What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (4 Viewers)

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Normal People - Sally Rooney (y)(y)(y)(y)
Educated - Tara Westover :sleep:
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow (y)(y)(y)(y)(y)
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Vladimir Nabokov (y)(y)(y)(y)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh (y)(y)(y)(y)

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Borstal Boy - Brendan Behan
A Life of My Own - Claire Tomalin
 
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I read Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn over the weekend - the first in the "Patrick Melrose" series. I haven't seen the tv show, or read any of his other books, but I'll definitely be checking out more. Superb writing; reallly acerbic, funny and very very dark too.
I'm now thinking of moving onto My Year of Rest and Relaxation - that got lots of good reviews last year.
 
I'd be interested to hear more of people's thoughts on My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I had a lot of trouble with it and can't even be sure I liked or enjoyed it, but still rate it relatively highly.
 
I read Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn over the weekend - the first in the "Patrick Melrose" series. I haven't seen the tv show, or read any of his other books, but I'll definitely be checking out more. Superb writing; reallly acerbic, funny and very very dark too.
I'm now thinking of moving onto My Year of Rest and Relaxation - that got lots of good reviews last year.
Read the first two of these. The second one, Bad News, is amazing.
 
I'd be interested to hear more of people's thoughts on My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I had a lot of trouble with it and can't even be sure I liked or enjoyed it, but still rate it relatively highly.
I felt a bit like that with MIlkman, but finally found that I had really enjoyed reading it.
 
I'd be interested to hear more of people's thoughts on My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I had a lot of trouble with it and can't even be sure I liked or enjoyed it, but still rate it relatively highly.
It was my book of the year 2018. I fucking loved it. The main character was a hideous, self absorbed and destroying sack of flesh and it perfectly encapsulated my experience of having zero self esteem for yourself and a deep hatred of everyone around you due to having 0 serotonin. It was really funny, dark, cruel and sadistic.

I enjoy that sort of thing as you know :D I'm surprised you finished it!
 
I read Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn over the weekend - the first in the "Patrick Melrose" series. I haven't seen the tv show, or read any of his other books, but I'll definitely be checking out more. Superb writing; reallly acerbic, funny and very very dark too.
I'm now thinking of moving onto My Year of Rest and Relaxation - that got lots of good reviews last year.
Looking forward to checking out his work. My hatred of Cumberbatch is turning me off the show.
 
It was my book of the year 2018. I fucking loved it. The main character was a hideous, self absorbed and destroying sack of flesh and it perfectly encapsulated my experience of having zero self esteem for yourself and a deep hatred of everyone around you due to having 0 serotonin. It was really funny, dark, cruel and sadistic.

I enjoy that sort of thing as you know :D I'm surprised you finished it!

I find it really hard to sit with profoundly self absorbed protagonists, always have, I don't necessarily struggle with unlikeable narrators just unbelievably narcissistic ones. And being reminded of her being so thin and beautiful and rich every two pages was effective, I guess. All of that said, I know I was supposed to feel exactly as I did and I felt a kind of joy at my disgusting hatred for her, and the authors ability to pull it off. Something about how filthy and smelly and gross she was described as being was weirdly refreshing in a female narrator, it even nearly made me like her. Nearly :'D

What I could not stand and what I actually thought was just weak was the repetative therapy sessions. It was so boring and repetative it just annoyed me, it's like, ok really, another one after three pages? I don't know, it just irked me. I did LOVE Reba.

And again, I think sometimes an interesting book is one that challenges you, and sometimes repells you. I had serious issues with everyones problematic fave, a little life too, and some of the most interesting and divisive conversations I've had have been about my hatred of that book, so the challenge was reward enough.
 
Books read since last May(!):

Why Science Needs Art - Richard Roche, Francesca Farina and Seán Commins (2018)
A brief but wonderful book about the relationships between artistic representation and the sciences, particularly neuroscience.
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Cold Hand in Mine - Robert Aickman (1975)
Dark Entries - Robert Aickman (1964)
The Wine-Dark Sea - Robert Aickman (1988)
Collections of stories by the absolute master of the "strange tale". These are in a genre of their own, somewhere between a traditional ghost story and existential absurdism. But wittier. Aickman has been someone I've been meaning to check out further (I've come across him in anthologies) and I'm going to buy the rest of his collections this year. Highly recommended, especially Dark Entries.
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Seven Gothic Tales - Isla Dinesen (Karen Blixen; 1934)
This was in the horror section in Hodges Figgis and sounded interesting. It wasn't. I found it to be a real slog. The writing is dense if you're into that sort of thing but my concentration kept drifting throughout it, even though the stories are not exactly massive.
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The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares - Joyce Carol Oates (2011)
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense - Joyce Carol Oates (2018)
Two collections of horror/psychological terror that I thoroughly enjoyed. The Corn Maiden in particular is amazing, I had actual anxiety sweats in at least two of the stories.
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Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome (1889)
Pleasant little book that is fairly dated but still funny. Not one I'm likely to read again but one to cross off my list of classics.
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The Psychobiotic Revolution - Scott C. Anderson with John F. Cryan & Ted Dinan (2017)
An overview of research on how bacteria in your gut can impact on your brain. The basic science is fairly robust (I'm familiar with the UCC group that does it) but the American journalist who writes the book pushes the case too far in my opinion. It comes across as a bit self-helpy and I was a bit disappointed.
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Room to Dream - David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (2018)
A mixture of memoirs and biography, this was a savage read. One of the most interesting books on film or art that I've read in a long time. (Full disclosure: I could read about Lynch all day so I'm biased.)
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Living Together - Matt Thomas (2018)
The Unwish - Claire Dean (2017)
The Hook - Florence Sunnen (2018)
The Automaton - David Wheldon (2017)
Bremen - Claire Dean (2017)
Five chapbooks published by Nightjar Press in the UK. One short story in each, very much in the weird/uncanny end of things. Like the Aickman books, these aren't so much tales of the supernatural but of a bending in reality. Unfortunately they all appear to be out of print now but I'm definitely going to order more of these from Nightjar.
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Sparks from the Fire - Rosalie Parker (2018)
Rosalie Parker runs Tartarus Press with her husband but also publishes her own ghost stories. These are very traditional, all the trappings of 19th century/early 20th century supernatural fiction is there but it is done rather well. I'd be surprised if it wasn't given that Tartarus Press is probably the best publisher of gothic fiction around.
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