Good Books read!

[roar]

^ I have heard many a good thing about those books, but lots of people have also struggled with them.

[Wokko]

I'm part way through the second book in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. For what is essentially autobiography (a six-part autobiography, no less!), it's absolutely engrossing and brilliantly written.

I saw "My Struggle" and thought you were delving into Hitler's work.

[David]

[watt price tully]

^ that was a brilliant book that did not translate well into film.

i am reading "the phoenix rises" which charts the revival of the vfl and its transformation to the afl.

You should speak with Dr Pie: in short that was (sort of) the subject matter of his PhD.

[blackmissionary]

A lot of the stuff I've enjoyed in 2016 has had a strong religious theme, and usually fiercely intelligent even in their blasphemous moments.

If you really love blasphemy (in this case against the Christian and Jewish faiths) than Nick Tosches' 'Under Tiberius', a re-imagining of the life of Jesus as a hoax concocted by a Jewish loiterer and a former speech writer for the emperor Tiberius, will be right up your alley. The miracles and disciples are a laugh, but its Tosches' attention to detail that really wins you over.

Michel Houellebeqc's novel 'Submission' - on what happens when a 'moderate' Muslim party wins the 2022 French presidential election - is either razor sharp satire on the state of the French left and its academic wings, or a grim warning for the future of Europe. I took it as satire, but plenty to chew on if you like your fiction provocative.

Chuck Palahniuk's 'Pygmy', on how a high school exchange student to the US from a nation run by a totalitarian regime compares his home country's brutal education system to the ruthlessness of the American one, is an absolute pisser. Told purely via the propaganda lens of the title character (the not quite broken English is key to the effect), this is warped stuff.

Michael Faber's 'The Book of Strange New Things' is set in the not too distant future, where as society starts falling apart on Earth, a corporation's colonisation of an alien world leads to them hiring a Christian (Protestant) pastor to act as a go-between between humans and the indigenous aliens. The pastor finds a chance to minister to a new flock, but this slow, meditative, thoughtful novel has a lot of surprises up its sleeve.

[David]

^ sounds like some interesting titles, blackmissionary (the Houellebecq novel was the one I was referring to in the other thread, by the way).

[watt price tully]

I'm not sure about a great read but a pretty good read (If you're into crime fiction - which I am) is "Close Your Eyes" by Michael Rowbotham (2015) which I'm reading now.

[stui magpie]

[watt price tully]

[think positive]

aye yi yi yi!

[David]

[think positive]

i have no idea who this guy is or about his books, but the Hitler stuff is interesting. a morbid curiosity i guess. i just cannot understand how he got so many to do his bidding, the murder, the torture, the unspeakable, ridiculous ...i cant even put it into words with out using "evil" which i know you dont believe exists.

didnt go to any camps while we were in Germany, we were on the other side of the country, although there is a monument for the very first death camp near Stuttgart, but we didnt visit.

At the Mercedes museum they have a history wall down the walkways, and there is a photo that declared D day and the end of Hitler.

i wonder how many other profile traits of a serial killer could be found in his background apart from the hated father?

[David]

[stui magpie]

I had all the Enid Blyton books, read the magic faraway tree to my kids. Good stories.

Great bump.

I strongly recommend anything by Matthew Reilly for people who like action movies.

I recently bought 2 quite different books.

Dark Emu and A Brief History of Time. Looking forward to the opportunity to read them.

Also, for the young bloke, get a copy of "The animals Noah forgot" and read it to him.

[think positive]

Magic faraway tree is brilliant, try swallows and amazons too David! I loved encyclopaedia Brown too!