Better Than Starbucks discussion

If you feel the urge, discuss your books here.

As January is almost over, and we havent had too much going on the first part here on GR

Almost half way through Station Eleven. Interest flagging.

Ruth, do you read a lot of poets, the GR poetry contest excluded?

I do read a lot of poetry. But I seldom sit down and read a whole book of poetry in a front to back manner. There are poetry books all over the house, and I pick them up and graze.

BTW, I've resigned as poetry judge. My husband has Alzheimer's and my duties around here have increased exponentially. Have to cut a few things out.

Sorry to hear on both counts. Your judgeship will be missed, but that is minor point. I wish you many good days, tons of patience, and rest. I know it's cliche but it's true, take of yourself.

After finishing 4 books (better than last year) I'm hoping to finish the novel my 15 year old gave me for Christmas, Paw and Order. While nothing stellar, it does give me a few laughs.

I read Beatlebone, the second novel from Irish writer Kevin Barry, which is the story of a fictional journey by John Lennon to an island he owned off the west coast of Ireland. It is a really interesting exploration of creativity and allows Barry to explore the west of Ireland from an interesting perspective.

Seamus wrote: "I read Beatlebone, the second novel from Irish writer Kevin Barry, which is the story of a fictional journey by John Lennon to an island he owned off the west coast of Ireland. It is a really inter..."

might have to give it a look!

Mariana by Monica Dickens (Charles' great granddaughter)

Into the Shadows by Glen Beck

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life CS Lewis

Reading and really enjoying David Byrne's How Music Works He approaches music from a number of different angles and is not afraid to go out on a limb. As an added bonus you get to hear many of the ideas and influences which drove his work from Talking Heads onwards.

Seamus wrote: "Reading and really enjoying David Byrne's How Music Works He approaches music from a number of different angles and is not afraid to go out on a limb. As an added bonus you get to h..."

Um...that sounds fascinating, but somehow...I had to *make* myself write that, because it's so ponderous to have your post appear, automagically quoted, when really all I want to say is...that sounds fascinating.

Some members of another Shelfari list I'm on are going to some other platform...Leaf something. And some people I knew at Readerville, from a loooong time ago, have reformed on something called Book Balloon. There are alternatives to GoodReads. If they can't offer message threads that make it possible to have conversations more easily, perhaps we should consider another venue?

Trying hard to keep participating, because I don't want to lose touch, but this is DAMNED DEPRESSING.

I finally made it to the end of 'The Emperor of Ocean Park' with great relief that it was over, and allowed myself to read some of the reviews from the big-name American publications that reviewed the book when it came out, which were *extremely* entertaining. Since the only thing keeping me going was the urge to know the Big Secret, I didn't read the reviews before because I was afraid of spoilers.

Oh. My. Goodness. They ranged from somebody in the New York Times saying "This is a bad book", to some that were on the positive side of neutral. This wouldn't be news except that the author got an advance of $4.2 million, yes, over four million dollars.

WHY didn't they edit the thing? Factual errors--okay, things slip through, but the pace! Oh vey! This was a thriller??? Plodding along...plodding some more...oh, the poor protagonist, a doormat for all, bullied by strong women because he just can't stand up to an angry woman...his wife is probably having an affair...yes, people send him strange clues but he doesn't seem to wonder about them, because he's just plodding along...plodding along...for 600 bleedin' pages.

Pretty much the only thing that it really had going for it was that it was set among wealthy African Americans in the Ivy League, which is a demographic not well-represented in current lit. That was interesting. But the rest? A story interesting enough that I did indeed want to know what was up, though chunks of it were ridiculously unbelievable and, after a couple of hundred pages, I kept reading in large part because I hated to lose the investment of time I'd put in.

So I got a real kick out of the various ways that reviewers said "this was not a good read"--although of course some did enjoy it. Heck, they made a movie of it--couldn't be all bad, but the *writing* was bad. I like a good verbose sentence--when there is *artistry* in the words! Some of the contemporary reviews:



•"The Emperor of Ocean Park is just about the sort of middling effort one might expect from an intellectual who likes to divert himself with thrillers and thinks he might even try his hand at one himself some day. (...) It is also funereally paced, though blame may fairly be divvied up on that score, since the manuscript appears to have been unsullied by any editor's pencil." - Jonathan Dee, The Washington Post

* Among the most interesting reactions over the past year were occasioned by Stephen L. Carter's much-hyped The Emperor of Ocean Park ... Few books in recent memory received such divergent reviews, from Erica Wagner simply stating: "This is a bad novel" (in The Times, 1 June) and David Gates calling Carter "a first novelist manifestly without skills and apparently without gifts" (Newsweek, 10 June) to Peter Guttridge insisting "The book is superb, both as a thriller and as a novel of social observation" (The Observer, 16 June).

Was just looking for something else at Shelfari and stumbled upon a discussion from almost exactly two years ago, about Tap bringing his books over here from Shelfari, and how he had to massage the data on every line of the spreadsheet downloaded from Shelfari in order to get the books to import properly to GoodReads--individually.

What you wanna bet that the closure of Shelfari was delayed this long because they were working on their import procedure??

Somebody on another Shelfari group says that a big chunk of her books, a few years in the middle of her shelf, didn't make it to GR, and that random stars seem to have fallen off.

That makes no sense from a database programming point of view. Tap, are you there, and do you have an opinion?

Does anybody know whether Beginnings is over here?

"Ghosts of Old Virginny" by Milla van der Have
Scents of sagebrush, shadows of soaring vultures, coyote yelps, and abandoned mines with silver-linings are redolent metaphors of love in Milla van der Have’s collection of “Ghosts of Old Virginny” poems. The imagery may be stark, yet the desert quietude seems an apt setting for words of amorous longings:

“I didn’t know the quiet desolation of the heart.
All I had were premonitions, a gentle stirring
As the wind struck up.”

"So it's back to where we started
the mountains standing to silent attention
and only the ghost of you on the path
that winds through me as if through land."

Dutch poet Milla van der Have has created some hauntingly beautiful ghosts.

What I'm finding is that GoodReads makes it easy to post and less easy to read other peoples' posts.

For me to follow a conversation, I have to read through all the conversations, all jumbled together. I feel we're at a party, but we're all standing around the edges of the room (did I say this? Maybe I did) shouting our conversation out into the middle, and a person on the other side who wants to hear has to parse all of the other things s/he's hearing to keep that conversation going, so it's almost too much work to bother.

That's why I say it feels as though GoodReads makes saying what you think a priority, over listening to what other people say--even if you really, really want to know what they say.

"I finally read Moby Dick!"
"What did you think of it?"
"Oh. My. God. Jennifer Egan is amazing."
"Is there another Girl with the Dragon Tattoo book in the works?"
"What of hers have you read?"
"There was too much about whaling in it, really, for my taste."
"I don't know, I didn't like the last one as much as his first one."
"I'm reading Goon Squad right now."
"I'm re-reading some of the Toni Morrison books I loved when I was a student."
"That one is stellar, but I think her short fiction is even better."
"What edition did you read?"
"I loved that."
"Larsson's estate is coining money, they'd be fools to stop there."
"I've only read The Bluest Eye."
"You have to read it as history."
"You should try The Keep."
"I'm just not that into whales."

This is a blog post waiting to happen. Please don't copy that --like you were going to, right?-- I'm going to use it m'self.

I am not at all above stealing ideas for blogging, but this is all yours:)

What? You don't like blue eyed whales and girls with harpoons and tattoos? You might want to stay away from Jennifer Morrison's latest, "The Goons at Sea"

It's not a patch on Toni Egan's ink-stained epic The Goon with the Whale Tattoo anyway.

Seamus wrote: "It's not a patch on Toni Egan's ink-stained epic The Goon with the Whale Tattoo anyway."

it was all just a larkson, but then, im not a steigler

Smarter places find ways to work around these sorts of inane conversational flows, especially Shelfarians moving over here :).

But wait, this is supposed to be a thread on discussing our books and now we're discussing how conversations often work on Goodreads ;) .

Yes, because there's no other place set up for general conversation.

Please tell us how other groups find ways to work around the issue of all conversational threads in one topic piling into the same discussion.

The only way I can see--but then I've put a total of 20 seconds into looking for workarounds--is to have a different discussion for every conversation.

So far, I think it sucks. And that tells you that I feel strongly, because I dn't usually use that language.

Furthermore, what this format does, to my eye, is make for less of a sense of community. I have to seek out the discussion on Jennifer Egan rather than just come to the party and see what my friends are reading and talking about, throw in Jennifer Egan, and get some cross-fertilization of ideas, each instance of which is a tiny bond that grows, threading in and out among other such bonds, until a community is knit together.

GoodReads seems to be set up for altogether a different sort of interaction. So if I'm coloring outside the lines by talking about this in this thread, that's life. (I won't apologize for that, but I will or my mixed metaphors.)

mef wrote: "Yes, because there's no other place set up for general conversation.

Please tell us how other groups find ways to work around the issue of all conversational threads in one topic piling into the s..."

I meant smarter book sites, actually, rather than smarter groups, but none is as good as Shelfari. Leafmarks has some conversational advantages, such as nesting replies, but is run by one person so needs more work. There you can't click on the red "new" to go to the first new comment, and when you click at the bottom to read more, you lose the red "new" tags. Plus there you can only have one site page open at a time.


And I was more joking about the tangent; I'm a huge one for tangents IRL.

Ruth wrote: "Almost half way through Station Eleven. Interest flagging."

inspired to write: Interest in Flagging, Semaphore Station