Fifth Avenue Forum

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is great. Very much enjoyed the read.

Huh.

I remember when J.G. Ballard was considered science fiction.

I remember listening to a podcast a few years ago praising Ballard for having the most prescient vision of the future of all contemporary sci fi writers. That turned me on to him

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Anyone else ever read Stephen Hunter? He is kind of an underappreciated novelist imo... He also won the Pulitzer as a film critic. In any event, his Earl Swagger/Bob Lee Swagger books are very entertaining and well written.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Yes, yes, we're magicians.

Curious question Gaucho...do you normally read English language novels in the original vernacular or translated to German? I know you are fluent in both so was just wondering

Curious question Gaucho...do you normally read English language novels in the original vernacular or translated to German? I know you are fluent in both so was just wondering

Yes, I normally read them in English.

Curious question Gaucho...do you normally read English language novels in the original vernacular or translated to German? I know you are fluent in both so was just wondering

Yes, I normally read them in English.

Nice....at Juniata College, I took a German literature course with this guy:

http://jcsites.juniata.edu/faculty/jaeger/

All around great dude who loved telling stories from back home. He introduced me to Gunter Grass, as we read Crabwalk. Great novel, would like to eventually read the Danzig trilogy.

Curious question Gaucho...do you normally read English language novels in the original vernacular or translated to German? I know you are fluent in both so was just wondering

Yes, I normally read them in English.

Nice....at Juniata College, I took a German literature course with this guy:

http://jcsites.juniata.edu/faculty/jaeger/

All around great dude who loved telling stories from back home. He introduced me to Gunter Grass, as we read Crabwalk. Great novel, would like to eventually read the Danzig trilogy.

I tried reading The Tin Drum twice, but didn't make it past the first 50 or so pages each time. Not sure why, maybe I'll try it a third time some day.

Had no idea AMC was doing a borne series. Love how weird he is and how much he fights for the environment. Looking forward to his new book this summer.

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil.

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.

Things had gotten -- what's the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working as a city janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the WIlliamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.

Finally started The Last Command, book 3 of the Thrawn trilogy. Had to order on Amazon (yes, the softcover, I am an anti-Kindleite).

Forgot how much I loved the SW book universe set after the original trilogy. As far as I'm concerned these books are canon, not the new trilogy.

Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance . And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.

In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words, and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat under water, dead children who spoke in bones. A man who loved bottles.

Power of the dog by Don Winslow is so **** good.

Correct.

Is Cartel and The Border just as good?

I'd rate them A+, A, A-.

Or maybe A, A-, B+.