Great quote from William Golding just popped up on ‘Quote of the Day’ on my customised Google homepage:
Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.
Month: July 2005
A Good Day to Die – Simon Kernick
A Good Day to Die is Kernick‘s fourth book, and it brings back the anti-hero of the first, disgraced ex-copper Dennis Milne.
(Clicking the book cover takes you to Amazon – the commission helps fund Palimpsest)
Kernick’s books are a real strange mix, and I haven’t come across anything quite like them before. On one level, they are pretty standard thrillers, written with plot and pace in mind and conciously without any kind of literary embellishments.
But there are two things which set these apart from other books in the genre. Firstly, a rich vein of black humour runs throughout the book, and the numerous sarcastic asides do raise a smile on the face of the reader; which is all the more surprising given the second standout feature of Kernick’s work which is the sheer grimness of the subject matter. It really is heard to imagine a light-hearted romp involving murderous paedophile gangs, but that really is what this book is (kind of). So you have this real contradiction between style and content, but somehow it just works. I breezed through it in the space of a few hours reading time, I would say, and it’s a clear improvement on the earlier books and a good, no-nonsense read.
BBC Podcasts
The BBC are running a trial offering some of their radio programmes as downloads, effectively making them podcasts. Might give this a go for some of the more interesting stuff.
Mark Kermode‘s film reviews might well become a regular listen.
Palimpsest Book Group
Palimpsest has a book group, discussing books read by all the members in a topic on the forum. It has worked really well in the past, but recently has fallen behind a little.
To try and perk things up a bit it was decided that instead of choosing books month-by-month, 6 books should be chosen to cover half a year’s group reading, meaning that everyone knows where they stand. After various discussions and slightly complicated voting systems, the final selection looks like this:
- 1 September 2005: The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Gustave Flaubert
- 1 October 2005: No One Writes to the Colonel, Gabriel García Márquez
- 1 November 2005: The First Men in the Moon/The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells
- 1 December 2005: Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami
- 1 January 2006: Virtual Light, William Gibson
- 1 February 2006: The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare
Some pretty challenging stuff there!