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Pit Book/Discussion Thread

Anybody read Tenth of December or Subtle Bodies? Looking at those for my next two pick-ups.
 
TownieDeac said:
Doesn't it have, like, vampires in it?
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I mean, Mitchell has earned my money by now.

Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.
 
It's going to be painful if they select a writer whose works I really want to read.
 
What are some good short story collections (by a single author)? I'm working through Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson and have What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver up next.
 
Roald Dahl actually has a decent collection of short stories for adults. I liked Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes too.
 
Read about The Martian in this week's Entertainment Weekly. The writer was a former IT guy who basically wrote as a hobby, and this one particular novel was his big break. Just picked it up as an Ebook for free through my library, so I can't wait to get into it. They are currently filming the movie with Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon.
 
KickballDeac said:
What are some good short story collections (by a single author)? I'm working through Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson and have What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver up next.
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I liked Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.
 
TownieDeac said:
I just finished it last night, circa 1 AM. I didn't really anticipate finishing because I had 150ish pages to go, but I couldn't stop reading. There's a sorta false climax to the main story arc, but the "epilogue" is perhaps the best part of the book. It's not called an epilogue, but it takes place far after the end of the main narrative, and it's really fucking compelling.

The book is so different from Cloud Atlas. What a talented writer. To say the book kept me guessing is such an understatement. He reveals everything slowly so you're willing to suspend your disbelief more and more as the story gets more and more ridiculous til you're in the final act and it's insane.

Great read.
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That's great to hear; the same cousin got it for me for my birthday. I wish I wasn't in the top 5% of slowest readers on the planet (my estimate) so I could get to it sooner.
 
TownieDeac said:
I just finished it last night, circa 1 AM. I didn't really anticipate finishing because I had 150ish pages to go, but I couldn't stop reading. There's a sorta false climax to the main story arc, but the "epilogue" is perhaps the best part of the book. It's not called an epilogue, but it takes place far after the end of the main narrative, and it's really fucking compelling.

The book is so different from Cloud Atlas. What a talented writer. To say the book kept me guessing is such an understatement. He reveals everything slowly so you're willing to suspend your disbelief more and more as the story gets more and more ridiculous til you're in the final act and it's insane.

Great read.
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I wish I didn't have like 6 books going and a new ps4 so I could dive into this. Alas, I will attempt to become a fake NBA All Star instead.
 
Finished The Wings of the Dove the other day. It's the third book by James that I've read, with the other two being Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. On the whole, I thought it was good but not outstanding. The obvious issue with James, of course, is his prose, which, in my opinion, stinks. Not that it's not well-crafted or sloppy, but the purpose of language is to communicate, and his just doesn't get it done. You've got endless turns of clauses and phrases, tortured sentences, and chapters that literally have the same number of paragraphs as they do pages. I know he's capable of writing clearly--he did it, as best I recall, in Portrait--so I don't know why he chose to do it this way. It's a shame, because there's a good story in there, but he makes it far too difficult to get at.

As for the other elements of the book, I mostly liked it.
He did a good job of balancing characters and managed the intrigue very well, with shifting points of view to leave the reader guessing who knows what at what point in time. The tension built up nicely, and the climax was very good. I was a little surprised to read that some people found the ending ambiguous, as I thought it was pretty unequivocal--it's ovah. My major problem, apart from the prose, was that I was never really all that invested in Kate's and Densher's relationship; James pretty much told you up front that it didn't have much to it, and Densher never seems to get past infatuation while I couldn't tell that Kate even felt that much. I was also disappointed in how quickly Kate went from sympathetic character (first couple of chapters with her father and sister) to scheming, manipulative bitch.
 
Have you done Turn of the Screw?

Cheers, also, for the spoilers tag.
 
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