The Reader’s Nook - The N&G Book Thread

supahypeag said:
Also, the name reads like "supa hype ag" as in "super hype aggie," a reference to my undergraduate college (Texas A&M). It was more or less my college email address.
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I like how I came up with 3 different options for how the spacing worked and all three were wrong 😂. I've been reading it as "supahy peag" up until now lol. I was trying to figure out what it was an anagram for, so cheers for clearing that up haha.
 
Teeeee said:
Very weird. Which is why it isn't for everyone. But I laughed at it a lot. Especially the part

where they wanted Yoko Ono to represent Earth. And since she wasn't available, Courtney Love. I was dying.
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The author first got on my radar with The Refrigerator Monologues. Basically, she got really pissed off at the comic book trope in which the superhero's female significant other or friend or whatever is brutally murdered/assaulted/etc in order to provide the male hero with motivation. So she wrote that book in response.
 
Starting my 2020 reading with Kafka's 'The Castle'. Looking forward to getting back into my books. I also want to read Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' this year.
 
@Ericj32 and @Tyr
I finished book one of My Struggle yesterday. I can't pinpoint what made me read it so ravenously...there is SO much minutiae, and yet it leads (sometimes anyway) to such big topics like death, love, art, family. Other times, it only serves to let us glimpse into his perspective on some of the mundane things in life, like, the details sees when he looks at a stranger in an airport: His tie, coat, nose shape, dandruff on shoulders. Why is it so interesting? I can't answer that. But I couldn't put it down, haven't stopped thinking about it, and I want to get to book two immediately. Not sure I will though, I have three other things queued up ahead of it.
 
ranbalam said:
@Ericj32 and @Tyr
I finished book one of My Struggle yesterday. I can't pinpoint what made me read it so ravenously...there is SO much minutiae, and yet it leads (sometimes anyway) to such big topics like death, love, art, family. Other times, it only serves to let us glimpse into his perspective on some of the mundane things in life, like, the details sees when he looks at a stranger in an airport: His tie, coat, nose shape, dandruff on shoulders. Why is it so interesting? I can't answer that. But I couldn't put it down, haven't stopped thinking about it, and I want to get to book two immediately. Not sure I will though, I have three other things queued up ahead of it.
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YES! I'm so glad that you enjoyed it. And your feedback seems to be one I hear a lot with KOV's book. "I'm not sure why I liked it so much, but I did!". I also could not put down his books. His writing captivated me.

I think you are absolutely correct about his ability to scale up the micro details to talk about more esoteric topics on a macro level. Before long you realize that the small details he is conveying about something as simple as a sofa or a sink are funnels into his larger thoughts about life, death, and loss. It is fascinating to me.

LeSamourai said:
Is it weird that everything I've heard about My Struggle makes it sound both interesting and insufferable... I probably won't get to it soon, but I'm curious.
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Not weird at all. That was my initial thought as well when I read the synopsis.
 
ranbalam said:
@Ericj32 and @Tyr
I finished book one of My Struggle yesterday. I can't pinpoint what made me read it so ravenously...there is SO much minutiae, and yet it leads (sometimes anyway) to such big topics like death, love, art, family. Other times, it only serves to let us glimpse into his perspective on some of the mundane things in life, like, the details sees when he looks at a stranger in an airport: His tie, coat, nose shape, dandruff on shoulders. Why is it so interesting? I can't answer that. But I couldn't put it down, haven't stopped thinking about it, and I want to get to book two immediately. Not sure I will though, I have three other things queued up ahead of it.
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This makes me want to start reading it tonight haha.
 
I finished The Nickel Boys and Catch and Kill recently.

The Nickel Boys was quite good. But a tough read. I read it right after The Water Dancer and that was a mistake. Both books deal with slavery and its consequences. Both are necessary reads. Just not one after the other.

Catch and Kill - I did not like. I thought it would be the story of the women and what they went through. Nope. It was the story of Ronan chasing the story. It just wasn't what I expected. Ronan said several times in the book something like: I don't want the focus to be on me, it should be on these brave women and their story. Also Ronan: But look at me and everything I went through and how amazing I am to have done this! Yuck.

I'm now reading The Bird King. It's lovely so far.
 
Teeeee said:
I finished The Nickel Boys and Catch and Kill recently.

The Nickel Boys was quite good. But a tough read. I read it right after The Water Dancer and that was a mistake. Both books deal with slavery and its consequences. Both are necessary reads. Just not one after the other.

Catch and Kill - I did not like. I thought it would be the story of the women and what they went through. Nope. It was the story of Ronan chasing the story. It just wasn't what I expected. Ronan said several times in the book something like: I don't want the focus to be on me, it should be on these brave women and their story. Also Ronan: But look at me and everything I went through and how amazing I am to have done this! Yuck.

I'm now reading The Bird King. It's lovely so far.
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This is a pretty fair assessment of Catch and Kill. I had to remind myself that the resulting journalism was about the women and the victims, while this book was totally about Farrow, the investigation, and how it affected him; I hadn't heard him say it's definitely not about him, which rings disappointingly false.

Meanwhile, in my ever-failing quest to read something simply for the sake of entertainment (most recently, I picked up Jeff Vandermeer's Borne with the intent of reading some fluffy sci-fi, but instead got an abstract, thoughtful and sometimes-heartbreaking wasteland story), I'm reading Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, the start of his Aubrey-Maturin series. Adventure!
 
Bull Shannon said:
This is a pretty fair assessment of Catch and Kill. I had to remind myself that the resulting journalism was about the women and the victims, while this book was totally about Farrow, the investigation, and how it affected him; I hadn't heard him say it's definitely not about him, which rings disappointingly false.

Meanwhile, in my ever-failing quest to read something simply for the sake of entertainment (most recently, I picked up Jeff Vandermeer's Borne with the intent of reading some fluffy sci-fi, but instead got an abstract, thoughtful and sometimes-heartbreaking wasteland story), I'm reading Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, the start of his Aubrey-Maturin series. Adventure!
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It probably was my fault for not paying close attention to what it was about when it came out. I am quite sure I just assumed it was a story about the women. But even with it being about his chase of the story, it came across whiny. You know when someone is so into a particular field that they can't see through anything but the lens of that field? That's how the book was. Again, probably my fault for assuming it was something else. Also, Matt Lauer is disgusting, gross, a pig and many more names that I'll leave to the imagination. And the parts of the book that went after him were my favorite.

I also just didn't find it well written. Lol
 
Jan said:
Have, you seen this, @Teeeee

www.popmatters.com

‘Switched on Pop’ Schools the Academy, PopMatters

Switched on Pop, the podcast that originated Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding's book of the same name from Oxford University Press, is a kind of primer on...
www.popmatters.com www.popmatters.com
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Have I!!!??? I love that podcast so much. And I got the book for xmas! I really want to read it, it's sitting there mocking me. But I have some ebooks on hold at the library. Some have been on hold for months. And when they are available, they get auto-checked out to me. If I can finish The Bird King before my next on hold book becomes available, I'm going to read Switched on Pop.

Thank you for thinking of me! I'm super excited to read it.
 
@Teeeee - finished I'll Be Gone in the Dark.

It wasn't really the book I thought it was going to be. I had heard about the story of her passing before it was finished, so I was expecting there to be more about how someone else picked up another persons passion and how they completed it, so I was probably disappointed that it was a straight up true crime book. I'm not a huge fan of true crime to be honest; at the back of my mind I always know that dozens of real people were killed etc. for this bit of entertainment.

The bits she had finalised were very well written though, and possibly the biggest shame of all this is that she wasn't here to complete the book - I think she would have been amazing at talking us through the end stages of it all.
 
Thackeraye said:
@Teeeee - finished I'll Be Gone in the Dark.

It wasn't really the book I thought it was going to be. I had heard about the story of her passing before it was finished, so I was expecting there to be more about how someone else picked up another persons passion and how they completed it, so I was probably disappointed that it was a straight up true crime book. I'm not a huge fan of true crime to be honest; at the back of my mind I always know that dozens of real people were killed etc. for this bit of entertainment.

The bits she had finalised were very well written though, and possibly the biggest shame of all this is that she wasn't here to complete the book - I think she would have been amazing at talking us through the end stages of it all.
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I completely agree! It's why I wanted you to check back in after you read it. It was not at all what I thought it would be. It was a bit disappointing to me. So many people loved it and I kept thinking, "Huh, what am I missing, this is not even close to the best true crime book out there." I think that the parts not written by here were very out of place and made the rest very uncohesive and brought the quality down.
 
Teeeee said:
I completely agree! It's why I wanted you to check back in after you read it. It was not at all what I thought it would be. It was a bit disappointing to me. So many people loved it and I kept thinking, "Huh, what am I missing, this is not even close to the best true crime book out there." I think that the parts not written by here were very out of place and made the rest very uncohesive and brought the quality down.
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Yup, basically this. It’s one of those books where you actually want to know more about the author than about the thing itself: why are they doing this, how are they doing it, etc. It had that promise in the first couple of chapters, then it lost all that.
 
Thackeraye said:
@Teeeee - finished I'll Be Gone in the Dark.

It wasn't really the book I thought it was going to be. I had heard about the story of her passing before it was finished, so I was expecting there to be more about how someone else picked up another persons passion and how they completed it, so I was probably disappointed that it was a straight up true crime book. I'm not a huge fan of true crime to be honest; at the back of my mind I always know that dozens of real people were killed etc. for this bit of entertainment.

The bits she had finalised were very well written though, and possibly the biggest shame of all this is that she wasn't here to complete the book - I think she would have been amazing at talking us through the end stages of it all.
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Teeeee said:
I completely agree! It's why I wanted you to check back in after you read it. It was not at all what I thought it would be. It was a bit disappointing to me. So many people loved it and I kept thinking, "Huh, what am I missing, this is not even close to the best true crime book out there." I think that the parts not written by here were very out of place and made the rest very uncohesive and brought the quality down.
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🤷‍♂️ I loved it. I am a fan of true crime, and yeah if that's not something you're into/can't get behind, then it's definitely not for you. In terms of the real victims that suffered, I would say it's not "for this book/entertainment." In fact, largely the reason this case was so compelling was because of the fact that there are tons of victims out there who deserve justice, and that's what she was trying to obtain. I thought that came across very clear. You could feel her passion and compassion for this. Having said all that, once she passes away and the books handed off to other people, it definitely takes a nose-dive in quality. It's such a shame. She seemed like an incredible person, with an important goal, and I just wish she could have seen what happened after this book came out.
 
Anyone read Lost Children Archive? I just started it.

I read Kill Your Friends over the weekend, badically an American Psycho ripoff but following an A&R guy in London during britpop. Entertaining and well written, right up my alley but frivolous.
 
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