I'd like to strongly recommend JP Delaney's Believe Me, having just completed it.  It's not only a whodunnit and therefore a nice mental jigsaw - JP Delaney has a great deal of psychological insight into the way people behave, and the motivations behind it (and shares that with other top-notch writers of crime fiction).  This particular book explores art, and people's response to it, and the responsibility if any of an artist for the unhinged ways people may respond to it.  It also looks at essentially the "observer effect" of having an audience, and asks how that affects people's behaviour, and what's acting and what's reality.

I've read a fair few of this genre in the last ten years or so, and therefore wasn't surprised by any of the plot twists in it - because I've become very good at avoiding being led, keeping an open mind, and asking myself at the end of every chapter, "What's an alternative scenario, to the one that obviously suggests itself?  What are the assumptions being made?  What are the other possibilities here?"  So I only had one mild surprise in this one, and that's when Claire said, "Constantinople!"  Excellent novel, and like any good literature, makes you think hard, including about what you personally believe, and why.

I've been reading most of T.C. Boyle's "Outside looking in" and it's been quite a trip...

QuoteOutside Looking In tells a fictional story about psychology graduate students at Harvard University who attempt to explore the nature of human consciousness by taking psychedelic drugs. Boyle says he was intrigued by recent news stories about LSD coming back into medical use. "So I went back to discover where it's all coming from," he says.

Gunther Weil was a 23-year-old doctoral student in clinical psychology when he entered Harvard in 1960. Leary was his faculty adviser, and Weil says that Boyle got a lot of things right in his novel.

"I think he did an incredibly great job describing the zeitgeist of the time — the nature of the trips," Weil says. "The protagonist is a graduate student who seems to be an amalgam of a number of us."

Over four years Weil says he attended between 40 and 50 research sessions — ingesting the hallucinogens psilocybin and LSD with a handful of colleagues.

"We definitely felt that we were on the leading edge of research in consciousness," he recalls. "We definitely felt like pioneers. We definitely were enthralled and captured by the mysteries that we were beginning to approach."

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/12/721555304/did-this-novel-about-lsd-trials-get-it-right-we-ask-someone-who-was-there?t=1609170888695

Yeah, I'm still about two thirds through Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations, which is on a similar topic but with the added contextualising of various usual and unusual brain conditions, like Bonnet syndrome (vivid visual hallucinations that happen in some blind people).  Really interesting topic.  I've also heard a podcast or two by various academics investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of depression, trauma etc; also one about these Bachelor of Divinity students who were given psychedelic drugs versus placebos (blind, i.e. nobody knew what they were getting) during some religious ritual, and the ones who'd been given psychedelics reported having deeply religious experiences, which even 20 years after the study they nominated as one of the most life-affecting experiences they'd ever had.  We have psychedelic mushrooms growing around the bushland here but my brain is already plenty trippy without enhancing agents so I'm still sticking to Portobello mushrooms for my pizzas, etc. 

I finished Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything (as a result of which I ended up listening to Disintegration a lot) and am now re-reading No Logo - and the cucumber growing section of The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow, which is kind of my bible this past decade.  We're inland and I couldn't get cucumber seedlings to germinate properly, even in the greenhouse, until last week because it's still too cold at night... now it's time to plant them out and make up for lost time! 

Quote from: SueC on December 29, 2020, 02:11:29I've also heard a podcast or two by various academics investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of depression, trauma etc; also one about these Bachelor of Divinity students who were given psychedelic drugs versus placebos (blind, i.e. nobody knew what they were getting) during some religious ritual, and the ones who'd been given psychedelics reported having deeply religious experiences...

They do the same in TC Boyle's book! (So I guess Dr. Leary & co. really did something like it.)

Next on my list - as soon as Brett is finished with it, he got it for Christmas - is Entangled Life - psychedelics are just one tiny aspect of fungi (antibiotics another, but fungi collectively produce a huge array of chemicals that affect other life forms on purpose or accidentally) and the broad view always beats the narrow!  One of my favourite things about fungi is their underground symbioses with plant roots, known as mycorrhizae.  You might like this one too, @Ulrich!

And I will say that Garry Disher's Peace, which I was underwhelmed by at page 12 stage, got much better by page 24.  I still don't think his prose is up to that of A-class crime writers like Val McDermid or Stieg Larsson, but by this stage of the book he is creating a pretty realistic picture of rural South Australia, and the sense of decay in many small Australian rural places, not to mention the fishiness of some of the people there (racism, general bigotry, lack of genuine concern for others, endemic substance abuse, and the underbelly of crime).  He's now holding my interest, chiefly by making me laugh at his mockery of paperwork, the dread of paperwork, the machinations of the town gossip and small-pond politics etc.

Quote from: SueC on December 30, 2020, 00:31:16And I will say that Garry Disher's Peace, which I was underwhelmed by at page 12 stage, got much better by page 24.  ... by this stage of the book he is creating a pretty realistic picture of rural South Australia, and the sense of decay in many small Australian rural places, ...(racism, general bigotry, lack of genuine concern for others, endemic substance abuse, and the underbelly of crime.)

Good to hear this. I got the same impression from the one I'd read a few weeks ago (see earlier in this topic); soon(ish) I will start reading his "Hope Hill Drive"* (German translation).

(Edit: * it might indeed be possible that this is the German translation of "Peace" - no idea why they had to change the title.)
https://garrydisher.com/

One of my goals of 2021 is to read 1 book/week. Got this to start:

- Hemingway, Ernest "The Old Man and the Sea"
- Kadavy, David "Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters (Getting Art Done, Band 2):
- Nicholas A. Christakis: "Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live"
- Knapp, Jake,Zeratsky, John: "Make Time: How to focus on what matters every day"
- Snowden, Edward: "Permanent Record"
- Borges, Jorge Luis: "Fictions"
- Duhigg, Charles: "The Power of Habit"

Will start with - Duhigg, Charles: "The Power of Habit", as I want to make reading an habit (just as coming to curefans.com

Brett came home on the eve of two and a half weeks of annual leave with the new Cormoran Strike novel Troubled Blood (looked at last one here) and popped it on my bedside table.    OMG, it's enormous - over 900 pages long - and with this, JK Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, is replicating something from the Harry Potter series - namely, the tendency for sequels to get enormous...

I loved Harry Potter, fabulous plot, setting, characterisations, themes, details, language, etc etc - but the Cormoran Strike books are something else, are university level to the wizard series' high school - are not just a notch above, but several dimensions above the series that made JK Rowling famous.  I've read the first couple of chapters and am purring like a cat who's had a bowl of cream, the writing is so utterly delicious.  Over the past ten years I've come to really enjoy, and regularly read, whodunnits; starting with Minette Walters, Val McDermid, and Raymond Chandler, then Camilla Lackberg, and currently, on @Ulrich's recommendation, Australia's Garry Disher - all of whom I enjoy, for different reasons.  But none of them hold a candle to JK Rowling's foray into this genre...

With the Cormoran Strike books, you're not reading primarily to solve the puzzle, nor are you reading chiefly because of compelling regular characters and how they go about solving problems both professional and personal - although there's all that.  You're literally reading sentence-by-sentence, going oooh-aaah for all sorts of reasons.  (Brett, naughty man that he is, can be heard loudly intoning, "I'm just reading it to see if Cormoran and Robin will get together!" )

With many detective books, I'm in at least something of a rush to get to the solution - but not with JK Rowling's...there I savour each page, and take it slowly because the puzzle is no more interesting than a thousand other things.  There's superb descriptions, humour at every corner, an exceptional amount of insight into relationships and how humans individually, humans as groups and humans as society operate, lots of overt and covert commentary on all sorts of matters I'm interested in, and prose that's both gorgeous and clever...and, and, and...such a wonderful treat to read this stuff.   

I've just finished reading Troubled Blood and have to say that I find the trans backlash against this book as appalling and unreasonable as the fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. The new JK Rowling offering is an excellent book in which a fine lens is comprehensively pointed at all manner of social injustice, including racism, classism, misogyny – as well as family dysfunction and violence, verbal, emotional and financial abuse, rape, sexual harassment, office politics, sociopathy, narcissism, journalistic and personal spin, the after-effects and long road to recovery from trauma, and various other interconnected issues, not to mention murder and deceit – as this is a detective series.

At no point is her feminism hateful, or negative towards men or anyone else per se – she explores the struggles (and crimes) of both men and women in the profoundly dysfunctional society we've been born into, and the role of family dynamics and intimate relationships in either contributing to or buffering us against the ills of our society – and she does it with keen insight and compassion, while also creating lead characters who are compelling, flawed and lovable.

But apparently that's not good enough for some people...

After I finished Garry Disher's Peace, the library had its predecessor, Bitter Wash Road, available to borrow, and I've got to say that was an A+ book - really superbly described places, excellent characterisations, and a pretty realistic tour through the almost casual corruption of Australian bureaucracies - in this case, police - and the ostracisation of those who call out such corruption.  It's grim stuff set in fairly remote rural South Australia, and as you read it, the dust from that landscape seems to seep into your bones.  The flawed hero, Constable Hirschhausen, makes a bright spot against the unrelentingly dark backdrop, and discovers a few other bright spots along the way, while stewarding his local community and solving crime in spite of the obstacles his bureaucracy and alleged superiors throw in his path.  Highly recommended.

If Bitter Wash Road is noir, then Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart is a tar pit in the middle of an Arctic winter.  I've just read the opening chapter - if you've never known bottomless poverty, read this book, and get disgusted with our failure in our societies to seriously address - end - this.  In Australia we're veering closer and closer to the US model of the few ultra-rich, increasing numbers of people under the poverty line, and a middle class too ready to swallow the line of our entitled politicos that the poor only have themselves to blame and why don't they move to the agricultural areas and pick fruit (at $3/hour, in some instances - welcome to the new feudalism).

I was never as desperately down-and-out as Shuggie Bain, but when I was 15, 16 I suffered from malnutrition, didn't have money for the bus or decent clothes (I don't mean labels, I mean waterproof jackets and good supportive water-resistant shoes and a few pretty things to wear instead of just jeans, T-shirts, shapeless jumpers and cheap sneakers), wasn't allowed the school graduation ball or dancing lessons with the rest of my graduating class or concerts or movies or to get my hair cut at a hairdresser's, was castigated for using too much hot water in the shower and interrogated when I needed hair conditioner (grudgingly I was given a bottle of the cheapest possible stuff because the knots of my uncut hair wouldn't come out without it), and paradoxically it wasn't as if my parents didn't have money, they actually had a lot more of that than most of my friends' parents who didn't go without.  I severed ties with home when I was 17 and continued, the whole time I was an undergraduate, to have to go past the majority of the fruit and vegetable section in the supermarket because that was too expensive - I ate mostly rice, pasta, lentils, cheddar, porridge, yoghurt, thinly adorned with the cheaper F&V, and my animal protein came chiefly from liver because it was cheap.  I used to walk past things like dried apricots salivating and swore to myself that once I graduated and was in fulltime work, I'd never ever scrimp on food ever again as long as I lived, and I haven't - when I was 22 I started in environmental/sustainability research, and since then I've always made a point of getting good quality, nutritious ingredients for my meals - and for the last decade I've grown a lot of our own (F&V, beef, honey).

If you've experienced hunger and cold and shame because you've got so little in the midst of a society of plenty, you'll get flashbacks to that stuff when you read Shuggie Bain too.  If you haven't, it's educational, but I fear that the people who most need to read these kinds of accounts to grow some empathy and start making noise for social change aren't going to be interested - they've been too insulated for too long from being on the bare bones of their backsides, and usually not because they work harder than average - but because they come from social privilege.  (In theory I came from social privilege, but it was seriously fvcked up - you can be a Cinderella in a privileged family while the resources get thrown at the boys, the racehorses, the yacht etc.  In a way I'm glad I was a Cinderella in that kind of family, or I might have become as odious as they are, or as many of the people governing us are - nothing like experiencing a few things for yourself to make you grow some empathy and a sense of justice. )

And I've not even got to Shuggie's childhood yet, in the narrative... I suspect I'll get a few more jagged flashbacks when I read about that... because that's how it always goes, it always returns you to your most equivalent experiences.  On the bright side, it's a refresher course for empathy, and it makes me even more grateful, if that is even possible, for now being in a home filled with love, justice, laughter, wonderful conversations and good food. ♥

A couple of years ago, I received "The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair" by Joel Dicker as a gift and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. (He writes in French, so I'm bound to read the German translations.)
Here's some info on it:

Quote from: undefinedThe Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker is an admirable novel with an intoxicating plot mixing shady past and shifting present. It recounts the investigation of Marcus Goldman, a successful novelist, who attempts to clear the name of his former professor, accused of having murdered a young girl.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28950832-the-truth-about-the-harry-quebert-affair-by-jo-l-dicker-book-analysis

A bit later I read another one, now I got his new novel:
https://rantthinking.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/book-review-the-enigma-of-room-622-by-joel-dicker/

Quote from: undefinedSo far, Joël Dicker had concentrated geographically on the East Coast of the United States for all his novels which were set in Long Island and in Baltimore. "The Truth about Harry Quebert", his first great success, took the world over by surprise and was translated into 35 languages, and sold in millions of copies. In November 2018, it was made into a mini series by MGM television and TF1 and featured Patrick Dempsey and Kristine Forseth.

He is now writing about his own town, Geneva, which he knows well. The famous Swiss secret banking system is the background  for this new thriller, which is partly set in Verbier, the fashionable ski resort where Prince Andrew has bought a multimillion francs chalet.

What makes this new book particularly wonderful is that the author includes many personal and intimate details on his own family and his daily life in the story.

I particularly enjoyed the way Dicker includes his publisher Bernard de Fallois in many passages of the book, proving if he had to, that he has become a masterful writer, and more creative and literary than in the past two books, "Le Livre des Baltimore" and "La disparition de Stéphanie Mailer" which were huge success anyway.

Shuggie Bain, like all the other Booker Prize winners I've ever read, is so unrelentingly dismal I have to take a break from it so I don't get depressed.  I'm going to read that one in small doses... I do recommend it... I've read about life in tenements and slums before, for example in Minette Walters' Acid Row and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (but he had the gift of providing comic relief and actual beauty in the midst of misery; it wasn't just a deep dive into a tar pit) and in a friend's autobiography I edited and gave feedback for (and she was marvellously educational, providing ideas and solutions along with her evocative dredging of the cabinet of horrors)...

Shuggie Bain is like a haemophiliac bleeding from a torn-off fingernail, it just painfully goes on and on; we have a friend who loves reading stuff like this and I will recommend it to him if he's not snaffled it already... (he's a child of justabout the most horrifically dysfunctional marriage imaginable - his father raped his teenage mother and was then cajoled by an Eastern European Catholic priest into marrying her to "make it right" and quite apart from the hideousness of forcing a young girl to have her rapist as a life partner, there was terrible emotional abuse and domestic violence ever after - it's amazing our friend is so sane and lovely and has come out so well but it's cost him...)

The reason I would still recommend Shuggie Bain for general reading is because it was written by a person with first-hand experience of what he's talking about, and it shows more clearly than everything else I've read on the subject why a lot of people never physically or psychologically escape from those kinds of circumstances, which they were born into (and firstly, nobody asks to be born, and secondly, where you're born into is a lottery).  If you're in the pitch black and that's all you've ever seen, it's hard to imagine colour.  Neglected and surrounded by violence, substance abuse and hopelessness in your birth family as well as your immediate community is a double whammy - you may never see a better example of how to live, that you can personally relate to - and the dice are loaded against you even in education - plus you are unlikely to read recreationally, so that method of flying into alternative universes to try them on for size is also often closed by circumstances.

This is not to say it's completely impossible to escape - the author did; some people do - usually people who are blessed with extra imagination and sensitivity, like the character Shuggie in this book, who may encounter an inspirational person along the road - and/or just are too different to fit in so that they have a strong drive to get out - again, like Shuggie in this book (but his getting out is to live in a boarding house of murky characters and work in the supermarket deli at 15, and it's unlikely he's ever going to jump as completely as Frank McCourt did - though of course even with him, part of his past always sat on his shoulder talking into his ear and making life unnecessarily difficult).

At this point I want to make all those smug neoliberal subscribers to the prosperity gospel who treat poverty as a sin and a punishment by God sit in front of these pages and wipe their faces in this novel... I'm agnostic but honestly, they should actually read the gospels they purport to follow for a change, because that's not what's said in those; but the people I'm talking about are the kind that suck up everything dysfunctional they can find - which in the Bible is mostly located in the Old Testament and in the Epistles, and I do know this because unlike most practicing Christians, I've actually read the thing word for word and front to back with close attention (nearly perishing in the quagmire of cubits in the narrative, if you can call it that, of the construction of the Temple) - and the Catholic version at that, which has extra books the Protestants got rid of (if you really want to indulge, read the Ethiopian version of the Bible, it's got tons more books) - anyway, the practicing evangelical Christians love to suck up the dysfunctional stuff and adopt it as their religion, thus turning themselves into the Pharisees that Jesus - whether for real or as another literary character - railed against when he sought to bring a bit more love, compassion, empathy, equality, critical thinking and justice into religion (not that this was 100% perfect either, but one heck of an improvement on what went before, and on what is preached from many supposedly Christian pulpits these days, especially in the American Bible Belt and its franchises around the world...)

Really, this massive problem of perception and attitude isn't confined to religion, it's what humans seem to do no matter what their cultural background - that what doesn't happen on blind programmed autopilot from childhood is cherry-picked from the things that have the most appeal to them (...confirmation bias), and turned into their blueprint for life - which generally becomes repeating the cycle of dysfunction they grew up with - or perhaps making their very own iteration, like a sort of patchwork quilt...

Anyway, I recommend Shuggie Bain as a general read for everyone in the West because it picks you up and drops you right into a highly dysfunctional family in a highly dysfunctional community in a highly dysfunctional society, and hopefully, from that perspective, you reflect on what life would have been like had you been born into that position, and what your chances of escape would have been - and if you're not behind a movement for social justice yet, then this might maybe convince you that the problem of the most socially disadvantaged in your community is your problem too, and your responsibility too, and your ethical obligation to do something about, by how you vote, what you buy and don't buy, what you challenge instead of walking past, what grass roots collective action you might get behind, etc.

This is not to say that it's only the responsibility of those who are better off financially and emotionally - of course everyone has responsibility for their own lives no matter where they happened to land.  We all need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, no matter what circumstances we're born into - and we all need to also look out for one another.

I'm taking a break from Shuggie Bain and will return to it in smaller bites so its unrelenting doom doesn't put out my light... honestly, you'll shudder at the way even friends treat one another in this book, at the blinkers all over the shop, at the spiralling self-sabotage and the systematic sabotage of others, at the underlying violence in everyday life, the ubiquity of alcoholism, sexual violence, physical abuse, bullying, taunting, betrayal and neglect of one another, senses of entitlement, hunger, lies, diverse addictions, selfishness, snobbery, inverted snobbery...

We're just re-watching the late 90s BBC series The Lakes (Jimmy McGovern) which explored a number of similar themes, and Shuggie Bain makes that look like a picnic...

I think this is a good time to look at something else Scottish, and finally read Adventures of a Waterboy front to back, after hitherto only dipping into that randomly.  At least I know Mike Scott will make me laugh along the way.

After a quick internet search, I found out that the new Garry Disher book (part 3 of the "Hirsch" series) will be out in Germany on July 12th. (Something to look forward to, until then I will re-read an old book or find something else...)
http://www.unionsverlag.com/info/title.asp?title_id=8509

Quote from: Ulrich on May 26, 2021, 17:45:12After a quick internet search, I found out that the new Garry Disher book (part 3 of the "Hirsch" series) will be out in Germany on July 12th. (Something to look forward to, until then I will re-read an old book or find something else...)
http://www.unionsverlag.com/info/title.asp?title_id=8509

Here it's come out as Consolation and I was trying to get an e-book copy - until they wanted $28 for it!    For an e-book!!!    Publishers, honestly - it should be cheaper than a paperback, considering you don't have to print and distribute it. Now I'm going to borrow it from the library.

Quote from: SueC on June 12, 2021, 14:51:35until they wanted $28 for it!    For an e-book!!! 

Wow! It might even be cheaper if I'd send you my copy (after I read it)!