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1 hour ago, Shandon Par said:

James Ellroy is in Glasgow on 29th May as part of his book tour. 

I see his new book comes out the next day, been a long time coming, 600 pages though. :thumsup2

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1 hour ago, welshbairn said:

I see his new book comes out the next day, been a long time coming, 600 pages though. :thumsup2

Only about 3 years behind schedule with it. I know books are perfectly valid in their own right but I'd love to see a really decent TV or film adaptation of his more recent stuff. The LA Confidential film was good but still didn't really do some of the characters justice. 

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4 hours ago, Shandon Par said:

Only about 3 years behind schedule with it. I know books are perfectly valid in their own right but I'd love to see a really decent TV or film adaptation of his more recent stuff. The LA Confidential film was good but still didn't really do some of the characters justice. 

Wasn't keen on the first book of his new series, hopefully the time he spent on it paid off. He got a lot of stick for the experimental stuff on The Cold 6 Thousand which I thought was his best book, so he thought he had to go more conventional. If I was in Glasgow on the 29th I'd call him a Jessie.

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On 01/05/2019 at 17:02, mathematics said:

Finished “Minority Report” by Philip K Dick today. It’s a book of short stories, two of which were adapted into the movies “minority report” and “total recall”. 

I think that PKD has some good ideas for stories, but isn’t necessarily that good a writer, or maybe I just don’t like short stories.

Completely agree with the ideas being better than the writing in general. He couldn't do characters. That can work in some stories where the character is incidental. A Scanner Darkly for example  works because the environment removes any individuality. 

 

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Just finished Brookmyres latest. Felt almost like an Ian Banks book because of the set up, but clearly Brookmyres style. Some good ranty asides and some genuinely unsettling and emotional serious bits. 

Very grown up and probably his best written book yet. 

Plotwise though, it would be nice to have some more self decapitating henchmen and OTT megalomaniacs like in the olden days. 

 

Edited by coprolite
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Been trying to rattle through the embarrassingly large (and ever growing) collection of unread books on my shelves. Had a good start to the year so far.

Flew through my last one as I got roped into supervising a half way ghee history candidate and had four hours of dead time.

White Crocodile by K.T Medina

Debut novel by a former TA engineer about a minesweeper in Cambodia who investigates a serial killer operating around one of the country's largest minefields. Having been to Cambodia, it sets the scene very well and it's clear the author knows the country well. Good plot, good pacing, well written and a very gripping conclusion.

Solid first novel and look forward to seeing whether she picks up the central character Tess for a second book.

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Darkening age by Catherine Nixey. 

Narrative history of the early years of Christianity, focusing on them burning books, persecuting philosophers, flaying heretics and generally behaving like ISIS to usher in the dark ages. 

Pretty decent, although it laboured a couple of points too much. Really good anecdotes told with a lot of vivid detail. 

 

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On 31/05/2019 at 09:57, Shandon Par said:

Just got the new James Ellroy book. Some size. 

He also does literary criticism.

Quote

Ellroy writes about lowlife Los Angeles and admits that as a young man he read a lot of Raymond Chandler, the patron saint of hard-boiled crime fiction. But woe betide anyone who suggests he is beholden to him. “Raymond Chandler is the most overrated writer in the American canon,” he told Hay. “Raymond Chandler sucks chihuahua dicks.”

His preference is for Dashiell Hammett, the creator of Sam Spade. “Hammett wrote the kind of man that he was afraid that he was. Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wished he were.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/02/james-ellroy-says-film-adaptation-of-la-confidential-was-as-deep-as-a-tortilla

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The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock.

Style is somewhere between O Brother Where Art Thou and True Grit - Typical Coen Brothers dark humour and caricature characters. It's set in rural America during the first world war. When an old sharecropper dies and makes his 3 children orphans, the Jewett brothers decide that they'd rather reap their rewards on earth than wait to dine at God's heavenly table. Inspired by the anti-hero of an old pulp novel that the oldest brother read to his younger siblings for years, the Jewetts decide to pursue the outlaw life in a southern America on the edges between cowboys and the modern era.

I enjoyed it. It would be easy for the author to sneer at his characters as backward hicks and southern rednecks but there's a genuine warmth in some of the characters in the novel and even the 3 Jewetts are given rounded and developed personalities. Pollock weaves several threads together over the course of about 360 pages. The ending still feels a touch rushed - things come together a little too quickly over the final 30 or so pages of the novel and it would have been a little better if the author had kept the pace of the preceding chapters when reaching the ultimate ending for the Jewetts and the other main protagonists he did well to flesh out. It doesnt detract from the story nor take too much away from the overall enjoyment.

 Definitely recommended.

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On 02/06/2019 at 20:51, welshbairn said:

Cheers - think I’ve agreed with his summation already on here that no adaptation has really done his work justice. Just finishing an Elmore Leonard before getting stuck into the new Ellroy. 

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1 minute ago, Shandon Par said:

Cheers - think I’ve agreed with his summation already on here that no adaptation has really done his work justice. Just finishing an Elmore Leonard before getting stuck into the new Ellroy. 

I thought LA Confidential was pretty good.

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2 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

I thought LA Confidential was pretty good.

Me too but always thought it was a shame they didn’t do more with the Dudley Smith character. He’s almost supernaturally evil and powerful in the books but was a bit of a nasty wee nyaff in the film. Still one of the very best film noirs though.

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