Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Nick Russell,
there are a bunch of people down here in Wellington who can actually change the law. Lawyers and courts, not so much
Actually not at all -- there's very good reasons why we separate the judicial and legislative branches of government. Isn't there?
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Ihug founder Tim Wood and his wife Sasha, have brought private money and business sense. It’s very notable that the Woods’ $500,000 investment in The Dark Horse has already been returned.
The Dark Horse is also a film that's had a low-key but pretty astute international release -- just getting the basics right, What should be really interesting is how the U.S. release on December 11th is going to go. I'm hoping Fear The Walking Dead is going to be the hit AMC expects, and Cliff Curtis can leverage some attention off that and onto this.
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Well, yes. Was very pleasantly surprised to find I'd not only read nine of the longlisted titles this year (including The Chimes), but liked them all. Hasn't happened for years. But with all due and sincere respect to Smaill, Marilynne Robinson's Lila is leading the pack by a considerable margin. This, along with Gilead and Home was well worth waiting two-and-a-half decades for.
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Emma Hart,
Someone in the comments is all “I only read Pratchett and Gaiman”, and I’ve had EXACTLY that conversation with someone I know.
I've also had that kind of conversation with someone who claims to be a serious crime/mystery reader. I was literally lost for words -- and everyone here should know how rare that is. FFS, I just can't take anyone seriously who claims to be a fan of this genre but says with a straight face they've never read Christie, Sayers, Marsh and Allingham. Or Patricia Highsmith. Ruth Rendell and P.D. James? Anne Rule -- the 'Queen of True Crime' who died earlier this week? Closer to home: How about Kerry Greenwood, Anne Perry and Vanda Symon? Margaret Millar? Gladys Mitchell? Marina Cole? Gillian Flynn? Patricia Cornwall and Sara Paretsky, who (IMO) aren't at the top of their game anymore but still productive? Susan Hill?
That's just the names I've pulled out of the air -- and none of whom are hard to find in any decently stocked public library or bookstore (new or secondhand).
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Carol Stewart,
I was well aware of Alice Munro when I lived in Victoria, British Columbia, for a couple of years, as there was a magnificent local bookstore (Munro’s books) which was founded by Munro and her then-husband in 1963.
And still going strong! I wish I could find the link again, but there was a rather amusing piece about how after she won the Nobel the staff found themselves explaining they really couldn’t put the owner’s first wife on the phone since she hasn’t worked there for over forty years. :)
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Apparently she took up writing as she decided she could do a better job than many of the books that were available back then.
That's a very good reason for writing anything -- if nobody else is writing what you want to read, why not give it a poke? :)
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Or Alice Munro
True -- but it's kind of depressing anyone would have to. As far as I'm aware, she's the only person to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature who worked entirely in the short story form. And started building her formidable reputation when the conventional wisdom was that you could count on a clenched fist the number of people interested in reading Canadian "literary realism" -- let alone short fiction written by women.
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Joe Wylie,
’ve only recently read Every Day is Mother’s Day, which I believe is her first. On the strength of that I’m looking forward to the later stuff, though the subject matter seems worlds away.
The irony is that she had another historical novel -- A Place of Greater Safety, which I'd strongly recommend -- wasn't published until 1992 (after she had five other novels under her belt) because nobody was willing to take a punt on a very long novel about the French Revolution from an unknown.
Totally agree with you Mantel just doesn't do kitchen sink sentimentality. If you'd like some insight into why, her memoir Giving Up The Ghost is well worth tracking down.
Neither does Ferrante -- which may go a very long way to explaining why she's blown up despite the pretty dismal amounts of contemporary fiction that gets translated into English these days.
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Therefore: "conservative proletariat." If votes are emotive, it's the "conservative" part that wins the vote. Fuck proletariat.
Um, OK... You know, conservative ≠ "pathologically racist, misogynistic, homophobic and thick as a bucket of pig shit left out in the sun" any more than bogan does.
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I have read the odd book by woman authors(sic) but they have failed to inspire the loyalty I feel towards writers like Saul Bellow, Henry Millar and David Foster Wallace, some of whom have no doubt been criticised for being chauvanists of the highest order.
Hum... I'd criticize Bellow, Miller and Foster Wallace for being over-rated fucking bores, but YMMV on that. Anyway, if it wasn't a vile misuse of my favourite novelist such nonsense would be responded to by throwing my second-best set of Jane Austen at the heads of such numpties. I'd respectfully suggest she has to have done a lot of something right to keep her six novels (two of which were published posthumously) continuously in print for two centuries. Let's see if Henry Miller pretentious wank-fodder is still around in the 22nd century.