Current Reading - Books best thread

[Rumpus]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Found myself drawn into Nicola Barker's Darkmans. By the end I was giddy - in a good way - but it is a slow burn.

About halfway through the fuse starts to fizz and all becomes more believable, unsettling and funny.

Until then I struggled to follow the gleefully-evoked threads of repression, delusion and denial.

Once the story allowed in lust, jealously and other daily vices it was easier to appreciate the more peculiar shadows cast.

From the off though it is fantastic fun and difficult to forget. Barker has all the moves.

[Mumpo]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Stop having so much bloody time to read, Lanigan. You're making me jealous.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I finished Miles early this morning (difficulty sleeping), and now have to make a tricky decision. I've got four Borges collections (three in Spanish, one of poetry and two of short stories, and one of his non-fiction writing in English, which I've read before), a book on the relationship between football and politics in Argentina, or a book in English about the difficulties in finding biographical details of Shakespeare's life. I think I'll start the latter.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Apologies, Mumpo. It's been an unusual year.

I've been dipping into Nietzsche's greatest hits in tandem with Musil. He was a brilliant writer and, needless to say, it's utterly bizarre that his name was associated with Nazism for years. (Already he's full of admiration for the Jews in Europe and dead against the kind of lunkhead herd mind necessary for fascism, for example; just goes to show how much damage a thick sister can do to your rep.)

[Eggchaser]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just bought and finished Captain America: The Man With No Face, Captain America: The Road to Reborn and Captain America: Reborn. Steve Rogers is back, baby!

For my birthday my wife bought me (or rather I bought myself since her credit card got blocked after a nice American gentlement attempted to use it to buy £1,500 of electrical equipment) the first nine Horus Heresy books from Beardhammer's Black Library publishing arm. So far I've finished Horus Rising and False Gods and have started Galaxy in Flames. None of them will win the Booker Prise but they rattle along at a cracking rate and the Heresy one of my favourite Beardhammer sub-genres since they launched the Adeptus Titanicus game when I was an adolescent object.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is providing light (in at least two senses) relief from Musil's superb, ponderous brick of a work. Gleaming stuff, if a little jarring in its racial attitudes at times. Great character names; top marks for Lady Cockpurse.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I promised you all a review of Against The Day, and I intended to follow through. I had notes mentally sketched for it as I began reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, and as I got further into the latter it became clear that it would be useful to write accounts of the two in contrast.

And then

two-thirds of the way through TMOI, it became clear that it was not at all the book I had thought, and not at all the book I had been preparing to pan. Indeed, much of its brilliance derives from convincing you that it is a wholly other book, a wholly other type of book.

So this double review is going to take a bit longer than planned, though I'm determined to do it. The short version: both are brilliant, buy and read both.

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm hoping it's good, I've ordered it as my holiday reading.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam

I read this in one sitting today. It's a work of genius.

The story opens with a dead girl floating down a canal between Glasgow and Leith, and the rest follows inexorably on from there. Kind of. It's a pure hit, a fictional world of absolute integrity and economy: the black canal water, white flesh and grey skies of 'The Pale North' are integral to Joe's phenomenological narration. There's both indisputable logic and lightly worn madness in everything he relays. He's always on the periphery (of the city, of work, of other people's relationships, of fiction and reality). There's not a wasted word; it does a hell of a lot with apparently very little. Every paragraph holds a surprise. I'm not explaining it very well - I'm still a bit charged up having just put it down, to be honest - but novels this simple and smart are rare indeed.

You could see it as a cold counterpart to Camus' blazing Algeria. I prefer it: probably because it's closer to home, but perhaps because it's stronger writing.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Have just finished Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. The first two books, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, are outstanding; the third, Titus Alone, disappointing in comparison.

Some of the characters in the first two books are amongst the most memorable I have come across – Steerpike, the Prunesquallors, Flay, Swelter, Lady Fuschia, Barquentine even the minor characters like Rottcod and The Wedge Faced Poet. None of these appear in the third book in which Titus takes a dominant role after hardly featuring in Titus Groan and being overshadowed by Steerpike in Gormenghast.

However, as I read the third book, I realized that the true star of the first two books is actually Gormenghast Castle itself which is not a part of the final book. I notice that some critics have said the story moves at too slow a place and that Peake’s language is too “flowery” but I think the descriptions of the castle’s rooms, halls, corridors and dungeons are wonderful. I can’t think of many other books where I’ve felt so familiar with the location.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'd agree with that MA, although I did still enjoy the third book, for the totally different light it sheds on the first two novels when it becomes apparent that the castle - which previously seemed to be the entire world of the story - is in fact totally insignificant to those outside.

Has no-one started any new books in the last month, or have you all been as bad at updating as me?

Searching For Shakespeare by an author whose name I forget was really good, much more of a straight biography than I expected. Very interesting.

I've since read The Meaning Of Tango by Christine Dennison, a dead interesting history of... well, guess what.

Now on to Aid And Other Dirty Business by Giles Bolton, a former British government aid worker in Africa, talking about the details behind charitable donations and where the money ends up going. I'm slightly less than halfway through at the moment, but I'd go so far as to say it should be required reading for people before making more donations.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Alexander Trocchi - Cain's Book

What an incredible talent. He only managed two proper books and this - a sleek magnum opus, if that's possible - is the second best. All the same, it is superb: the best description of heroin culture ever to see print (it certainly shows Burroughs up for the thickie he was) and a remarkable philosophical tract.

He quite consciously takes negation as far as it can go on the page: your man lives on a scow with minimal labour to carry out; his writing is presented as little more than a reflex activity which heroin threatens to obliterate altogether. But the writing that remains is always punchy, engaged, surprising and exotic, his reasoning as impressive as its implications are terrifying.

The book itself unravels as Trocchi did; it becomes obvious that the skag is scrambling his phenomenological enquiry, but because he’s such a sharp writer it makes for a compelling spectacle. He actually did go on to become a full-time addict, at home in the mush of sixties counterculture around Notting Hill, writing only a couple of dubious manifestos calling for a Revolution In Consciousness And That. A waste, but as he’d already done it all in two books that run to around 350 pages in total, not so tragic from our point of view.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just been reintroduced to the pleasure of reading this week. I've really read almost nothing since October what with all the 80-hour weeks. But Bloodlands, Surface Detail and now Red Plenty since XMAS has got me back in the swing of things, for anohter day or two at least.

Anyways, Red Plenty, then. By Francis Spufford. Christ, this is a weird and wonderful book. Set in the years around 1960 in the Soviet Union, it takes place at the moment when it is conceivable that the USSR might actually overtake the west in living standards. Krushchev (a major figure in the book) gets increasingly excited about the possibility and starts making promises about how communism - meaning in this sense the fulfilment of all material wishes (the "Red Plenty" of the title) will occur in 1980. This actually happened - it was in the 1961 Party Programme. Anyways, this book follows the lives of a group of economists, biologists, cybernieticians and other true belivers who want to work to make this come true.

It's a novel about the price mechanism, and how economies grind to a halt without it.

I know, I know, wonk city. But it works. It's brilliant. Even the passages which are really lectures about the soviet system are really entertaining because they're precisely the stuff you;ve never heard about (how higher education was shut down and then massively expanded under Stalin, for instance, or how Gosplan actually worked). It's a completely genius novel, precisely because it's written from such a symathetic point of view. Great stuff.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've finished Aid And Other Dirty Business, which I would as I hinted above recommend to anyone. I will tomorrow (or maybe later tonight, but it's already 2:30) be starting The Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins. It's been rather too long since I last read some fiction.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I read somewhere that China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station was A Book For People Who Like Gormenghast and, sure enough, Mieville says in the acknowledgements that he wouldn’t have become a writer without the inspiration of Mervyn Peake. I was encouraged by this and by Mieville’s sound politics; less so by the fact that he seems to have won lots of awards with Arthur C Clarke and fantasy in the title. I wasn’t convinced this would be my thing although both Peake and Mieville have, apparently, little love for Tolkien so there was hope.

Well, despite there being some irritating Del Boy dialogue (I got particularly annoyed by the repeated use of Godspit and Sweet Jabber) and reading most of it on an inappropriate location (a Phillip Island beach), I really liked it. The city of New Crobuzon is brilliantly described as are the grotesque characters. I don’t think the writing style is Peake like (much faster paced) but the ability to make you feel you inhabit a place is there.

I’ve just started John Updike’s Couples. I love the Rabbit books but I’ve never read anything else by Updike.

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Iron Council by Mieville is fantastic and the novel where his politics are most visible. It's also set in the same world as Perdido Street Station but mostly outside of New Crobuzon.

I think that The City and The City is his best book so far though, amazing imaginitive aspects in a noir style plot. It's the best crime book I've read in ages.

I know this thread is mostly for fiction but I'm enjoying The Struggle For Mastery in Europe far too much. Taylor is increadibly readable and 19th century diplomacy is fascinating. I wish this was in the national curiculum instead of all the Industrial revolution stuff.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I got The City and The City for $5 at a book sale today. Pleased about that because books in Australia are horrendously expensive.

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature is very entertaining. I thought it was going to be too slavish to literary theory, but it's fast-moving, funny, and has pointed out many things about Tintin I never noticed before.

I'm also reading Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed, about the paranoiac seventies. Funny, with some great anecdotes. Nixon's a prominent figure, naturally, and I am always fascinated (and appalled) by Nixon stories. There doesn't seem to be an overarching narrative, but that's maybe not the worst thing since Wheen digs up lots of great little stories.

I also just finished Badasses, about the Oakland Raiders under John Madden in the late sixties and early to mid seventies. Probably for the Raider Nation only, though people interested in the way the NFL was before the massive commercialization and PR initiatives of the eighties and nineties might find it interesting, too.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've actually had time to read a bit since XMAS, so I've a couple to report on. Adrian Goldsworthy's Why Rome Fell, for instance. Which is a far-too conventional narrative history of Imperial Rome from Marcus Aurelius onwards. The narrative approach allows him to do soe good examinations of counter-factuals towards the end, but there's too much chronology and too little analysis for my liking. And his Tory/Republican rant in the postscript is appaling.

Also, there's Gary Steyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. Better than Absurdistan, not as good as Russian Debutantes. As good a satirical take on the general spririt of American self-obsession and fecklessness as you're likely to find.

Currently just starting on a fascinating book called Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a day. Based on research in India and Africa, it's not just about how people get by - it's about how they also borrow and save and the whole panoply of lending agencies and mutual assurance systems that exist in societies with neither banks nor social safety nets. I really wish I'd had this last time I was working in Africa.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Some recent bits and pieces:

J.-K Huysmans - Stranded / En rade

Naturalist Huysmans and decadent Huysmans, almost in alternating chapters. A strange but winning account of a neurotic Parisian couple getting it together in the countryside, among aquiline-nosed, workshy farming types who spend their days drinking, moaning and trying to rip the city slickers off.

Whole chapters are given over to incredible dream sequences that would influence the Surrealists (including a vivid trip to the moon, in which he succeeded in outdoing his proto-sci-fi peers; "Fuck Verne!" as he wrote in a contemporary letter). The rest is marked by an entertaining, slightly camp pessimism.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

For the three other people on OTF who would care, I just read Lawrence Martin's Harperland. If you've been in a cave the last five years, it's probably not bad. If, on the other hand you've actually read newspapers halfway intently in taht period, it's intensely boring.

Also, Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, as recounted on the World thread.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Gerard de Nerval - Aurelia

Another touchstone for the Surrealists: an astonishing novella from 1855 that just about maps the possibilities of fantastical fiction in just sixty pages. Grandiose dreams, visions and madness mix seamlessly and, it turns out, authentically with reality: Nerval wrote Aurelia partly as an attempt to prove his sanity while he was banged up in an asylum. He didn't do a very good job on that front, but he did have had just the right balance of reasoned insight and visionary hypomania to produce uniquely heady work. It's a beautiful, breathtaking read, I can't imagine anyone disliking it.

Perhaps it's a mark of how much work the imagination can do that the model for his etheral love interest/obsession, Aurelia, went by the earthier handle, Jenny Colon.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Making Love

At first, it promises to be a spare, stylish tour through a couple's private hell, set in and around a Japanese hotel. But it soon dwindles into an account of nothing much that has no conceptual worth either. He's gone for a swim without the lights on! He's got a bottle of acid which, er, he's not going to do anything dramatic with! They're going to split up! Not very good.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Fernando Arrabal - The Compass Stone

Novel from one of the main players in the Panic movement, a highly provocative gang of successors to the Surrealists. He's primarily a dramatist and filmmaker, which you can tell (the book even opens with a stage set-style diagram). But he uses the medium very effectively, creating a series of - stop me if you've heard this bit before - heady, surreal monologues and dialogues.

You can't tell what's thought, spoken, real or imagined at any point, but the fecund poetics and alarming sexual/violent behaviour compel you to try. Not a great work - it's let down by some annoying tics like entire paragraphs composed of questions, and it doesn't really lead anywhere - but a very impressive curio.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Herbert Read - The Green Child

The anarchist art critic's only novel, from 1935. The first chapter is wonderful: a mercurial, contemporary retelling of a 12th century legend in which two green children arrive in a village, speaking an unknown language. Unfortunately, it then turns into a profoundly dull adventure story, set in South America and relayed in such a dry, "and then this happened" fashion you'd swear it was a different author (one who shouldn't have been published). A final, sci-fi chapter almost pulls it back from the brink, but the concept's not quite strong enough. Shame.