Kay's comments (member since Apr 04, 2009)

Kay's comments from the CIRCLE OF FRIENDS group.

Now I've just finished "The Stone Gods" by Jeanette Winterson and have found it to be the most enjoyable of her books so far. There are some marvellous passages that i must note down somewhere- they are really deeply emotional and descriptive of the mood behind this strange set of linked tales. I've started Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" and oddly for me, I'm finding it less enthralling than the TV series I saw a year or so ago on Australia's ABC (like the UK's BBC- no advertising). It seems to me as though the author just jumps into the middle of a young guy's life and doesn't really give any setting or reason for the feelings and action. I guess H will explain it later in oblique fashion, but it just struck me as a device that wasn't working for me at this stage. If I didn't know it was a good story, I might have dropped the book and turned to something else- all a bit discombobulating! Anyone else read this?

Any Lee Childs keeps me occupied on a plane- the books are so gripping I forget to have a sleep sometimes! We generally have 24hour trips back and forth to Europe to fill up, so books that suppress boredom are great. Light fluffy reads bore me too easily so I get restless!

I've dropped off a quarter the way into "Drood" by Dan Simmons- it was starting to grate on me, but maybe I can re-adapt later. Now I'm 3/4 the way through Robertson Davies' "Murther and Walking Spirits", which is fairly gripping- RD is such a fantastic writer- sucks me in, wonderful characters, superb storytelling- he should get the Nobel Prize! I sooo recommend his writing- give "The Deptford Trilogy" a try.

I would also recommend The Time Traveller's Wife, plus Connie Willis' novel To Say Nothing of the Dog (riotous, science fiction, time travel, classic writing, academia, history, period piece...) and The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon), just for starters.

There are so many- but Jigme's suggestion "Celestine Prophecy" was an absolute mongrel- couldn't finish it and I'm still irritated by the people who tried to live their own lives by it- what sort of prophecy is that??? Mephisto by Klaus Mann (written 1936, reprinted for the 1981 movie) was a real crock, I remember; plus The Mulberry Empire: A Novel by Philip Hensher- so tedious, with sentences as long as a traffic jam!

I finished Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" last week and it was awwesome- just so comple, well written, full of believable and unusal characters- frantic to read the sequels! Currently I'm just concluding Barbara Nadel's "River of the Dead", referring to the Euphrates in Turkey on the borders with Syria and Iraq.It is a very relevant detective tale centred around the Middle Eastern drugs trade, especially involving Afghanistan.

I found The Gold Coast a bit disappointing comapred to his other books- a bit disjointed or something- maybe I was delirious with some germ or other!