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[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Oh, so no longer in London? That's too bad - I never make it to Leeds.

Do you want me to keep sending those ads? I'm happy to, if you like. The next couple of months are when most of the postings for 09-10 will go up.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, please do. I'm having to start thinking about second jobs and CV-building already...

Also, I spend loads of the time in London anyway, so do keep me posted on your travel plans.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Finished the Elizabeth Potter - it's very thorough and persuasive, and pretty accessible. I could see Wyatt getting a good deal out of it.

Am replacing it with Setting Sun, an anthology of Japanese Photographers' writings.

[Errorist Sympathiser]

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Just finished Flood by Stephen Baxter. Alright, I s'pose, but the crushing inevitability of the end slowed the book down to a crawl.

Now starting The Burning Man by Mark Chadbourn, the 8th book in a series of ever-decreasing returns...

[Sam]

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Finished Inverting The Pyramid, read a very short book about The Book Of Kells today, and tomorrow I'll be starting The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

[Anton Gramscescu]

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I am completely addicted to Robert Harris. I'm not generally a thriller kind of guy, but Fatherland was genius. And Imperium. So, on the plan home yesterday, I finished Ghost, and am completely unable to figure out how he avoided a slander suit from the Blairs.

Also read David Conn's The Beautful Game (starring TonTon!), which was a truly excellent book. I've also been reading When Friday Comes, which has a rich and promising subject but is written by a rank amateur. Makes the Bennet book on Russia read like Simon Kuper. I'm holding out because I assume there will be nuggets, but yeesh!

[Guest]

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Just finished Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and it was excellent. This morning I nipped into Barcelona and did this walk, which, if I'm being honest, was a bit underwhelming (obviously enough for a work of fiction, as you're just staring at random buildings half the time), though did give a good 'feel'for the book ...

[Jon]

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Did you like Ghost, Antonio? I've never read any Robert Harris but listened to the radio adaptation of Ghost on a Book at Bedtime and was distinctly underwhelmed. Maybe the adaptation didn't do it justice though and I'm pretty sure they abridge them anyway.

Talking, as Lodz was, of Spanish writers I've just finished La de Bringas by Benito Perez Galdos. Although it's set in Madrid, most of it takes place inside the Royal Palace so it doesn't really conjure up 19th century Madrid like the majestic Fortunata y Jacinta does.

[Sam]

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Lodzubelieveit wrote:

Just finished Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and it was excellent.

I had a bit of an odd relationship with that book. The first hundred pages or so are too descriptive by far for my liking... but after that it changed and became a really, really bloody good read.

[Anton Gramscescu]

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I enjoy all of Harris' stuff, even the ones that aren't that good. Like this one, and Archangel (both set in the present and with wholly ludicrous premises). Not up to the standards of my two faves (Imperium and Fatherland).

None of Harris' novels stand on their own and make you say: "hey! great literature!" But he has a way of carryng you along - the pages do fly, even when he's not at his best (which this wasn't).

[Sundeporino]

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"Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson. A very good read and throws up all sorts of weird historical facts along the way.

[G-Man]

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Ah, I want to buy that Shakespeare book.

I'm in the habit of doing two books at once. I've just finished a very good book on the Berlin Wall by somebody Taylor and at the same time finished Spud by the South African author John de Ruit, which is actually my son's book. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The sort of book teenagers and their parents can both enjoy. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

Currently I'm skipping through Steve Martin's Pure Drivel on audiobook, which alternately lives up to its name and has me roaring with laughter ("I would like to apologise to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for using the term 'Colored People'"), and reading the political memoirs of former ANC MP Mark Feinstein, After The Party, which reveals the inside story of how the Mbeki government and its lackeys closed ranks to prevent a parliamentary investigation into corruption in the country's scandalous arms deal of the '90s.

[Sundeporino]

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G.Man : I cant recommend the Shakespeare book enough...its not a biog but rather an anti-biog in that its mainly about what "they" dont know about him.
Girlfriends an Eng Lit graduate yet I dont know the difference between a noun and a vowel...as my grammar/punctuation on otf shows. I think shes now gonna try drip feeding me more highbrow culture.

Now reading Charles Mingus's autobiog "Beneath The Underdog".

[Sam]

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I've got a feeling I've got that Shakespeare book. I've got at least one Bryson I've not read yet (the writer's dictionary he did earlier this year).

The Remains Of The Day is a really good book, I've been lucky with my reading this year. It's been a long time since I read something I didn't thoroughly enjoy. I'm now onto Tomás Eloy Martínez's The Tango Singer, which reminds me of The Shadow Of The Wind, only it's better, and it's about a city that's more conducive to literary eulogising and character-building (Buenos Aires as opposed to Barcelona).

Tomorrow, if I'm feeling a bit better than I have been today, I'm going to start on Faust.

[Guest]

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The Rotters Club was brilliant, especially as it was set in places I know, and namechecked music I know, but gets docked half a point for gratuitous Nazi interlude.

Now on The Damned Utd. Hmmm. I'll let you know.

Another thumbs-up for the Bryson Shakespeare, especially for the well-deserved kicking handed out to the Shakespeare deniers.

I usually like Harris, but Archangel was hogwash, and I am not tempted by Ghost. Bring on the next installment in the Cicero story.

[Jon]

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The Rotters Club was brilliant, especially as it was set in places I know, and namechecked music I know, but gets docked half a point for gratuitous Nazi interlude.

Is that the bit that takes place at the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge, where one of the characters is having a dirty weekend?

I liked it a lot, there was a TV adaptation a couple of years ago too. Plus a sequel as well but I've not read it.

[San Bernardhinault]

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I'm reading Gillian Tendall's The House By The Thames, which has interesting stuff about Bankside, but she's started doing something that really winds me up in biography, and treating the subject as a close friend, always Christian name, and so on "Bill enjoyed spending time with his family", etc. It's even worse because you know that it's all extrapolated from tiny bits of information.

Got sufficiently irate/bored that I needed a distraction book and I'm reading Riaan Manser's "Round Africa On My Bicycle", which is quite entertaining, although not very well written. There's enough going on (30 odd countries, with lots of jungle, corruption and punctures does that) to keep it interesting and not make me care about the writing quality.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Jon wrote:

The Rotters Club was brilliant, especially as it was set in places I know, and namechecked music I know, but gets docked half a point for gratuitous Nazi interlude.

Is that the bit that takes place at the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge, where one of the characters is having a dirty weekend?

No, it's the encounter with holocaust survivors in Denmark. Didn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the book.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Jonathan Wilson's excellent football tactics thing, and William Gaddis' stunning Agapé Agape.

[Sam]

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The Tango Singer was finished a few days ago, and is superb to the point where I must get hold of more of Eloy Martínez's stuff. I loved it.

I'm now reading Goethe's Faust in the evenings and weekends, and because it's a very very large edition from the Folio Society that doesn't fit in my bag to take into work every day (although I'm tempted if only because I'd look absolutely hilarious reading it on public transport), I've also got the Folio Society's collection of 'Great Short Stories' to read during the daytime.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Back to the Poetry Anthology, and also Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought.

[Guest]

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Toro, I was reading something today about how Pound asserted that Ovid influenced him - but apparently he actually lacked a knowledge of Ovid. does this sound right? could I just go and read a particular bit or is it more of a constant thread type thing do you reckon? (I didn't get the impression the author of the article knew for certain)

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Well, my knowledge of Ovid is not really sufficient to comment authoritatively

But it sounds in line with his general working methods - Pound was an incredible intellectual dilettante, reading anything and everything that came to hand, picking everything that fitted into his idiosyncratic worldview, and wedging it into his own work - particularly the Cantos - often verbatim. That means he covers, refers to in both form and content, a vast body of material. But it also means, necessarily, that much of it won't have been understand in great depth, or won't have been remembered very long afterwards. I think he more or less acknowledges this as one of the causes of his great error towards the end of the Cantos.

Just off the top of my head, though, there are certainly bits of the Pisan Cantos very similar in tone to Ted Hughes' Ovid - though the influence is probably working in the other direction there...

[Guest]

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Thanks, that's cool, I will try to follow that up.

I'm back in the library now; the reference in the article was to Guide to Kulchur and apparently Pound said that "a great treasure of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and in the subject matter of Ovid's long poem, and that only in this form could it be registered." So the verity is something external to both texts, I guess. Which means that it doesn't really matter how shaky his knowledge of the text was, maybe? And Hughes says wrt Ovid that the "right man met the right material at the right moment" so something quite similar. Certainly assertions of this sort de-privilege the notion of 'the original' - we are in any case conscious of the way intertextuality seems to work in a web-like structure, perhaps, not a straight line - and they allow the modern poets to claim the same for themselves as they do for Ovid. Which is probably fair enough. It's not as if he wouldn't have done the same.

Oh God I think I'm going to have to try to read Joyce. I don't want to! I'm scared.

[Anton Gramscescu]

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Finished off a couple of books this week - A book on Dubai by Christpher Davidson, which makes me think this is a much more interesting part of the world than I thought; Soccer Revolution by Willy Meisl, which is quite remarkable (review shortly on the appropriate thread), and Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which was very very enjoyable even if a bit fluffy.