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After years of being a Clarke fan, I concluded that none of his novels are as good as Childhood's End.

I haven't read too many novels by him; that's too bad. On the other hand, as good as Childhood's End was, it's understandable.

Actually, growing up I think there were times when I preferred his science fact writing.

That's the way I felt about Asimov, believe it or not. :g

Oh, I find that VERY believable. Asimov was always more convincing in the non-fiction category.

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I've been reading Philip Kerr's "Bernie Gunther" series. Very interesting concept: a noirish and hard-boiled detective's progress and survival through Germany in the 1930s and 40s (with everything that entails), and subsequent globe-trotting exile. I'm on the seventh of eight (so far). Unusually for such a series, the writing generally improves book to book. Kerr took a 15-year sabbatical from the series at one point. I recommend these unless you have an aversion to or are tired of Nazi-related books.

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Close to wrapping up The Mill on the Floss. My initial impression still holds -- a novel that you sort of admire but don't actually enjoy that much. Tom is still such an insufferable prat, and the father is, to his dying day, a man determined to make the wrong choice from what life has to offer him. I just want it to be over at this point.

I happened to grab the graphic novel version of J.B. Priestly's An Inspector Calls (with the full text, they declare proudly). Boy, am I glad that I read this in this format, rather than paying to watch it on stage. For me, time has done it no favors. The speeches are so over the top. Look, look at the uncaring industrialist. Step right this way to see the selfish children of the rich. Look at the charity society woman who has no "soul." And so on. G.B. Shaw and Brecht can sometimes pull off the trick of writing politicial or politicized speech without seeming like they are pulling pages out of a sociology textbook, but Priestly sure can't.

And then the "twist" or rather double-twist at the end is, to me, an infuriating cheat straight out of the pages of G.K. Chesterton, maybe copped directly from The Man Who Was Thursday. I certainly know people who love the Father Brown stories, but I found them unbearable (atheists who kill simply to make The Church look bad, I mean really). I'll be steering clear away from this in the future and probably all of Priestly's work.

Edited by ejp626
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Really disappointed in the last 100 or so pages of Mill on the Floss. I particularly disliked the actual ending. It seemed like it was heading to a downbeat but "organically consistent" ending, i.e. one that made sense given what had happened before. The actual ending is almost totally random and stupid.

I am totally showing my age, but one of the newsmagazines (probably Time) ran little inserts on how to improve one's writing as well as reading comprehension. I think there was Bill Cosby discussing speed reading and so on. Anyway, some comic writer decided to give some advice and said that endings were easy: Everyone got run over by a bus. And if you wanted to change it up a bit, you could use Everyone was run over by a truck.

That's kind of how I felt at the end of this novel -- I honestly feel cheated -- it's such a long book for such a terrible payoff.

All that said, there is one semi-brilliant passage in the novel, which I will copy out gratis to spare you from making my mistake.

For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character’ — says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms — ‘character is destiny.’ But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia and got through life with a reputation of sanity notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.
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First read this 35+ years ago. Still holds up.

My experience, too. Have read it three times - first at the age of 15 and last about 5 years ago. One of the truly great books for me.

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Amazingly good read. What a character !

Does not surprise me. I used to work with him.

Did you! Any stories to tell?

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It's entertaining and at times insightful. It's very much a baby boomer book in that there are lots of cultural references that a middle-age white goy would know. I have been sharing a lot of books on these matters with my Dad but didn't this one as these references would have less meaning to him.

At its core it's a bit too much about John Coats and less about interpretation of Genesis. I enjoyed it but not as much as other books about Paul, Abram et al that I've read lately.

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It's entertaining and at times insightful. It's very much a baby boomer book in that there are lots of cultural references that a middle-age white goy would know. I have been sharing a lot of books on these matters with my Dad but didn't this one as these references would have less meaning to him.

At its core it's a bit too much about John Coats and less about interpretation of Genesis. I enjoyed it but not as much as other books about Paul, Abram et al that I've read lately.

Thanks for the info. :tup

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