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Chani gave 4 of 5 stars to:
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
My rating:
didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing
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Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere
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didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing
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Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
Point Omega
by Don DeLillo
read in January, 2012
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Chani gave 4 of 5 stars to:
Twilight by William Gay
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William Gay borrows from several genres but mostly revives the darkest European fairytales in this Southern Gothic thriller which is served by an elegant prose.
Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
L'homme inquiet by Henning Mankell
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Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates
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didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing
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Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
Mémoires De La Jungle by Tristan Garcia
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didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing
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Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
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didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing
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Chani gave 4 of 5 stars to:
La carte et le territoire by Michel Houellebecq
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Chani gave 3 of 5 stars to:
Gone by Mo Hayder
Gone
by Mo Hayder
read in June, 2010
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More of Chani's books…
“Humming is the sign of the truly asocial man, for no other sound is at once so soothing and pleasant to its maker and so irritating to any other listener.”
Howard McCord, The Man Who Walked to the Moon: A Novella

Daniel Mendelsohn
“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

“I would tell you the safe procedure to avoid lightning strikes while on an exposed ridge, but I see no reason you should not learn it as I did. If you get tweaked by God's long electric fingers, I can hardly be to blame. You are a fat-assed nerd anyway, without a pistol within reach and incapable of running more than three miles without the last rites. You, fart-brain, are a reader, and the only thing I despise more is a writer, who simply ought to announce himself a public masturbator and be done with it. But I am telling my story, you are listening, and so we have a truce, if not respect. I am a writer, you a reader, and if there were a God, he might be amused to have mercy on our souls. Or piss on them. In long electric streaks.”
Howard McCord, The Man Who Walked to the Moon: A Novella


Robert
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