Nigeyb > Recent Status Updates

Charming Peter versus Button Dainty showdown 😱

Enjoying EL’s meticulous detailing of middle-class cultural gatekeeping and his single minded obsession with status

The post-party discussion between Sarah and Wilfred is fascinating. Talk about cards on the table! And very uncomplimentary if it’s also about AS Byatt

I’m around halfway through this book now and finding it a bit of a slog. Perhaps it will make more sense when I reach the conclusion and reflect upon it? Perhaps I’m just not that interested in the history of California?

The murder section is a bit more interesting and revealing

Some jaw dropping stuff in this book. No surprise Meta are not keen on this information being in the public domain. I probably wouldn’t be reading it if they hadn’t tried to suppress it

The men and women of the West scraped clear the glass of their own lives whenever they wanted to make a new image there, and San Francisco was a hothouse made out of these lives, incubating fantasies, erasures, and new beginnings. (Like the glass used for early photographic negatives and later repurposed for green houses)

That exotic new world of images speeding by would become the true home of those who spent their Saturdays watching images beamed across the darkness of the movie the-ater, then their evenings watching images beamed through the atmosphere and brought home into a box like a camera obscura or a crystal ball, then their waking hours surfing the Internet wired like the old telegraph system.

Through the new technologies-the train to the landscape, the camera to the spectacle-the Victorians were trying to find their way back, but where they had lost the old familiar things they recovered exotic new ones. What they had lost was solid; what they gained was made out of air.

I loved the James Ellroy-esque "A Violent Masterpiece" and this seems to be just as good. Another dark, razor-sharp modern noir that moves at breakneck speed and pulls no punches. I'm a confirmed Jordan Harper fan!

This captures that narrow historical corridor between the austerity of the 1950s and the full explosion of Swinging London in the mid/late 60s. Despite elements of modernity the infrastructure for a truly modern female life hasn't quite been built yet. These characters are caught between eras. It's fab and has a wonderful duality: part classic novel of manners, part early herald of 1960s liberation

Every time I pick this up I love it. I've just got to the party section which is brilliantly done. All that's good and all that's awful about house parties. This is such a vivid evocation of early 60s London complete with Beehives, bohemianism, and the shadow of Victorian values clearly present but starting to recede.

Very assured for a debut

My second JH and, so far, another goodie

Bizarrely brilliant

All the threads have come together and this is tense as

I have just reached the point whether the three narratives are starting to merge. This is superb. I am hoping Jordan Harper can keep this going through to the finale

Brilliant eye witness account of the Ziggy years

It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him....

The surgery was as dingy as the passage outside, with the same sticky-looking, brown wainscoting. The carpet was red, blue, and green, the wallpaper dusty yellow. The chair faced the windows, the lower halves of which were boarded over, and the crooked shape of the drill hung high up by a cluster of frosted-glass lights

Giovanni at last looked away from the Fort, Ortiz too had remained quite still and was gazing intently at the yellow walls. He, too, who had lived there for eighteen years, looked at them as if bewitched, as if once more he witnessed a miracle. It seemed he could not tire of looking upon them once again, and a vague smile, half joyful, half sad, slowly lit his face.

The Greek ideals of male companionship and beauty are used by the characters as a "safe language" to discuss their feelings in a society that lacks the modern vocabulary for it

A taut, psychologically driven espionage thriller that leans toward the John le Carré school of realism. Enjoying it so far. I suspect it’s about to get very very tense from here on in

The section immediately after Petta walks out of the dinner with Quintin, Alma, and Claypole is heartbreakingly moving. OM captures that specific, cold panic of a woman who has staked her identity on her beauty only to realise an indifferent world has moved on without her.A masterclass of quiet desperation

Only now were we able to cast off our fears and worries, because it was getting later and later, and we had drunk a bottle of Spätlese and all three of us were tiddly. A mere residue of anxiety prevented us from looking at the clock.