiction books.

Registering to book related websites such as LT has allowed my to almost eliminate my TBR pile other the years: I realised that it was more convenient for me to add book to my wishlist here rather than buying them. I still have a small TBR pile though, through gifts and loans and books I can't resist picking up at the bookcrossing monthly meeting. So I guess one of my goal this year is to read all the books that are currently in my TBR pile (7 at the moment), and not increase my TBR's size. :)

I also have a weak lifelong goal to read all novels having received the Hugo or Nebula awards. I have read three of these last years (which I did not like so much), so technically I've made progress... We'll see how I go about this in 2015.

TBR pile as of January, 2015:

Pour en finir avec la fabrique des garçons, by Sylvie Ayral and Yves Raibaud -> finished on March, 12
Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge -> finished on January, 27
Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks -> tried to read and did not finish
Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson -> finished on March, 30
Oryx and Crate, by Margaret Atwood -> finished on march, 20
Fortunately the Milk, by Neil Gaiman -> finished on april, 16
Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross -> Finished on February, 18

Acquired in 2015:

Not that kind of girl by Lena Dunham (given to me on January, 10) -> finished on april, 11
Le livre de l'eau by Edward Limonov (given to me on January, 25) -> finished on May 20, 2015
Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry (acquired on april, 14) -> finished on May, 23
Nineteen Seventy Four by David Peace (acquired on april, 14) -> finished on May, 31
What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe (given to me on June, 5)
Le Slynx by Tatiana Tolstoi (picked up on June 9)
Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason (picked up on June 9) -> finished on June, 19
L'analphabète by Agota Kristof (acquired on August, 21)
Traité des passions de l'âme by Antonio Lobo Anutnes (picked up on July, 14)
The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (picked up on August, 5)
The first fifteen lives of Harry August by Claire North (picked up in ugust, 5)
Sur les quatre routes by Le Corbusier
Un feu amical by Avraham B. Yehoshua

Ongoing series that I would like to keep track of:
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
The Culture series by Iain M. Banks
Pour en finir avec la fabrique des garçons

As a fellow French reader I'm looking forward to following your thread.

And I likewise, though I understand from the introduction thread that you will be reading many books in Japanese. :)

Hi Chlorine, nice to see you here!

Bonjour et bienvenu chlorine, unfortunately that's near the limit of my French now (or, fortunately for you, I experiment no further). I used to love the original Dune series by Frank Herbert, a Hugo winner I seem to remember, and also the Foundation series of Asimov, that I guess must also have won at times. I can tell I'm on holiday, Im thinking how nice it would be to improve that French of mine, if only I had time.

I too am a wannabe French reader. I whittle away at it slowly trying to improve my vocabulary. Looking forward to your commentary on your reading.

welcome, chlorine! I'm curious what your username means in French -- more than the name of the chemical element? I read very little sci-fi/fantasy so I'm interested to read about it on other readers' threads :) Looking forward to yours.

FlorenceArt: Really nice to see you too, and looking forwards to learn about your readings! :)

TonyH: Thanks for the trying to speak French! :) I have indeed read and enjoyed the Dune and Foundation series when I was a teenager. I know how you feel about improving your French: I often feel the same way about improving my Russian but never put much work in it...

Poquette: hope you find some books, in French or other languages, that you really enjoy!

detailmuse: my username has no precise meaning in French but it is evocative of chlorine (which is "chlore" in French). I was really surprised that this was an actual English word! :) Maybe I will interest you in reading more science-fiction this year, who knows?... ;)

Russian! sacre bleu, I may go green with envy.

Don't, as my proficiency with the language would hardly impress anybody! ;)

BTW, Chlorine, I didn't try to "speak" French to you because I cannot write it. I learned by listening first, then reading. I have never done any drill in writing, so even though I recognize what I read, there is no way I can reproduce it without looking up every word for spelling, accents, etc. As you know, many verb forms sound the same but are spelled differently, and this trips me up sometimes when I think I want to write something in French. Very frustrating, but overall I am more interested in reading and speaking.

Yes I know French spelling is really hard, and it sometimes confuses kids who are learning to read also (though for learning to read as a kid I think it must be much more easy than for English speaking kids!). Not only are some words pronounced the same but spelled differently, but the converse also happens, e.g.: "Les poules couvent au couvent" (The hens sit on their eggs in the convent): exact same spelling and completely different meanings!

Anyway I think you're very right to concentrate on reading and speaking. My main use for _writing_ English is to communicate on forums and the reason I do this so much is I have a hard time finding quality forums in French (I suspect this is mostly due to the numbers: with so many more English-speaking people there is bound to be more variety and more quality in English than in French...)

"Les poules couvent au couvent" Yes, we have similar traps in English! I think it all comes down to vocabulary and reading as much as possible to see words and phrases in context. Unfortunately, I am a couple of hundred years past childhood so at my age the learning curve is much longer. I don't think dementia has set in yet, but my memory doesn't retain like it did when I was younger so absorbing and retaining new words is even more challenging. But I do love the sound of French and I mostly read aloud to myself to keep my accent fresh.

Anyway, it is good to have you in Club Read!

I hope dementia is far a way and we can talk about books a lot! :) Thanks for the welcome.

Hello Clemence. I thought I would check in to see if you are still enjoying The Goldfinch. I'm looking forward to your thoughts, and hope you like it as much as I did.

I am very impressed by all of the people here who can speak or read in multiple languages. I wish that I had continued learning French. The very little that I did learn lets me read quotes that are sometimes in books, but even then, I sometimes need to use a translator.

I'm looking forward to hear about your reading this year.

Salut Clémence. I'm looking forward to your thread this year. I try to include some French books each year, and am always looking for good recommendations - especially given the similar interest in sci-fi/fantasy. Enjoy Club Read!

Thanks for dropping by, NanaCC and ljbwell! :)

I now have a bit less than 200 pages to read in The Goldfinch and yes, I'm still enjoying it very very much. I have to admit that I think some parts in the second half are less enthralling than the rest, but it's minor and they are still very good - as you would expect the weakest part of an excellent book to be.
I'm dying to know how it ends.

>18 chlorine: Happy you are here. I was just talking about how The Goldfinch is a polarizing novel with the majority of folks either loving or hating it. I loved it even though it rambled and went a bit off-course. Her writing more than made up for those flaws.

What can I say except: what a great way to start a reading year!
The Goldfinch is Donna Tartt's third novel, the former two having been written approximately ten and twenty years ago, respectively. I think she is a remarkably popular author given the number of books she has written.

I was drawn to her after I read The little Friend by chance: I liked it so much that I wanted to read other books from her, and was really disappointed to learn that there was only one other book. I read The secret history three years ago and liked it a bit less than The little Friend. Apparently Tartt's fans are divided between those who
adore the first book and do not care as much for the second one, and those for which it is the opposite. I suspect that this third book will mostly be loved by those who loved The little Friend.

Theo is thirteen when his mother dies in a bombing in a museum. He was there with her but he escaped mostly unharmed - physically.
Through the book we follow Theo from this point on till young adulthood (he may be a bit less than 30 when the book ends?). Three themes play a strong role in his life and in the story: mourning, post-traumatic stress from the bombing, and the love of art he has inherited from his mother - I have absolutely no aesthetic visual sense so this last aspect left me somewhat cold. The story is very rich and told with a detailed style. While I was captivated by the global story, I was also delighted in the way the characters and small moments in life were described: the author painted portraits by adding up little detail after little detail, minor aspects taken regardless of chronological order, which made for very lively descriptions.
Theo's adolescence is somewhat chaotic, because he has to find a way to deal with loss and post-traumatic stress, but mostly because his future is uncertain: he and his mother lived by themselves, his dad had run away no one knows wher, and his only other living relatives were his grandparents on his father's side, which he had met only once. It is therefore very unclear at many times in the book who will have custody and responsibility for him.
The whole part in which Theo is a teenager and struggling with all these issues is absolutely riveting and I was quite surprised to find that I was actually worriying very much for the kid - I suspect that readers of different ages (I'm 37) will have different reactions to this novel, adolescents and yound adults may feel more connected with Theo and worry less about him.

In these aspects the book was reminiscent to me of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, because in both cases we are inside the mind of a lost, lonely teenager.

All this makes for a great book, which immediately jumps quite high on my ordered list of favorite books.
The book also has - unfortenately and inevitably maybe - some shortcomings.
My first minor nitpick - which does not spoil the book at all - is that there is no way somebody whose mothertongue is Russian would say sentences in English such as "Is true." (instead of "It's true"), as Theo's friend Boris repetedly does throughout the novel.
The main shortcoming of the novel comes in my opinion from the greatness of the first part: I do not see how it is possible to devise an ending that makes justice to the greatness of the book's first part. Consequently, the second part, in which Theo is a young adult, felt a bit too long to me, and I was thouroughly disappointed by the ending.

It is unfortunate that the weaker (in my opinion) part is situated after the great part: if it had been the opposite I'm sure I would have no divided feelings at all about the book. The fact that the ending was disappointing leaves me with mixed feelings about the book.
All in all I still feel I must highly recommend it because I've rarely attained before a reading experience that thrilled me so much.

The Goldfinch wound up on my favorites list for 2014. My criticism was that the book was about 100 pages too long. There was a perfect place to end the book, and then she continued with the part where Theo seemed to be explaining himself at the end, and it went on....

Yes I completely agree with you! I thought the book would never finish! Although I've read in some reviews that some people have liked the ending very much and some even thought that the last 50 pages were among the best written they'd ever read.
I've been looking at some reviews and it's amazing how different people have loved the book but have cared most for very different parts. I guess it is what makes great art - speaks to many people, for many different reasons.

I read The goldfinch last year as well. I finished it, but came to the realisation (about 2/3rds of the way in) that I really didn't care what happened to Theo, I just wanted to know what happened to the painting. Not one I plan on revisiting, and it hasn't filled me with a desire to read anything else of hers either.

Chlorine, I'm a bit late for that but have you read Jo Walton's posts on Tor.com "Revisiting Hugo Awards Nominees"? They might guide you to choose the "good" books.

I've had The Goldfinch on my kindle waiting to be read for about a year! I read The Secret History a couple of years ago and liked it but didn't love it. Thanks for the nudge to get to The Goldfinch. I do intend to read it this year.

> 24 h-mb
No I didn't know about Walton's post, I'll go check it out, thanks!

>25 japaul22: japaul22
Hope you like it as much as I did! Do read The little friend if you do. :)

For the first time in a very very long time I'm reading two books at the same time (native English speakers: don't hesitate to advise on how to limit the use of the word time in the previous sentence! Two books at once doesn't seem correct to me somehow...)

I'm very disappointed by the start of LA barbe ! la politique sur le fil du rasoir, à humorous essay about politicians and beard through time, so I also started reading Mr Peanut, a kind of mystery novel.

Previous attempts at reading two books concurrently (Ha! ;) have resulted in one book being abandoned, but this is something I'd like to explore again.

I would say two books at the same time are a minimum for me! I listen to one while driving, I read another one. And I usually juggle fiction and non fiction books. Well, usually might be a tad optimistic but... often.

I find two books on the go at once works if they are distinctly different. I usually have an audio book in the car and a book by the bed. I have had two (proper) books on the go at once, when that happens its often a heavyweight and a lighter read, to suit the mood. Dense non-fiction isn't what I want as a bedtime read.

I am always reading more than one book at once. I do make sure they are different from each other, though. For instance, I'll pair fiction with nonfiction or a classic with something very modern or a mystery. And then I have an audiobook going in the car that is extra.

I don't seem to get confused, and I do like the variety. I find that I read more this way because there is always something I feel like reading.

Hi Chlorine, welcome! You have an interesting mix of TBRs! I've read a few Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks novels, but it's the hubby (dukedom_enough) who is the big fan. The same is true for Poul Anderson (I think we may have every Poul Anderson book in our library). We have a joint thread here in Club Read and he reads mostly SF, if you are interested in connecting with others who do so.

I mostly have 4 books I'm reading at the same time. I am curious why you tend to end up abandoning one when you read more than one - do you just get more involved in one than the other?

If I'm reading something really long, I might add something shorter to mix it up, but I then tend to lose track of what's going on in my long book. I'm not sure that I would fare well with several on the go all the time.

>27 chlorine: For the first time in a very very long time I'm reading two books at the same
I think the repetition works like an echo and is perfect.

I too alternate among many books -- always at least a fiction and a nonfiction and an audiobook; often also a collection (short stories or essays) and something light like humor or illustrated. Usually I do get more involved in one and finish it, but then have to replace it in the queue...

I have a hard time reading more than one book at a time unless one is non-fiction. Inevitably I'll find one more engaging and finish it first then go back to the other.

I have trouble reading more than one book at a time. Get the characters and plots mixed up going back and forth. The best thing I like about Kindle is reading the same book in several different places on different devices and picking up right where I left off. It fails a bit on a cruise but I am more likely to stick to one device so the lack of WiFi is not as critical.

I read more than one book at a time, mostly because I find it sometimes difficult to engage with a new book after finishing a very good book. This way, I've got at least one other I'm invested in.

I was one of those who loved The Goldfinch. I can see that it could have been a bit shorter, but since I was enjoying the journey so much, I would have liked an extra hundred pages. By the end of the book, I did like Theo less than I had at the beginning, which is an interesting thing for the author to do.

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts! :)

I saw on other threads that many here read several books at the same time which is what inspired me to try again. It's also interesting to see that not everybody can/wants to manage it. :)

The reason I tend to abandon one book when I do so is that my reading schedule is mostly reading on the subway and reading at home before going to bed. Most of the times when I've tried to read two books at once was when one did not fit easily in my purse, so I picked something else for my commute. However what doesn't fit easily in my purse tends to be dense nonfiction, and as HelenLiz said, I'm not too keen on reading it before going to bed... So I tend to abandon it.

>31 avaland: avaland: yes I do already follow your joint thread! :)

I've finished Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge and here's a few thoughts:

Rainbows End (and not, as I first misread before being corrected by a remark in the book, Rainbow's End) is several things at once. Thriler, cyberpunk, reflection on what makes us what we are, what is old age.

Robert Gu was a world famous poet who was utterly unlikeable - manipulative, mean, scornful - before Alzheimer stroke.
After having spent several years in a vegetative state, he is awakened by the miracles of modern medecine who not only completely cures him but gives him back the able body - and even the looks - of a much younger man. Meanwhile technology has transformed what we now know as the internet into something totally encompassing: wearing contact lenses and smart clothes allows you to connect to anybody, search any information, being virtually present in a faraway place and seeing your surroundings completely recreated by the imagination of one or many cooperating persons, rather than seeing the plain "real view".

Robert will be confronted with many things: school work as he studies to integrate into this new world, a malevolent scheme to take over the world, a conspiration led by old people like him to try and preserve physical paper books, and my favorite: a riot between two opposite groups trying to create a coherent virtual reality (two "belief circles") trying to convince the by-standers that their ideas are the best.

Rainbows End was not a page turner but was a pleasant and entertaining read.

Though I have to say: What is wrong with anglo-saxon publishers and printers who think the shallow margin should be close to the binding?!!
I often have trouble with books in English because the lines ends are so close to the book binding that it's hard to read, but this book has taken this to such extremes that at many times I felt like I was physically fighting with my book to be able to read it.

Clemence, I hate books with tight margins. They certainly detract from the book.

Glad to know I'm not alone! I wonder why editors do that...

The publishers, I think. A cheaply produced book will make more money per book than a well designed and produced one and if they don't expect the book to do well or are just printing disposable mass market paperbacks, there's no motivation to make something beautiful and lasting.

All your arguments make sound and are surely part of the reason, but I don't think I've ever had the problem with books in French while I've had it many times with books in English, so there must be something else... Well, there are so many things I'll never know! :)

>42 RidgewayGirl: I think your point about cheaply made books may be right on, Kay. Printing costs have risen so much that they are making it harder and harder for newspapers and magazines to stay competitive and profitable. That is why so many of them are going to online subscriptions. That may be having an effect on book printing as well.

intrigued by the set up of Rainbow's End. Thinking about all the other ways that same set-up could take.

>43 chlorine: French publishers' margins are probably higher than in countries where book prices are subject to competition. I like the quality of French paper books, especially the covers which are beautiful in most cases, when english language books, and especially American ones, well...

For a very long time I could not imagine reading more than one book at the same time. And then it changed. It started with a period when I had very long commute times, and I would sometimes get tired of reading the same book for such a long time, so I started carrying two books in my handbag. And then came e-books, and things started to get out of control. I can carry as many books as I want on my iPad and iPhone, and switch whenever I feel like it. But in the whole, even though there are many books in my "reading now" list, I think I usually have three or four going at the same time:
- one non-fiction
- one "serious" fiction
- one fluff or comfort reading fiction (optional)
- and In Search of Lost Time, which I have been reading a few pages at a time for a very long time (approximately since I discovered e-readers actually)

>45 dchaikin: dchaikin: Yes the setup (at least as I described it) is quite generic and I didn't know what to expect when I picked up the book. If it hadn't been a book by Vinge and had received a Hugo I would probably not have been very attracted to it (but then it was a gift. ;)

>46 FlorenceArt: Florence: Yes it makes a lot of sense that the fixed price for books in France plays a role in the quality...

I like your idea of reading a comfort fiction at the same time as a serious one! :)

I have given up on La barbe ! la politique sur le fil du rasoir by Xavier Mauduit. It 's supposed to be a humorous essay on the trends concerning beard (or the lack of it) among politicians, from the antiquity to nowadays.
It consists mainly of email exchanges between the author and Julien, the last bearded roman emperor. I thought the text lacked so much a leading idea that it looked like rambling, and I found the many many puns were very weak.

I have tried to finish it because it was a bookclub read, but I got only as far as two thirds before the bookclub, and can't muster any will to keep reading now that the bookclub is passed. The other person who read it in the bookclub liked it, as a light-hearted fun book, though.

I've finished Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross.
What a strange book!

First I have to say that I read it translated to French and there are definitely some translation problems, and it's hard to gauge how much of my non-enjoyment of the book was caused by this.
The other things I didn't like: the novel was told from the perspective of three different characters - a man who is accused of the murder of his wife, a police officer investigating the death who has marital problem of his own, and the officer's partner, who is based on a real person having been accused and then convicted for his wife's murder, before being acquitted ten years later (Sam Sheppard). The story does not follow chronological order and sometimes crosses the gap between reality and something else (did some of those men dream that they murdered their wives or did they actually do it?). This makes it at some points really hard to follow, and I felt that "reality" sometimes was not really believable which does not help. The translation may not have helped either.

Despite being so confused, this book has its great moments - parts where I was riveted not just by the story but by the atmosphere.

On a side note - one thing that puzzled me was that most of the married couples in the book slept in separate beds. I'm not sure when the book is supposed to take place, I'd say in the 70s. Is this/was this a common thing in the US at the time?

Mr Peanut was a strange book in the original language version as well.

I've finished Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.
Tough I've liked it a lot, I will go ahead and say that it _might_ not be necessary to read the book if you've seen the movie (of course if you've seen and hated the movie then it's absolutely not necessary to read the book! ;)
I'm suprised about this because generally, when I've seen a movie I really liked that was inspired by a book, the book has most of the time had more material, more depth than the movie, and brought new elements of reflection (this does not mean that I liked the book better though. For instance in the case of The remains of the day the movie, as far as I remember, is centered around a small part of the novel and this makes it much stronger IMO. Still the book brought new elements).

The book is about a male protagonist in his thirties, with a whitecollar job he hates, who has no purpose in life and suffers from acute insomnia. Then he meets a friend who makes him, little by little, challenge everything he takes for granted, including the rules of society, and he finds some sort of achievement in more and more antisocial activities.
This is a grim book, but not a book that bring despair. It can also be brilliantly funny at times. The two main characters are nothing if not smart and they bring brio and a keen sense of irony to their thinking and activities (though I can easily understand that this kind of humour will not be to everyone's taste).
I was surprised by the strength with which scenes from the movie came to my mind while I was reading the book (I tend to forget everything about the movies I see/the books I read except whether I liked them or not). The book is narrated in the first person and this monologue serves, if I remember correctly, as an off screen voice during most of the movie, and these sentences really bridge the gap between book and movie.

Though I liked the book a lot, as I said, I was less swept off my feet than I expected. The book is short and is a quick read, and the movie is IMO very faithful to the book. I did not feel much wiser for having read the book vs having seen the movie once more.
When I see the movie (I've seen it several times, at least three I'd say), I always feel like there is a weaker part in the second half. I did not feel this at all in the book. On the countrary, I think I read the first part a bit fast and it spoiled my enjoinment a bit. At approximately the beginning of this part I felt that I appreciated the writing better if I slowed my reading by mouthing the words (being a non native English speaker may be a cause for having a hard time appreciating the writing). I therefore appreciated this part more than the first.
This said, I think there are some minor differences in the plot between the two media. I'll try to see the movie again soon to check this.

The kindle edition I bought comes with an afterword by the author, explaining how he came to write the book and the reception it has had. I found this afterword extremely interesting and well-written.

>51 chlorine: I haven't read anything by Palahniuk but have wanted to read/see Fight Club because of all the references to it in popular culture. I'm intrigued by and repelled by the premise and your review heightens both of those reactions! The Afterword sounds interesting ... I suppose it has major spoilers?

>51 chlorine: Fight Club is definitely one of those where the original novel was cinematic enough that it feels like they barely needed a screenplay to film it. You're right that there are a couple of differences - it's been a while since I read the book but I believe the ending is different.

>52 detailmuse: detailmuse: I got late in my keeping up with this thread and now I can't remember exactly what's in the afterword. I had a quick glance through it and there are indeed spoilers. I did not see a _major_ spoiler but may have missed it.

>53 ursula: ursula: I totally agree with you. And you're also right that the ending is different! In two different ways actually: the ending is in two parts in the book. In the movie, the first part is different in plot, though the main ideas are here, and the second part is missing.
There are also a couple of differences in the plot, but I think that they are faithful to the book.

The movie also adds a few things. There's a flashback humour which was nice. Also, one dialogue that really struck me in the movie:
- This conversation...
- This conversation..
- Is over.
is not in the book.

Oops I've fallen behind in my thread!

So I've started reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.
He is (was) an interesting author because he wrote two different kinds of books: science-fiction books, published under the name Iain M. Banks, and more classical books (though there is an element of fantastical in the two of these I've read) under the name Iain Banks.

I had high expectations for Consider Phlebas as it's the first book in a widely popular series, The Culture. I had read and really liked one book from this series, Inversions, a long time ago.
Also, I really adored the two Iain Banks books I read (The Wasp Factory and The Bridge) and there are others I really want to read.

I have to say I read the book translated to French, which may have been part of the problem. I stopped reading after a bit more than 250 pages (out of more than 600). I thought the book was badly written, the characters poorly described, and the plot was riddled with random events that made the book too long without taking the story anywhere.
It was not a horrible read and I would have finished the book if it had not been so long.

I finished Pour en finir avec la fabrique des garçons (first volume: school).
The title can be (loosely) translated to: How to end up with the boy factory.

It's a collection of essays. The leading idea is that every individual in society is shaped by two types of education: official (school) and unofficial (family, friends, media...). The way kids define themselves as boys or girls, and therefore the way they behave, is shaped by these two educations. The main claim is that boys are subject to opposite messages: the official one says that men and women are equal in all, but the unofficial one states (wordlessly) the opposite. Moreover, school values (studying, being serious, quiet, ...) are parts of the unofficial women values, while some traditional male attitudes (talking back, talking loud, recklessness, violence) are in opposition with this.
This would explain why many boys fail at school, because they won't comply to school values.

This is a very poor rendering of what the book is about.
I found it quite enlightening, though not all essays were of the same interest to me (at least one was quite obscure). As a teacher in university, I felt like it gave some insights on how to understand and deal with some troublesome students. It also gave interesting insights on how students coming from different socio-cultural contexts and/or contries than myself could relate to my teaching.

There's an interesting article (in French) about it in the Journal du CNRS here:
https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/billets/en-finir-avec-la-fabrique-des-garcons

>56 chlorine: Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me! Thank you for the link, I saved it for later reading.

>56 chlorine: This has been on my radar for a while too: I'm a vocational counselor and work mostly with high school students. I'm glad to know it's worth reading. I'll push it "higher" in the need-to-buy pile.

I'll try to read the second volume during the year and let you know what I think! :)

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

I picked this one up a bit by chance, based on the backcover description and the fact that I had liked The handmaid's Tale by the same author.

Well this was a very pleasant surprise. While I had thought The handmaid's tale an interesting and thought-provoking read, it was not an unforgettable book in my opinion (maybe I was expecting too much).
This book, on the other hand, was very well written and was a very pleasant read.

The setting is post-apocalyptic: Snowman, formerly known as Jimmy, seems to be the only classical-breed human left on earth. He is surrounded by a village of some kind of primitive new-breed humans, who are better equipped than him to deal with pollution and extreme sun radiation, as well as finding food. Two stories are told by Jimmy at the same time: the present day and how he tries to survive (he is almost starving), and his past, in our future, in a world more and more polluted, with more and more social inequalities.
Gradually we come to understand how Snowman's present situation, and how the new-breed humans, came to be.

This is the first volume in a trilogy. Though it ends in a cliffhanger it can be read as stand-alone. I look forwards to reading the sequel tough.

La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (which can be translated to: The Trojan war won't happen), by Jean Giraudoux.

Read to commemorate the coming of Jean Giraudoux's work in the public domain in the EU.

This is a short and pleasant play, set in the antiquity. As the title says it, Hector and Andromaque are determined that the war shouldn't happen: the Greek are coming to get Helen back and there's no reason why she should not go with them. Alas, as Cassandra had predicted, fate does not always follow common sense...
The play is light-toned and irreverant but touches deeper topics about humankind, war, relationships...

I saw it live at La comédie française when I was about 12 and was delighted to discover that theatre could be so light-hearted. It was a real mind-opener. Since then I've read and loved other plays by Giraudoux, in particular Electre and Ondine. Reading La guerre de Troie... nowadays left me a bit disappointed: the elements I love are there but are only sketched-out, compared to these two other plays. The fact that it was written first probably plays a role in this, the author's style may have been less mature at the time.

Still an enjoyable and short read that I recommend!

Thank you for the review! I downloaded La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu but haven't read it yet (in fact I had forgotten about it a little). Maybe I should read it now, right after Phèdre which I just bought. Or maybe I should read Electre since you say it's better.

Anything by Giraudoux would be a nice contrepoint to Racine! :)
I don't know which one to advise among Electre and La guerre de Troie. Ondine is in a different setting so I'd save that for later. Go for whichever you fancy, both are easy read and if you like one I think you will like the other.

Now you make me want to read some Racine. I read Britannicus in high school and hated it. Maybe now I'm more grown up I would appreciate Racine! :)

The edition of Phèdre that I bought is for students, I think, and it has a lot of information that I haven't read yet. I did read the short note on versification and how the verses were supposed to be recited (déclamés) which I found very informative and will help me sound it out in my head. I think I will read some of the other notes after the play. It's an e-book by Garnier-Flammarion, and it's a nice change from the usual crappy editions you find of public domain classics.

>61 chlorine: I had forgotten Giraudoux's books were public domain! Thanks for the reminder.

I found reading Racine aloud can be a great experience - I don't mean declaim. This really need to be heard in my opinion: Sound and rythm are essential here.

Thanks for the tips on Racine, I'll try to read a bit out loud if I get round to reading it!
I had the same impression when I read Hamlet actually - the text needed to be said out loud sometimes.

I am happy to see there are more 'francophone' readers at Club Read. Racine is still a bit beyond my scope, but I enjoy your various discussions. For me reading French as a foreign language is still an uphill struggle, but over the past 10 years, my fluency (reading) has largely returned, and the number of books I read in French gradually increases.

>67 edwinbcn: edwinbcn: glad our discussions are interesting to other people than just French native speakers! :) What's the last book you read in French?

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Oh my god the writing!
One review I read here on LT sums it up for me. It went approximately: This used to be one of my favorite books when I was in my twenties. I've read it again and found the writing really chunky. Great story though.

The story of a long distance spaceship that has a breakdown and is forced to keep accelearting, coming closer and closer to light speed, the time in the rest of the universe therefore passing quicker and quicker, is indeed quite interesting. But the characters! Artificial, hard to believe in, like bad actors with a bad script.

Still it's a short read, and I liked the story and the ending. I would not recommend it per se but if you feel the urge to read it don't shy from it!

The last book I read was Liberté du XVIIIème by Philippe Sollers, which is a selection from La guerre du goût, which I am now reading in its entirety. Currently, I am also reading Venises by Paul Morand.

Sounds like you are able to read books that are not so easy, congrats to you! :)

Hi Chlorine - I'm a swimmer, so I love your nickname! Have you read Perdido Street Station yet? I've read other books by China Meville, but not that one.

>72 twogerbils:: thanks! :)

Yes I've read Perdido Street Station last November. It was instant love, and I dearly want to read the two other books in the series.
Prior to this I had read The city & the city and also loved it. The two books are really good in my opinion and I'm very impressed by the fact that they are of different styles: IMO The city is fantastical almost in the style of Poe, while Perdido Street Station is some strange kind of steampunk.
This seems to be a versatile author! Which of his books have you read?

There are other books linked to Perdido Street Station??? I loved that book, the first I read by Miéville, and none of the others has been up to that first one, although I did enjoy most of them.

Yes, Perdido Street Station is apparently the first of a trilogy. You can see that in the 'Series' link at the top of the work's page here on LT.
The second book is The Scar and the third is Iron Council.

I'll be sure to let both of you know what I think when I get around to reading The Scar! :)

>75 chlorine: Ah OK. I read The Scar and it's actually the exception in the "almost all" above. I can't say I hated it but it was definitely a big disappointment after Perdido Street Station. I don't think I read Iron Council.

Ouch. OK I'll read it without too much expectations, which might help me not be disappointed!

Well, maybe it was just me, who knows.

I've also read The City & the City and loved it and the book that got me on to China Meville was Kraken. I haven't read something from him for a while, so I'll have to bump Perdido Street Station further up my list.

He does seem like a versatile author - I think somewhere I read once that he wants to write something in all of the different genre types.

Kraken is also on my wishlist so I'm glad to know you liked it.
My, so many books with just one author - I wonder whether I'll find the time to read all those I'm interested in eventually...

>73 chlorine: I just read Perdido Street Station last month, and loved it. Would recommend!

Lots of fans of this author in this thread! :)

I've read Truckers by Terry Pratchett.

This is a re-read. I've first read this book (and the two other books in the trilogy) a bit more than 10 years ago.
It is a story about nomes (a variant of the word gnome - I had no idea that the g was silent in this word btw!), 4 inches people. Most of these nomes live in a department store, hiding in the interfloor space, and have forgotten that there is anything outside the store. They know about the world through signs that come and go in the store, according to the seasons. This is for instance how they know that their prayers for good fortune should go to Bargains Galore, and that they should fear the terrible Prices Slashed.
I cannot do justice to the book because it is very funny and witty.

When I read it for the first time I was delighted and read it in little more than one day. I was somewhat less delighted this time around, but still this is a very enjoyable and light-hearted book. It's a quick and fun read that I recommend (the other person who read it in my bookclub read the whole trilogy which is published as one book in French and loved it).
I won't be reading the sequels again though, there are far too many interesting books I want to read!

IMO this series is much better than the Diskworld series that has made Pratchett so famous.

I thought The scar was nearly as good as perdido Street Station Its worth reading.

Not that kind of girl by Lena Dunham.

Inspired by the book Having it all by Helen Gurley Brown, Lena Dunham tells us everything about her life. Her inspiration comes not from the ideas in the book, but from the fact that she admired the author for hiding nothing from the not so glamorous aspects of her life.

As far as I understand, her goal is to help others as she has been helped by this book. For me the book was not uninteresting, but I did not feel it brought much to me. This is probably because I did not face the same issues as her, and partly because I am now somewhat mature (37). Still I think there is value for others, probably younger than me, in her telling about sex, OCD, and other aspects of life that may be difficult.

Well it seems I have accomplished my goal for 2015. My small TBR pile (it was seven books high at the beginning of the year) has shrunk to 3, and, more importantly, it contains only books I have acquired in 2015: the original 7 books have been read! :)

Congratulations on reaching your goal! Clearly, you aren't spending enough time (or money) in bookstores!

:) I do not spend that much time in bookstores indeed, but most of all I've learned to transform my urge of buying a book into a more reasonable urge of putting it in my wishlist. :)

>87 chlorine:

I'm the same way. I'm very good at keeping books on my wishlist and only buying books when I need them. At least, that's how I am with books written in English. I still have a relatively large TBR pile because when I go back to France I tend to buy all the books I want in French, and then in Japan I would buy all the books I wanted in Japanese. And since I haven't read a book in about 3 months my TBR pile hasn't budged a bit.

>88 lilisin: lilisin:
Given your situation you have indeed no reason to fret about the size of your TBR. You also have lots of things to do apart from reading. :) I hope you are still enjoying Japan. :)

I used to be pretty good at not buying books unless I needed something to read, but that was before (1) I started reading more than one book at a time and (2) e-books, which I can buy or download for free at the slightest whim, and then completely forget about because I don't see them. Now things are getting a bit harder to manage.

To be honest I don't count ebooks I have gotten for free as actually being in my TBR. I have a number of PD books I have fetched just in case I find myself without anything to read.

Chien Blanc (White dog) by Romain Gary

Breathtaking. I knew only about the premise of this book, which is about a dog in the US which was raised to attack black people.
I expected fiction about this theme (I knew that such dogs existed or had existed). I was very surprised to discover the real story of Romain Gary, living in the US with his american wife at the end of the sixties, lover of animals, who accidentally adopted a wandering dog who turned out to be such a white dog.
Gary was devastated when he discovered the nature of this dog. Everybody said that it was too late to change its conditioning and that it should be put down, but Gary embarked on a crusade to train the dog to forget his conditioning. During this time Martin Luther King is murdered, and Gary witnesses the riots following this. He also goes back to Paris to witness the events of May 1968.
Gary is a brilliant, humane but somewhat disillusioned person. His prose is beautiful, striking, witty and even funny (in a dark humour way) at times. It is rare that I laugh out loud while reading a book, and I certainly didn't expect this to happen to me while reading a book on such a dark topic.

The book has made a profound impression on me, and I think I will never forget the end. Though the book is on a depressing subject it is not at all a depressing book, partly because it is a beautiful book. I cannot do it justice enough. I'll just say that in general I'm not a fan of saying that a book is a "must-read", but if I were I'd say that this book is definitely one! ;)

As a side note Gary is my mom's favorite author. I read some of his books while I was youger (less than 20) and have wanted to read some again for a long time. This definitely makes me want to read more by this author.

>92 chlorine: This sounds fascinating, thanks for your great review!

>92 chlorine:

Great review. This is a book I've seen many times at the bookstore but never actually knew what it was about. I'll have to pick it up next time I'm in France as I love digging into a good Gary.

>92 chlorine: Sounds interesting. I read The Roots of Heaven and it really made me want to read more by Gary (but I'm always slow to return to an author).

Thanks for the kind comments. If any of you read it I'll be really interested to know what you think!

I think a movie was made from the book Chien blanc in the 90's. I haven't read anything by him except La vie devant soi. I should read more.

I heard about the movie. Apparently the end is different (or the friend who told me about it misremembered).

Fortunately, the milk by Neil Gaiman

A charming children's book about a father who goes out to buy some milk for breakfast and come back ages later. The children suspect he has met a friend and spent a long time chatting with him. But he has an epic story to tell them, including being abducted by aliens, meeting a dinosaur scientist travelling in time, and many other things. Do the children believe him?

It's a quick and charming read, and I really liked the drawings.

Le choeur des femmes (the women's choir) by Martin Winckler

We follow a doctor in training who has to spend six months in a woman's health service in a hospital and hates this, being only interested in surgery. Her opinion is that it is much better to come to women when they are anesthetized, perform surgery and leave rather than having to hear their silly complaints and babble.

Little by little, she will come to understand that this way of considering medicine is dehumanizing and that patients deserve better. Mixed with this are stories about her own life and how she came to think like this, her family history, and some other strange patient cases.

This book was somewhat a disappointment. The part about the views on medicine is interesting, but I felt as if the author wanted to pack too many stories inside a single book. The main character also felt a bit artificial, in the way she kept changing her mind so quickly.
Not a bad book (and it reads rather quickly though it's long) but not something you should go out of your way to read IMO.

The Scar by China Miéville.

This is the second book in the Bas-Lag series, the first one being Perdido Street Station. It is set in the same world, but away from the city of New Crobuzon which was almost a character in the first book.

Here we follow Bellis Coldwine, fleeing the city because she feels the authorities are after her. She is heading for the colonies, planning to stay there a few years until it is safe to go back. Unfortunately for her, her path will be diverted...

My oh my, China Miéville can write. The world is still a very complex and well thought one, with lots of places, characters and races that are quite interesting. The steampunk elements also felt stronger in this book. However, either the lack of surprise or the fact that Miéville was less successful here made that I was engrossed in the world description a bit less than for the first book.
The second thing that made me enjoy the book a bit less than the first was Bellis' personality. She withdraws from other people and acts coldly. I thought she was a consistent and well brought-out character, but it was a bit hard at some times to care about her story.

This being said, I still consider this a good book and I will most certainly read the third book in this universe (and everything by Miéville!).

Iphigénie by Jean Racine

Woah.
I've always thought that Racine was not for me (to be quite honest I tended to think that only specialists in French litterature or snobs could like his plays). In my mind a Racine play equalled tedious, pompous verses and characters that nobody can relate to or care about.

But Iphigénie's verses are so beautiful! I will go ahead and say that I had almost the same kind of aesthetic shock I had when I finally read Hamlet (though I may have missed some of Hamlet's beauties since I read it in English).
And though the characters' motivations are indeed hard to relate to (who would consider sacrificing his daughter so that the gods send the winds that will allow one's armies to go and ransack the city of Troy?), the characters were quite moving: Agamemnon torn between his love for his daughter and Fate, Clytemnestre outraged at her husband and determined to save her daughter (this character was easy to relate to by the way!) and Achille swearing to defend the one he loves.

All in all a very beautiful and moving play. This was a new reading experience for me.

Thank you Florence for bringing Racine to my attention!

Next maybe I should try to read Britannicus: I had to read it for high-school and _hated_ it (as did many, if not all, of my classmates).

Forgot to say the the end of Iphigénie surprised me.

Extension du domaine de la lutte by Michel Houellebecq
This book was published in English under the title 'Whatever' but the French title translates to something like 'Expansion of the field of struggle'.

What a strange book!
I'm not sure whether this work is autobiographical or not. The main character is deeply depressed, and it is obvious to the reader long before the protagonist knows it. The book is told in first person form and we follow him as he works, struggles to interact with people, sees the few (maybe only, I'm not sure) friend he still has, writes fiction about animals engaged in dialogs about the meaning of existence.
I did not feel the book to be particularly engaging and still it was hard at some points to put it down (it's quite short which helps to read it very quickly).

The title refers to the main protagonist's theory that "sexuality is a system of social hierarchy". Besides the "classical" system based on income, he claims that some people's success in finding sexual partners places them in a dominant category of society. This system is orthogonal to the income system, some people being sucessful in one or the other system, some in both and some in none. Among several arguments in this direction he states that a couple of adolescents or young people will spend more time kissing, holding hands, etc. if they are in public that if they are alone.
The main protagonist, being depressed, does not seem to be very concerned that he is not sexually "successful", however.

The book begins nowhere and ends nowhere, making the end kind of a surprise.

I don't know whether I would recommend this book or not. Since it's very short I would say read it, because it's something different (from what _I_ usually read, anyway).

I liked Houellebecq's The possibility of an Island much much more, but then Extension du domaine de la lutte was his first book, so we can assume that his writing skills increased since then.

I'll definitely seek out others book by him. By the way he writes very good (in my opinion) poetry. I have found by chance a short poem collection by him and some I care very much about.

I forgot to say that the writing style was sometimes evocative to me of poetry, in the way for instance that some very long sentences were followed by very short ones, which gave a kind of rythm to the text.

I just discovered that this book was on the 1001 books to read before you die list. I had no idea.

>103 chlorine: Now, I'll have to read Iphigénie again because I can't remember how it ends in Racine's version!

Extension du domaine de la lutte is the only Houellebecq I have read, and I didn't find it particularly engaging either, it was too realistic a description! I should read another. I have La carte et le territoire.

And now I have to read Iphigénie too! I'd also like to read the Greek play, I think I tried to find it but couldn't get a decent ebook edition. And I can't even remember the name of the author...

Ha, who would have thought that I would find in these threads two other people who have read Extension du domaine de la lutte My French is not very good and my book mark is stuck about half way through. Thank you chlorine for your review as I wondered where it was going.......

> 108 Florence :
I didn't even know there was a Greek play about Iphigénie. I've read Electre by Sophocle and Les Koephores (also based on the Electre story) by Eschilles. Maybe one of them wrote Iphigénie?

> 109 baswood:
You're welcome! I was surprised to see that it was on the 1001 list. This means that it is more popular than you and I thought (of course I knew Houellebecq was popular in France, but I'm surprised to see his work cited as important internationally).

>101 chlorine: I keep saying this, but I really need to read something by Mieville. I've had Perdido Street Station on my list for ages and for some reason just never get round to it.

>108 FlorenceArt:, >110 chlorine: Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides?

>112 ELiz_M: Thanks! It is Euripides, but the play I was thinking of is Iphigenia in Aulis. Iphigenia in Taurus is the second part of the story (I just learned than thanks to Wikipedia). I think the first part is the one that inspired Racine.

>111 valkyrdeath: valkyrdeath :
Though Perdido Street Station is huge, I think it is consistent throughout and you'll know rather quickly whether it's your cup of tea or not. So my advice is to go ahead and read it! :)

>112 ELiz_M: ELiz_M :
Sounds like you're right! I see that Euripides also wrote a version of Electra, which for some reason I did not read when I was trying to read all plays on this topic. Well, that urge has passed now so I don't think I'll try and get it.

>113 FlorenceArt: Interesting. I actually knew the title from the Gluck opera and overlooked that it was part two.

>114 chlorine: "Well, that urge has passed now" Ha! At present, I own at least three different Oresteia and maybe an additional copy or two of the individual plays. Someday I am going to read them all and sort out this family drama.

> 113 Florence :
Thanks for sharing the results of your research!

>115 ELiz_M: ELiz_M :
Please let us know when you've sorted it out!

Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco

valkyrdeath is currently in a streak of good books, I'm in a streak of strange ones. Not bad ones, strange ones, and Rhinocéros is one of them.

I guess this play is in the same absurd theme as La cantatrice chauve or La leçon, but IMO it was done in a less charming way than in both these plays (though I've seen them live whereas I only read Rhinocéros hence the comparison may not be fair). The play features a main protagonist surrounded by people who, one by one, change into rhinoceroses (is that the correct plural?!).

Some parts of the play were very well done, in particular some scenes where several conversations are happening at once, the dialogue alternating between the different conversations. This must be hard to set up, but fascinating to watch in theater. However I failed to understand the meaning of the play. There is definitely something there about conformism, many people allowing themselves to change because "one must live with one's time", but I'm not sure whether it is supposed to be a bad or good thing.

Ok, that is really strange. Wonder why rhinoceroses (and I think that is the correct spelling)

I think the play is supposed to be an allegory of the rise of fascism. At least I think I read that somewhere...

Actually after I wrote my review I read that it's about the rise of communism (which has similarities with the rise of fascism). I'm not sure I understand how the analogy works, though.

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

This is presented as a companion novel to The reader which I had loved: set in the same universe, but neither a sequel nor a prequel, and involving different characters.

This is not a dystopia in the same sense as The Giver, since nobody in Kira's village thinks life is great : people quarrel a lot, are jealous of each other, children are deemed an inconvenience, etc. Yet somehow Kira will come to question the way her village runs and is governed, and this feeling of coming of age, of rising awareness, is common to many dystopia books.

The book reads quickly and the story kept me interested, but my main feeling was : Meh. The writing is clumsy at times, and the book felt like a half book because the end is so abrupt.
Apparently the next book in the series involves some of the same characters, but is not a direct sequel. I'll probably read it in the not too distant future.

Le livre de l'eau by Edward Limonov

Another very strange book.

Limonov seems to be an interesting character, but far from a likable one: waging wars apparently for pleasure, confessing to hitting his girlfriend, dubious political orientations...
He wrote these memoirs while in prison.

This book was given to me and I would not have read it if there hadn't been a connection with a book my bookclub read a while back (which I didn't read). I almost gave it up soon after the beginning because of the strange way it is constructed: Limonov recounts small scenes in his life, based on the waters they happened close to: seas, rivers, fountains, etc. Each scene is less than ten pages long, and there is no chronological ordering at all.
Knowing nothing about the character, I was quickly lost and honestly a bit fed up.
Yet. There is something about this book, a kind of charm that kept me reading even though I did not like the man at all. The book reads quickly because each scene is short, and the fact that I lived in Moscow for some time created some kind of connection to me.

In the end I would not recommend this book, unless you are interested in the character of Limonov _and_ have already read books by or about him.

I forgot to add to my list of unlikable traits of Limonov : dating a girl of 17, who looked according to him like she was 12, when he was old enough to be her father...

Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace

Ugh. I almost gave up on that book but the fact that I had already stopped reading two books in 2015, which is very uncommon for me, made me wonder if I was in some kind of giving up phase, and I plundered on.

The main problem with this book (which may have been partly due to translation, but only partly according to some reviews I read) was that I simply did not understand what was going on, who was who and who did what. I thought this would improve as I progressed through the book but know I finished it and I'm not sure who did the crime or what were the relations between the participants, and how the journalist found out. For a crime novel this is admittedly a bit of a problem.
The second problem was that I was unable to believe in the main character, in particular regarding his relationships with women. He seemed to be wildly swinging from love to utter lack of care.

Luckily the book was a rather quick read so I did not linger too long on it!

Yeah, the Red Riding Quartet is not easy to read. That particular view of women is thankfully not as common today.

>124 chlorine: I simply did not understand what was going on, who was who and who did what.

I found that too, but I persevered, and think I got the main idea for the most part. I agree with Kay thatRed Riding Quartet is not easy to read (for a variety of reasons), but I was amazed by what Peace accomplished.

>122 chlorine: Enjoying catching up on your thread. I just read Emmauel Carrere's book on Limonov, which I found more enjoyable than anything I've read by Limonov himself I agree with you that Limonov's own writing is strange, but I found Carrere's story of his life very compelling. Carrerre himself is quite honest about the limits of Limonov's own talents.

Your thread makes me wish I was more fluent in French! Your current selection of 'strange' books sound intriguing.

(sorry, editing because I hit post before I was done)

>125 RidgewayGirl:, 126: I really think that translation did not help with understanding this book. I found one glaring mistake: the sentence "it's alive", referring to a swan, has been translated with the neutral pronoun where it should have been the masculine in French. This results in a change of meaning, equivalent to "that's alive". If I noticed one, who knows how many there are?

>127 reva8: reva8: Thanks for stopping by! The Carrere book seems interesting but I'm not sure I'll get to it - so many books to read!
My streak of strange books seems to be coming to an end, which is good: I enjoy going outside of my boundaries but if this had gone on for too long this may have been a bit hard.

Blindness by José Saramago (read in French)

I was aware of the Reading Globally group here on LT but thought that my reading was eclectic enough and I did not need to follow them. Then a friend of mine suggested central Europe for a reading group meeting and I was appalled by how few authors from this region I have read (which is basically none since I'm an adult except Agota Kristof).
Reconsidering my views on the Reading Globally group, I went to see what they were doing, and was _even more_ appalled to discover that I had never read any book by a Portuguese author (their theme for this quarter is the Iberic peninsula).

Hence Blindness by Portuguese (and Nobel prize winner) author José Saramago.

This is a kind of fable, in which people (in contemporary society) become blind one by one, in a kind of unexplained epidemic. To stop the spreading, the authorities round up the affected and place them in a former psychatric hospital, and surround them with soldiers who have orders to shoot if they attempt to escape.
The book then follows these blind persons and their deteriorating living conditions, which gives rise to a reflection about what it means to be human.
The strangest thing in this book is that the characters have no names, and are referred to some attibutes of their lives before the blindness (the first blind, the doctor's wife, the young lady with sunglasses, etc.). This creates a strange atmosphere but the book is totally readable and enjoyable. It is told by an omniscient narrator that sometimes comments on what is happening, sometimes with humour.

All in all I liked the book and found it quite original and worth reading.

>130 chlorine: good to read your review of Blindness, as this is a book that I've been on the fence about in terms of whether it should go on my wish list or not.

I think you've sold it to me - sounds pretty good.

What a responsibility for me! ;) Hope you like it!

La vie devant soi (The Life Before Us), by Romain Gary under the pseudonym Emile Ajar.

Admittedly I was not in the best state of mind when I read this book to really enjoy it. Still, I found the character of Momo, the son of an unknown prostitute living in a home held by the old Madame Rosa, charming at first and then somewhat tiring, artificial. The boy is uneducated in the classical sense but has seen a lot from life and therefore at the same time misunderstands a lot of things and is wise beyond his years.
Meh. I had trouble believing in the character. Still the end was very moving to the point that I cried, which happens rather rarely now.

This was quite a disappointment after I loved so much the Gary I've read recently, Chien blanc. I think I'll stick to the Gary books and avoid the Ajar ones in the future.

Interesting! La vie devant soi is the only book by Romain Gary I have read, but I don't remember anything about it. I remember the movie better. I should read another book by him. Chien blanc for instance.

Chien blanc is great but maybe a bit atypical (from the little I know about Gary). I recommend it, but you may also want to consider La promesse de l'aube which is his most famous work I think. I also liked L'éducation européenne.

Ah yes, I knew there was a famous book of his I was supposed to read, that's La promesse de l'aube.

Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason (read in French)

I've been wanting to read this one for years, ever since it was made into a movie (which I did not see but I did see the trailer) and I was lucky to find it at a bookcrossing meetup two months ago.

Inspector Erlendur and his colleagues investigate a murder that happened in the suburbs in Reykjavik. While many things seem to point to a random crime by a drug addict, a strange note left on the body, as well as intuition, lead Erlendur to think the murder is linked to the victim's past.

The (moderately) bad: the writing is clumsy at places, especially when Indridason tries to give insight into the character's lives, feelings and personality. Erlendur's daughter is a drug addict, he feels partly responsible for this because he feels he may not have been a close father. Indridason tells us that in approximately as many words. It kind of feels like he has reached the point in his script where he has to introduce the family history but has no idea how to do it.
The good: a good crime story that happens on two different timelines: the present in which the investigation is taking place, and the past (30 years ago approximately) which may or may not be linked to the murder and which we discover little by little as the investigators discover it. This is reminiscent to me of the TV show Cold Case and Indridason himself exploited the same idea (with more success IMO) in Silence from the grave.

Bottom line: this is the fourth novel by Indridason I've read and my second favorite one, after Silence of the grave. The other two, Arctic Chill and Hypothermia didn't quite hold my interest, as I think they dwell on too much on Erlendur's personal life, with the same problems occurring again and again.

A note on names: Icelandic names are very strange (at least to a French reader). In particular it's hard to know if names are first or last names. Is Erlendur a first name? Is Sigurdir Oli a composite first name or a first and a last name? (apparently all names are first names) Still, there is _one_ character in the novel who has a usual (at least to a French reader) name: Marion. And throughout the novel, people who hear about her keep saying things like: "Marion?! Who is this Marion? What kind of strange name is that? How do you even know if it's a male or female name? etc." Go figure. ;)

Heh, that's funny about the names. I read one book by Indridason (Outrage/La rivière noire) and thought it was OK, but it didn't make me look for other books by him.

Outrage seems to be a late book in the series. If I do read other books by him I'll probably look up the early ones.

Dubliners by James Joyce

I was intimidated by this book because I expected a very difficult level of English. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could read it easily.
I was disconcerted by the first few stories. They picked a character at a seemingly random moments of their lives, and left them at other random moments, leaving me thinking: "So what?" I considered giving up at this point but persevered because it was a bookclub read.

The next stories were somewhat longer and did in a sense manage to drag me in the character's world, and consequently I liked them much more.
All in all it was a somewhat strange but enjoyable book, and I was a bit disappointed because I expected a masterpiece. I think maybe it has aged a bit. As I understand the stream of consciousness writing, which places us inside a character's mind, was quite new at the time and must have captivated the readers of the time. I feel like it is more common now, and therefore some of the charm has been taken away.

This makes me consider reading Ulysses but that's somewhat frightening!

>140 chlorine: I was daunted by James Joyce's reputation too so was really surprised when I found Dubliners to be a really easy read. I quite enjoyed it, and I did like how the stories each covered a different period of life, covering older characters as the book progressed. I've yet to tackle Ulysses myself, though I do hope to one day.

>137 chlorine: That's interesting about Icelandic names. I knew that their last names are generally made from their father's name, and whether they are boys or girls: father's first name + son for boys and father's first name + dottir for girls. But I just did a little more reading and see that Icelanders refer to each other by their first names exclusively (their telephone directories are by first name!), which I did not know.

>141 valkyrdeath: valkyrdeath: I'm confident one day we'll achieve reading Ulysses (or not... ;)

>142 ursula: ursula: I was unsure about the extent of the use of the fist names in Iceland, though I'd gathered it was much larger than in France. Thanks for the information about the phone directories! I really wonder how they manage to choose first names that have a high enough variety to allow this...

>143 chlorine: I read that they use the person's profession as a differentiator! And if you have an extremely common first name, it's become more widespread to give a middle name, which also helps. It's an interesting way to do things.

Didn't realize Dubliners was an easy read. I have in mind reading Ulysses next year, as part of a Homeric theme for the year.

I read Dubliners in high school; I'm sure I'd get much more out of it now.

Dubliners I think is a superb collection of short stories, which have an underlying theme of missed opportunities or the failure to follow a dream, and it all culminates in The Dead which is a fitting end to the collection.

>140 chlorine: I haven't touched Dubliners as yet because I too was intimidated, but I think, after your review, that I'd like to give it a shot.

So there are several of us considering tackling Ulysses, that's nice!

>147 baswood: baswod: I agree that The Dead is a superb ending for the collection.

>148 reva8: reva8:do try to read Dubliners if you feel like it, it's other intimida8at all!

I had a nightmare about the book I'm reading!
Quantum Computing since Democritus is some weird mix between a popularization book and a textbook. I'm a computer scientist but not in this field and I have a hard time following it. Tonight I dreamt that I had to teach class about one of the chapter of the book, which was not going very well since I didn't have time to prepare and I didn't master my subject at all. All the students were complaining and leaving the amphitheater.

This may be the first time both that I dream about a book I'm reading and that I dream about teaching.

You have amusing nightmares. : )

Does this mean it's a great book, or an awful one? The title is interesting.

It means that it's an interesting book but that I'm struggling with it :p (and I'm a researcher in computer science)

I've heard a lot of people say they dreamed of being a student and taking an exam unprepared. I've never heard of anyone dreaming of being a teacher and giving a lesson unprepared. At least you get points for originality ;-)

You've reignited a James Joyce for a few people here now! I think I'll leave you all to the hard work of Ulysses though and will enjoy your summarised versions.

>153 FlorenceArt: Florence: I guess the exam dream is comment because many people have passed exams at some point. You could expect the teaching dream to be common among teachers. Though none of my colleagues I told my dream to told me they had had this kind of dream, so maybe it is rare even among teachers,

>154 AlisonY: Alison: Don't hold your breath too long waiting for a review of Ulysses from me! I'm interested in reading it, but I don't pretend it will be any time soon. :)

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks

Woah. This book has been on my wishlist for a long time. Since I loved the books published under the name Iain Banks that I have read, but disliked the one book published under the name Iain M. Banks that I tried to read recently (Consider Phlebas), I hesitated a bit before starting it. I shouldn't have hesitated, as I really liked it.

We follow four different characters in a world that seems to be Earth in a distant future. We learn from the start that the planet is threatened by a cosmic phenomena called "the encroachment". Each part of the book is divided into four chapters, one for each of the main characters. Each one of them will gradually come to be involved in the study and the attempt to find a solution to the problem caused by the Encroachment.

It's hard to tell more without risking giving away spoilers. I can only say that I was captivated from the start. The fact that one of the four character's part is written in some weird sort of phonetics did not even put me off from the book, which IMO says something about the author's talent.
By the way it seems like Iain Banks is fond of this style, as The Bridge featured a barbarian with a scottish accent which was also rendered phonetically (and these parts were hilarious).

>156 chlorine: This one looks interesting: I'm adding it. Thanks!

Its title reminds me of Alfred Bester's The Computer Connection which was translated in French by "Les clowns de l'Eden" (clowns of Eden) : a distorsion of "clones de l'ADN" (DNA clones). I liked that play on words. I don't remember the book well enough to juge if the French title was coherent. I noticed the French translations used to "enhance" English titles. Grass by Tepper became "Hunting rituals" which actually fitted the text. Besides I never would have picked up a book called "Herbe"! So... don't juge a book on its title or cover, eh?

I like the "clowns de l'Eden" pun! :)
Usually I think that there's a problem that simple titles look cooler to French readers if they're in English than in French, hence maybe the enhancement you're talking about (or the lack of translation. Uglies has been published under this English title in France and I have a hard time imagining a book titled "Les moches"...).
Then there are some weird translations, such as Hugh Howey's Wool which ahas been translated to "Silo" (I haven't read it so I don't know if this is relevant or not).

>156 chlorine: That sounds like something I'd enjoy. Adding it to my wish list.

Non réconcilié by Michel Houellebecq

I like poetry but I don't read much of it, and I'm not sure how to review a poetry book. So I'll start by saying that I really love Houellebecq's poems.

The theme is dark. Houellebecq seems to be in an absurdly despaired state of mind: life is bleak and this is caused by our consumerism society - even failed love stories are somehow not a personal matter but a consequence of societal organisation. At the same time he has humour and manages to see the absurd in some situations in a delightful way - in the way he will match a "profound" word like despair with the name of a kitchen appliance for a rhyme, for instance.

The form is varied. There are some very short poems (4 verses), some longer ones, some with verses that are several lines long. My favorite ones tended to be the ones with a classical form, in which the rhymes are very beautiful IMO.

This is an anthology of previously published poems, chosen by the author himself. I'm not sure what the goal here is but eh, why not. I had previously read only one of Houellebecq's poetry books, La poursuite du bonheur, and one of my favorite poems from there is not featured in this anthology, so I do not recommend confining oneself to it.

I'll finish by saying that I highly recommend this to anybody who is at least moderately interested in French poetry, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite poems:

Il y aura des journées et des temps difficiles
Et des nuits de souffrance qui semblent insurmontables
Où l’on pleure bêtement les deux bras sur la table
Où la vie suspendue ne tient plus qu’à un fil ;
Mon amour je te sens, qui marche dans la ville.

Il y aura des lettres écrites et déchirées
Des occasions perdues des amis fatigués
Des voyages inutiles des déplacements vides
Des heures sans bouger sous un soleil torride,
Il y aura la peur qui me suit sans parler

Qui s’approche de moi, qui me regarde en face
Et son sourire est beau, son pas lent et tenace
Elle a le souvenir dans ses yeux de cristal,
Elle a mon avenir dans ses mains de métal
Elle descend sur le monde comme un halo de glace.

Il y aura la mort tu le sais mon amour
Il y aura le malheur et les tout derniers jours
On n’oublie jamais rien, les mots et les visages
Flottent joyeusement jusqu’au dernier rivage
Il y aura le regret, puis un sommeil très lourd.

Alexandrins, really? That sounds weird. I didn't know Houellebecq wrote poetry.

>161 FlorenceArt: Neither did I!

>156 chlorine: I've been wanting to test Banks's Culture series, but keep getting hung up on where to start. I'd been thinking Consider Phlebas or Player of Games, but now I'll throw in Feersum Endjinn. It looks like a good one, too.

>161 FlorenceArt: FlorenceArt: I didn't even notice these were alexandrins!

>156 chlorine: ljbwell: Feersum Endjinn is science-fiction but is not part of the Culture series. I am myself struggling a bit with these series. I have read Inversions years ago, and quite liked it. Then I have tried reading Consider Phlebas this year and did not like it, did not even finish it, so I don't know if I should keep up with this series or not.
I have read since then that maybe Consider Phlebas was not a favorite of people who liked the series, so maybe you should skip it and start with A player of games?

>164 chlorine: Maybe that's why you liked the poem better than I did. It sounds horrible to me because I have to adapt to the rhythm, for example "il y aura" must be pronounced il-y-au-ra or il-yau-ra depending on the line it's in, and it sounds really artificial and out of place.

>164 chlorine: Ack, I see that now about Feersum Endjinn. On the up side, it means I can read it and not worry about its place in the series. :-)

I have finally finished Quantum Computing since Democritus by Scott Aaronson.

I learned some interesting small facts along the way but I failed to grasp the main point of this book. It was so dense that I would have needed to do side work to understand it and it did not motivate me enough to do this. My main regret is that I still don't quite know what quantum computing _is_, which is one of the main things I wanted to learn.
I used the opportunity of being on holiday to finish it: I would read one chapter in the morning and then turn to a novel for the rest of the day, so it was not too tedious to finish it. And at least it let me practice reading two books at the same time, which is something I almost never do but feel I should do more. :)

Clara et la pénombre (Clara and the Darkness) by José Carlos Somoza

In a very near future, or a contemporary alternative world, painting has evolved and the most regarded form of it consists in painting on people. Some persons have therefore trained to become canvasses: be painted and perfumed in the morning and spend all day standing unmoving in the pose and expression decided by the artist. Clara is a professional canvas and wants more than anything to become a masterwork. Being a great canvas and being able to reproduce the emotions that the artist wants requires some type of very hard psychological training and yielding one's self to the painting. Clara is a bit frightening in that she seems to want to lose herself in a perfect act of art.

Then one night the canvas for a very famous painting is slain. Is this murder, or the destruction of a painting?

This book is half crime book, half reflections on art. The world of art (and craft) on people is quite interestingly described. It also gives rise to very interesting characters, such as Clara and Miss Wood, the head of security for the foundation to which the painting belonged, who refuses to see the canvas as a person.
Yet the book was slightly disappointing for me. First I have always noticed some writing flaws (which I think may very well be caused by the translator, I read it in French) in Somoza's books. In this novel they escalate so that some sentences don't seem to make sense. Then ultimately I had trouble believing in Clara. In the beginning she was quite a character but in the end I didn't understand her, as if her motivations were unsufficiently fleshed out.

It was still an enjoyable book and a quick read, so I would heartily recommend it to anybody more interested in art than I am. For anybody who has not read any book by Somoza, I would recommend starting with La caverne des idées (The Athenian murders).

>167 chlorine: Quantum Computing sounds like it could be an important advance in the future, but much as I love both physics and computing, I'm not sure I could cope with a whole book about it. If I did, it sounds like maybe this isn't the best one to pick.

I never used to read more than one book at a time but in the last few years I've started doing it and I've found it's helped me avoid reading slumps, since if I can't face one book I can always read from another. On the other hand, sometimes it's easy to then not go back to the other book.

Yes I had tried in the past going from one book to the other to avoid reading slumps. It worked like a charm, except that I never went back to the more difficult book. :p

Had a friendly book moment with unidentified neighbours these last few days: They left books on a ledge in my courtyard with a note stating "Help yourselves. :)". So I did and added a little "Thank you" to the note. Today they has added "More to come" to the note, and there were indeed more books. :)
(and I took one more, now my TBR pile hates them ;)

>171 chlorine: That's fantastic. What did you get from them?

>171 chlorine: >172 ljbwell: That was my question too!

You are curious people! ;)

I got several comic books, two flipbooks for my godson, and three books for me:
Sur les quatre routes by Le Corbusier, an architect and urbanist
Feu amical (Friendly Fire) by Avraham B. Yehoshua
The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend.
This last one is in English BTW. I have a feeling I've heard Townsend's name before, is she famous?

Sue Townsend is quite well known here in the UK, and the Adrian Mole series was a big success. I loved them myself and still enjoyed the first one when I reread it last year.

Glad I picked it up then! I didn't realise Adrian Mole was a series.

Redemption Ark by Alaistair Reynolds

This book is part of the Revelation Space series. As in the first book, the strength of the novel is not only in the story (spread between several characters that may be light years apart), but also in the detailed description of the universe and its planet more or less recently colonised, and of humans that have split into several factions, according to their way of life but also to the various modifications they make to their bodies and the implants they can place in their brains.
This book is mainly set in the same parts of the universe that have been explored in Revelation Space. The characters are mainly a new cast but we do see some faces from the past. Also, we learn a lot more about the Conjoiner faction, which was only alluded at in the first book if my memory is correct.

What can I say except that I love this series! The author's imagination is brilliant, the characters are varied and interesting, the universe is a fascinating place to visit, and the story is riveting. If you are at all interested in science-fiction, be sure to give this series a try!

A note on reading order: depending on where you look, you see this book mentioned as second or third in the series.
It is a strict sequel to Revelation Space. There's a standalone novel Chasm City that was mentioned as second in the series and which I read prior to this book, and I'm glad I did. First, though it won't hinder your understanding of this current book, there are some elements in Chasm City that are hinted at in Redemption Ark. Having read it made me appreciate these elements, in particular I think this resonates with the title of the book. Then Chasm City takes place mostly in a single city, following one single main character, and I liked the change of pace between two novels following three or four parties of characters across light years.

I think the Revelation Space series is a very good one, but he saves the best till last in Absolution Gap, which was the third book in the original trilogy.

Ooh, looking forwards to Absolution Ark then! Though I think I'll follow LT 's order and read Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days before.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (read in French)

This is a book that begins a bit weirdly, which I became hooked to rather quickly, and at some point it became an important book.

Mr. Streator, a journalist, investigates a series of sudden infant death syndromes, and realises that a given book may be the common cause. Follows a hallucinating road trip to try and destroy all existing copies of this book, with road-mates of dubious intentions and different levels of tolerability.
Throughout the book we are presented with Streator's theory about the modern Big Brother (constant noise and distractions preventing people from thinking) - and we experience it with him, as the book really skillfully recreates oppressive situations that can occur because of noise or incessant chatter. Streator is maddened by this and we are maddened with him.
Threaded into this is a reflection about power - does power corrupt? as well as chilling mentions of the living conditions of animals in food industries.

The book is captivating and striking - a quick read that will leave a lasting impression. Highly recommended.

Sounds fascinating. I've never read anything by Chuck Palahniuk and you're making me want to try.

I was fascinated, I'm not sure it makes the book fascinating. :p Let me know what you think if you try it!

L'analphabète: récit autobiographique by Agota Kristof is a very short book telling about her life in a non chronological way.
Her love for books and stories from very early on, her years in boarding school, her flight from communist Hungary with her baby daughter and husband, her difficult adaptation to Switzerland and the French tongue, her regrets, and finally how she became a published writer.

It's both well-written and a very quick read, so I wonder how lasting an impression it will make. I have been quite impressed by the description of her bleak life after her emigration.

The first fifteen lives of Harry August by Claire North (read in French)

Harry August was born, lived his life, died... and was born again, at the exact same time that the first time, with his memory of his first life quickly coming back to him as he was growing up. As he lives again and dies again, he is forced to admit that he doesn't die like other people, but is reborn again every time, and retains all the memories of his previous lives. Finally he learns that he is not alone and joins a circle of people like him (called kalashakras). This circle can transmit messages backwards or forward in time: a child can tell the message to a dying man, who will remember it when he is reborn and transmit it (or conversely an old man can tell the message to a child, who will transmit it when he is old). The book begins with Harry receiving a message traveling back in time, as he is near death: "The end of the world is coming".

I'm a sucker for time travel stories (though I've read very few books about time travel) and this one introduced a new (to me, at least) and interesting twist in the notion. Though I would not call it a great book, I found it an enjoyable read, and I was anxious to finish it and know how it ended.

Users of LT recommend Replay by Ken Grimwood which seems to follow a similar premise. It's going straight to my wishlist.
Also tonight The butterfly effect is aired on TV and I will probably watch that.

I haven't read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, but I have read and loved Replay. I hope you do too when you get to it

>185 arubabookwoman: just saw your post, I'm awfully late with my reading of this group. Thanks for the recommendation for Replay!

Traité des passions de l'âme by Antonio Lobo Antunes
(I'm not sure this Portuguese book has been translated to English, the title is roughly: treatise about the soul's passions)

I felt like I was gaping all the time while reading this book. I was completely swept off my feet. This book was something completely different and new for me. I had always heard the style of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce described as stream of consciousness, and I had never really seen the appeal of this style (I suspect that this is partly due to the fact that this style was innovative when it was introduced but is not so striking now).

This is stream of consciousness taken to a whole new level. The book follows the characters through all their thoughts, including some ramblings, which creates a complete sense of immersion and adds a lot of tension as you wait to see how each scene will unfold, and try to distinguish what is actually happening from what is memory or imagination. Actually I I don't think you can follow everything, at least during a first reading, since you don't even know at some points which character is speaking. The charm of the book therefore also came from the fact that I had to let go and accept that I didn't understand everything, which allowed me to be carried away.

The story seems almost irrelevant compared to the style, but just to give an idea of what the book is about : an examining magistrate (best translation I could find for "juge d'instruction") is charged with a terrorist case, the man he has to interrogate being his childhood friend. While the investigation unfolds we learn more about their lives, the manipulations that the magistrate is submitted to, the details of their friendship, including some deep resentments, and the terrorist organisation the defendant belongs to, and also follow many characters related to this story.

>187 chlorine: Fascinating! Have you red anything else by Antunes? I have a copy of Fado Alexandrino, which I hope to read......someday...

>187 chlorine: Wow, you certainly made me curious, more than curious, about this book. One more for the wishlist!

>187 chlorine: Wow! I've never read anything by Antunes.

> 188, 189, 190 Glad my review carried something of my enthusiasm!

ELiz_M: No this is the first book I've read by him, but I will most certainly try to read others in the Future. The Splendor of Portugal was recommended to me by two different sources, so that's probably the one I'll try to get to first.

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya (the French edition I read lists her name with the male form, Tolstoy. She's Leon's niece)

A colourful and highly enjoyable book set in a post-apocalyptic Russia (I was going to write that the book is "truculent" but apparently, though the word exists both in English and French, it has very different meanings!)

Benedikt (Benia) is a scribe of approximately 20 years old. Both his parents are dead and he lives by himself in a small isba in his village. Some kind of nuclear catastrophe has happened in the past because civilisation has gone down to the level of the middle ages. Moreover many things are not good to eat because of radiations and people mostly live on mice, their skins being used to make clothes also. Many people have after-effects: strange mutations ranging from extra or lacking eyes or limbs to the appearance of animal characteristics, such as dog tails or chicken crests.
Education has gone down also. People are very ignorant in general. Benedikt is one of the most educated ones, because of his job but mostly because of his mother, who was alive at the time of the catastrophe: the most surprising after-effect is that people alive at the time do not die of old age (but they may die to other causes, therefore very few of them are still alive at the time of the book).

His mother's influence is not enough however to counterbalance a life in a backwards village, and Benedikt fails to understand many things among what is happening around him. The book is told through his perspective (though in third person), and his ingenuity is one of the key aspects of the book. The other one is the language: the book is written in some form of archaic Russian, which the translator managed very well to render into French IMO.

All in all this book does not intend to be realistic at all, and should mostly be read for its atmosphere, which I thought highly enjoyable.
This book is completely atypical and reads rather quickly, so I highly recommend that you check it out if you're interested.

>192 chlorine: That sounds very interesting.

>193 baswood: Thanks for stopping by!

I stumbled upon it a bit by chance and I'm glad I did because I would probably never have heard of it in my usual circle of interest.

I recently read Voices of Chernobyl, which seems quite relevant to The Slynx. Enjoyed your review.

Glad to hear from you Chlorine! The Slynx sounds interesting.

>195 dchaikin: Voices of Chernobyl must have been much more chilling than The Slynx, though!

>196 FlorenceArt: Glad to be here! I'm really behind on my reviews but I'm glad I did not give up completely on this forum. :)

My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (red in French)

My advice if you start this book: start the book and if you reach a point where you become bored, drop it. It will not become more interesting later.

This is IMO a book that should be read mostly for the setting and atmosphere. I was under the charm at the beginning but I had enough after approximately one half of the (long) book. The story takes place in Istanbul in the late 16th century, in the world of painters that illustrate books. This is a very interesting setting and I was captivated at first by the reflections about the differences between the eastern and western worlds about paintings, mostly based on the fact that painters in Venice were painting portraits of people, which is completely forbidden by Islam.
There's a murder at the beginning of the book, and a large part of it is devoted to try and find the culprit - but at many times I could not find rhyme or reason in the way the investigation was conducted. I trudged till the end only to discover that the painters that are the suspects were utterly undistinguishable from each other, which made the announcement of the culprit a complete letdown.

It was a bookclub read, and though one person really liked it (for the atmosphere), at least two or three others were not able to finish it.

Oh and if anybody knows why on earth there is a reference to Gone with the wind, I'd be really interested to know! I felt it was completely out of place.

I don't remember the reference to Gone with the Wind! Mostly I remember how horrible the translation was. Since the translator didn't seem to master the most basic rules of the French language, I also attributed the clumsy writing to them. But I never got around to reading another Pamuk (his other books had a different translator, I checked).

>199 FlorenceArt: Is that Gilles Authier, the Folio collection? I hope not as I've got it somewhere in my TBR pile.

I don't remember the name, but it must be him, yes. I'm surprised he has a French name, given that he apparently doesn't know that à+le=au and keeps writing "à le noir" or "de le noir". The fact that le noir is the character's nickname is no excuse. And unfortunately that's the main character, so his name keeps coming up.

>199 FlorenceArt: Strange, I usually think of myself as sensitive to bad translations, but I don't remember anything making me cringe in this book. I don't have it with me unfortunately, so I can't check the translator's name.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

A dark book about a former slave who killed her baby daughter to prevent her from being brought into slavery (the book starts with us knowing only about the fact, the explanation of how this came to be is revealed later).

This is a book I've wanted to read for a long time, but in the end it didn't click for me. Though I deeply sympathised with the characters I didn't really relate to them. I found that the writing was obscure in the beginning, only to discover that it was deliberate and that the ingredients needed to understand would be distilled later. While I can really appreciate this kind of narrative (I absolutely loved Love in the time of cholera), here this didn't work for me as I just didn't understand what was going on, rather than reading in anticipation of explanations to come.
The thing with the ghost was rather strange to me also.

>202 chlorine: That is strange. Maybe there is another translation around? I checked the library website and the translator was indeed Gilles Authier. That is, if I borrowed it from the library, which I think I did.

>198 chlorine: I think I persevered through My Name Is Red because I thought I should like it better than I did, so your advice, sadly, came about a decade late for me!

I kind of enjoyed the book myself, despite the translation. I liked the description of Istanbul and the world of miniature painters, and the people. I don't know about the plot, it was a bit convoluted I think, but I never pay much attention to plot anyway. I gave it three stars and I thought I would probably have liked it better with a decent translation.

There's a study of My name is red and other great books of "World Literature" at Annenberg Learner:
http://learner.org/courses/worldlit/my-name-is-red/watch/

Florence, I'm not saying my translation wasn't bad, just that it didn't jar me. If I can think about it I'll try and check out the translator's name next time I'm at my parents.

>205 rebeccanyc: I hope it's not _too_ sad that my advice came too late! I'll try and be quicker next time. ;)

>207 h-mb: Very interesting video, thanks for the link!

>198 chlorine: that's fair advice on My Name id Red. I liked it, a lot, but I can see following that rule.

Too bad Beloved didn't work for you.

Yes I feel quite disappointed by these two books from which I expected a lot.

BTW I checked at my mom's and the translator for the edition I read is the same as the one mentioned by Florence, Gilles Authier or something like that.

Here is a desperate attempt to finish reviewing the books I've read during the winter holidays.
I'll try and be brief in order to have a chance to finish.

Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi

After his wife's death, the main protagonist, on the first day of school, promises his daughter he'll spend the day waiting for her at the entrance. What was said as a joke becomes the truth, and he starts spending all his days sitting in the car in front of the school. His company is in the process of merging with another, and this creates a chaos that allows him to work from his car.
He becomes an observant of things around him, and of the people who come and talk to him. The stories of these people form a large part of the book, often taking precedence over the main story arch, in a discontinuous way that is quite successful.

All in all this is a very touching and original book. I find after reading it that it tends to stay with me, as from time to time something around me will remind me of this book in a fond way.
Warmly recommended.

>211 chlorine: Sounds like a great book! I hadn't heard of it.

>212 FlorenceArt: I read it by chance, I hadn't heard of it either. Forgot to say I read it in French.

City of lies: love, sex, death and the search for truth in Tehran, by Raritan Navai

The claim of the author is that the Iranian regime is so oppressive that absolutely everybody has to lie in order to get by. This book is a collection of stories (around six, if I remember correctly) about people in Tehran and the lies they live with - from wives being cheated on by their husbands to opposant of the regime or regime officials drinking alcohol, and others.

I found the book not very well written but quite interesting.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

For those who know him, Randall Munroe is the author of the xkcd webcomic. For those who don't, no problem, there is no need to know the comic to enjoy the book.

The book is exactly what the title suggests. It is composed of small chapters (from 3 to 7 pages long), each one dedicated to a question such as: From what height must one drop a steak so that it is cooked when it touches the ground? What would happen if everyone on the planet jumped up and down at exactly the same time? How long would it take to write all the tweets that are possible in the English language? and many, many more, questions, most of them _really_ absurd.
The author then addresses the question with scientific rigour and a lot of humour, resulting in a very funny and original read. The drawings that come with each question really add charm to the book, and many of the punchlines are little gems in themselves.

Highly recommended to anybody who is at least partially interested in science or humour.

Un feu amical (A friendly Fire) by Avraham B. Yehoshua

The history of this Israeli family is marked by the death of a young soldier killed by mistake by one of his comrades, by friendly fire. Years after the fact, the aunt goes to visit her brother in law who lives in Africa - her sister, the soldier's mother, has passed away some time ago and she wants to commemorate this.
The book alternates chapters narrated from this woman's and her husband's points of view. They are not so young anymore, and the husband worries about his wife travelling by herself, and has to live his daily life with problems at work, his very old father to care for, and his relationships with their grown-up children. The wife finds her brother in law changed, and tries to understand his position.

The book is written in a very factual way, leaving little to feelings, yet is very touching and made quite an impression on me. My boyfriend read it after I did and said he alternated between thinking it was a masterpiece and thinking it was insignificant. In the end his opinion is that it is a very good book, though not a masterpiece.

The fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

I read it in French and the translation could have been much better.

This science-fiction book has surprisingly little science-fiction elements. It takes place in a world more technologically advanced than ours, some planets in the solar system having been colonized. However this plays very little role in the story, which is centered around the building of a space elevator.

Despite the bad translation I found it an enjoyable and sometimes gripping story. Recommended for a fun reading.

I'm very interested in Friendly Fire and intrigued by your review.

>218 dchaikin: My review is awkward and does not do justice to my reading experience. It was an unconventional read and I don't quite know how to express my thoughts.

That happens to me too (well actually it happens on practically every review). Some books are difficult to review. But from a reader perspective it's a helpful review.

Good to know it's somewhat helpful! :)