To think so many books these days are fairly crap and unoriginal

[goddessoftheharvest]

I'm going away for the weekend, so I decided to get some new books for my kindle.

There's thousands of books in the Kindle store, it shouldn't be so hard to locate something decent!

They all seem to be trashy crime (there's a time and a place for a good crime thriller, but really)

Or else they have awful twee names, along the lines of "The Cotton Candy Teashop For Hopeless Cat Ladies In Badly Patterned Retro Swing Dresses"

Or they look ok, then you read the description and it's one of those plots where Mandy finds a letter in her granny's shoe, and for some reason this means that every other chapter flashes back to Cynthia in 1914, who has a dark secret that is actually bloody underwhelming, once you are 554 pages in.

Then there's the ones where the author can write well, but they try to be a bit too highbrow, and they churn out some huge fucking tome which tarts itself out as "a moving depiction of the disintegration of a marriage",when really it's about Barbara finding out that Cyril has been shagging round with the lady in the chemist.

I love books, and I'm not even that picky. I don't think it has to make big statements about love, or war. I'm not adverse to trash, especially when it's fairly well written, you can tell the author has just had a good time writing it, tongue firmly lodged in cheek

Everyone seems to feel their book has to be deep, to say something really original and meaningful and subversive. Either that or it's a story about Mary Sue opening a fucking organic cupcake shop

AIBU? Suggestions welcome, by the way. So far I've only downloaded a book about Nepalese cookery,which is lovely but not exactly what I'm looking for

I recently bought The Bees by Laline Paull, mainly because I thought the premise was intriguing. It's set in the 'totalitarian state' of a bee hive. I haven't read it yet (too busy) but it's had some good reviews and I'm looking forward to it.

I have a very satisfying list of books on my kindle now, all with "new" beside them

I'll give Kate Atkinson another try. I read the first chapter of the one where the mum and baby get, well, fucking annihilated when walking down a country lane. Think the spaniel copped it too. Had baby DD at the time, lived down a country lane myself, and was convinced Kate was on a one woman mission to give me a panic attack. So I gave the book to a friend who reads Jodi Picoult, and she loved it. The two things don't have to be mutually exclusive,but I made assumptions.

I read the lemon cake book too. It made me really hungry. My mum makes a fab lemon drizzle

Alice Munro is brilliant. As is Daphne du Maurier

It's funny, I know there's always been crap books, but you look at something that was considered a bit of light reading 150 years ago, and it's still better than most of the stuff today.

^when I say have, I don't mean in the biblical sense.

scrambled a story...narrated by a bee? has the book created a lot of...buzz? will there be a sting in the tale? Shall I stop now? I am, of course, joking. I read the bee fact that led to the author writing it and mi d was officially blown.
OP ...it made me really hungry. Love this comment. Thought it was just me.
Which Alice unrlnovelwould you recommend?Have read some of her short stories.
Does anyone remember the title of the Kate Atkinson book?

Has anyone read any 'Peter James'?
I'm reading my second book of the 'Roy Grace' series.
A friend introduced me to them. They are a bit gory after reading chic lit all my life.
But I think I'm converted!

Munro

Try Muriel Spark bloody brilliant. Am reading The Girls of Slender Means again. Very witty, brittle, socially aware.

Goddess I don't think that's true. The real dross of a century back just hasn't survived. After all, why would Sophie Kinsella's terrible books be remembered? I think thay if you comlare a Shakespeare comedy to Beckett (I know, I know), you can see how the work necomes more nuanced, more challengung, more mature as the years roll on. I entirely reject the idea that all modern fiction is worthless, there's gold out there.

Actually, I have a similar example of improvement in a genre, albeit a less highbrow one : girls' school stories. Angela Brazil may have been a founding light, but many of her successors, such as the Trebizon stories, decades later were far better written.

I won't go so far as to hold the Chalet School books up as examples of this phenomenon of literary evolution, but it still exists.

I think my most twee book was Tapas, a corpse and carrot cake. It didn't even last me a whole flight from Barcelona (1.5 hrs) and read how i imagine my version of nanowiro would go (plot point given ok but then resolved in a page).

worryingly, i did quite enjoy an easy non taxing read.

Bander does this make the title (All the light we cannot see) less annoying? I thought it was mainly due to one of the main characters being blind. Thanks for making me think about it!

"It’s a reference first and foremost to all the light we literally cannot see: that is, the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the ability of human eyes to detect (radio waves, of course, being the most relevant). It’s also a metaphorical suggestion that there are countless invisible stories still buried within World War II — that stories of ordinary children, for example, are a kind of light we do not typically see. Ultimately, the title is intended as a suggestion that we spend too much time focused on only a small slice of the spectrum of possibility". - from Doerr’s site

Thanks Bacon, yes I love Russian writers. Can't get enough Dostoevsky, but he hasn't written much recently.

I will look at some of your recommendations.