Current Reading - Books best thread

[San Bernardhinault]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Netherland is great. It's, in many ways, a perfect OTF book. (Although surely more Purple Cow than Tubby Isaacs...)

As for the late-era dystopian Ballard novels, I felt they got consecutively worse, until Kingdom Come felt like a parody of Ballard rather than the real thing.

[Sundeporino]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finally started "McMafia" this week. Im loving it.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've started reading Emma Goldman's autobiography "Living My Life". I thought it was going to be a hard but worthwhile slog, but it's hugely entertaining, pacey and easy to read (so far). She had one of the most incredible lives I've ever heard about.

Books I've finished recently are McMafia, the first half of which was fantastic but from South Africa onwards it just seemed like filler.

Then, I've mentioned it before, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Just a brilliant book to read and by the end of it you just want to immerse yourself in as much literature as you can get your hands on - which is magical.

[Kid A]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Marcus Trescothick's book Coming Back To Me is excellent. Not many famous people are brave enough to publicly admit they've had depression. One of the few sports autobiographies that could be of interest to a reader who doesn't particularly like the sport concerned.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

steveeeeeeeee wrote:

Books I've finished recently are McMafia, the first half of which was fantastic but from South Africa onwards it just seemed like filler.

My feelings *exactly*.

[Kid A]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I started and finished The White Tiger last night. I can't remember the last time I read a whole book in an evening. I thought it was superb. In any fiction book I'm either wanting a gripping story or something that makes me understand the world a bit more. A lot of books don't manage either but this does both. I can't recommend this enough.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I read William Gaddis's Agape Agape [this board doesn't like macrons, sorry] during a National Express coach journey on Sunday; it's a scorcher, really fascinating stuff. My favourite "railing against the world while succumbing to cancer" novella, hands down; it's packed with great ideas that are always a little too ambitious to pull off, but makes a virtue of it.

I've also just started on Michael's Bracewell's Roxy (formerly Remake/Remodel in its hardback guise). I actually had pretty low expectations, despite the brilliant premise - basically: how on earth did Roxy Music come to be? - but it's incredible so far, a great social history of England during the birth of pop.

It's going for £3 in this new equivalent of Fopp at the moment (and probably in Fopp too). Can't recommend it highly enough.

[Ibn Pickthall]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Kid A wrote:

Marcus Trescothick's book Coming Back To Me is excellent. Not many famous people are brave enough to publicly admit they've had depression. One of the few sports autobiographies that could be of interest to a reader who doesn't particularly like the sport concerned.

A reader with no knowledge of cricket would have some difficulty understanding parts of the first half of the book, particularly when he's discussing his technical problems. It is excellent though, my one criticism is that the chapter on the 2005 Ashes isn't big or detailed enough.

[Ibn Pickthall]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Has anyone read:

Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange

Ferguson's Cash Nexus

Beattie's False Economy

or

Akerlof and Schiller's Animal Spirits

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Not read Bernstein but I seem to recall it getting some deeply lukewarm reviews. The Cash Nexus is great - probably Ferguson's best book. I've just bought False Economy but haven't read it yet - I'll let you know sometime this month, though. Not read Animal Spirits, but Akerlof's a genius.*

* Full disclosure: there's an outside chance he's writing the forward to the next book I'm editing - apparently he really likes the project we've been working on.

[Ibn Pickthall]

Current Reading - Books best thread

There's a very sour reader review of Beattie's book on Amazon which I found odd given that William Easterly was full of praise for it. I don't like the look or feel of the harback version of the book so will probably wait in any case until the p/b is published.

Have you read El-Arian's "When Markets Collide"?

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just purchased, and am 30 pages into:



It's about doing things with your hands, and how a good number of us have lost this skill over the past generation as a result of the focus on the 'knowledge economy'.

Updates to come.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Toro, you have been ignoring this thread too long. Come back.

Oh, alright then.

I've just finished Erving Goffman's Asylums - excellent, but not as good as Stigma. I'm meant to be writing a piece on its impact fifty years on with, among others, Melmoth The Wanderer, sometime of this parish.

Currently about halfway through lucky Jim, and am enjoying it greatly. never previously read any Amis, which i now rcognise to have been a great mistake.

Been on a sci-fi kick recently - got through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Solaris, both of which I loved. Again, I haven't really read as much SciFi as I'd like.

What else lately? Mrs Dalloway and Seduction and Betrayal, a collection of Elizabeth Hardwick's lectures and essays on women in/and literature. For obvious reasons, they complemented each other brilliantly.

I read William Gaddis's Agape Agape [this board doesn't like macrons, sorry] during a National Express coach journey on Sunday; it's a scorcher, really fascinating stuff. My favourite "railing against the world while succumbing to cancer" novella, hands down; it's packed with great ideas that are always a little too ambitious to pull off, but makes a virtue of it.

Word. Gaddis is just about my favourite writer ever, and that's him at his best. Incredibly inventive, at once impassioned and ironically detached, and totally, totally in control of his medium.

Have you read much else by him? The absurd lengths can be offputting (Agape Agape is obviously an exception here), but scarcely a page is wasted. I've been meaning to get onto JR for a while - it's particularly entertaining/despair-inducing in the current economic moment, I'm told. I love The Recognitions like a brother.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

WOM - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance much?

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Toro: Count On It wrote:

WOM - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance much?

God damn was that a tough slog. It's where I began forming my (now deeply held) opinion that anything 'written by' and 'published by' one person should be 'edited by' someone else entirely.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

No, Toro, I've actually been hugely resistant to the Big American Novel for a long time (they always sound so parochial to me). But having read midi-Gaddis - an absolute blast, like John Coltrane's Interstellar Space - I'm about ready to supersize up to JR; his game is obviously pretty unique.

Come to think of it, I've become hugely resistant to the Economical American Short Story too - the singer-songwriter of the literary world. A housemate foisted Richard Ford's Granta US short story anthology on me recently, and the three I've read at random have only further entrenched that view: no fucking imagination or ideas whatsoever. There must be loads of great American short story writers disastrously missed out of that collection; good old Donald Barthelme sticks out like Roxy Music on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

An equivalent anthology of the Western European short story would be fascinating, I reckon, but of course it'll never get made.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

WornOldMotorbike wrote:

Toro: Count On It wrote:

WOM - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance much?

God damn was that a tough slog. It's where I began forming my (now deeply held) opinion that anything 'written by' and 'published by' one person should be 'edited by' someone else entirely.

Haha, I really enjoyed it (if "enjoyed" is the right term to use about a 400-page nervous breakdown that offers next to no insight into Zen) but I don't know that it deserves its "life-changing" rep. Perhaps it would have been a big deal at the time, though.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I don't know if it really counts as reading, as it's reference, but the last book I bought was The Collins German Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged. 2,108 pages of hardcore wordage.

I'm determined to get my German to a non-embarrassing level at some undefined point in the hazy future....

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

It's about doing things with your hands, and how a good number of us have lost this skill over the past generation as a result of the focus on the 'knowledge economy'.

Updates to come.

Sounds interesting. One of the subjects I've begun looking at is the precipitous decline in male enrollment in visual arts programs (well, all arts programs actually) in the past decade or so. There's obviously no single reason but a significant factor could well be the lack of value given to hand/craft skills. This seems as if might be worth a peek.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Really tried to get into Claire Messud's The Emporer's New Children, but after 80 pages I just admitted that it didn't grab me at all, and I hated all of the characters.

[Pants]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ah man, Incandenza, that's one of my favourite novels of the last few years. The characters aren't likable, but I'm surprised it didn't grab you. If you decide to stick with it, it has an absolutely mind-blowing ending.

I think that's the first time we've ever disagreed on a novel!

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yes, I think this is a first. Maybe my problem was that I would read a bit, take a few days off, and pick it up again.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Lucia Lanigan wrote:

WornOldMotorbike wrote:

Toro: Count On It wrote:

WOM - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance much?

God damn was that a tough slog. It's where I began forming my (now deeply held) opinion that anything 'written by' and 'published by' one person should be 'edited by' someone else entirely.

Haha, I really enjoyed it (if "enjoyed" is the right term to use about a 400-page nervous breakdown that offers next to no insight into Zen) but I don't know that it deserves its "life-changing" rep. Perhaps it would have been a big deal at the time, though.

I haven't reread it and have no desire to, though it did provide a half-baked — but much needed — loop back into Western philosophy for those of us who had been into, like, that Eastern shit man. Mind if you think ZAtAoMM was bad, don't go anywhere near Lila the follow up. Incoherent vanity publishing at its absolute worst.

[Sundeporino]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Have to agree with the posters concerning "Mcmafia". The first two thirds are amazing but the "bad guy listing" never gives up. It turns into a chinese water torture thing dripping away until eventually I couldnt wait for the book to end.
A chance missed.

About to start "Hardboiled Hollywood" by Max Decharne. Its a breakdown of the "true stories" behind the great Film Noirs.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm with Pants on Clare Messud. Thouht the book was very good. A more un-OTF group of characters would be hard to imagine, though.