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  1. #2026
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    Klondyke's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by pseudolus View Post
    One would hope. Problem is most murikans reading them would say their were disrespectful, unpatriotic, and they should be banned to protect the USA from Terrorists 5555
    Do you think that the Grisham's books are not very popular in USA? Hence, the (hundreds of) millions of his books are more read outside USA?

    Perhaps, that is what this article is asking:

    Why did Hollywood stop making John Grisham movies?

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.2685009503b2

  2. #2027
    RIP pseudolus's Avatar
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    Reckon they popular with certain folk, and read with a derisive "it's fiction" attitude of many more

  3. #2028
    fcuked off SKkin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by pseudolus View Post
    Indeed - But its not just in the US. Re-read works by people such as Thomas Hardy, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, J.M. Barrie, G.K. Chesterton, Owen Seaman, Henry Newbolt, Robert Bridges, John Masefield etc and the works from 1914 onwards all carry pro war messages
    Chesterton did that too?

    Elegy in a Country Churchyard
    by G.K. Chesterton

    The men that worked for England
    They have their graves at home:
    And bees and birds of England
    About the cross can roam.


    But they that fought for England,
    Following a falling star,
    Alas, alas for England
    They have their graves afar.


    And they that rule in England,
    In stately conclave met,
    Alas, alas for England,
    They have no graves as yet.

  4. #2029
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    I've subject myself on 700-pages pshychodelic hell by picking up Ulysses by James Joyce. This book isn't only an acuurate representation of madness but it's a contageous madness itself, though I like it. I gives a trully tangible unique psychological experience of living in soebody's head. I've beginned with On the road and though- hmm, well, this is stream of consciouses and i like it, I should pick another one from the same category, i've never been so wrong As for Kerouac, yu know, there's the writing and there's the typing that's what aforementioned dharma dude did. My next book will be some Teen fkng Indians for Christ sake https://readsobserver.com/186/Ten-Little-Indians.

  5. #2030
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    Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow.

    I'm a fan of this guy. Just previously read a couple of Martin Amis' books, "London Fields" and "Money". Very good, and not a little 'unpleasant' in places. Amis certainly has a handle on black humour and the grotesque, but with the wit and literary brilliance to keep you hooked.
    Can see where a few other British writers like Irvine Welsh, John Niven, etc got some of their inspiration from.

  6. #2031
    Hangin' Around cyrille's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kmart View Post
    I'm a fan of this guy. Just previously read a couple of Martin Amis' books, "London Fields" and "Money".
    Quit now.

    It's a long, long way down from there.

  7. #2032
    RIP pseudolus's Avatar
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    So I was reading this book around November. It charts the full history up to WW1 which does shine a light on the bullshit narrative written by the winners. Highly fascinating and interesting stuff written off of primary and documented evidence.


    This lead me onto this book.




    Utterly staggering really. The premise is that the "good guys" refused to accept the end of the war earlier because they wanted to completely destroy the German industrial machine which was a threat to the British Empire at the time. It also points out, probably correctly, that the war did not end in 1918 as that was simply an armistice. The war with the |British blockade of Germany continued for a few more years yet which plunged Germany into such dire straights that the country was kept in starvation and utterly degraded.

    Anyway - Fascinating books and well researched.

  8. #2033
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    The Midnight Manager by John le Carre

    One of two of his books I picked up at the airport. Doesn't disappoint. Enjoy the character build up at the start.

  9. #2034
    fcuked off SKkin's Avatar
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    Spot on in title and content...well actually, I might have a few quibbles here and there.

    Book is not suitable for the willfully ignorant. You know who you are.

  10. #2035
    I'm in Jail

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    BC cave man. Just for the one liners.

  11. #2036
    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    ...Don Winslow: Power of the Dog trilogy...excellent read concerning effects of the drug trade on characters from both sides of the border...a well-written and compelling story...

  12. #2037
    Thailand Expat Storekeeper's Avatar
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    Treason by Rick Campbell.

    Author is a retired US Navy submariner.

  13. #2038
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    Quote Originally Posted by SKkin View Post
    Book is not suitable for the willfully ignorant. You know who you are.
    Please no names here...

  14. #2039
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    a light novel called " The King Never Smiles"

  15. #2040
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    Two contempory books books about Japanese everyday life.
    Nakano thrift shop and Strange weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami.

  16. #2041
    fcuked off SKkin's Avatar
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    Another dead on accurate book that's making my blood boil.



    bsnub likes to go on about lemmings and oligarchs. Read Chapter 4 of this book snub and tell me who the lemmings are. Has to do with oligarch sports team owners and the lemming fans who subsidize them.

  17. #2042
    Thailand Expat Boon Mee's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ethanc View Post
    I've subject myself on 700-pages pshychodelic hell by picking up Ulysses by James Joyce. This book isn't only an acuurate representation of madness but it's a contageous madness itself, though I like it. I gives a trully tangible unique psychological experience of living in soebody's head. I've beginned with On the road and though- hmm, well, this is stream of consciouses and i like it, I should pick another one from the same category, i've never been so wrong As for Kerouac, yu know, there's the writing and there's the typing that's what aforementioned dharma dude did. My next book will be some Teen fkng Indians for Christ sake https://readsobserver.com/186/Ten-Little-Indians.
    Read Ulysses ages ago and it was a slog!

    'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by Joyce is a far better read IMO

    Reading the latest John Sanford cop fiction now 'Neon Prey"
    Definitely light reading...

  18. #2043
    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    ...intend to download these two to my e-reader shortly:

    BANGKOK WAKES TO RAIN
    By Pitchaya Sudbanthad
    THE BLIND EARTHWORM IN THE LABYRINTH
    By Veeraporn Nitiprapha

    Reviews by Hannah Beech (NYT)

    In 2010, my husband and I left our young children sleeping at home in Bangkok and went out to cover what we feared would be a massacre. In front of us, in the hazy heat of May, a military sniper shot a street protester. Armored personnel carriers rumbled toward us from different directions, trapping protesters in a pincer motion.

    A block away from the killing, street vendors were selling coconut ice cream. At least 90 people died in the security forces’ assault on protesters that spring, including two medics, an Italian photographer and a soldier struck by friendly fire. When we got home, our boys were still napping. To this day, no one has been held accountable for the deaths nine years ago.

    For all its memorable brashness — the chili-laced cuisine, the vicious heat, the excess of tropical botany — Thailand excels in forgetting, a deliberate amnesia that makes history turn, if not in circles at least in cul-de-sacs. Two novels from Thai-born authors, “Bangkok Wakes to Rain,” by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, and “The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth,” by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, examine these hidden, overlooked spaces, where ghosts and spirits and discarded dreams orbit, even as people try to outpace the past. “So much,” Pitchaya writes, “had been lost or erased from the books.”

    There are a lot of characters in “Bangkok Wakes to Rain,” multiple generations all connected, it turns out, to a single house built by the great-great-grandfather of Sammy, a photographer with a penchant for leaving when things get uncomfortable. In rough chronological order, the Bangkok home is linked to an American missionary doctor, a divorced socialite, a construction worker hopped up on brightly colored pills, a student who survived an earlier political massacre, a troubled plastic surgeon and the young owner of one of the faces he carves. There are many others. Some are animals.

    At first, each chapter feels more like a deft character sketch than something with the forward momentum of a novel. Eventually, though, the stories begin to intersect and build on one another, like banana leaves woven to make a floating offering for the water spirits.

    Despite the profusion of characters, Pitchaya’s debut novel is more an evocation of a place than of a people. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krungthep, and not just that but Krungthep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya and over a dozen words more. It means the city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city and so on.
    Sammy’s father, a former Thai diplomat living in London with Sammy’s British stepmother, laments the latest paroxysm of political violence in Bangkok, the deaths of more pro-democracy students on the streets as the military imposes its will. He asks Sammy, also in self-imposed exile, whether he still knows Krungthep’s full name, as he did when he was a boy.

    Sammy does not. Few Thais remember how to say the entire name; getting partway through is like knowing a few numbers past the decimal point of Pi. Bangkok is changing too fast, shedding layers of its history like the skins of a snake. Yet the city retains its allure, and the quest to return is like some animal, “its tail straightened like a rudder. Sammy knows it won’t stop until it’s home.”

    “The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth,” which won the South East Asian Writers Award for the original Thai edition, is also lush with characters — and foliage and fauna. In Veeraporn’s telling, the Thai capital doesn’t unfold, as in Pitchaya’s plaited tale, but explode.

    Like a Thai soap opera that captivates viewers in air-conditioned condos and wooden shacks alike, the novel follows three characters, two sisters named Chareeya and Chalika and an orphaned boy named Pran, and the concentric circles of melodrama and tragedy that trap them. There are affairs, deaths and doomed romances aplenty but, as in a telenovela, the effect is less poignant and more propulsive.

    In Veeraporn’s Bangkok and the small riverside town near the Thai capital where the three main characters grow up, the colors appear heightened, the sounds — Schumann, the Cure, the Thai country music that was fortified by what Vietnam War vets left behind — amplified. Ghosts mingle with lovers. A woman is the mother of five children who shared three fathers, “a mathematical riddle and parentage conundrum.” Adjectives abound.

    Gardens overflow with champaca, pikul, ylang ylang, Mon rose, monkey flowers and butterfly pea, an unfamiliar and thrilling taxonomy. Chareeya and Pran flirt, a ritual that can seem “like two Siamese fighting fish grappling each other in a bottle of glue.” Characters feast on Israeli tabbouleh, Hungarian goulash and rose-tinted spheres of condensed goat milk from India — a nod to the Thai ability to synthesize new ingredients, music or art and give them a distinct national flavor.

    The effect of Veeraporn’s narrative is akin to a malarial hallucination, but that’s what Bangkok feels like: a soap opera in which someone wakes up and realizes that the preceding episodes were all just a fever dream. Or is the waking the actual dream?

    The exact fates of characters matter less than the unexpected rotations of life. Veeraporn describes a mollusk that discovers its shell has gone missing while it slept. “It spent the rest of its life creeping along, naked, in the cold loneliness of a beach shining with a million white shells,” she writes, “without ever being able to find a shell that fit quite like the battered old shell it had lost — not a single one.”

    “The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth” was written in Thai and painstakingly translated by Kong Rithdee, a movie critic and documentary filmmaker. There are few concessions made to non-Thai audiences, apart from an occasional footnote to explain a touchstone of Thai culture and a list of botanical names at the end of the book. Veeraporn’s Bangkok is an immersive experience, exotic but not exoticized.

    Pitchaya, who grew up in Thailand but also in Saudi Arabia and the Southern United States, informs in a more conventional fashion. “Bangkok Wakes to Rain” is written in English and, particularly in the first half of the novel, explanatory clauses about Thai history or culture can feel a bit like a travel guide, albeit an adroitly written one.

    The novel falters when it reaches into the future, a dystopian vision of a capital drowned by hubris and climate change. Bangkok’s reality is both real and surreal enough without entering the realm of science fiction. But Pitchaya soon takes the story back to the past, and characters that were just one part of the city’s mosaic — a once-famous jazz pianist, an American missionary coming to terms with Bangkok, the now-middle-aged survivor of the long-ago military crackdown — come alive. “The forgotten return again and again, as new names and faces, and again this city makes new ghosts,” Pitchaya writes.

    For Veeraporn, that ritual of recollection and loss — “to erase from our heads who we are, what we’ve had to feel happy or sad about, or that we ever had anything to remember” — takes place in an urban jungle in which the real jungle intrudes, with bugs and snakes and giant monitor lizards. Bangkok is an overgrown Garden of Eden in which digging turns up nothing but “blind earthworms, one after another, lost in a labyrinth of their own making.”
















    Majestically enthroned amid the vulgar herd

  19. #2044
    fcuked off SKkin's Avatar
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    Vincent Bugliosi and his book Reclaiming History, the DPD, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA and the Warren Commission...Fail!

    Every S in the title should have been replaced with $.

  20. #2045
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    Now I have just been reading " Gunnships over Angola " Alouette pilot experiences.

  21. #2046
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    The Lying Game by Ruth Ware. Thought I'd try another of her books but this one was a bit weak as far as storyline.

  22. #2047
    Thailand Expat AntRobertson's Avatar
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  23. #2048
    I'm in Jail

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    ^ You need this one :

    What book are you reading right now?-psychbible-jpg
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails What book are you reading right now?-psychbible-jpg  

  24. #2049
    Thailand Expat AntRobertson's Avatar
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    You need an instructional on what ignore means.

    It'll need a lot of pictures obviously.



    Ps. It's actually kinda psychotic how often you stalk me around the forum or post about me. I'm also not interested in some saddo old broke ass loser sorry, get over it.

  25. #2050
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    Pismire's Progress...

    Not to be confused with Bunyan's, The Pilgrim's Progress, which is much more positive...

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