Recent content by Scott89119

Boy does this make my heart heavy. She was a profound, seminal talent. This snippet from "Amundsen" will always be one of the most beautiful things I'll ever read: "Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some small, untidy...

RIP titan. You deserved the Nobel, even though you probably couldn't have cared less about it.

Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety Big and fun and dense so far. I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I LOVE how Mantel takes on history; she could do no wrong with me.

??The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk It's literary quality is obvious, but tbh I can't wait for it to be over. It doesn't grab me in any way. Way too scatterbrained and abstract.

?? Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague. I've been looking forward to it all year, but I'm a quarter of the way through, and sadly it's a crushing bore.

It's a shame Philip Roth never got it, and a damn shame Hilary Mantel didn't either.

Absolutely. Gunter Grass's incredible The Tin Drum. The recent English translation by Breon Mitchell blew me away.

Fun thread: Sigrid Undset, Kristen Lavransdottir Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (LOVE) Sinclair Lewis, Main Street Ernest Hemingway, As the Sun Rises Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King Gabriel...

I knew she had health problems, but I didn't know they were life-threatening. Shocking, tragic news. The Cromwell trilogy will live on as the stupendous achievement it is. I was really gunning for her to win the Nobel too.

I wrote a post in this thread in 2010 about not being able to understand Wolf Hall. I eventually finished it, along with Bring Up the Bodies, but wasn't impressed and didn't remember anything about them. In getting ready for The Mirror and the Light, I decided to re-read both books, and... well...