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airdog

fossilfranv@good.franv.site

Joined 1 year, 5 months ago

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Midnight News (2023, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf) 3 stars

It is 1940 and twenty-year-old Charlotte Richmond watches from her attic window as enemy planes …

A bit long at the beginning but turns out not bad at all

3 stars

For the first 100 pages or so I thought this girl is off her rocker but then it gets more precise and turns out she was quite logical. Written in English as it was spoken during WWII which makes for a nice reading.

The child (2018) 2 stars

Als bij opgravingen een skelet van een baby wordt gevonden, blijkt het het kindje te …

Very long first 3/4 but surprising end

2 stars

I'm not sure how and why I read this book to the end. As mentioned the first part of the book is long and boring, written a la Agatha Christie but without the logical reasoning with lots of statements such as "Oh my God, you must feel devastated!" and the like.

But the end somehow rescues the whole thing with a several very original plot twists. Not sure it was worth the long read for that though...

Broken Harbor (Paperback, 2013, French, Tana, Penguin Books) 4 stars

Mick “Scorcher" Kennedy is the star of the Dublin Murder Squad. He plays by the …

Gives a new meaning to psychological thriller

4 stars

Again a book in which French follows each thought thread in every possible direction and this writing method puts the reader right in the middle of that universe with all it's terror and anxiety.

The Trespasser (2016, Viking) 4 stars

Being on the Murder Squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. …

As good as the preceeding one was bad

4 stars

If someone read only the 2 last books in the series that person couldn't possibly figure how the same author could write 2 books so different in tone and quality of writing. In this last work Tana French gives a new meaning to psychological thriller. She looks at every situation from all possible angles, examines in depth the consequences of each line of thought and very soon the reader finds him/herself in what feels like those mirror labyrinths not knowing who's who and who did what. Allow me a quote just to give you a taste: "That feeling, it’s not some bullshit figure of speech. It lives inside you somewhere deeper and older and more real than anything else except sex, and when it comes rising it takes your whole body for its own. It’s a smell of blood raging at the back of your nose, it’s your arm muscle …

The Secret Place (2014, Viking) 2 stars

Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when …

Don't read

2 stars

I was impressed by all her past works I've read, the quality of the language, the tension buildup.

In this one the ravings of a bunch of teenage, rich teenage girls with sentences such as "it as like, ewww, I don't know". So you could say that the ambience is well recreated but it sure makes for a long a boring read. At about 25% I went to read other reviews who all said it didn't get better until the end so I have to admit I left it at that.

Civilization and Its Discontents (Paperback, 2002, Penguin) 4 stars

Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It …

Everyone should read this book

4 stars

I was directed to this work by listening to an episode of France Culture's Chemins de la philosophie: L'universel, à l'épreuve du mal.

I won't go into the details but Kristeva was talking about the attitude contemporary society should adopt towards the conept of "evil", given the spreading of what has come to be called polulism. Freud, looking out from the basic economy (not money but the management of forces in the mind) of the libido and death drives gives us a very raw vision of society and it's attempt to organize and maintain a semblance of cohesion. I'm very surprised that a work that, to me, seems so rich in consequences and potential has not been looked into by others.

Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) …

Lecture longue et penible

3 stars

Desole pour le manque d'accents, mon clavier n'en a pas.

J'ai longtemps hesite avant de lire ce classique car je connaissais l'antisemitisme passione de l'auteur. En general les extremistes en toutes choses ont un discours qui m'ennui tres vite. Ils repetent toujours la meme chose de maniere similaire ou differente mais toujours la meme chose. Je me suis enfin resolu a le lire pour me rendre compte que ce que je craignais se realisait: en gros on peut resumer les quelques 400 pages par ces mots: chienne de vie, nous sommes des vers pourris sur une terre pourrie. Ce sont mes mots mais je crois que je traduis assez fidelement le message de l'auteur. Il a bien sur son stlyle a lui et fait souvent de bonnes trouvailles mais la repetition incessante rend la lecture lassante. N'allez pas m'assassiner pour la comparaison mais il m'a fait penser a La Putain …

Borges and the eternal orangutans (Paperback, 2005, New Directions) 3 stars

Entertaining little book

3 stars

Read this book because I'm just back from Buenos Aires which totally charmed me and where the action of this novel is located.

A thriller a la A.E.Poe the goal is to find who murdered one of the participants to a Poe convention that has been moved at the last minute to Buenos Aires.

Allow me to quote to give you a better idea of the tone: "And you told us what the story would be like if you had written it. Urquiza was to kill Johnson. Urquiza was to invoke the powerful beings from the South, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, and to be the embodiment of Hastur, the destroyer, he who walks in the wind, so as to prevent Johnson from revealing even more than he already had, quite innocently, revealed of the language of the Necronomicon and of the secret code concealed in Poe’s literature. Everything had been set …

The Butterfly House 2 stars

Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. But in the coronary care unit at …

Poor quality "whodunit"

2 stars

The problem with this type of work is that the genre has been firmly established by Agatha Christie quite a while ago and the structure as such does not present many surprises. In consequence if someone wants to write an original and interesting thriller that author has to come up with something else that's original. Katrine Engberg does definitively not succeed. First she constantly introduces new characters to the point that from the get go the reader becomes quite confused as to who is who and the fact that I'm not Danish and the names of course are doesn't help. Second the characters have shallow personalities whose actions and reactions are stereotypical to the point of seeming to be copied from some high school manual. I could go on but I think that gives a good idea of the work. In my humble opinion don't waste your time.

Never 2 stars

The new must-read epic from master storyteller Ken Follett: more than a thriller, it's an …

Would have expected better from him

2 stars

You're probably too young to remember painting by numbers. Basically when you bought that, you got a board on which you found the outline of what was being painted in (a tiger, a house, etc) and this outline was filled with small numbered areas. You applied paint #1 to the areas numbered 1, 2 to the 2s and the final result was a beautiful tiger in full colour which you could then show to your friends pretending you painted that. This novel by Follett reminds me exactly of that. It seems to be written by Mr Follett following a pretty exact recipe on how to write a spy novel. You have to hang in during the first 75% because not much exciting happens. Things get a bit more lively towards the end but by then I had mostly lost my patience. Nevertheless reading a work on a possible scenario leading …

The philosophy of Schopenhauer (1997, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press) 4 stars

Uniquely accurate explanation of a philosophy

4 stars

I have read many introductions to philosophers but this is in my opinion the best I've read. If you want to not only understand the remarkable philosophy of Schopenhauer but also avoid the obvious pitfalls of any even modestly complex system of thought, then read this book. But be warned, it's not easy reading and it's definitively not condensed (465 pages).