Current Reading - Books best thread

[Glass Half Empty]

Current Reading - Books best thread

In need of some light relief I picked up Adolf Hitler - his part in my downfall a couple of weeks ago and I've ended up reading this and the five subsequent volumes in quick time.

I read the first three volumes in the early '80's and I was pleased to find that there are still some laugh out loud moments. There is an overwhelming sentimentality about the books which I find quite easy to forgive and the remaining mixture of humour, madness, pathos and bare-boned honesty ensured that they fitted the bill superbly as bedtime reading.

I'm going through a phase of catching up with things I should have read before now. I'm halfway through Ivanhoe, which I'm finding surprisingly good. Next on the pile is Tortilla Flat which will be the first Steinbeck I've read since student days.

[Sundeporino]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Recently finished Will Hodgkinson's "Guitar Man" and "Song Man". A bit too close to the "round Ireland with a microwave strapped to my back" blokes stuff, but enjoyable enough. Im determined to write and record a song on/with my recently purchased Yukelele now.

Just finished "Red Moon Rising" which concerns the "space race" viewed from the Russian angle. A cracking read.

Just started "A Basque History Of The World". Great stuff. One chapter down and I know where I want to go for my next holiday.

[imp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm reading 'In Cold Blood.' Although I didn't much like the film 'Capote', it intrigued me enough to try the book that the film's events revolve around, and it's every bit as chillingly brilliant as all the plaudits from the past 50 years attest.

[Edie St Pierre]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm reading 'The Lord of Light' by Roger Zelazny. It's great, inventive, full of ideas, compellingly mysterious plot, and all that. Before that I read 'Babel-17' by Samuel R. Delany. So there you go. Two counter cultural late 60's sci-fi novels in a row.

Before that I read 'Les Miserables' by Victor Hugo. It took me bleeding ages. The stuff about Patron Minette and the criminal underworld in Paris in the 1830's was great though. If you don't want to read all the depressing stuff about women being forced into prostitution and some poor old saintly bastard having a frankly dreadful life of guilt and self-sacrifice just read the last two chapters of Book III and forget the rest. He's good, Victor Hugo.

Hello again, by the way.

[matt j]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Matt P's back!

I generally like Roger Zelazny, and I pretty much think he's a great writer. Unfortunately, I'm always a bit let down by actual plots though. Lord of Light was one I really expected to love, and only liked.

[ad hoc]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished Saramago's "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" which I didn't like as much as other stuff of his I'd read, except that by the last couple of pages I was beginning to realise that he'd pulled off a cool trick and the penny finally dropped. Now I have to think about the whole book again for a while to decide whether it is actually genius or just an interesting novel.

It is quite strange reading a novel when you know the entire plot and what's involving about it is purely in the angle that the author has chosen to take on it, and how he's written it.

As I say, though, I'm not sure if I'm ready to recommend it yet, but give me a couple of days of pondering and I may be.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've finished "The fall of Hyperion"...This has been one hell of a read, epic space-opera but also an incredible human story of faith, quest for truth and musing about God and the nature of God. With a long dead Romantic poet as one of the main characters.

I would actually recommend it to Toro, somehow I think he would enjoy it.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I haven't posted to this in far too long.

Whilst in Mexico I read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which I loved. Before I was one page into it I'd already embarrassed myself in Toronto airport with my laughter. As someone who's been to Sitka (well, flown through it at least), the image of the fictional version he conjures up was hilarious. This was even before I had any idea that the Slattery Report actually did exist.

I'm now reading The Perfect Ten. After that who knows - I've got plenty to be going on with. Last night I ordered, thanks to this very messageboard, 2666. Maybe I'll hit it up right away when it arrives.

[erwin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Very, very behind the times, but Bill Bryson's Notes from a Big Country. I've been giggling to myself on the train, and people have moved seas to avoid me.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Like Moses?

[erwin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Tee hee!

(whoops)

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Recommendation noted, MS, cheers!

At the moment, I'm in the middle of Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, Jurgen Habermas's Between Naturalism and Religion, and A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill which, despite the title, is poetry. Really enjoying them all so far, albeit in very different ways.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Toro, are you aware of the experimental film maker Jurgen Haabermaaster?

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ha, that is absolutely brilliant. Thank you...

[Moonlight Shadow]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Oh Toro, amongst the other characters are a Catholic priest (a Jesuit) and theologian wracked with doubt about his faith and a Jewish scholar whose area of expertise is the relation between God and mankind...And the story start with a pilgrimage to a lone planet,called Hyperion, where all 7 pilgrims expect to die with only one granted his/her wish by a creature akin to a mechanical scourge of God (but which one...).

[Neil Kulkarni]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Do feel like I should be intoning this like Cyril Fletcher but anyhoo, I'm currently rereading The Rack by A.E. Ellis. Never fail to be knocked out by it's precision and power and compassion. Not to make it sound awful, which I am, but it's one of the most unforgettable books I've read - Grahame Greene loved it, Ellis (real name Derek Lyndsay, pal of Kenneth Tynan)never wrote anything else.
And cos the blurb on the back of 'The Rack' reminded me of GG (he's one of the awed reviewers) I'm again enjoying the collection of C19th pulpfiction collated by Greene & his brother Hugh called 'Victorian Villainies' particularly cos one of the novellas contained within it's lurid covers is Richard Marsh's cracking 'The Beetle' (just begging to be fimed -someone get Bruce Campbell & Roger Corman on the case) which rattles along like nothing of it's time this side of Wells.
Both the above highly recommended anyhoo, even if I'm putting you off.

[S. aureus]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Currently wading my way through Godel, Escher, Bach. Which is really very interesting, if a little tough going at times (in part because it's hard for me to get more than 10 minutes at a time to read right now, though mostly just because there are some difficult concepts for my little brain in there). If I had more time I think I'd turn right round and re-read it.
However one little detail that, for some reason, really bothered the bejesus out of me is that Hofstadter doesn't know where the deoxy part of DNA is.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished the Habermas and the Hill - now reading Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red and Illness by Havi Carel.

Philosophy of Medicine is an area I've been moving into a little bit recently - and Havi is a philosopher at the University of the West of England who was diagnosed a couple of years ago with a terminal, and incurable, lung condition. The book has received criticism in some quarters for being overly autobiographical - but part of the philosophical point Havi is concerned to make is that philosophy of medicine needs to be phenomenological, to deal with the lived experience of illness. That's right up my street, philosophically, while the autobiographical story is incredibly moving. So I'm liking it rather a bit.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Homo Aestheticus by Ellen Dissanayake. 'Course I mostly like it because she agrees with me, or I agree with her, (the latter, I admit is slightly more disappointing.) Seriously though, it's really well written stuff on a subject — where art comes from and why — that, when written about at all, is usually marinated in assumptions and expressed in bafflegab.

[Ibn Pickthall]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Also Sprach Zaratoro wrote:

Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red

Is that the one about the murder inquiry of a miniaturist?

[ad hoc]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished The Steep Approach to Garbadale, which is the first Iain banks I've read in years. Enjoyable page turner and very Banksian (Scotland, drugs, indie music, builds up to twist conclusion). However the twist was telegraphed from about page 3, and hence the ending sort of was a massive let down. Like a long, but interesting journey with a shit destination. Driving across Spain to Algeciras, type thing. Or to stay in theme, walking from John o'Groats to Motherwell.

[Spence Cascaval Pane]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Toro - Havi Carel was my pastoral supervisor for a year when I was an undergrad at York. She's a very nice woman, and I was very sorry when I heard about her illness. Glad you liked the book.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, I met her at a conference last month. I've also met her husband a few times, though I had no idea he was her husband.

Finished the book now, it's really excellent - have moved on to H.O. Eaton's The Austrian Philosophy of Values, which is a bit of a rare piece.

Ibn - yeah, that's the one. I'm enjoying it a lot, it's very The Name of the Rose.

Do I recall you having fairly strong negative views on Pamuk?

[Ibn Pickthall]

Current Reading - Books best thread

No, that wasn't me, toro. Though I did struggle a bit with "My name is Red" a few years back, I can't recall why. I don't think I got more than about a quarter of the way through.

[Etienne]

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Just read The Alienist by Caleb Carr (whose name puts me in mind of Gillian Welch every time). Very good thriller, to which Jed Rubenfeld's Interpretation of Murder owes, ahem, a heavy debt. Now on to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.