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[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I found a copy of Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy" in my workplace, and I'm currently half-way through "City of Glass", which I'm enjoying more than I thought I would.

[ursus arctos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I used to eat in Moon Palace (the name of the novel he did after the trilogy) on a semi-regular basis.

Like much of the Columbia/Morningside Heights area that plays a role in that novel, it's gone.

[Baptiste]

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Toro: Count On It wrote:

So I finally finished Finnegans Wake. Dizzying, revelatory stuff - every cliché you've heard, positive and negative, is true. Completely exhiliarating, though I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. You already know if you'd like it, and whether you've got the time and patience.

Good effort. How long did it take you?

At uni, having studied A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & Ulysees for 3 months, I really didn't have the energy for Finnegans Wake by the time we moved on to that. I promised myself I would return to it one day, you may just have provoked me. May have to be in a darkened room though.

[Brandenburger Toro]

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Since just before Christmas, but that was very on-and-off - I basically didn't look at it for a ten-week window when I had to teach in Warwick.

If you're inclined to put the investment in and - having read Ulysses - know what you're getting into, I'd say go for it...

[Anton Gramscescu]

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Just finished new Ian McEwan book, Solar. Vicious and hilarious. Couldn't put it down.

Haven't read a great deal else lately...Philip Short's bio of Pol Pot which was excellent, the Rogoff-Reinhart book "This Time is Different" which is probably about 150 pages too long, seeing as the only real message is "too much debt is a bad thing". Tom Holland's "Persian Fire" on the invasion of Greece was OK but not as good as his book "Rubicon" on the end of the Roman Republic. George Friedman's The next 100 Years was an interesting look at how geo-strategists think even though the whole thing hinges on the ludicrous idea that China will undergo a major collapse in 2020 or so.
Also read Iain Banks' not-quite-but-almost-sci-fi "The Business", which was highly enjoyable. There's probably a couple of others I've reas but can't recall...been reading a lot for work lately

(speaking of which, Inca - I finished the Gaye Tuchman book "Wannabe U"....I don't think I would recommend it...it's a decent ethnography of a particular type of university set-up, but the commentary is of the "wouldn't life be better if we could just get rid of the audit society" type. Which, whatever you think of that argument, isn't exactly new or riveting)

[Sam]

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steveeeeeeeee wrote:

I found a copy of Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy" in my workplace, and I'm currently half-way through "City of Glass", which I'm enjoying more than I thought I would.

Brilliant. Let us know if you've a fucking clue what's going on, Steve.

I read The Business a few years ago AG, I remember enjoying it a lot without being tempted to read anything else of his.

And I'm still working my way through Sunnyside, which I picked up again over the weekend having not so much as taken it out of my bag since arriving in BA.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

One chapter to go on "City of Glass", and I've really enjoyed it. The bit when Quinn meets Paul Auster has made me want to read Don Quixote, which can't be a bad thing.

[Incandenza]

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Carcass--let me know how you like Zeitoun. And you to, wildtalents, if you read it.

AG--I pretty much skim-read through Wannabe U, but yes, I got that impression as well.

[Anton Gramscescu]

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I forgot one - Robert Lacey's Inside the Kingdom, which is superb. This is by some distance the best book on Saudi Arabia to come out in the past decade (Trofimov's Siege of Mecca was pretty good too, but because of its focus on such a short period of time it doesn't help you understand much about the country itself). It's a good history of the last forty years, an excellent primer on the politics of the Royal Family, and has some good social history and sociology to balance it out (could have done with a bit more of this, actually, but can't complain).

[Gerontophile]

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The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren.

Its a gay themed book, but if you are fit enough to ignore that, its a story about love, and desire, (yeah, its of a gay theme, its a gay book), but it burns one's heart because it makes you get inside the characters... and if/when you do, the world is a different place.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm coming to the end of "High-Rise" by Ballard and despite reading so many plaudits, i'sorry to say that I've found it a bit meh. I got the general impression of depravity amongst the privileged after the first 20 pages and it's been on repeat ever since. It would've made a great short story imo, but there's not enough there for a novel.

I've got "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" line-up once I finish "High-Rise".

[Anton Gramscescu]

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steveeeeeeeee wrote:

I'm coming to the end of "High-Rise"...It would've made a great short story imo, but there's not enough there for a novel.

This is, of course, true of nearly all his books. It's mostly the same short story, too. But I still read them all, so more fool me.

Just finished Bill Hayton's Vietnam: Rising Dragon. As these "introduction to an entire nation's history and culture in one volume" projects go, this is pretty good. Like the Lacey book, actually. Except instead of trying to penetrate the realm of rich, secretive royals who rule through religion, he's trying to penetrate the realm of rich, secretive party comrades who rule through an ideology they clearly don't believe in. Kind of fascinating. Very good on the increasingly subtle way in which communist countries rule by managing public opinion, rather than through brute totalitarian fear (much of what's in here would apply to China, as well).

[Incandenza]

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Just started on The Handmaid's Tale, which I've never read before. I didn't really know much about it when I checked it out, just that it's a "modern classic." About 20 pages in and I'm hooked.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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I agree with Steveeeeeeee about Ballard. Obviously the latter's an ideas man, and very important as such, but he was never that fascinating a writer, judging by everything I've read by him.

The theory heads have obfuscated this observation very well; the marketstall-sized psychogeography business is based pretty much entirely on his ideas, but it's never been so compelling or weird ("Going for a walk" + "local history" about summarises it). I hate to say it, today of all days, but Ballard was not a left-leaning critic; he was a drunk surrealist in Surrey, and while he got to the grot at the heart of his people's world, it was never going to be neat.

Having said that, I do think Crash is an amazing novel, and written on a creative high compared to everything else he did. No one could come out unaltered after reading it.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Anyway, Angela Carter - that's where it's at. I'm halfway through The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman right now and I swear to the non-existent god I don't believe in, it could be the greatest novel ever written by a human being. Chapter 1 is certainly the best Chapter 1, anyway, and the rest has been a blast.

She either gets the wrong kind of praise (from the bland likes of Sarah Waters, for example, who's Blairishly managed to reduce her legacy to 'mildly modern historical fiction' or somesuch) or ignored completely despite her very obvious talents. And I think that's because we're in a cultural puddle up to our collective, sodden Y-fronts right now. From A Clockwork Orange to The Holy Mountain, you won't find anything that outdoes her contemporaneous novels. If the incidental paedophilia, anal rape, Hammer horror decadence and what-not are what's preventing this one from even getting published these days, we should hang our heads in shame.

[steveeeeeeeee]

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I'm halfway through "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and I'm loving it. It does exactly what it says on the cover, it's a page turning, intelligent thriller. It's really effected my sleep pattern over the past week, I find myself reading it until the early hours of the morning, it's really engaging.

I found an Elizabeth Taylor novel amongst a pile of discarded books at work today. Again, I've always enjoyed references made to her in LRB, even though her work doesn't sound my type of thing. Is anyone on here a fan?

[Amor de Cosmos]

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I think I must be the only person in the world — well me and Elmore Leonard anyway — who hasn't been infatuated by the Larsson books. They are addictive page-turners but because of that it's easy to miss how thin they are, particularly when it comes to plotting and character. I don't read mysteries to unravel them, but if I did I'd feel cheated by TGWTDT, I'd figured out the main puzzle within a page or two and I'm normally not good at that at all. Then there's the repetition, does everyone in Sweden put on a pot of coffee every time they walk into a room? And has there ever been a more boring sleuth than Blomkvist? Dull, dull, dull. Yet any woman who comes within range of him can't resist ripping off her underwear, talk about author's wish fulfillment. The one and only saving grace — and it's a massive one — is Salander. She is a great character and deserves a much better author.

[Anton Gramscescu]

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You're not alone, Amor. I felt pretty much the same way.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I finished The Handmaid's Tale. I was really impressed. I never had it assigned to me in any classes, and I didn't know much about it. That's the first Atwood I've read.

[Edie St Pierre]

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Lucia, I read 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman' last year, it's the first Angela Carter i'd read in ages (I was a huge fan when I was a teenager). It's astonishing, isn't it?

The experience of reading it was kind of enhanced by being in Mumbai when I read it, as i'm fairly certain that is supposed to be the mysterious city of the opening chapter. I visited during the Ganesha, when all of Mumbai was full of statues of Ganesha, parades to Ganesha, and rituals associated with Ganesha. Absolutely did my Western secular mind in, it did. "An Elephant God, what the fuck?"

And then when I was walking around Churchgate (Central Mumbai) with a mate we went to this exhibition this woman had done, full of statue, friezes and what-have-you, where she said she was trying to explain 'the Ganesha myth, through using principles of pure mathematics and geomotary'.

Great back-drop to reading the novel, it was. I don't think Angela Carter is a surreal writer at all to be honest, I think she's a highly rationalist writer in an accelerated age attempting to explain the way ancient pre-industrial fantasies and consumerist fantasies mix and mingle. I hate the term Magic Realism as well, what dreary fucker came up with that one.

I haven't read much recently though actually, been slowly working my way through 'The Queens Fool' by Philippa Gregory, which is great fun.

[ian.64]

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Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris by Lucien Randall. Just a third of the way through this book on the man himself. It seems a brisk skate over the details of Morris's life rather than any truly depthful examination of his character, but seeing as Morris let others speak for him rather than spilling the beans all by himself perhaps that's no surprise. But it's no real hindrance to enjoying what's a brisk and bracing read of a man with a very, very controlled way of doing his own thing and doing it with a discipline that's quite admirable.

Looking forward to polishing off the rest soon.

[steveeeeeeeee]

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I'm coming to the end of TGWTDT and it's got better as it's progressed. I needed a good page-turner after run of quite challenging books and this gave me everything I was looking for and a bit more.

I've got a bunch of stuff which was given to me by a work colleague, any advice on the following?

Zoe Heller - Notes on a Scandal
Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
Ballard - The Crystal World
Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
Kate Summerscale - The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Elizabeth Taylor - The Devastating Boys

A few people at work have told me "Notes on a Scandal" is good, so I'm leaning towards that.

[Anton Gramscescu]

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Apart from the footie books, I;ve been on a finance/economics tear: Nouriel Roubini's new book Crisis Economics and Roger Boyes' Meltdown Iceland which, as ou might expect, is about the implosion of Iceland in the fall of 2008.

Both books were a bit meh. The first five chapters or so of Roubini are kind of interesting because he has a nice way of putting events into historical perspective. He also has a nice way of drawing out the strengths and weaknesses of various economic theorists (Keynesians beat Austrians in the short run, but over the medium-to-long term anyone not paying attention to hte Austrians is going to end up in trouble. But it becomes a slog when it comes to reform of regulatory agencies, and there's remarkably little in here about the fiscal (as opposed to the financial) crisis.

Boyes' book is useful in that you learn quite a bit about Icelandic society, the nature of that country's "oligarchs" and their ties to the long-ruling Independence Party. But I actually thought Michael Lewis' article in Vanity Fair about a year ago was actually better at describing the mechanics of the Icelandic banks actually went bust. It also had the virtue of being a quick read. On the flip side, it fails in trying to portray iceland as "a microcosm" of the 2008 crash, but on a smaller, more understandable scale. Yes, there are some similarities to what happened on wall street, but there are engouh differences to make the comparison a little forced.

[Guest]

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Re Stieg Larsson, I agree with the underwhelmed. I really liked the first one, true, in an in-spite-of-its-flaws kind of way - it was like an old fashioned PD James type mystery. But the other two are massively disappointing I'm afraid.

[steveeeeeeeee]

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In the end I chose to start reading "The Damned United" by David Peace and I've got about 100 pages to go. Fantastically researched, but for some reason it's doing nothing for me. I get the impression Peace's style of writing is invigorating the first time you read something by him, but it gets quite tedious with subsequent books because there is no bloody change to the style, no change, no change to that style, his style, no bloody change. Pour a drink, light a fag.