Brad Meltzer’s Book of Lies. Meh. Kinda Dan Brownish without the far-fetched over-elaborate puzzles. Doesn’t leave much Dan Brown though, does it?
Anyway, alternate title: Quest for the Weapon Cain Used to Slay Abel which is Also the Mark of Cain ànd a Book for some Reason while the Proto-Nazi Cult of Thule Wants it Too!
And Superman comics. Because Übermensch…
Trying to summarise it for this forum just made me realise more how ridiculous this book is.
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry:
Grandfather Nariman has alzheimer’s disease. Coomy Aunty dislikes caring for him. When Grandfather breaks his leg, Aunty seizes this opportunity to shove him into her sister Roxana’s small apartment, “just until the break heals”…
This sets in motion a chain of familial, financial, and social consequences. The familiy tries, fails, halfway succeeds,… in adapting to this new situation.
Tragic in its depiction of people’s inability to overcome emotional boundaries and (re)connect, comedic to almost Allo, Allo-levels in the schemes to make a bit more money, heartwarming in the family’s love for each other.
My current main reading, on my Kindle, so I can read with the utterly gargantuan font that helps me keep reading with my progressive neurological illness. The 6 books shown are the ones I’m currently mainly cycling through. A mix of fiction and non fiction reads.
Screenshot of a Kindle Paperwhite e-reader in portrait mode with a black and white screen. The view shows 6 book covers, in 2 rows of 3. At the top are “The King of Elfland’s Daughter” by Lord Dunsany, “Stone & Sky” by Ben Aaronovitch, and “Echolands: In Search of Boudica” by Duncan Mackay. Then on the second row are “Wintering” by Katherine May, “Restoration London” by Liza Picard, and “The Black Archive #72: Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead” by Dale Smith. Each book has a percentage number showing progress so far. Some are further through, e.g. 26% on “Wintering” and 17% for “Restoration London”, while others are newer started.
This is the sort of font I read on my Kindle. On the left is what it started up with by default when I set up a new Kindle a while back. On the right is how I adjusted it for my preference. I don’t need a humungous font for visual impairment so much as brain impairment (cognitive). For the last 25 years or so I’ve found I can read much more easily with a gigantic font. Bigger than typical large print.
This is also why I tend to play IF with gargantuan fonts, and get very distressed when I can’t adjust them. My favourite parser IF interpreter (Lectrote) is set up with a huge font!
Two screenshots side by side of Kindle Paperwhites. On the left is a Sherlock Holmes story, in the default font, with nearly 20 lines of text visible. On the right is the same story with just 9 lines of text, much bigger and more spread out.
@vivdunstan : Thanks for sharing! I’m definitely going to look for Echolands. Boudikaa is a very intriguing personality.
I read two novels set in and around early 20th century New York:
New Rochelle, New York, in the United States of America.
The beginning of the 20th century.
A time of progress.
Flying machines, telephones, electric trams, skyscrapers, land of hope and Houdini.
Racism, poverty, child labour, snorting and stomping and chestpounding capitalism.
They were ragged times. Scott Joplin wrote the music.
Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow.
There is a short and funny sequence in Ragtime describing Sigmund Freud’s visit to the USA. This reminded me of another novel that was somewhere in my stack of unread books: The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld.
Coinciding with Dr Freud’s visit to New York, where he will be staying to give his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis at Clark University, a gruesome murder is committed. A day later, a young woman is attacked in the same manner as the murder victim. She survives, but has lost all recollection of the event. Dr Stratham Younger, an American devotee of Freud’s who is acting as the great Doctor’s guide in New York, takes it upon himself to help the young woman regain her memory through analysis.
Very clever mystery novel. A great sense of early 20th century New York, a good deal of (fictionalised but true in spirit) conflict between Freud and Jung, and a psychoanalytic perspective on Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an ongoing motif throughout the book.
-Freud: Five Lectures on Psych-Analysis (Internet Archive link)
-The Interpretation of Murder (Jed Rubenfeld) - Wikipedia
Freud: Penis envy!
Jung: Mandalas!
Freud: PENIS ENVY!
Jung: MANDALAS!
-Wade
Inspired by The Complete History of Trinity podcast, I’ve been reading The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie. In a word, it’s frickin’ weird. The three-chapter digression about Peter Pan seemed particularly pointless and out of place, and the protagonist himself is a straight-up creep. A number of bits that are evidently intended as charming just annoyed me. I’m not done yet; maybe it gets better.
I thought Jung was the proto-Myers-Briggs guy… Mandalas feels more like new age misinterpretations of non-judeochristian religious traditions if we’re going to be using it to psychoanalyze people…
