Current Reading - Books best thread

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

In Spain, I finished If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (thanks to the AVE journey from Barna to Zaragoza - I don't normally read a lot on holiday), which is superb.

I am now reading Soccer In A Football World by David Wagnerin, which is published by a wonderful bunch of people who gave it me for writing something on WSC Daily back in August. It's really, really, really bloody interesting (although he's misplaced the hyphen in Gil Scott-Heron's name).

[Ibn Pickthall]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I must've started If on a Winter's Night a Traveller about 5 times and nver got past the first 10 pages. I can't remember what it was about it that made it feel so impenetrable. I think I gave my copy away.

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ibn Pickthall wrote:

I must've started If on a Winter's Night a Traveller about 5 times and nver got past the first 10 pages. I can't remember what it was about it that made it feel so impenetrable. I think I gave my copy away.

Are you refering to the bit about buying a book and finding somewhere to read it? Or the way it switches to the story?

I found the first few pages totally magical and really made me stick with the book later on when I began to feel a little lost. I've never read anything that describes the act of buying and reading a book in such a magnificent way.

I've just finished The Good Soldier Švejk and The Right Stuff in quick sucession. The Good Soldier really is hilarious, and the episodic nature helps mitigate the way it ends. The Right Stuff was enthralling, it seemed to get into the mindset of its subjects in very believable way (not that I'd know if it didn't), I was struck by Woolf's notes about how since the First World War there were no stories about the Officer Corps, most tales focussed on the everyman, like The Good Soldier. Do people think this is true?

I've resolved to finish some of the books I've started but never got round to finishing, most often because something else more interesting pops up.

Life: A Users Manual
Force of Destiny
Gravity's Rainbow
Dead Souls
and AJP Taylor's The Hapsburg Monarchy

are all started, I'm just not sure which I feel like reading right at the moment.

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

So I've started on Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796. I've only got to 1817 so far but it really is fascinating. I'm enjoying it all the more for not knowing what will happen next. The situation does look fairly hopeless at the moment, people keep rising in revolt only to find out that there are only half a dozen lawyers and some officers on their side. No one else cares. Italy really doesn't exist does it? Gran Colombia was much more of a country at this point than Italy was.

Quotes for the day...

"Castlereagh was impervious to such appeals. The Lombards, he said, had absolutely nothing to fear from the 'kindly government of Austria'"

and

"According to the writer Ludovico Di Breme, the Milanese would happily have ruled the whole of Italy, 'but when it comes down to it, Italy does not extend very far beyond the [suburb of] Borgo degli Ortolani, in their view'.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Current Reading - Books best thread

It has not changed that much (the Milanesis opinion of where Italy begins and ends...)

[Purves Grundy]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Getting stuck into Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow at the moment. What a brilliant book. It ought to be compulsory reading for every fourteen-year-old in the world.

[Tony C]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' last week.

Quite enjoyed it, though a more prudent editor might have trimmed it a bit without losing too much.

[erwin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I hadn't read any Iain Banks and picked up The Wasp Factory in Oxfam when I was home. I must admit it's leaving rather a nasty taste in my mouth, like American Psycho did when I read it ... only to find out that it was "an hilarious satire on our times". This fact had whizzed over my head, and I'm afraid it might be the same case with TWF.

Just finished Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. If you can get past the relentless cultural references (it's 1982), it's a very sensitive, touching, funny and fun book ... and presses lots of memory buttons, although the protaganist is 13 and I was a bit older at the time.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Soccer In A Football World was really excellent, and I'm now onto The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which has been lent to me by a lady friend. I'm enjoying it, although I'm noticing that as with every novel I've ever read which is set in (or partly in) New York, I feel slightly at one remove from the action, so to speak. This has to be coincidence - I'm not saying the choice of the city is the reason for it - but the only NY-set novel I've read and not got this from was Kav & Clay.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Purves Grundy wrote:

Getting stuck into Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow at the moment. What a brilliant book. It ought to be compulsory reading for every fourteen-year-old in the world.

Really? I thought it was wretched, the point where he really jumped the shark. I was a big fan of everything he wrote previously, but I found it terrible. The title is an attempted riposte to Keats (!) which is not only centuries late, but totally misses what is very obviously Keats' point. By the time he started talking about people generally preferring landscape paintings to modern art because they evolved on the savannah, I was reading it only out of obstinacy.

Ricky Lenin wrote:

Life: A Users Manual

Read it a couple of weeks ago - great stuff. Started slowly enough, but became utterly engrossing very, very quickly. The central conceit, with the jigsaws, is just mind-bogglingly clever, and pointless.

Hmm, what else since I last posted? The wonderful, wonderful Mason & Dixon, easily the thing of Pynchon's I liked most that I've read. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing; a slow start again, but becomes very brilliantly weird.

Can't think of anything else; two monsters there, and I've been working pretty hard what with not having a job...

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Sam--did you finish Oscar Wao? Curious to know what you thought if you did.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I felt like a loser for not finishing Life A User's Manual. Someone spoiled the what the moves meant and I just lost interest. But I feel guilty about it. Also, Surfacing, I love Atwood but I *hate* Surfacing, hate it, hate it, hate it. I found it aggravatingly smug and condescending with its heavy handed message.

oh and I'm still on page 5 of Mason & Dixon and probably will be for evermore. I am far too stupid/attention deficit for proper books, evidently, but I am giving Clarissa another go. I really want to make it work between us this time. About fifth time lucky hopefully.

[San Bernardhinault]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Mason & Dixon took me months to read, but I really enjoyed it when I'd finally battled through.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I don't think "getting" the moves in L:AUM is important; I'm sure I missed the majority. It's the sheer erudition and playfulness of the whole thing that's great.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Lyra wrote:

Also, Surfacing, I love Atwood but I *hate* Surfacing, hate it, hate it, hate it. I found it aggravatingly smug and condescending with its heavy handed message.

Aggravatingly smug and condescending? From Atwood? *Gasp*

Fact is, that's probably what her tombstone will read.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Tony C wrote:

Finished Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' last week.

Quite enjoyed it, though a more prudent editor might have trimmed it a bit without losing too much.

Ah, I love that book. Excellently paced, I thought; it's long, but it just cracks along inexorably.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Me too. I first read it as a classics student in the kind of college where everyone is posh and you sit around drinking martinis in supervisions and so on.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Incandenza wrote:

Sam--did you finish Oscar Wao? Curious to know what you thought if you did.

Most certainly did. I loved it. The narrative voice is very strong and the way a nation's worries and problems are told through those of one family... it's a very Latin American novel in that respect. As one of the review quotes on the cover said, the overriding feeling is that it's a novel written with a lot of love. Díaz really does seem to love all of his characters (well not Trujillo and his entourage, obviously).

It is a very, very good novel indeed and I was delighted I'd read it. It's one of those books after which life seems that tiny bit more colourful.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Aggravatingly smug and condescending? From Atwood? *Gasp*

You know she really isn't — most of the time anyway — she just sounds as if she is.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, smug isn't quite the right word. Unshakably convinced in the rightness of her view of the world, yes. Unaccustomed to not being shown phenomenal amounts of deference, yes. But not smug.

(I'm a bit biased because she tried to put a fatwa out on my brother during the last election after he reported her comments on how she wished she could support Gilles Duceppe).

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Amor de Cosmos wrote:

Aggravatingly smug and condescending? From Atwood? *Gasp*

You know she really isn't — most of the time anyway — she just sounds as if she is.

You could be right. It really is her delivery that gives me that sense. That and her reputation for being curt and prickly in interviews. She just doesn't come off as a nice person.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I never get that impression from Atwood, honestly.

Oh, I forgot, I also read Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin. Very arch, very enjoyable.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Come live here where you can be exposed to her more often - you'll learn soon enough.

Sort of on that subject, PM for you shortly, Toro.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Currently reading the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It's about the physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer, who has started medical organizations in Haiti and Peru, treating the poor at no cost and generally pissing off authorities. I'm only about halfway through, so I don't know the whole story. Enjoying it so far.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Life: A Users Manual

Read it a couple of weeks ago - great stuff. Started slowly enough, but became utterly engrossing very, very quickly. The central conceit, with the jigsaws, is just mind-bogglingly clever, and pointless.

I'm 50 pages into this right now, and drawn in already. A Void was kind of appropriately titled in the end - really enjoyable until the final third, during which its tall-beyond-their-means tales began to feel like sandpaper on my metatextual nipples. Ultimately, not one to indulge. Eeeeee. Life: A Users Manual has a stronger conceit and took a decade to write, though, so the signs are good.

I've also had Jonathan Coe's biog of B.S. Johnson on the go, and it's oddly fascinating, if perhaps a little too thorough. Very peculiar position to be in, being Johnson: he had an emo-like attachment to ideals of authenticity and realism, spliced with an evangelically experimental, formalist approach to writing; but what Coe's dug out from his diaries and letters (aside from the standard egotism and insecurity perhaps standard for anyonetaking such a position) is a peculiarly English brand of superstitious, quasi-pagan belief underpinning it all. Unfair though it seems to pick over the transient brainwrongs of a youngish suicide, he does emerge as a very strange character indeed, which is not to knock The Unfortunates or Christie Malry's. . ., cause they are fantastic novels. Coe's always been best on the social history of England, and all the class-bound, Hancock-style repression is right there, even in Johnson's attempts to match Robbe-Grillet and his gang.