From his mid/late 30s Young looks back on his relationships as a young-ish gay man in Seoul.

Rather rambling narrative that frequently left me waiting for something to happen but even when it did, it didn't make much impact and was referred to so obliquely that it took me a while to realise what he meant.

No idea why it was longlisted for the International Booker.

#koreanbook #koreanfood (bulgogi dosirak)

#coffeeandabook

"I took the elevator to the third floor of the hotel and went into the Emerald Hall."

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

The weapon shops are the only recourse against the tyranny of the Isher empire although the weapons they sell can only work as self-defence for their owner.

I was a great fan of the author as a teenager - especially the Null-A books - so I must have read this before, but I had no memory of the story. I expect I enjoyed it then, mainly because I was unaware of certain controversies it seems to be playing into. Now, not so much.

Brief sketches of Western writers who have set books in Asia. Each has a quick bio, a summary of their main works and the setting and whether a literary pilgrimage is still possible.

It wasn't horrible but disappointingly few books to add to my wishlist. The book was poorly edited with what appeared to be lines missing and sentences that should have been simple but had to be read several times to be understood.

S0-So verging on a Pan.

#coffeeandabook

#ClassicLSFBC
@RamsFan1963

#lunchandabook

An unnamed narrator wanders the streets of 1880s Kristiana (Oslo) as an impoverished freelance writer suffering hallucinations and physical and mental weakness while on the verge of starving to death.

Personally, I would have given up long before I got to that stage, but that may explain why the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I didn't.

@ShyBookOwl
#FirstLineFridays

#sunshinewellness

Percy Jackson journeys to the Bermuda Triangle in a quest for the Golden Fleece.

Another enthralling adventure. I hope it's not the last we see of Tyson.

In the guise of concern for their welfare, DICOMY makes use of another inspection to try to take control of the children in Marsyas.

More heavy-handed and preachy than its predecessor but this doesn't quite overwhelm the whimsical tone which kept me reading.

My March Storygraph stats - though they don't seem to have the same definitions of genres as I do.

#AprilReadingPlans

Linus Baker, a DICMY (the Department In Charge of Magical Youth) inspector, comes to Marsyas Island to inspect the orphanage there.

There were times when I thought the AUTHOR'S MESSAGE was getting a bit heavy-handed, but the characters worm their way into your heart enough to overcome that and make this book a delight.

When a group of re-enactors turns up for a week-long festival one of the candidates for their leader is murdered by eating a poisoned fig pastry. Meanwhile Simon has his own problems with the arrival of his academic and vampiric mentor as one of the suspects

Nice final novel wrapping up various plot lines, though some threads are still left hanging. I'm pleased to say I got the who right even if i didn't get the why.

#lunchandabook

I haven‘t been dead all that long, but I‘m getting used to it.

#FirstLineFriday
@ShyBookOwl

Interesting and thought-provoking essay by Ursula K. Le Guin which deserves a PICK but accompanied by a foreword by Donna Haraway that I didn't understand at all and would have been a BAIL if it hadn't been so short.

A very unpleasant TV home makeover star comes to Blitherington Hall and is not surprisingly murdered. Unfortunately the only person without an alibi is Lady Prunella.

It had its amusing moments but the ending was a bit too Agatha Christie-ish, with a denouement as the suspects gather in the drawing room to hear the detective solve the case. Why read a pale imitation when you can read the original?

Two gay men find love during the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

Difficult to read at times because the stakes if they were caught were so high. Another thing that stuck out to me in the flashbacks to the men's earlier lives was what a violent society Iran was even before the Revolution. The author has a playlist for the book on YouTube with some surprising choices, which was interesting to listen to while reading.

Simon and Giles (still not a couple) attend a literary conference where an imposter turns up claiming to be the person behind one of Simon's pen names. When the imposter is murdered, Simon and Giles investigate.

Fun, but I'm continuing mainly because I want to know when Simon and Giles will get together and when Simon will tell Giles the truth about himself.

#coffeeandabook

A US vampire moves to a small English village. Because medication reduces his “condition“ to a mild allergy to garlic and eliminates the need to drink blood he can fit in with his new surroundings. Then the local postmistress is murdered and he is drawn into the investigation.

It had its moments, but not as good as the author's books set in the American South. Perhaps you need to be part of a culture yourself for this kind of humour to work.

#coffeeandabook

The Overlords take over Earth, ushering in a golden age. But what is their purpose?

Classic SF novel. Obviously dated in some respects, but still a great story.

@RamsFan1963 @ClassicLSFBC

#lunchandabook

@RamsFan1963 #ClassicLSFBC

Novella about an Icelandic trader who travels to Mongolia in the 8th century and returns with a herd of horses led by a white mare.

A fascinating story and great fun exploring the people and places referred to.

#coffeeandabook

The Ducote Sisters are asked to investigate spooky goings-on at a friend's home. When a fellow-guest is found dead in his bed, was his death caused by the spirit world or something more mundane?

This seems to have been the last in the series, but I have questions about what happened later. Did the Sisters adopt Benjy? Did he go to study at Athena College and meet Charlie and Diesel? (Or were we told in the main series and I've just forgotten?)

“Do you mean to sit there and tell me you think Cliffwood really is haunted?” Miss An‘gel Ducote regarded her sister with a frown.

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

Soon after Hadley Partridge inherits the family home from his brother Hamish, a skeleton is found in the grounds. Could it be Hamish's wife, Callie, who disappeared about the same time Hadley left the neighbourhood, and allegedly ran away to join him?

Yet another breathtakingly handsome man causing chaos. We do get to meet a certain feline and his human after being teased with the possibility through most of the book.

The Ducote sisters (and Benjy and the animals) visit their cousin whose granddaughter is getting married but the girl dies during a storm the night before the wedding.

There was a totally unexpected twist near the end but also a trope repeated from the previous book. I'm curious to see if it appears again in the next book.

#coffeeandabook

An old friend turns up on the Ducote sisters' doorstep, convinced her family are trying to kill her. Unfortunately, the family soon figures out where she's gone and follow, straining the sisters' hospitality to its limits, and that's before the deaths start.

First in a spin-off series. I could definitely have done with a family tree to keep Rosabelle's family straight in my mind.

#coffeeandabook

While Darren and Alana are on holiday in Italy they get a call from Aggie, whose girlfriend is working on a dig where the archaeologist in charge has been found dead in a trench. Did he fall or was he pushed?

The author obviously has not done his homework about pre-Roman Italy. A relationship between Etruscan and Turkish is a stretch, to put it mildly, and what are wild turkeys doing in Italy some 2000 years before Columbus?

Darren Priest, formerly an elite interrogator with the US Army and now a writer for a wine magazine, is asked to look into nefarious goings-on connected with a bank in Vienna.

For almost every bite of food and sip of a drink we are told where Priest was eating or drinking, who the server was, and the precise origin of the wine, beer, or coffee. Even allowing for a drug having been slipped into his morning espresso, this verged on the obsessive.

#coffeeandabook

“Hey.” I heard the voice from a foggy distance. “You can‘t sleep here.”

#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl

Since celaphods like octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish are about as far from us as you can get in the animal kingdom, Peter Godfrey-Smith uses the differences between them and us to explore the nature of sentience and consciousness and how far back in evolution they can be traced. ⬇

#coffeeandabook

Marcellus, an octopus exhibited in an aquarium, is bored, while Tova , the aquarium's night cleaner, is working as a form of grief therapy. Together they may be able to resolve each other's problems.

I didn't hate it. I thought it was too obvious too soon who Cameron was, and I wasn't convinced by Marcellus. An octopus POV should be a lot stranger than Marcellus's musings. The story was cute enough to keep me going but it didn't enthuse me.

#sunshinewellness #bookclubchoice

The unnamed narrator is a firefighter in a post-apocalyptic world. In the first chapter he and his crew are called out to a fire, but then change to a flashback for more than half the book.

Up until the big reveal about 2/3 of the way through, we followed some very, very funny detours but I don't think the actual story was enough to carry the reader on by itself, particularly as I kept losing track of who was who.

PICK with reservations.

@ShyBookOwl
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too busy battling the Evangelist‘s blazing determination to ban on religious grounds several of the texts students are required to study that year. Gulliver‘s Travels survives the scissors, as does A Christmas Carol, but Modern Short Stories in English is consigned for ever to the forbidden zone. Sadly, it is so dull that not even this recommendation can make any of us read it more than once.

Building + Culture = Architecture.

The author takes some buildings he sees as iconic (emphasising this is a personal choice which would be different for somebody from a different cultural background) and how the cultural meanings they accumulate make them architecturally significant. An interesting book which could be improved with better pictures as the photos don't really illustrate the points the author is making.