Current Reading - Books best thread

[imp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Diable Rouge wrote:

Got around to reading One Day - enjoyable enough and the unusual concept draws you into the characters' lives, but you're left wondering what attracts Em to such narcissists and one-dimensional clowns. Any sympathy you have for her will evaporate when Keira Knightley plays her in the film, which guarantees it will be pure muck, in contrast to the book, which I'd give 7/10.

That was my reaction too. An easy and diverting enough read, though, like all his books, if you can overlook the contrivance of the One Day thread.

It was the same with the film Tamara Drewe - why would an intelligent woman go for such dickheads, except in the mind of a misoygnist male writer falling prey to the cliche that most women are attracted to wankers?

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

High Rise by JG Ballard. Great stuff, quite camp in places (he keeps saying, "ooh, look how things are falling apart - they're all at it on the stairwell!", stuff like that) but a brilliant imagination all the same. He was basically a posh thug roaming around his milieu looking for trouble, wasn't he. This must have been what they had instead of computer games in the olden days.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I gave my opinion on High Rise about 30 pages ago on this thread. To sum up, I reckon it would've been a great short story but there wasn't enough there for a novel, imo.

Coming to the end of Madame Bovary, which has turned me into a paranoid freak with the other half. She came home half-an-hour later than normal yesterday because she'd visited the studio of an artist friend to look at his new paintings. "Looking at his new paintings, were you? Is that all you were doing? I've been reading Flaubert, I know what you women are all up to!"

As you can imagine, she didn't talk to me for the rest of the evening.

I've got "Teenagers" (based on imp's recommendation) and "Titus Groan" waiting to be read, might go with the latter.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, I know what you mean, steveeeeeeee: great material that's been stretched out to novel length. Having said that, the Ballard short stories I've read have bored me to tears, they're oddly lifeless; whereas High Rise and Crash have a mad drive to them that carried me through. I kind of like the way they're equal measures pulp fiction and avant garde; quite a 70s, British balance.

I'm reading Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow now, which I'm really enjoying.

[worldcupboy]

Current Reading - Books best thread

In the kitchen by Monica Ali.A great book about a team of kitchen workers in multinational London.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Before I Go To Sleep - S.J. Watson. I was a bit skeptical at first, thinking this would be a book version of Memento--a woman wakes up and has no idea who she is or where she is, and we discover that she's had an accident that keeps her from forming short term memories. Then at the end of the first chapter...I'll just say that there's something that grabs your attention. A really gripping literary thriller.

All the more impressive that it's the author's first novel.

[Squarewheelbike]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished Stephen Fry's Chronicles. A good read, and sometimes infuriating at times, mainly his bewilderment as a student actor in Cambridge, he was amazed things like sets got built, lit and productions happened.

RE: One Day. Being surprised that intelligent girls fall for complete dicks, happens all around us!

[Arturo]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finally got round to reading Brian Moore's 'Beware of the Dog'. A decent book all told, but not sure I'd have given it the William Hill Prize. Intelligent guy and some shocking stuff in there, but most of it just reads like a standard sports biog. Maybe I'm not a big enough Rugby Union fan, but a lot of it just didn't click for me.

Early tip for this year's award. 'Engage' by Matt Hampson (another RU book oddly enough) and was lucky enough to have read a proof copy recently (not out until August). It's a pretty inspirational story about coping with disability and quite painful to read at times. Paul Kimmage is the co-author (Rough Ride, Secret Life of Tony Cascarino).

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

La Lanterne Rouge wrote:

Ned Baumann's Boxer Beetle, which I think could get some love on here. Vaguely steampunky, vaguely detectivey, fltting back and forth between the modern era and pre-WWII London. It feels quite like the first novel that it is, perhaps more full of ideas, and a not fully mature writing style, but really good fun.

Just finished this a few minutes ago. Excellent. Just jammed with ideas and some genuinely funny lines and scenarios. And he's ...fuck him...only 26. If he keeps this up he's going to be writing some brilliant stuff in the years ahead.

Highly recommended and good fun.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I can't recommend highly enough.

Starting on Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Clarice Lispector - The Hour of the Star

Really good 80-pager: the life of a poor girl in Brazil being imagined before your eyes but grabbing you all the same. Lovely writing with a musical feel to its construction and language.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've got "Family Ties" by Lispector lined up to read on my book-shelf.

Finished "Teenage", found it hard work and fairly unrewarding. Enjoyed the stuff about G.Is, swing kids and the first world war, but found the endless chapters on the scouts and similar organisations bloody tiresome.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Dante - Divine Comedy

Very good. Gold star, Dante. Maybe lay off the religion for the next one?

[dddd]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ooh, I remember finding Dante books with uncut pages in my parents' library, that was a thrill.

Nearly finished 'Pavane' by Keith Roberts, a contemporary of the New Worlds mob who I'd never previously heard of. It's excellent, an alternate history novel set in a grim 1968 where the Reformation had been swiftly crushed and Britain is under the sway of a pretty medieval Catholic Church. The story is told in a series of very loosely linked vignettes, mostly set in a bleak and wintry Dorset, that chronicle rising tension and rebellion in the theocracy.

[Diable Rouge]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Two widely-contrasting, but both rather excellent books worth a mention here:

The Robots of Dawn: Isaac Asimov

A person should always be wary of reading a book by a classic genre author, as expectations can often be shattered by the underwhelming reality, but thankfully, this wasn't the case here. The last of the Elijah Bailey/Daneel Olivaw trilogy, the details of Dawn have been minutely considered - the Three Laws of Robotics, societal reaction to human/robot relations, mechanical science, politics, realistic characters and of course, a breakneck-paced plot.

The Uncle's Story - Witi Ihimaera:

Unlike the last novel, I'll admit that I'd never heard of the author previously, and picked this up based on the blurb. As it turns out, Ihimaera is the author of The Whale Rider, and he proves the author of a compelling, convincing narrative. Various themes run through the novel - familial relations, the duties of a son in a traditional, convention-based, ritualised society, the outsider fighting against convention, the role of sexuality and the impact of past events upon the present. In less than 400 pages, all the above are interwoven until the dramatic conclusion - highly recommended.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've been drawn into the world of Arthur Machen. Brilliantly restrained weird/horror fiction, the other end of the spectrum from HP Lovecraft, I guess. I can't think of another writer who captures London so well, he was fascinated by the place. Particularly the sort of non-zones that lurk around the corner of the well-known zones, or at the edges of the city. Really talented writer.

His stuff's out of copyright and you can download a lot of it for free (links on this page). I particularly liked The Three Imposters and The Great God Pan, although I think they're all in a simlar vein.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Have been reading loads of books lately about English language teaching, which aren't worth mentioning on here.

However, I recently finally fired up the Kindle I received for Christmas and have been reading Hitch 22 in large doses. I've gone through life without ever coming across Christopher Hitchen's writing, but he's got that gift of writing which makes reading like eating ice-cream, you get going and can't stop. I've mentioned in a couple of other threads that I've got a mate dying of the same causes as Hitchens, and the intro was quite hard to read. Apart from that, hugely enjoyable stuff and I think it only cost me £2.

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Currently: Neal Stephenson's Reamde. I've not read any of his before, and this seems a fairly enjoyable potboiler — lots of improbably strung together action sequences, and an underpinning of MMORPG technology that adds some geeky flavour.

After that I've a fair backlog to work through. Any recommendations on which of the following to tackle first?

Supergods, Grant Morrison [a history of comic book superheroes, I think]
Zone One, Colson Whitehead [zombie horror with literary pretensions]
The Gun, CJ Chivers [a social history of the AK-47]
The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
Scorched Earth, Black Snow, Andrew Salmon [Korean War history]
The Good, The Bad & The Multiplex, Mark Kermode
The Weight Of Numbers, Simon Ings
Retromania, Simon Reynolds [I made it through the first 194 pages, but it's not grabbing me as much as I want it to]

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I enjoyed the Weight of Numbers. Not earth-shatteringly great, but a good page-turner. Haven't read any of the others.

Would recommend both Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon if you're liking Reamde.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'd had Hitchens down as a dick, cause I'd only noticed him as the pro-war dick who was mates with Martin Amis whose dickheadedly indulgent "Letter to The Hitch about those things he said in the Oxbridge common room about Stalin" got published in pro-war organ The Observer around the time he started playing his "How racist a dick can one be without being actually racist?" game. That, and because he sat next to me in the cinema when I watched He's Not There, smelling of sweet booze and guffawing every time Bob Dylan was horrible to a woman. And singing along in the drunk grandad style to all the songs he recognised from off of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.

But he's mostly excellent, isn't he. I read God Is Not Great in a weekend; it's really a celebration of everything good, in the face of the rank stupidity we're so used to accepting without batting an eyelid. It's a joyride that swerves around plenty of difficult issues, but a rich read all the same.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yup, on the strength of Hitch 22 he's an effortlessly entertaining writer. I agree that he comes off a right twat when I see him on TV and that's why I've always resisted investigating his writing. But every story and anecdote in his memoirs make him out to be a top man, mostly through his tone of writing more than anything else. Sort of like Clive James I suppose.

[Hofzinser]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I totally echo the stuff about Hitchens. He’s just a fantastic writer; whether he’s saying things I agree with or not, his prose is a sheer joy to read. The scope of his references, his breadth of knowledge and his confident command of language are breathtaking at times.

I too whizzed through God Is Not Great, and I also have a collection of his columns and essays from various publications, the title of which I forget, and which is brilliant to have just to dip into from time to time and be assured of an exhilarating and thought-provoking read from a vast array of subjects.

It’s a shame that he’s most commonly lumped in with either Dawkins, for the God stuff, or with Amis, his chum, as I think it’s off-putting for a lot of people, and also does his talent a huge disservice – he’s funnier, warmer and pithier than the former, cleverer and more incisive than the latter, and speaks with more profundity and humanity than either.

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Hitchens is a very good writer. His column in The Nation in the eighties and nineties, when I was in high school and college, was a big part of my political and literary education.

I disagree with most of his Iraq war stuff and am disappointed by his lazy abandonment of socialism (I'm not necessarily disappointed that he's abandoned socialism, but that he claims to have abandoned it for an advocacy of "whatever works" in economic policy, which is a remarkably fatuous and complacent thing to say for somebody so obviously intelligent and well read in political economy). But when he's good he's still very very good.

Charming (to me, at least) recent story about Hitchens here.

[imp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm reading Bob Mould's See A Little Light that I picked up in the Borders fire sale. I only mention that because I'm very glad I didn't pay full price for it. It might as well be called I'm An Asshole and here's all the asshole things I've done my whole life, and while I'm telling you them, I'm going to continue coming across as an absolute asshole.

But I keep reading because I'm interested enough in the stories, while being glad I'm not hearing them first hand from the miserable, pompous prick, who also happens to be one of my favorite songwriters.

[Edie St Pierre]

Current Reading - Books best thread

'The Past Is A Forign Country' by Gianrico Carofiglio on here. Really good. About a young man from Bari being drawn into bad habits with the local card sharp. Not gonna give too much away, but it has a very compelling plot. I read the whole thing in one sitting actually which doesn't happen all that often.

I couldn't put the fucking thing down.