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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 23, 2016 21:18:10 GMT
Outside the realm of Catholic stuff, what do you guys read for fun? I just finished reading a chick lit novel called Winter Street by Elin Hildebrand which I thoroughly enjoyed. I've always felt that chick lit, at least theoretically, was more serious than thrillers and spy and detective stories, since at least it's about ordinary life and human relationships. It was set at Christmas, there were several casual references to Mass, and the climactic scene is a family prayer around the dinner table-- although none of the characters seemed to pay the slightest notice to Christian sexual ethics.
I started reading Stephen King's Dr. Sleep recently, but after a good and focused start it got too overblown. I also started reading a Calvin and Hobbes collection but I gave it up after a few pages, wondering where the strip got its exalted reputation.
(I don't draw a distinction between Christian reading and 'secular' reading in terms of fun. I read G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis for fun. But I'm interested in what other contributors read for pure entertainment.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 24, 2016 21:13:35 GMT
I don't really distinguish between reading for fun and for business, but as my profession is based on reading and writing I have that option. Two recent literary reads are Ian Rankin's EVEN DOGS IN THE WILD, the latest Inspector Rebus - part of the fun being the portrayal of the down-at-heel side of Edinburgh, part of it being the question of how far Rankin can stretch the formula before it snaps (Rebus is now past retirement age and his ability to intervene in police investigations gets increasingly less plausible). Adrian McKinty's RIVER DOGS is the latest in a series of Rebus ripoffs set in Troubles-era Carrickfergus. Part of the fun here is to see how increasingly ridiculous the series gets (so far the main character has, amongst other things, shot Stakeknife, exposed John De Lorean, and saved Maggie Thatcher from the Brighton bomb; meanwhile he can't remember if he went to school in St Patrick's College Dungannon or St Malachy's College Belfast). Knowing Carrickfergus - albeit only slightly - adds to the interest.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 24, 2016 21:39:30 GMT
If I was caught on a desert island with a library of detective novels and no other reading material, I would spend a lot of time building sandcastles.
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Post by pugio on Jan 25, 2016 14:50:14 GMT
I haven't read any novels in almost a year, but the last few I read were John le Carre's Smiley novels. I still have plenty to get through!
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 25, 2016 15:40:54 GMT
I read a couple of Le Carré novels. Our Game and The Tailor of Panama. They were pretty good. Good characterisation.
Reading for fun doesn't have to be novels, though.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 25, 2016 22:28:08 GMT
Haven't read any of Le Carre's novels, though I have meant to do so for some time after seeing the film version of TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY. I tend to see my adult life in terms of constructing a memory palace - I get interested in one author through reading another, or developing an interest on which they impinge. I had Scott and Trollope periods some years back, both through curiosity about their influence on nineteenth-century Ireland. Alfred Duggan's historical novels are very impressive; the sensibility of imperial decline and the description of military experience of course reflect his own life-experience (he was a younger contemporary of Evelyn Waugh - a Catholic too - and the touch of sardonicism makes them akin). A bit too fond of the English gentleman, perhaps; I find his version of Edward the Confessor too good to be true - but if you want to confirm all your worst suspicions about the British royal family, read THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING.
Apropos of detective novels, there's a theory that they are seen as more respectable than other types of genre fiction because the detective reconstructing events from fragments is doing something akin to what academics do. (Conversely, other genres are seen as less respectable; I know several educated women who believe that the mid-century writer of historical romances Georgette Heyer is undervalued because women's romance novels are dismissed as soppy and escapist.)
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Post by assisi on Jan 25, 2016 22:34:04 GMT
I read Donna Tartt's 'Goldfinch' a little while ago. A pretty big book novel that, in my opinion, would have been better if it was about one third shorter than it is. Good story nonetheless with themes such as fragmented family life, drugs, living a lie, criminality, the Art world....but if you were looking to read any Donna Tartt, her first novel, the 'Secret History' is more enjoyable, set amongst an elitist 'arty' group of students in an American university (Tartt, who is a bit of a recluse, is supposedly Catholic, though it is hard to see any evidence of that in her novels).
The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, such as 'Labyrinths', are little esoteric gems of stories that draw upon mythology, religious themes and much more and and usually pack a surprise.
I wouldn't be a fan of Chick Lit, but I liked a certain genre that preceded it which dealt in protagonists, usually single English girl in their thirties, who are lonely but befriend a group of assertive and confident people and suffer the consequences - in novels by Anita Brookner ('Hotel Du Lac' is a good example) and Penelope Lively - a representation of quiet English despair and eccentricity.
Don DeLillo is another writer worth a read, although he is at times a little pretentious. His novel 'Underworld' is worth reading if only to get a flavour of the move to a darker impersonal America in the second half of the 20th century - at 800 pages or so and it being a slow starter, you might want to think twice before undertaking it.
Some of the better science fiction books are a nice form of escapism. Solaris by Stanisław Lem, I Robot by Asimov, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clark, being some of the better ones.
If all else fails I have a big old book called 'Fifty masterpieces of mystery' which has 50 short (ghost, mystery and crime) stories from writers such as Lord Dunsany, Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton and many other now mostly forgotten writers from the late 19th and early 20th century.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 25, 2016 23:03:17 GMT
Interesting point; SOLARIS is actually an atheist manifesto based on the principle that the universe is utterly alien and unknowable. This is reversed in both the film versions; Tarkovsky was a Christian and this comes through in his film adaptation, and the Soderbergh version is "Amor vincit omnia", complete with George Clooney and Natasha McElhone. This last is a cop-out, but I confess I was and am incredibly moved by the last words of the McElhone character to the Clooney character as she hushes him: "Everything we've done is forgiven. Everything." BTW Stanislaw Lem, the author of the novel, lived in Krakow and in the 50s used to have arguments in pubs with a local Catholic philosopher, a priest called Karol Wojytla.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 25, 2016 23:19:56 GMT
I like Trollope too, Hibernicus. I've only three of his books, all Barchester chronicles, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. I like the psychological realism-- all of his characters are very believable and plausible. Virginia Woolf or someone said that the pleasure of reading Trollope was akin to the pleasure of looking out a window and I think that's amazingly accurate.
I don't like bizarre characters or weird plots. I like naturalism, more or less, even if supernatural things are happening.
I especially liked the elderly brother and sister couple in one of the books (Barchester Towers?) who idolise pre-Conquest England and try to revive its sports at one of their fetes. That was funny and an interesting glimpse of social history.
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