What is the last book you read, and your rating?
- Sunday diamond
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Re: What is the last book you read, and your rating?
I always love such a book like that. Its truths-revealing and knowledge- packed. I can't risk deleting the book even as I've already done with the reading.
- FionaTZY
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- mymanga003
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- sarahmarlowe
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You can spend your time however you want, but you can spend it only once.
- Norma Fleagane
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- Redlegs
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The tale of Poppy Shakespeare is narrated by N (we never know her by any other handle), a long-term client of the Dorothy Fish day care centre for people with mental illness. Clients spend their days at the centre, and return home for nights, weekends and public holidays.
Poppy is forced to attend the Dorothy Fish centre, despite the fact that she believes she is completely sane. To be able to access a lawyer to help her get out, she must be in receipt of government benefits, known as MAD money, and to get the funding, Poppy needs to prove she is mentally ill. The classic Catch-22 situation!
N decides to help Poppy navigate the complex forms and bureaucratic processes that are required to demonstrate her mental illness, so she can receive MAD money support.
The story is related in the first person by N, using her particularly colloquial style of speaking (which will drive some grammar purists nuts), which is why the tragi-comic events described are so often laugh out loud funny.
I won't say much more about the plot, except that there is an underlying deeps sense of sadness and despair beneath the humorous style of relating the lives and fates of this group of peculiar characters.
Clare Allan has written a lively satire of the British mental health care system (I understand some from personal experience) that will keep you really engaged from beginning to end. 4 stars out of 5
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
- Zimall
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Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost"
- Redlegs
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This is his final novel - he was so upset by the criticism of the novel, on moralistic rather than literary grounds, that he thereafter wrote only poetry.
The essence of the story is the relationship between Jude Fawley, impoverished stonemason, and his cousin, Sue Bridehead,
Jude is trapped into a youthful marriage by the very forward Arabella, but it lasts only a short time before Arabella leaves him.
Jude, meanwhile, develops a loving but chaste relationship with Sue. Sue marries a schoolmaster, Phillotson, but her heart is Jude's and she seeks leave, and is granted, permission to leave her husband to live with Jude.
Eventually both Jude and Sue are released from their respective first marriages by legal divorce, leaving them free to marry each other. However, Sue gets cold feet at the last minute on several occasions and Jude, out of his deep love for her, indulges Sue's increasing irrational whims.
The moral attitudes of the time mean that Jude and Sue are shunned for their unmarried cohabitation, making their lives difficult and impecunious.
In sometimes convoluted passages, Hardy sets out moral arguments for the nature of the relationship between men and women. It is the proposition that perhaps genuine love between the sexes, chaste or not, is more important than marital status that ultimately caused the author, as well as his characters, so much grief.
It's despair and unfulfilling outcomes make it a little less enjoyable than other Hardy novels I have read, but it is nevertheless important quality fiction.
4.5 stars out of 5
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
- dailey2820
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- Charlyt
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- rwhite1289
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- SpencerVo
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- Redlegs
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Bredon's inquiries, which he needs to keep casual and discreet to avoid suspicion (he is supposed to be a new copy-writer), soon lead him to organised crime links involving the importation and distribution of cocaine and other drugs, through an upper class party set. At times, Wimsy resumes his own real persona to pursue the investigation with the police, particularly with his brother-in-law, who is a senior police officer.
Sayers has a load of fun with the intricacies and absurdities of the advertising business. The story is full of quirky characters, many of them quite fanciful, and much of the plot stretches the bounds of credibility up to and well beyond its limit.
Similar in style to an Agatha Christie crime mystery (perhaps a little more ostentatious), Sayers plays the whole thing for fun and enjoyment. Nothing is to be taken too seriously here.
The novel is deliberately whimsical in nature, and I think that Sayers' choice to name her principal character Sir Peter Wimsy (he features in may of her novels) is quite a intentional pun.
3.5 - not quite 4 - stars of of 5
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald