Post your unputdownable book
by behemot 21 Replies latest jw friends
-
-
-
four candles
Reading one now called 'The Book Thief' by Markus Zusak. Very good,about a little girl,an accordionist,some fanatical Germans,a jewish fist fighter and quite a lot of thievery!!!
Recommended.
-
zoiks
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman
The scholarship is so interesting, and he writes with a sense of curiosity and discovery that is, in my opinion, exhilerating.
-
Locutus of Borg
"One Second After" by Forstchen. I could not put it down, scared the hell out of me.
From Booklist:
In a Norman Rockwell town in North Carolina, where residents rarely lock homes, retired army colonel John Matherson teaches college, raises two daughters, and grieves the loss of his wife to cancer. When phones die and cars inexplicably stall, Grandma’s pre-computerized Edsel takes readers to a stunning scene on the car-littered interstate, on which 500 stranded strangers, some with guns, awaken John’s New Jersey street-smart instincts to get the family home and load the shotgun. Next morning, some townspeople realize that an electromagnetic pulse weapon has destroyed America’s power grid, and they proceed to set survival priorities. John’s list includes insulin for his type-one diabetic 12-year-old, candy bars, and sacks of ice. Deaths start with heart attacks and eventually escalate alarmingly. Food becomes scarce, and societal breakdown proceeds with inevitable violence; towns burn, and ex-servicemen recall “Korea in ’51” as military action by unlikely people becomes the norm in Forstchen’s sad, riveting cautionary tale, the premise of which Newt Gingrich’s foreword says is completely possible. --Whitney Scott
http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765317583
-
-
keyser soze
The Truth That Leads to Everlasting Life
-
Terry
'Blood Meridian,' by Cormac McCarthy
REVIEW BY CARYN JAMES Published: April 28, 1985"BLOOD MERIDIAN'' comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants. But while Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore. Any page of his work reveals his originality, a passionate voice given equally to ugliness and lyricism. Over the past 20 years the brutality of his subjects may have kept readers away, but the power of his writing has earned high critical repute. Three early novels, in fact - ''The Orchard Keeper,'' ''Outer Dark'' and ''Child of God'' - have been reissued in the Ecco Press series, ''Neglected Works of the Twentieth Century.''
This latest book is his most important, for it puts in perspective the Faulknerian language and unprovoked violence running through the previous works, which were often viewed as exercises in style or studies of evil. ''Blood Meridian'' makes it clear that all along Mr. McCarthy has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal, jolting us out of complacency.
Loosely based on historical events, the novel follows a fictitious 14-year-old called only ''the kid'' - born in 1833, exactly 100 years before the author - as he drifts through the Southwest. He soon joins an outlaw band of Indian hunters who have been hired by a Mexican governor to return Apache scalps at $100 apiece. These misfits - including an ex-priest, a man with initials tattooed on his forehead and a mysterious, erudite judge named Holden - have a taste for blood and death that Mr. McCarthy seems to revel in.
Grotesque descriptions are alleviated by scenes that might have come off a movie screen. Indians pass through the novel like extras in a Fellini film, ''wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery . . . one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood stained weddingveil.'' The kid's terseness is a mild parody of B-movie westerns. Looking at a severed head, ''he spat and wiped his mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.'' The horrifying details stick in our minds, however, while the surreal elements melt away. That imbalance is a problem, for Mr. McCarthy's emphasis is not on the violent set pieces but on the characters' reactions to them. The kid recedes into the background as the judge comes forward, in scene after scene sounding the novel's major themes and hinting at the author's strategy. Half-naked, the judge sits among the others by the fire ''like an icon'' and pontificates. One who observed a conflict between two enemies ''expressed the very nature of the witness and . . . was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?'' Pointing to the surrounding Indian ruins he announces, ''Here are the dead fathers'' against whom their descendants define themselves.
The kid and the judge are our own dead fathers, whom Mr. McCarthy resurrects for us to witness. He distances us not only from the historical past, not only from our cowboy-and-Indian images of it, but also from revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims. All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the ''meridian'' from which their civilization will quickly fall. War is a civilized ritual beyond morality for the judge, but not for Mr. McCarthy, who positions his readers to evaluate the characters' moral and philosophical stances. The kid frequently responds to the judge's grandiose speeches by saying, ''You're crazy'' - a notion so plausible that it effectively undermines the judge's authority.
Mr. McCarthy carefully builds this dialectic only to let us down with a stylistically dazzling but facile conclusion. Years later, in a saloon where a bear dances on stage, the kid encounters the judge, who calls himself a ''true dancer'' of history, one who recognizes ''the sanctity of blood.'' There is a hint that he kills the kid. Last seen as a towering figure on stage, the judge is ''naked, dancing . . . He says that he will never die.'' H E is denied the last word, though. Mr. McCarthy's half-page epilogue presents a man crossing the plain making holes in the ground, blindly followed by other men who search for meaning in this pattern of holes. The judge's enigmatic dance and the long ordeal of the novel's violence demand more than this easy ambiguity. There are, of course, no answers to the life-and-death issues Mr. McCarthy raises, but there are more rigorous, coherent ways to frame the questions.
-
WingCommander
Revelation: It's Grand Climax at Hand!!! The pictures draw me in to the story, and the fact that it changes every couple of years makes it interesting!
When you get to the parts about how the trumphet blasts represent the conventions in Cedar Point, OH - well, you just can't stop laughing! Oh, and when the two imprisoned witnesses are supposed to equal Judge Rutherford and Knorr I believe; pure cult GOLD!!!!
A timeless classic composed of completely unproveable fiction which cannot be taken literally for fear of going insane!!!
- Wing Commander
-
aquagirl
"Cherry" or "Liars Club" by the lovely Mary Carr.
