What other author are you reading at the moment?

Which other authors do you enjoy? Discuss them here.
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Machupicchu14
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Machupicchu14 »

Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol.
An excellent book for Christmas!!! ;) :lol:
"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."
(все, что я понимаю, я понимаю только потому, что люблю)
Lev Tolstoy


You can call me Machupicchu14 or María Esther

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Chrissie777
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Chrissie777 »

Lucky Star wrote:The Conclave by Robert Harris. The latest from this terrific thriller writer.
Will check it out. Thanks for the tip, Lucky Star.
I read "Fatherland" many years ago.
Chrissie

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Chrissie777
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Chrissie777 »

floragord wrote:Heavens, Chrissie, I had no idea NO HIGHWAY had been made into a movie, and I love
Jimmy Stewart's work! Thank you for sharing that, I'll have to add it as an optional extra to my Christmas list!
THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE is one of my favourite Susan Howatch titles, THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT and THE SINS OF THE FATHERS are old friends too. The "Starbridge Six" and "St Benet's Three" aren't everyone's cup of tea, having been "dragged up" in a convent school the content of the series is quite familiar to me, a pleasant visit down memory lane as things have changed considerably in the C of E since the books were set in the 1930s-1980s.
Floragord, what is C of E?

Please let me know what you think once you've watched "No Highway in the Sky".
We watched it last year, but I forgot what it was about. :oops:
Chrissie

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Lucky Star
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Lucky Star »

Chrissie777 wrote:Floragord, what is C of E?
C of E stands for Church of England Chrissie.
"What a lot of trouble one avoids if one refuses to have anything to do with the common herd. To have no job, to devote ones life to literature, is the most wonderful thing in the world. - Cicero

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John Pickup
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by John Pickup »

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. A novel based on true events in Iceland back in the early 1800s.
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Chrissie777
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Chrissie777 »

Lucky Star wrote:C of E stands for Church of England Chrissie.
Thank you, Lucky Star. 8)
That one I never would have guessed. :o
Chrissie

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floragord
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by floragord »

Sorry, Chrissie :oops: , I should have written it out, thanks Lucky Star for updating.

I've put the NO HIGHWAY DVD on my lengthy and extensive Christmas list, Chrissie, :wink: , if it doesn't appear by 1 Jan 2017 I'll order it for myself. Does anyone else remember posting their list to Father Christmas by putting it in the fire and watching the envelope burst into flames and shoot up the chimney, so you knew it was safely on its way?
Last edited by floragord on 11 Dec 2016, 17:38, edited 1 time in total.
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Chrissie777
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Chrissie777 »

floragord wrote:Does anyone else remember posting their list to Father Christmas by putting it in the fire and watching the envelope burst into flames and shoot up the chimney, so you knew it was safely on its way?
Floragord, we didn't have a fire place. As a child I gave my Christmas wish list faithfully every year to my parents, but received with lots of luck maybe one Blyton book per Christmas/birthday event :cry: :cry: :cry: .
Those were the days when German parents still believed in giving rather dull presents pajamas, underwear and handkerchiefs as Christmas presents :roll: . I never really understood the sense of writing a wish list anyway as I didn't get more than a fraction of what I had listed.

So by the time I moved away from home in 1974, I still didn't have the complete Famous Five collection (but all 8 Adventure series books).
To make matters worse, my parents gave most of my childrens books away to some of my cousins in Wiesbaden which is hundreds of kilometers away from Braunschweig.
So at that point I had to start collecting EB books all over again via flea markets, posts on black boards in many elementary schools and also buying the FF books from those few bookstores in Hannover who still sold them with the original Eileen Soper illustrations as that was unfortunately also the time when Bertelsmann publishers modernized EB in their German translations and replaced Soper illustrations by Wolfgang Haennecke (sp?). :twisted: :mrgreen: :evil:

Thanks to the Internet and especially amazon I later started ordering all my missing children's books little by little and today have a large childrens books collection with British, American, German, Swedish and French authors plus ca. 218 EB books. :D
I'm very proud of it.
Chrissie

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Courtenay
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Courtenay »

floragord wrote:Does anyone else remember posting their list to Father Christmas by putting it in the fire and watching the envelope burst into flames and shoot up the chimney, so you knew it was safely on its way?
:D Now there's a sweet idea — not something we ever did, but then one doesn't light the fire too often at Christmas time where I come from. :wink: (On the other hand, you never know. The weather in southern Victoria is notoriously unpredictable — bit like England, really — and it's not unknown for late December (early summer) to be surprisingly cold!!)

I don't recall ever writing letters to Father Christmas / Santa when I was little — Mum used to say that "Father Christmas's birds" were watching us and would tell him what we wanted for Christmas (and also whether we'd been good or not!), but we didn't take it too seriously and I think we always knew deep down it was just a fun bit of make-believe. Certainly it didn't help that "Santa's" handwriting on our gift tags was suspiciously identical to Mum's... :mrgreen:
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Julie2owlsdene »

Yes, I used to post my letter to Father Christmas up the chimney, which I think I've mentioned in the Christmas thread. :lol:

8)
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Lucky Star »

Yes we also posted our letters to Santa up the chimney. Then on Christmas Eve we hung our socks from the mantelpiece for him to fill as he came down the chimney.
"What a lot of trouble one avoids if one refuses to have anything to do with the common herd. To have no job, to devote ones life to literature, is the most wonderful thing in the world. - Cicero

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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by KEVP »

Note that although the characters of "Santa Claus" and "Father Christmas" seem to have merged, originally they were distinct.
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floragord
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by floragord »

Julie2owlsdene wrote:Yes, I used to post my letter to Father Christmas up the chimney, which I think I've mentioned in the Christmas thread. :lol:
:oops: hadn't seen your post when I wrote that, Julie, it was (and is?) a delightful custom! We were given a sheet of nice writing paper to do the list in first staggery capitals (NAICE DOLLY, TWAIN SET) then best joined up writing, and the envelope probably prodded a bit with the poker so it shot up the chimney with plenty of sparks :D. None of us were ever surprised when everything on the list appeared under the tree for the opening ceremony on 25/12 morning, that's the magic of Christmas!
"Its a magic wood!" said Fanny suddenly.
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Stephen
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Stephen »

Two very different stories here. My break time/"real" book is currently 'Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH' by Robert C. O'Brien. While I've never actually read it myself, our teacher read it out to us when I was about 9 or 10, and so much is coming back to me! Names like Jeremy, Nicodemus, Justin, Jenner, Brutus, and even the concept of how they were going to "move" Mrs Frisby's house behind a large stone so that the plough would go round it.

On the other hand, my night time/Kindle book is currently 'Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan' by Morgan Robertson, published in 1898, which seemed to eerily predict many details about the sinking of the Titanic, fourteen years before it actually happened.
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Re: What other author are you reading at the moment?

Post by Courtenay »

Oh yes, I remember one of my teachers serialising Mrs Frisby for us at school — I can't remember which teacher it was now! — but for some reason we never finished it, so I ended up having to borrow it from the library a while later to read the end!! I really enjoyed it. There were at least two sequels written later, I think by O'Brien's daughter, but I didn't find them nearly as good.

As a bit of a Titanic buff in my teens, I remember reading about Futility, but I've never read the book myself. I guess it would have been forgotten if it hadn't been for the creepily similar real-life disaster 14 years later!
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It was a nuisance. An adventure was one thing - but an adventure without anything to eat was quite another thing. That wouldn't do at all. (The Valley of Adventure)
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