>>6925

Read more then lad.

Maybe we should have a .gs goodreads or summat

>>6926
>Maybe we should have a .gs goodreads or summat

I think that's more-or-less covered by >>5456. I'm presently reading What Am I Doing Here thanks to that thread.

>>6927
I recommended The Yiddish Policeman's Union aaaages ago to some lad here. On the offchance you're around, did you enjoy it as much as I did?

>>6928
I'd take that as a no.

>>6929
Well, not everyone posts here every single day. I hear some users actually have the attention span for books!

>>6928
Cheeky title lad. What's it about?

>>6931
It's about a cynical, alcoholic Jewish detective trying to solve the execution-style murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy in a halfway house. It takes place in an alternate reality where Israel lost the 1948 war with the Arabs and the Jews were resettled in Sitka, Alaska (this was an actual proposition for their relocation post-WWII). Our murder takes place decades later when 'reclamation' is about to happen, reverting the land back to full American status since the settlement was only supposed to be temporary. Our grizzled detective has precious little time to clear out the list of unsolved murders before this date, as ordered by his boss who is, of course, his ex-wife. The death of this strange young man soon takes on a conspiratorial bent as he looks into it, finding himself in more danger than he would ever have expected. The language is peppered with Yiddish slang, as Hebrew never took off as their new tongue, and it's got a great sense of humour among the general Jewish fatalism. A cracking read overall.

>>6932
It was delightful to read this synopsis ladm8.

>>6928
I'm >>6925 and your recommendation has reminded me that probably the last novel I read cover to cover was on holiday the summer before last, The Manual of Detection. It was an interesting Kafkaesque detective fiction. After a detective goes missing, his administrative handler is promoted to find him and has to follow a 'how to be a detective' book, with hilarious consequences. There's also some Gothic fantasy in there.

>>6934
Go on, lad. Read a book. I'm almost halfway through Catch-22 at the minute.

>>6935
If you're exactly halfway through, doesn't that make it Fumble-11?

>>6936
No because two fumbles don't equal a catch.

>>6934
>Kafkaesque

Where's the best place to start with Kafka?

>>6939
Page 1, left to right, can't go wrong.*

*Unless you got the Hebrew or Arabic translation.

>>6939
Illiteratus here; the only Kafka I ever read all the way through was Metamorphosis and, compared to The Trial which I got bored with, it's a straightforward tale. All the way through I was like "no, stop it, why is this happening", which I think is probably the quintessential reaction to Kafka.

>>6939

Why? The Metamorphosis is well enough known that you can think enough about a lot of its potential interpretations to the point you needn't really read it unless you especially want to, in which case there's your answer.
As >>6941 points out, The Trial is an exercise in bureaucracy that's not a whole barrel of laughs to read through, it's sort of like those bits in Family Guy where Peter's fighting that chicken or hurts his knee and it just keeps going and going and you just want it to end which arguably is the point.
If you want to get anything else out of him, reading something you haven't already heard umpteen different perspectives on then just get a collection of his short stories. Most of them will likely leave you nonplussed but you'll probably get more out of it than just reading the most well known ones.

Success, lads. He's just finished The Colour of Magic and has started cracking on with The Light Fantastic.

>>6954
You already had this success. >>6751

>>6955
He's actually reading them now, though.

>>6927
>I'm presently reading What Am I Doing Here thanks to that thread.

I enjoyed the parts on China the most, particularly the section on Emperor Wu-ti and the Heavenly Horses. It's piqued my interest; do you lads have any recommendations for further reading on Ancient China?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eudsYr0iER0

It didn't fill me with trepidation, unlike the Artemis Fowl trailer, so I guess that's a plus.

World Book Day: Parents spend more on outfits than they do on novels

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/world-book-day-parents-outfits-14097200

That doesn't surprise me. Most of the kids I've seen going to school this morning seemed to be dressed as superheroes or Disney princesses.

>>6961
Carpet-bagger.

https://fairytale.ink/book/grimms-fairy-tales

>>6961
>Parents spend more on outfits than they do on novels
That's not really surprising. Clothes are expensive, books are not.

A quarter of parents are using digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri to read bedtime stories to their children, a survey suggests. Two thirds said that they gave their children time on smartphones, tablets or television before they went sleep instead of a bedtime story

Some parenting websites extol the use of Alexa at bedtime. They say that, as well as allowing it to read a story to your child, you can ask it to sing to them, dim the lights, create white noise and respond to them from another room if they wake.

The survey showed that half of parents aimed to share a story with their child every night but barely more than a quarter did. Nearly a third said that work or commuting stopped them getting home in time and a fifth said they were too busy. For parents who did read stories with their child at night more than half said that they would choose to use an app or YouTube for the task. More than two fifths of children younger than 11 own a tablet and one in eight owns a tablet and a smartphone.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/busy-parents-rely-on-alexa-for-bedtime-stories-dtrm2xmhp

Are there any decent British comics these days? I'm going to trial The Phoenix for my daughter, but I can't think of any others. The Beano seems to have gone to shit and almost everything else is magazines for about a fiver with a load of tat attached to it.

>>7017
Get down the jumble sale and get some old annuals.

>>6784
>His sister is older now than he was when I started this thread and she's the opposite; she'll read but, other than Roald Dahl, she only wants to read relatively simplistic stuff

She's now obsessed with Jacqueline Wilson books. I swear at least 90% of them must be about a kid whose parents are going through a divorce. Either that or they've already divorced and the kid now has to look after their younger siblings because their mum has fucked off to Benidorm with her new fella and there's no telling when she'll be back.

>>7029
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. Smart kid.

>>7030
It might just be that these are the main themes she's decided to follow in her books aimed at 9 to 11 year olds. That and bullying.

She does have books aimed at older girls, but I know they cover things like sex and periods so obviously we aren't going to let her read them yet. Who knows what the themes in these books will be? Backstreet abortions and the time dad held mum's head over the hob for burning dinner?

>>7031
I read James Herbert's The Fog when I was 12 and it never did me any harm. No, watching If.... when I was 11 ruined my life.

>>6667
>Apparently they're making a His Dark Materials TV series.

It starts on Sunday. I'm not sure on the casting; the film was shite but it was at least well cast. I can't see James McAvoy pulling off Lord Asriel.

>>7065

There's not a fucking chance the BBC of all producers is going to effectively depict a child-maiming aristocracy and a full frontal assault on Catholicism.

Likely it'll just be a bit of an adult Harry Potter cum generic steampunk fantasy.

>>7066
The first episode was alright, albeit I don't think they've got the pacing right yet and it could have benefited from something like the mud wars between Lyra and the gyptian children as no real relationship was established between the two in Oxford. I'm not entirely convinced by Mrs Coulter, either.

I'll see how it goes.

>>7065
>>7067
I'm watching it and it seems decent but I paused it a while ago and can't be bothered to start it again. I don't like the use of CGI, it makes everything feel like the sets are tiny dioramas with no actual world around them.

Laddo's apparently ran out of books to read so I've given him The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm guessing he's into it because he didn't want to turn his light off when I went through a few minutes ago. I only really need to tide him over for a week or so until his birthday/Christmas but I'm unsure what to suggest to him next; I might try Orwell on him again.

>>7069
He's 12 now right? Yeah that's a good age for Hitchhiker's, most of my school mates had read it by then.

>>7069
Dirk Gently seems an obvious choice. Pratchett too.

>>7070
Yeah. A week today and he's a teenager.

>>7071
I'm not actually sure if I've got any Dirk Gently books, I've certainly got other ones by Adams but I have a feeling they're others in the Hitchhiker's series. He's got around 15 Discworld books plus a few others by Pratchett, such as Dodger and the Nome Trilogy; I'm looking to get more but you see surprisingly few Pratchett books in second-hand and charity shops considering his volume of output.

>>7071

Seconding Pratchett here. I read his truckers/diggers/wings trilogy in primary and loved it and started into discworld at 15 although I'd say an intelligent kid could definitely get it much younger than that.

>>7071

Dirk Gently always felt a bit more adult, even if I did read them as a Young Adult. Likewise I first read HHGTTG at 14-16 and probably didn't really appreciate them properly.

Sigh because my lad's just hit four and while he loves story time he has the attention span of a goldfish and I suppose I'll be here in a couple of years asking what you can read to an ADHD 6 year old.

I mean I would sit and listen to whole chapters of the Alice, Narnia, and Wind in the Willows when I was 3, I knew I never should have spaffed in his mum. Sage.

Did anyone actually watch all of His Dark Materials? It's been a couple of months and I'm still struggling to find the motivation to get around to the second episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl2r3Fwxz_o

Welp.

>>7071
I've just read the first Dirk Gently book. Can you lads recommend some authors similar to Adams and Pratchett? Not sure how alike they are, but the next books I'm planning to read are A Confederacy of Dunces and The Antipope.

>>7087
I tried reading artemis fowl back when I was a teenager, I never get far into the book because it just didn't appeal to me as you have a main character who is meant to be a super-intelligent kid, but mostly just came across to me as a massive bellend.

>>7133

I enjoyed them but agree with your sentiment. It's been a while since I read them but he's only supposed to be a knob cos his dad's missing, which didn't resonate with me at all since I was very pleased my dad was missing.

>>7133
A lot of 'book smart' people are educated fools who lack common sense and emotional intelligence. As a swot in school I can safely say that a lot of us were twats.

Laddo didn't wake up until about 3:15 this afternoon. Bought him a few Garth Nix books to keep him going and evidently he decided to read a couple of them last night/into the early hours of the morning.

He's watched the Artemis Fowl film on Disney+ and he said it was terrible.

>>7147
I'm still punishing myself by trying to finish the Keys to the Kingdom series. Currently in the middle of having stopped reading Sir Thursday about six months ago.

>>7148
He's read the first four Old Kingdom books this week so far, plus a fair chunk of the Nome trilogy. I picked up Mister Monday in a second-hand bookshop a few years back and now he's suddenly into Garth Nix again he's asking for all of the Keys to the Kingdom books.