Your favourite authors, and why?

[Maia]

I've finished The Templar Secret. It wasn't the head of John the Baptist in the end, but the secret wasn't really the point, anyway, as it turned out. And then, in an afterword, the author said that it was the thirtieth in the series of books featuring the main character, and the last. Oh well. It was ok, anyway.

[Maia]

I'm currently reading a novel called Down to the Woods by M. J. Arlidge, nearly finished, in fact, set in the New Forest in Hampshire, which I've only ever been to once, briefly, while visiting some Pagans in Glastonbury. We went there to meet up with some other Pagans at the Rufus Stone, a monument set up at the spot where William II was killed by an arrow in 1100 under highly suspicious circumstances, which some have alleged were part of a Pagan king-slaying ritual. Whatever the case, that's why I decided to give this book a go. A series of gruesome murders take place and the police have to investigate, focusing on, then eliminating, a number of different suspects. A fairly standard police procedural, in other words, though I'm not completely sure what the twist is going to be, yet. All of the leading characters, incidentally, are women, including the two main police officers and a journalist.

[Maia]

Well, I finished Down to the Woods, and the murderer turned out to be a character that wasn't even introduced until at least half way through, maybe more. This is pretty unsatisfying in a thriller, even if it happens to be true of real life crime investigations. A good author will introduce the killer very early on and drop clues all the way through, but ones that aren't too obvious, along with a load of false leads. Oh well, it wasn't too bad, otherwise.

[Phil8659]

I actually started reading things like Steinbeck while the classroom was trying to read "Spot, Dick and Jane." I went on with that type of reading for a while, and then I decided to read those whose pretense was the future. So, I was binge reading Sci-fi, until I not only could see the limits of man's imagination, but I also saw a hole in the mind of men. My deductions was based on what I later learnt from Plato. When we compare two things, they are either equal or not. If they are not equal, one is greater than the other, which is less than the first. So, here it is. Man cannot imagine, for himself, anything greater or less than his own bodies functions, his own senses. When he sees less, he goes to the past, when he thinks he sees more, he speaks of the future of man. However, ever work on the future put man with a mind that did not actually change. All anyone could do is imagine that an evolved mind was a mind that was doing the work of the other bodies parts. Thus, giving his body less to do, in the way of simple things, and his mind then did those things, and that is where you get the man with the hot air balloon head. Big brain, little body, which is a joke, really.
No one imagines what the work of a mind actually is, and how to do it.
There are very few works by authors who imagined a man, as mind, doing its own work. The author of the Bible does, The dialogs of Plato does. But all sci-fi is more like campy humor.
This is why people cannot comprehend the metaphors of the Bible, or Plato's metaphors. People imagine ridiculous myths, but they do this stupidity in science today, and they do not realize that it is ridiculous mythology.
One reads to wallow in their own myths, or to fight their way to comprehension, and a functional mind. Most do not even imagine themselves as dysfunctional and that is just sad.

[Maia]

I've just finished a novel called In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson, the same author who wrote Caedmon's Song, one of the best books I've read recently. In a Dry Season is part of his Inspector Banks series of crime thrillers, and opens when a village, which has been underwater for decades, is exposed when the reservoir dries up, and a skeleton is found under a building. It turns out to be that of a young woman, Gloria, who came to the village as a land girl during the war, and the novel then progresses along two parallel time lines, one in the "present" (actually the 1990s, when it was written, which allows a number of people from the war to still be alive, in their 70s), and the other during the war, as we follow the story of Gloria, and what happened to her. I won't give away who did it, but the suspects include her husband, who has been tortured in a Japanese POW camp and had his tongue cut out, an artist who lives in the village who turns out to be into young boys, her best friend with whom she almost, but not quite, has a lesbian affair, and a whole bunch of different American air force personnel from the nearby base, with whom Gloria has a number of liaisons. It's the job of Inspector Banks, in the present day, to track down these people, if they're still alive, and find out the truth.

It's actually a pretty linear story, with no real twists or surprises at all, but this is offset by Peter Robinson's excellent writing, and ability to conjure up scenes and atmosphere, and, especially, emotion.

[attofishpi]

I'm currently reading a novel called Down to the Woods by M. J. Arlidge, nearly finished, in fact, set in the New Forest in Hampshire, which I've only ever been to once, briefly, while visiting some Pagans in Glastonbury. We went there to meet up with some other Pagans at the Rufus Stone, a monument set up at the spot where William II was killed by an arrow in 1100 under highly suspicious circumstances, which some have alleged were part of a Pagan king-slaying ritual. Whatever the case, that's why I decided to give this book a go.

The New Forest is pretty much the most wonderful place I miss now that I am in Oz. We used to do big walks through the forest many weekends throughout the year.

I guess a bit more on topic, my great grandmother lived in a house in the forest called Bignell Wood, which is where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to own. I think that was the first house I ever got rather tipsy in at about the age of 12 with my cousin for a knees up when it was grandmother's 90th! My father who is an excellent craftsman (carpenter/joiner) has inherited an antique piece of furniture that used to be part of Bignell Wood - he told me he did have a good search of the small wooden cabinet for any notes etc! One day, he pulled the only drawer out of the unit and showed me the precision of the dovetail joints and told me he could never match that level of quality craftmanship for dovetails. That impressed me, my father had made a chest with 92 dovetails for Mum and me being someone that enjoyed woodwork at school and realised how difficult it is to make a decent join of 3 dovetails, I always was impressed with his skill, so for him to admit there is another calibre to the craft was amazing.

[Maia]

I'm currently reading a novel called Down to the Woods by M. J. Arlidge, nearly finished, in fact, set in the New Forest in Hampshire, which I've only ever been to once, briefly, while visiting some Pagans in Glastonbury. We went there to meet up with some other Pagans at the Rufus Stone, a monument set up at the spot where William II was killed by an arrow in 1100 under highly suspicious circumstances, which some have alleged were part of a Pagan king-slaying ritual. Whatever the case, that's why I decided to give this book a go.

The New Forest is pretty much the most wonderful place I miss now that I am in Oz. We used to do big walks through the forest many weekends throughout the year.

I guess a bit more on topic, my great grandmother lived in a house in the forest called Bignell Wood, which is where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to own. I think that was the first house I ever got rather tipsy in at about the age of 12 with my cousin for a knees up when it was grandmother's 90th! My father who is an excellent craftsman (carpenter/joiner) has inherited an antique piece of furniture that used to be part of Bignell Wood - he told me he did have a good search of the small wooden cabinet for any notes etc! One day, he pulled the only drawer out of the unit and showed me the precision of the dovetail joints and told me he could never match that level of quality craftmanship for dovetails. That impressed me, my father had made a chest with 92 dovetails for Mum and me being someone that enjoyed woodwork at school and realised how difficult it is to make a decent join of 3 dovetails, I always was impressed with his skill, so for him to admit there is another calibre to the craft was amazing.

Sounds like a lovely memory, and an idyllic setting, too. I've heard quite a lot about the New Forest, from various sources, and if it was closer, or easier to get to, I would undoubtedly have camped there by now, and done a bit of exploring, on my own, which I always like doing.

[Walker]

Ken Kesey is a favourite because he wrote The Great American Novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. It's an entertaining way to learn about the spirit that makes Americanism a state of mind, like freedom.

[Maia]

I've recently finished Moth Girls by Anne Cassidy, a young adult thriller about a girl who is haunted by memories of her two friends who mysteriously disappeared five years earlier, when they were all aged 12, and have never been found. The three of them had planned to sneak into an old house, but the protagonist, Mandy, had chickened out at the last minute, leaving the other two to their fate, whatever it was, and has been wracked by guilt ever since. When the police were brought in they found that the old man who owned the house had been brutally murdered.

Now 17, in the present day (actually 2015, when it was written), with the old house finally due to be demolished, Mandy is drawn into a series of bizarre coincidences that bring it all to the surface again. We then have a long series of flashbacks to five years earlier, and the story of Petra, one of the girls who disappeared. So the novel basically has two protagonists, one in the present and one in the past, and though their stories are covering the same series of events, they are very different, even contradictory, eventually converging.

What I found interesting about it is the idea of memory, and how it can play tricks, and also the endless searching for something that forever remains elusive, in this case a person. A few of the coincidences do strain credulity a bit, though. I've always felt that a novel is allowed one massive coincidence right at the beginning to set the ball rolling, without which there would be no story to tell, but after that they should be used very sparingly, if at all. In real life, of course, weird coincidences happen all the time, but in fiction they are less satisfying.

Another thing that threatened to put me off, right at the beginning, was when I realised it was set in London. I ploughed on, though, and I'm glad I did.

[reasonvemotion]

Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, by Henry Miller.

Henry and June by Anais Nin

Les Enfants du Paradis, by Marcel Carne

The Idiot, by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Mara (A Henry Miller Story)
Short film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUHehYbA8Zo

“Hasn’t anybody ever treated you right?”

Only today I read this post and watched the trailer of Mara.
The first glimpse of sanity I have seen for such a long time.
Henry and his brilliant ruthlessness!
Thanks Walker.

Another gem you may appreiciate or know of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera
He died a couple of years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFgmjjBEZt0 with Juliette Binoche

[Gary Childress]

I just read news on the Internet and people's posts these days. No favorite author, though if it's written by Chomsky, then I'll pay more attention to it because I trust his opinions to be relevant.

[Walker]

I'll check it out.

*

Henry Miller’s character Mara repeatedly says, “I give gold.”

Henry Miller gave gold and just managed to scratch out a living.


All the gold giving brings to mind Barton Fink, who says, “I tried to show you something beautiful. Something about all of us.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeBM3nwwmlE

Tough world under the veneer.