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    Books to save your sanity

    In a recent Believer review Nick Hornby bemoaned the apparent lack of good new fiction. "I try to find works of fiction, I promise, But it's like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket, I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements and so on... I suspect it's to do with age and risk." A poorly written piece of non-fiction, his theory goes, will at least tell you something you didn't already know, whereas: "Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire..."

    I can relate, and agree somewhat. But I also think when daily events outdo even the most creative imagination all a body can do is throw their hands in the air and go for a long lie down. This summer I'm limiting my recreational fiction reading to the darkly romantic (see the noir thread) and the comically absurd (mostly Wodehouse), none of it written after 1970. How are you preserving time and saving sanity in a time of shitgibbons?

    #2
    Too much non-fiction that I read these days is loaded with references to the current world-of-shitgibbons. Basically, anything historical that refers to empire, racism or 20th century wars - ie, pretty much everything - is loaded with connotations.

    I find "high-brow" modern fiction to be very hit and miss and often just a tiring battle to get through.

    So at the moment, I'm actually enjoying some middle-brow, easy for book-club style, fluff. The benefit is that it's fluff, so it takes little effort or time to read, which means I don't feel like a ton of my time is wasted. Of course, there's nothing specific that I'm going to admit to reading, because it's basically crap. But it's entertaining, harmless, distracting crap. The risk is that I'll end up reading Danielle Steele novels by the time the 2020 election comes around.

    I think my goal should be to read more decent travelogue books, but all modern ones are written by people who spend their time trying to do nothing but be funny. So I guess I have to delve into the past and finally read Theroux and Thesiger.

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      #3
      I've lost my appetite for very recent history/news background, thanks to Trump. Books about Obama, GFC, etc (Richard Wolffe, Michael Grunwald) now seem like a fool's errand. They told us how things had changed - and yes, obviously they have in many ways, but ... oh dear. Simply put, check the index: there may be no mention of Trump at all, in a 400 page "Where do we go from here?" book published in the decade before It Happened.

      So I'll take refuge in the more distant past. Mussolini's rise to power? Mmm, escapism. Trump's, not so much.

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        #4
        I try to read biographies and autobiographies of great human beings who raised the bar of human achievement instead of shitting in the mouth of humanity. Currently, for example, I have Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha and To Be Young Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry on the table. Obviously they will have connotations of racism in that their lives were lived fighting it, but the spirit is lifted by the moral intelligence rather than dragged through despair.

        On people like Richard Wolffe, think of the daily despair they knowing their writing means jack shit now. The treatments of the 2012 election all treated Trump as a joke candidate not someone doing a dry run and laying down a marker.
        Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 04-06-2018, 19:49.

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          #5
          I stick to sci-fi. Sad thing is now I have to go even further out, as the near future sci-fi is just as depressing (see The Water Knife, Aurora, etc...)

          Natural History and History of Science also seems to do the trick. (e.g. The Clockwork Universe.)

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            #6
            I try reading fluffier stuff - like Ian Tregillis' Alchemy Wars series, Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series, Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities series, or Django Wexler's Shadow Campaigns series.

            Doesn't always work though. I tried Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series but it was just too unbelievably nice. Even the conflict in it was generally resolved nicely.

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              #7
              Originally posted by matt j View Post
              I stick to sci-fi. Sad thing is now I have to go even further out, as the near future sci-fi is just as depressing (see The Water Knife, Aurora, etc...)

              Natural History and History of Science also seems to do the trick. (e.g. The Clockwork Universe.)
              Not being a sci-fi reader myself, I did wonder about this. I might be wrong but get the impression that dystopian stories dominate the genre these days (certainly on film and TV it's the case). Given that the present day is rapidly approaching that condition under its own steam, wouldn't utopian fictional alternatives be more appropriate?

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                #8
                Funny too that a lot of the future dystopia genre was inspired by Philip K Dick, writing in the 1950s when - cold war threat aside - America was on the up; and some of the inspirational future utopia stuff like Star Trek came along in the late 60s when America was rioting at home and sending its children off to war. There must be theses written on a correlation. Iain M Banks' utopian future Culture novels were mostly written while Thatcher was shutting Scotland down, weren't they?

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                  #9
                  "Comfort reads" for me always used to be the Discworld novels and (my mum's) Brother Cadfael stories.

                  I like reading children's books too. Paddington, the Moomins, etc. Always a good way to get a bit of headspace.

                  Or find something really weird, like The Outback Stars, which combines Australian aboriginal mythology with space navy sci-fi.

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                    #10
                    I did most of the Cadfael books too. I had a bit of a thing for historical detective fiction in general.

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                      #11
                      Growing up in Shrewsbury made them a bit special to me. When we went to Shrewsbury home games we used to park where Cadfael's sanctum sanctorum herb garden would have been if he had existed.

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                        #12
                        You mean he didn't?

                        I'm devastated!

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                          #13
                          Nick Hormby's point resonates for me; I'm conscious I read a lot of mon-fiction and keep trying new novels and running out of motivation. Part of this may be my reading style - a few pages at bedtime then nod off. So unless a book is absolutely compelling I will read it too slowly. I've even stopped books many say are good and I'm sure are, such as The Essex Serpent.

                          Yet I know that if I got a good football book or biography, something well written on non-recent history or natural histroy, I'd probably find the time. Or a Robert Harris - he's the comfort zone.

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                            #14
                            "Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire..."

                            That's a good description of what reading Hornby's own novels since Hi-Fidelity has been like for me.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by jameswba View Post
                              "Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire..."

                              That's a good description of what reading Hornby's own novels since Hi-Fidelity has been like for me.
                              Spot on.

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                                #16
                                Yes, I think the last hornby I read was a non-fiction one, ironically. 31 songs?

                                I concur with what's being said about preferring non-fiction nowadays to fiction. I have just finished a book about relief work in immediate post-war Germany. I haven't yet decided what to read next but it will almost definitely be another non-fiction choice. I used to justify this by saying that I still read plenty of fiction in comic book form but I'm increasingly reading books about comics rather than comics themselves.

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                                  #17
                                  Even that (31 Songs) was about as substantial as rice-paper. About a Boy was just insufferable, worse than the worst Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy, which is a really low bar. How To Be Good was a bit better, but not by enough to make me feel his fiction was worth pursuing further.

                                  I also read more non-fiction these days, or go back to novels I've read before and enjoyed. The most recent novel I've read was Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and that was because of a recommendation - followed by discussion - on this forum.

                                  'I think my goal should be to read more decent travelogue books, but all modern ones are written by people who spend their time trying to do nothing but be funny. So I guess I have to delve into the past and finally read Theroux and Thesiger.'

                                  That would be quite worthwhile. With Theroux, you don't have to go that far into the past, as he had one out 2-3 years ago called Deep South, obviously about travels in that region. The older Theroux is a kinder, mellower traveller than the younger one, and some of his more recent work reprises previous travels, so it's better to read the earlier book first. Deep South isn't in that category though, it's a stand-alone.

                                  I've always enjoyed Colin Thubron too. He's perhaps too self-consciously in the 'English gentleman' traveller tradition. At the same time, there's no better antidote to the 'funny', 'To Antarctica with my Dishwasher' type travelogue.

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                                    #18
                                    Jonathan Raban as a Travel Writer. I read almost everything he wrote one very miserable summer- it was prettymuch the only thing that kept me going.
                                    Last edited by Nefertiti2; 24-06-2018, 13:10.

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                                      #19
                                      I should revisit Jonathan Raban. I read one novel by him, which was somewhat forgettable and set in Seattle and had something to do with an immigrant Chinese community. The only other thing I read - years ago - was the rather marvellous Old Glory about his journey down the Mississippi in a small boat.

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                                        #20
                                        The novels aren't very good. Old Glory is great- Passage to Juneau about sailing up the Alaskan Coast and splitting up with his wife is also fantastic. I alson enjoyed Hunting Mr Heartbreak about moving to the US. and there are some essays which are also very good..

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                                          #21
                                          I feel like I've read Hunting Mr Heartbreak - at least, I know the name really well. But I have no recollection of any of the content, and reading the precis on Wiki or Amazon triggers nothing. I really should read Passage to Juneau, though. I'm on a Northern North America kick at the moment in my run up to a trip to Alaska.

                                          Currently, I'm reading "I Married The Klondike" which is surely the book Amor should be reading to save his sanity, but I'm 80% sure he'll have read it already. It's the memoir of a woman who left Toronto in 1907 and went to live in Dawson City in the Yukon - the town at the heart of the Klondike goldrush, and I think (although I'm not far into the book yet) lived basically through its demise into a near ghost-town.

                                          It has literally nothing to do with the current state of the world.

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                                            #22
                                            By Laura Berton right? Her son, Pierre Berton, was an extremely popular journalist/author/TV personality. He grew up in Dawson City, and wrote one of the better popular histories of the Gold Rush: Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush 1896–1899 also an excellent two volume story of of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

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                                              #23
                                              Yup. That's the one. I assume you've read it? A writer called Robert Service has shown up in this and a couple of other places recently, and seems to be utterly revered and it's assumed that the reader knows who he is. I'd never heard of him. Is he someone that's just automatically read in Canadian schools?

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                                                #24
                                                I'm two-thirds of the way through The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood by Jan Marsh. It's project related but well written and, though I'm fairly familiar with the characters, I can always happily lose myself in the period. There's also tons of context that's interesting — like women's bustles used thirty yards of fabric (how the heck could they walk carrying that weight?)

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                                                  #25
                                                  Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
                                                  Yup. That's the one. I assume you've read it? A writer called Robert Service has shown up in this and a couple of other places recently, and seems to be utterly revered and it's assumed that the reader knows who he is. I'd never heard of him. Is he someone that's just automatically read in Canadian schools?
                                                  Oh yes. If a Canadian is asked to name two poets one will be Leonard Cohen the other Robert Service (which one comes first would probably depend on the age of said Canadian) He's best known for his poems set in the Gold Rush period, (Songs of a Sourdough) but his best work, IMHO, is Rhymes of a Red Cross Man which were written based on his experiences as an ambulance driver on the Western Front during WW1. Really powerful stuff.

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