A Brief History of Seven Killings -
Becky Lindroos
bekker2 at icloud.com
Thu Dec 31 08:23:48 CST 2015
The books I listed were only those first published in 2015. I read 187 books in all (too much reading) and honestly, 2015 really wasn’t a great year for fiction.
A Brief History of Seven Killings is the best of the lot, imo.
City of Fire is long but it’s not a difficult read at all. Kind of a page-turner and Garth writes very nicely. It is long though, but I don’t think it ever dragged. There’s a crime element and Garth hits New York scene of the 1970s perfectly - like the clichéd love letter maybe.
Career of Evil is a typical crime series in that there is an overarching plot concerning the relationship between the detective, Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin. This is the third book in the series, but the crime plots of each book work as stand-alones. So to read them in order or not - well - do you care about the overarching plot? It’s not all that important in this particular series (to me anyway). I was recommending the book here because of the connection to the Blue Oyster Cult more than anything. Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) is, surprisingly, an excellent writer - for what she does - not literary masterpieces but great story-telling.
I didn’t read Power of the Dog and by the time I’d finished The Cartel I kind of wanted to but I was really tired of Mexican drug lords and kind of wished I’d read it first. It’s basically the story of El Chapo - the escapee guy. I just don’t have the energy for more violence on that level. Maybe in a couple years. It’s way, way better than anything else I’ve read by him (a few).
Also published in 2015 is Umberto Eco’s new one - Numero Zero. It’s lighter in tone than his prior fictions and funny rather than thick and serious. It’s about conspiracies and corruption in Italian newspapers and politics. Not too much semiotics, not too much real paranoia although there is some.
But NON-2015 books that I read these this year:
Karnak’s Cafe (Naguib Mahfouz/1974) about Anwar Sadat’s seriously repressive regime and it’s effects on the opposition folks of Cairo.
And Patrick Modiano is so nice to read - Suspended Sentences and Missing Person are both pretty powerful books - neither published this year.
Have you read The Door by Magda Szabo? That made the NY Times best of 2015 list because it has a new translation. I read it a few years ago and it’s a wonderful book - really - Life after WWII in the very repressive regime of Hungary -
Bek
> On Dec 30, 2015, at 8:10 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm reading reviews of your recommendations - short ones, Amazon style - and I'm definitely getting A Brief History...City on Fire sounds interesting, but long (?)...Career of Evil - do you recommend reading the trilogy in order? The Cartel - read The Power of the Dog first? Between the World...sold.
>
> I always appreciate your contributions.
>
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 9:40 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> Imo, the one book p-listers might enjoy most from this year’s offerings is A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. It’s quite violent but the structure and language are brilliant. A fictional retelling of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley but a lot of the story is what transpired later and how it related to what went before.
>
> Also excellent:
> City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg / New York City circa 1977
> Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith / crime - Blue Oyster Cult
> The Cartel by Don Winslow / crime - drug lords in Mexico
> Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates / nonfiction - race relations
>
> Bek -
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