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roar 



Joined: 01 Sep 2004


PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 9:58 am
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^ I have heard many a good thing about those books, but lots of people have also struggled with them.
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Wokko Pisces

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Joined: 04 Oct 2005


PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 10:25 am
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David wrote:
I'm part way through the second book in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. For what is essentially autobiography (a six-part autobiography, no less!), it's absolutely engrossing and brilliantly written.


I saw "My Struggle" and thought you were delving into Hitler's work. Laughing
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 11:29 am
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Given that the title of the book series in Norwegian is Min Kamp, I'm guessing it's a thoroughly intentional reference. I kind of admire the audacity of that. Smile

Roar, I really recommend picking up the first book (which is mostly about his adolescence and relationship with his alcoholic father) and seeing what you think – his writing style isn't for everyone (plenty of long sentences and digressions within digressions), but I find it totally captivating.

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watt price tully Scorpio



Joined: 15 May 2007


PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 11:45 am
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John Wren wrote:
^ that was a brilliant book that did not translate well into film.

i am reading "the phoenix rises" which charts the revival of the vfl and its transformation to the afl.


You should speak with Dr Pie: in short that was (sort of) the subject matter of his PhD.

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blackmissionary Cancer

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Joined: 26 Jul 2002


PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 1:51 pm
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A lot of the stuff I've enjoyed in 2016 has had a strong religious theme, and usually fiercely intelligent even in their blasphemous moments.

If you really love blasphemy (in this case against the Christian and Jewish faiths) than Nick Tosches' 'Under Tiberius', a re-imagining of the life of Jesus as a hoax concocted by a Jewish loiterer and a former speech writer for the emperor Tiberius, will be right up your alley. The miracles and disciples are a laugh, but its Tosches' attention to detail that really wins you over.

Michel Houellebeqc's novel 'Submission' - on what happens when a 'moderate' Muslim party wins the 2022 French presidential election - is either razor sharp satire on the state of the French left and its academic wings, or a grim warning for the future of Europe. I took it as satire, but plenty to chew on if you like your fiction provocative.

Chuck Palahniuk's 'Pygmy', on how a high school exchange student to the US from a nation run by a totalitarian regime compares his home country's brutal education system to the ruthlessness of the American one, is an absolute pisser. Told purely via the propaganda lens of the title character (the not quite broken English is key to the effect), this is warped stuff.

Michael Faber's 'The Book of Strange New Things' is set in the not too distant future, where as society starts falling apart on Earth, a corporation's colonisation of an alien world leads to them hiring a Christian (Protestant) pastor to act as a go-between between humans and the indigenous aliens. The pastor finds a chance to minister to a new flock, but this slow, meditative, thoughtful novel has a lot of surprises up its sleeve.
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2016 3:34 pm
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^ sounds like some interesting titles, blackmissionary (the Houellebecq novel was the one I was referring to in the other thread, by the way).
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watt price tully Scorpio



Joined: 15 May 2007


PostPosted: Tue Dec 17, 2019 6:01 pm
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I'm not sure about a great read but a pretty good read (If you're into crime fiction - which I am) is "Close Your Eyes" by Michael Rowbotham (2015) which I'm reading now.
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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 17, 2019 6:10 pm
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Good timing for a thread bump.

I heard about this book on the radio this morning, not my usual stuff by a long stretch but I'll confess to being intrigued. Highly rated.

http://sarahkrasnostein.com/the-trauma-cleaner/

Quote:
BEFORE SHE WAS A TRAUMA CLEANER, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, sex reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife…But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less.

A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose.

Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead—and the book she has written is equally extraordinary. Not just the compelling story of a fascinating life among lives of desperation, but an affirmation that, as isolated as we may feel, we are all in this together.

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watt price tully Scorpio



Joined: 15 May 2007


PostPosted: Tue Dec 17, 2019 8:49 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
Good timing for a thread bump.

I heard about this book on the radio this morning, not my usual stuff by a long stretch but I'll confess to being intrigued. Highly rated.

http://sarahkrasnostein.com/the-trauma-cleaner/

Quote:
BEFORE SHE WAS A TRAUMA CLEANER, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, sex reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife…But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less.

A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose.

Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead—and the book she has written is equally extraordinary. Not just the compelling story of a fascinating life among lives of desperation, but an affirmation that, as isolated as we may feel, we are all in this together.


While not a trauma cleaner per se, the stuff Mrs WPT does in her business working with hoarders and others is truly amazing. Some of her stories, One case some years ago they were helping an old woman with heaps of junk that had accummulated over the years. A neigbour came by and said they assisted the woman about 15-20 years earlier and in the mess / hoard etc was a skeleton of her deceased motherleft in the same postion that she died in. So what did they do?

Report it to authortities, the police, a funeral parlour? No they simply rolled the seleton up in an old carpet & took it down the tip!!

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think positive Libra

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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 18, 2019 9:54 am
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aye yi yi yi!
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 18, 2019 10:47 am
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I'm back on Knausgaard, incidentally! On to book 6 now (I skipped 3, 4 and 5, but may come back to them). Apparently he finally lives up to his book series' title by devoting a full third of the last one to talking about Hitler – I read about it here and my interest was piqued:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n21/christopher-clark/still-messing-with-our-heads

Quote:
Something​ very strange happens in the middle of The End, the sixth and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic work of self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler. For 360 pages Knausgaard discusses Hitler’s youthful longing and seriousness, his love for his mother, his struggle with an authoritarian father, his refusal of the destinies prescribed for him by convention. Long passages are given over to summarising, or simply quoting from, the first volume of Mein Kampf, written while Hitler was in prison in 1925. Knausgaard reflects (twice) on that moment in 1945, preserved on film, when Hitler emerged, ‘his hands shaking with sickness’, from a bunker beneath Berlin, ‘with the world in flames and millions of people dead as a result of his volition’, to greet a line of young boys who had been called up to defend the collapsing city. In that perilous moment, he writes, Hitler revealed, ‘in a fleeting gleam of his eyes ... something warm and kind, his soul’. ‘He was a small person,’ Knausgaard concedes, ‘but so are we all.’ And out of these and many other thoughts about Hitler spiral a long series of reflections on modern life, accompanied by high-end literary and cultural references. Not until page 848 does The End escape from Hitler’s orbit. In the meantime, the reader has trekked across a massive, crater-like depression in the book’s structure. It is like coming up for air when we are finally allowed to re-inhabit the body of the writer: ‘I sat down again, poured myself some tepid coffee from the vacuum jug and lit another cigarette.’

What is Hitler doing in this book? I suppose his appearance at some point was inevitable, given that the cycle’s Norwegian title, reluctantly accepted by Knausgaard’s publisher, was Min Kamp. (The German translator refused to use Mein Kampf as the title, and the books are published in Germany under the clunking rubric Das autobiografische Projekt.) Asked why he chose the title, Knausgaard has tended to fudge. A friend suggested it, he told one interviewer. It was better than his other working titles, ‘Argentina’ and ‘Parrot Park’. The Hitler essay at the heart of Book 6 doesn’t answer the question either, not directly. We have to infer its purpose by examining the services Hitler performs for the man who has summoned him back from the dead.

Mein Kampf, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled, Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother, the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous seriousness with which he approaches life, all these fixtures of the self on display throughout Min Kamp are also present in the author of Mein Kampf. Even Hitler’s abstention from masturbation, recalled by his youthful roommate August Kubizek and much discussed in the Hitler literature, chimes with Knausgaard’s belated and laborious efforts at onanism, bleakly recorded in Book 4.

To frame the journey towards Hitler as an encounter with oneself is unexpected. It doesn’t mean that Knausgaard endorses Hitler’s acts or worldview, though he insists that it must be possible to distinguish between who Hitler was and what he did. In the case of the young Hitler, already himself but not yet the author of a genocidal war, the distinction seems (at least to Knausgaard) impossible to deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This excessively ‘negative’ view, Knausgaard suggests, is not just ‘immature’, it makes the biography ‘almost unreadable’.

These strictures are bewildering. It is one thing for a male Norwegian writer to emote empathetically in the direction of an image of Adolf Hitler he has developed in his own mind after reading half a dozen books. But the task of Kershaw, who has immersed himself over decades in treatises and archival records, can scarcely be to sound out his own spiritual affinity with Hitler, it must rather be to understand what it was about him, even in his youth, that might help explain his later career. The distanciated, analytical perspective of the historian is precisely what disgusts Knausgaard.

By fixing on Hitler as the disturbing doppelgänger of the authorial ego, Knausgaard expands his work’s moral remit by folding into it the arc of modern history. Hitler becomes a test case for the Narrenfreiheit of the contemporary novelist. Readers with a better understanding than I have of the Norwegian context will no doubt discern other, local resonances. But it may be worth bearing in mind that the impact of the Nazi occupation on Norwegian society was especially deep. In trials that lasted from 1945 until 1957, more than 90,000 cases of collaboration were investigated (3.2 per cent of the country’s population was involved) and 46,000 people were sentenced. Far from stabilising the country, as the returning Norwegian government-in-exile had hoped, the trials had a profoundly polarising effect. This was the most expansive juridical reckoning anywhere in postwar Europe. Knausgaard makes no mention of these events, beyond registering his surprise when he discovers a Nazi pin among the belongings of his dead father. But the controversy of the trials resonates in his need to express both the attraction and the repulsion awakened in him by Nazism and Hitler.

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think positive Libra

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PostPosted: Wed Dec 18, 2019 11:36 am
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i have no idea who this guy is or about his books, but the Hitler stuff is interesting. a morbid curiosity i guess. i just cannot understand how he got so many to do his bidding, the murder, the torture, the unspeakable, ridiculous ...i cant even put it into words with out using "evil" which i know you dont believe exists.

didnt go to any camps while we were in Germany, we were on the other side of the country, although there is a monument for the very first death camp near Stuttgart, but we didnt visit.

At the Mercedes museum they have a history wall down the walkways, and there is a photo that declared D day and the end of Hitler.

i wonder how many other profile traits of a serial killer could be found in his background apart from the hated father?

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 23, 2020 7:31 pm
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Here's a surprise: I've been going through a lot of the classics with Ingmar as bedtime stories in the past year (The Magic Faraway Tree, The Chronicles of Narnia, some Astrid Lindgren books) and we just recently started on The Famous Five (specifically, the first book, Five Go to Treasure Island). My faint recollection of it from childhood was of it being a bit naff, and Enid Blyton's writing can be a bit flat at the best of times, but I have to admit I'm actually enjoying it every bit as much as Ingmar is, and curious about what will happen next.

(It's also given me an excuse to revisit this old TV show with him – does anyone else remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPkh0lxFOhE)

I think bedtime stories are among the best experiences of parenting, and I can tell it's an experience Ingmar really cherishes too. Smile

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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 23, 2020 7:52 pm
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I had all the Enid Blyton books, read the magic faraway tree to my kids. Good stories.

Great bump.

I strongly recommend anything by Matthew Reilly for people who like action movies.

I recently bought 2 quite different books.

Dark Emu and A Brief History of Time. Looking forward to the opportunity to read them.

Also, for the young bloke, get a copy of "The animals Noah forgot" and read it to him.

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think positive Libra

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PostPosted: Sun Feb 23, 2020 11:34 pm
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Magic faraway tree is brilliant, try swallows and amazons too David! I loved encyclopaedia Brown too!
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