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May 2019
10:07pm, 20 May 2019
27,763 posts
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LindsD
That ^
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May 2019
10:11pm, 20 May 2019
10,765 posts
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Badger
CS Lewis had clearly never read The Eye of Argon. Dying 7 years before it was committed is no excuse.
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May 2019
10:11pm, 20 May 2019
36,769 posts
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Diogenes
Oh, and the name Bezu means ones who desires to do well and serve justice, and fache means angry. Not one for subtlety, Mr Brown, who is himself a judo master and completely dun coloured from head to toe.
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May 2019
10:14pm, 20 May 2019
39,596 posts
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McGoohan
Dun Brown
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May 2019
10:15pm, 20 May 2019
39,597 posts
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McGoohan
I've read Foucault's Pendulum but I can't remember anything much about it.
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May 2019
10:18pm, 20 May 2019
10,766 posts
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Badger
I remember reading a line in a book about the music business to the effect of “never call a chart topping band talentless, even if you absolutely hate what they do - the ability to catch the public’s interest is a talent in itself. “ I think that’s driving at the same point as Lewis, and I suppose Brown’s style of short chapters with a cliffhanger at the end of every one is the equivalent of an annoyingly catchy riff in a terrible song by a band who can’t tune their instruments, never mind play them.
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May 2019
10:20pm, 20 May 2019
14,803 posts
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Sharkie
Yeah me too, I liked it at the time - which was well over twenty years ago.
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May 2019
10:24pm, 20 May 2019
14,804 posts
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Sharkie
I'm referring to the Umberto Eco book not Badger's post. Tricksy and complicated but not silly as far as I remember, mocking conspiracy theory rather than going along with it? It WAS a long time ago, but I've still got it so must have liked enough not to chuck.
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May 2019
10:57pm, 20 May 2019
17,979 posts
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Columba
Perhaps there were fewer bad books in C. S. Lewis's day. Than there are now, I mean.
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May 2019
11:31am, 21 May 2019
14,710 posts
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Chrisull
40 pages from the end of "the Overstory" by Richard Powers. I don't want it to end, over 600 pages and I only bought it 3 weeks ago. The best books change the way you see the world, to take something you hadn't considered fully and see it anew, and this certainly does with trees.
I've no doubt some will find it heavy-handed or worthy or have little truck with environmental activism themes, however even with such reservations (which I don't really hold), it's still lyrically written, its touchstones are carefully selected, such as Ovid's "Metamorphoses" - "Let me sing to you now about how people turn into different things". The book is divided into four sections, the first section is like 9 different short stories the "roots" section, where diverse characters who have little common have short and always interesting biographies (I note some critical Amazon reviewers find many of the characters dull and I can only conclude that they find people dull). In the second part "trunk" they are intertwined, in the third part "crown" they reach their small epiphanies, I have yet to reach the fourth part "seeds". The book is written in "tree time" so there are often large leaps of years in the individual narratives - up to 20, which is barely a thumbs width in the rings of a tree, as Powers points out.
Powers always chooses interesting subjects - music, the DNA sequence, artificial intelligence, autism, how art impacts on lives, and this is no different. There's a tasteful hint of magic realism, (and I mean hint). The research is obviously hefty (he said he read 120 books on trees in a recent Observer interview), and how it has even radicalized him, and occasionally it shows a bit too much, but if you aren't touched by at least some of the stories then I suspect you can't be touched, and ultimately it isn't about the people. I imagine at the end it will both break my heart and offer the finest slivers of hope.
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Acts of Minor Dissent
Sep 2024
