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Jul 2019
3:33pm, 24 Jul 2019
28,678 posts
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LindsD
I love that
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Jul 2019
4:47pm, 24 Jul 2019
113,508 posts
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GregP
I'll read Acne Platelet some time soon, yes.
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Jul 2019
6:29pm, 24 Jul 2019
13,380 posts
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Serendippily
Reread invisible cities and couldn’t abide it despite enjoying it first time round. Years ago I remember my mate saying “I used to go to the cinema To see films that made me think: now I just go to be entertained”. I fear I may have gone the same way with books
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Jul 2019
7:18pm, 24 Jul 2019
38,786 posts
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Diogenes
I’m beginning to feel the same. I rely on audiobooks to get me through more difficult stuff.
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Jul 2019
9:30pm, 24 Jul 2019
27,346 posts
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LazyDaisy
I am definitely in the 'just want to be entertained' camp where TV programmes are concerned. I can occasionally manage 'tough' books but just at the mo, I'm in 'easy read' territory - PG Wodehouse, and Ben Scott's 'approved' Jeeves novel (which I have to say, is not bad at all - much better than the Sebastian Faulks effort.)
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Jul 2019
9:36pm, 24 Jul 2019
113,514 posts
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GregP
I’m very much a ‘for pleasure’ chap. The Faulks one was ‘Wedding Bells’ yes? It’s on the pile there ~points~
MrsP really liked it.
Telly wise I’m devouring Bones - midway through Season 4 already. Daft but likeable.
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Jul 2019
9:53pm, 24 Jul 2019
40,623 posts
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McGoohan
Well, I mostly agree with the sentiments above, but... IMHO the very best books are the ones that can make you think as well as entertain. So: The Great Gatsby tells, for me, a compelling story of love and regret but also has some genuine insights into human behaviour. But then it is the Greatest Book Ever Written (TM and (C)).
The books I have enjoyed the most recently are Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage and Laurent Binet's HHhH. Neither tell a very straightforward narrative, but both tell of things that expand outside the world of just the words on the page. The first considers prevarication in all its forms but is extremely funny with it. The second is ostensibly about Operation Anthropoid in WW2 but again deals with more than that - with how it is possible to write historical novels or the simple recounting of historical events without making part of it up.
Both of them were entertaining but both also made me think and kept coming to mind in the days and weeks after I'd read them. Now that's a good book in my... ahem... book.
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Jul 2019
10:32pm, 24 Jul 2019
18,263 posts
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Columba
Books that make me think are definitely preferable to books that merely entertain.
Getting absorbed in thinking about something is a kind of entertainment... (Discuss).
Foodbank was very hectic for the first hour today, after which it quietened down and the FB manager and I started talking about books, the upshot of which was that next Wednesday she's going to lend me her copy of the potato peeling pie book (can't remember the full title).
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Jul 2019
10:47pm, 24 Jul 2019
38,788 posts
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Diogenes
Is that the Guernsey Potato Peel Society?
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Jul 2019
10:30am, 25 Jul 2019
1,448 posts
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beebop
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It’s taken me so long to type that with all the capitals that someone is sure to have got in first.
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Acts of Minor Dissent
Sep 2024