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It is 1940 and twenty-year-old Charlotte Richmond watches from her attic window as enemy planes …
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.
Als bij opgravingen een skelet van een baby wordt gevonden, blijkt het het kindje te …
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...
A man is arrested in the small town of Avechot. His shirt is covered in …
Not sure if it's the translation or the original writing, but it feels like something written by a teenager for other teens.
Good twist at the end.
Mick “Scorcher" Kennedy is the star of the Dublin Murder Squad. He plays by the …
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.
Being on the Murder Squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. …
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 …
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 throbbing to let go the bowstring, it’s drums speeding in your ears and a victory roar building at the bottom of your gut. I let myself love that feeling, one last time. I let myself drink it down, cram every second of it deep into me, lay away my store of it to last me the rest of my life." Well done!
Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz doesn't know who wants him dead. He has no recollection of …
Nothing really exceptional, keeps things rolling. A bit confused by all the characters who are there only for a few moments and pop back up chapters later.
Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when …
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 is a book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It …
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.
No matter if you're a spy novel fan or not, reading Herron is worth it just for the language. He has a way to make English sing like a very high quality violin played by a master.
Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) …
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 …
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 de Nelly Arcan. Toujours la meme hargne repetee sans repit.
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 …
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 up with that end in mind. The conference was moved to Buenos Aires in order to bring Johnson to the South, where Urquiza would invoke the powers of Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth as well as Hastur’s lethal skill with “the slicer” to eliminate him without leaving any traces..." As you can see Poe is not very far but diverted by Jorge Borges and the result makes for a light but nevertheless interesting reading. Maybe I'm still under the spell of this beautiful city...?
Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. But in the coronary care unit at …
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.
The new must-read epic from master storyteller Ken Follett: more than a thriller, it's an …
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 …
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 to nuclear war is a bit too close to home in these troubles times.
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).
