I tried to get into them but couldn't. My niece loaned me the first two books. They seemed good, but I think I was in the wrong mood.

Might give them another go at some point.

You should, if only for the cultural references.
I found they varied in both tone and quality but she can turn a good phrase and although the books are not tongue in cheek she does have a good sense of humour.

And of course it fulfils the childhood longing that doesn't leave some of us, that someone will turn up and say it's all a big mistake and we really are special after all.

hmmmm...

Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer has entered my stack of books. Its a good read so far mixing timelines and sports psychology. Moyer is a PA guy 1 or 2 years older than me whose baseball career was fascinating. He was a journeyman pitcher with a high school fastball who knocked around a lot but finally got cut from a team when he was about 30. Normally that means its time to pack it in. He got his brain worked on and became one of the best pitchers in baseball in his thirties and forties. He finally retired at 49 after successfully coming back from Tommy John surgery. Moyer is one of the true good guys in sports.

I'll probably read that...Should I re-read The Shining, as I don't remember a lot of it, beforehand, or can it (Dr. Sleep) stand by itself?

Wait, Dr. Sleep is the story about the kid from The Shining, isn't it?

Yeah. The little boy all grown up.

I might have to retread the shining too. Not exactly a chore it was a belter of a story

Re: Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde (not really spoilery, but white-texted just to be safe...)

Holy fucking fuck. What a bleak and brutal ending, after being all deadpan absurdist humor and physical comedy throughout the first 95% of the book. I still can't decide if I'm okay with the ending--I mean, it would be a great ending on a different book, I was just so unprepared for it.

Did you read Choke?

Chuck palatunik or however you spell that. Guy that wrote fight club.

The movie ends differently.

Anybody read the 13th Tale by Setterfield? It's a gothic and right up my alley....:ghost:

Did I post that I have Snuff out of the library or are we now so closely attuned you can read my thoughts?

No, I don't read thoughts. I read breasts. Thing is I learned to read them in Braile.

My breasts are shrinking along with the rest of me.
There is now no longer any way for them to reach across the Atlantic.

I can only assume the Cellar has a camera in my bedroom.
Diz says sorry for the recent run of poop.
And I say sorry for the baggy knickers. A few more months and I'll replace them. I want to skip a size.

Ahh, now, see, I kind of expected something. To me there was a very dark undertone to some of that ostensibly light material. A kind of dangerous infantilism.

Like the childlike vocabulary in Clockwork Orange.



It is, by the way, only the first of a series. But the next one isn't due until sometime next year (/sob)

In the Thursday Next series, Fforde usually manages to make me gasp and cry as well as laugh. And things that should be bluffs and easily resolved plot points really aren't. Someone really is dead, or missing. Fforde just throws you a few biscuits every now and then, where things really are joyfully resolved, the man shall have his mare again and all shall be well.

He can't hit me as hard as Kate Atkinson of course.
Where not only have I had to put the book down in order to cry properly, but the sadness has lived with me afterwards. Ditto Esther Freud, some of whose passages I think I know by heart now.

And yet both have made me properly laugh out loud, as well as snort, snigger and blow down my nose, which seems a method of expressing humour no-one else shares.

I just started "The Eyre Affair," and so far I'm not very taken with it. Part of it is the narrator, who talks so slowly. I'm going to give it a little more time, but things better start happening soon.

I suspect the Eyre Affair works better when read, rather than as an audio. I tried a sample of the audio and didn't get on with the narrator's voice at all. But I bought on kindle and thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact I'm halfway through the second book now.

There's quite a lot of humour in the text that probably wouldn't come through the same in audio. Some of the wordplay is quite visual. Like when the bookworms get agitated and start crapping apostrophes.