The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

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Cenwalh
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Re: The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

Postby Cenwalh » Fri Aug 21, 2020 8:01 pm

kanewai wrote:I'm about a hundred pages into Tiempos Recios. So far I enjoy it, though I'm having a hard time keeping track of the characters. Each chapter seems to represent a different POV. I love the basic premise, though - that the whole "communist insurgency" in Central America was a lie cooked up by United Fruit Company in the 1940s/1950s, part of a public relations campaign against the democratic government of Guatemala ... but it was a lie which turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Is anyone else reading it?


I'm just waiting for an Audible credit to come through, but I hope to at least start it this month. Thanks for your background knowledge beforehand
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Re: The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

Postby kanewai » Fri Aug 21, 2020 11:23 pm

kanewai wrote:The dialetto / italiano divide plays a big role in La vita bugiarda degli adulti also. I don't think Elena Ferrante uses dialect in her writing, so much as lets us know when characters are speaking Italian, and when they're speaking dialect. .
Well. That changed shortly after I wrote this - La vita bugiarda uses a lot of dialect once the main character meets her working class relatives. There is a lot of language that isn't in my main, proper Italian dictionary. Most of the new words (to me) are obscene terms for body parts and sexual acts, so I won't repeat them here. The language in this book is a lot more colorful than the Neapolitan quartet!
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Re: The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

Postby Cenwalh » Tue Aug 25, 2020 3:39 pm

Finally got a copy of Tiempos recios after I finished the last of the Neapolitan Novels yesterday and I plan to start with it this evening.

For September I'd like to nominate Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I'd never heard of it until it was mentioned in July's My Brilliant Friend, but since then I've seen it mentioned no less than three times by other people. I'm feeling the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon so strong with this one that I'm going to give it a try myself.

Its description from Goodreads:
Goodreads wrote:Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.
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Re: The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

Postby Mista » Fri Aug 28, 2020 10:17 pm

I'll join you in reading Little Women. I think I read it many years ago, but if I did, I can't remember a thing. I wasn't going to suggest any new books myself this month, since I haven't finished either of the last two, but reading a book in English will hopefully compete more with computer games than with reading Spanish or Italian.

Reading in Spanish is going really slow, I've only read about 50 pages so far. This is my first book in Spanish. I'm getting enough out of it to keep going, but it's tiring, so I usually don't spend more than 20 minutes at a time. Right now, I'm not sure how I'll proceed with these two books (Tiempos Recios and L'Amica Geniale), but I do hope to finish both by the end of the year.
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Re: The Forum Book Club thread 2020. August: Tiempos recios

Postby Jinx » Thu May 20, 2021 7:00 pm

Is the forum book club still active? I have just gone through this entire thread, using it as a source for book recommendations – so many interesting-sounding ones! I'd love to participate, if it's still happening.
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