Current Reading - Books best thread
This is true of most big "concept" books these days.
And Collapse is worse.
This is true of most big "concept" books these days.
And Collapse is worse.
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I assume this is because the publishers no longer stump up for anyone to show the author that less is quite often more?Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
There seems to be a perverse bias—when most people make less time than ever to read—toward "big books" in the publishing industry. They look more important, I suppose.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
An awful lot of books seem to start off as 10-15,000 word essays in the NYT weekend edition. Getting in there sets off a bidding war - $250,000 advances for books based on those articles are not unheard of. But basically all they are doing is taking the eight points they made in the article, turning each one into a chapter with more background/data/anecdotes, then slipping in an intro and conclusion.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Evariste Euler Gauss wrote:
This does seem irritatingly common. Naomi Klein's No Logo was the same. And Arrival City is displaying the same signs 91 pages in (although I'd be happy to be proved wrong).As mentioned on another thread, I've nearly finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. The issues in the book were discussed on here recently on some thread called "Why did only Eurasians colonise" or something like that.
It's a fascinating thesis, and an important one. It's very persuasive too. And it's full of interesting facts both about movements of peoples and cultural developments in the pre-historic period.
It does have one glaring deficiency, though, which is that it is mind-numbingly repetitive. A small number of main points are recapped, rehashed and respun so many times that it really tries one's patience. It could have been much better written in 100 fewer pages.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Garamczy Antal wrote:
And very often 10-15,000 words is the right size for a good magazine article. I'd like to see magazines feature longer stories while books (with few exceptions) should usually be shorter. And of course that's the opposite of the current trends. (At least it seems that way to me. I have no stats to back it up.)An awful lot of books seem to start off as 10-15,000 word essays in the NYT weekend edition. Getting in there sets off a bidding war - $250,000 advances for books based on those articles are not unheard of. But basically all they are doing is taking the eight points they made in the article, turning each one into a chapter with more background/data/anecdotes, then slipping in an intro and conclusion.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
There's a bit of that with Arrival City, yeah, but the diversity of Saunders' examples were enough to keep me going. It's also not especially long.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
That's certainly the trend in the UK, Renart, and I agree wholeheartedly. Bring back long reports and short fiction, I'd pay for both.
I want novels to be between 100 and 200 pages long too (or 1,000 and they took ten years to write). But people accept a bucket of Starbucks slop cause they've never tasted a good espresso.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Isn't Amazon selling long article/short book-length pieces for the Kindle? I thought I remembered hearing something about that, but I've forgotten what they were calling them.
I prefer to read printed matter (with pretty pictures and graphics for the magazine articles), but it might be a good thing if that were to take off.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Aye, me too. Mind you, I wonder if the whole digital publishing game isn't done for before it's begun: we're all used to getting everything for free, I can get the greatest books of the olden days for 1p each (+£2.80 P&P) on Amazon, and I'm not tempted to buy a Kindle because I've got a phone for free PDFs. And when I see that search engine full of free things it's not likely I'll be any more tempted to start paying for things either. I find myself in the pecular position of being a penniless potential patron of the arts.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Finished Reamde. I take back what I said about it being better than Cryptonomicon. The main villain is indifferently-written, there are a couple of continuity flaws in the latter half of the book, and the final blow-out goes on for at least eighty pages too many. Good, but could have been better.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Been plowing through Thant Myint-U's Where India Meets China, which is a very interesting book about Burma, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The latter is brilliant, but if you're not already especially interested in the topic of how people make decisions, my guess is this book will be a bit of a chorse.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
An anthology of O Henry short stories. His mastery of the language is ... er ... masterful. Some of the twists in the tale are very contrived, but it's the getting there that's the pleasure.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I'm working my way through Michael Connelly's books at the moment. I'm on The Poet, I'd been working my way through the Bosch books, but McEvoy came up in one of them so I decided to read this one.
Really good stuff.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Just finished The Tin Drum. I like bawdy jokes and tall tales, but 560 pages of orifice-poking whimsy rather tries the patience. Benny Hill came to mind, to a soundtrack of Herp Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. I'm not fond of galumphing picaresque novels (Catch-22, Midnight's Children). They buttonhole the reader with a twitchy, houndstooth-jacketed geezer whose manic quips are meant to underline that, behind the grin, behind the indefatigable displays of logorrhea and alliterative giddiness, lies PATHOS. For a while it seemed as if the book would go on for ever, by the kind of miracle of self-renewal Grass repeats to diminishing effect; to wit: Oskar supervises construction of the Berlin Wall; thus emboldened, he joins the Stasi and infiltrates the Red Army Faction as an agent provocateur; then, as populariser of its distinctive motorik beat, Oskar foments Krautrock, and later still, becomes Chancellor of reunified Germany, defeating Gerhard Schröder in a bitter struggle for leadership. Contrary to the above, parts were enjoyable. Even so, it would have been overlong at half the length*.
*Here you may supply your Tin Drum-related innuendo of choice, e.g. "And I don't, please note, mean Oskar's drumstick. Ta-dum!"Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Welcome, ETS.
Anyone remember the last time someone's first post came in Books? This may be a first.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Thanks, Garamczy. I've been reading WSC for a couple of years, but only belatedly saw the forums. Hope joining the discussions here will cure me of that incuriosity!Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
And don't let those Football and World forums steer you wrong. This is where the action is. Why, just last month two people had a mild disagreement.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I liked The Tin Drum when I read it, as I recall, but I don't mind a meander or two in a novel.
Currently reading Steven Pinker's latest, THe Better Angels Of Our Nature. Very good, it is, and well worth a look. I don't quite buy everything he's selling, but as he often does, he's trying gamely to explain something that needs explaining but is rarely explained: in this case, why the human race has on the whole got less routinely bloodthirsty over the last few centuries.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
You've forgiven him for the New College of the Humanities?Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
PG Wodehouse 'The Man Upstairs'.
An early collection of short stories. Published just before World War One broke out. Some funny stuff about a woman who is addicted to 'moving picture exhibitions', but generally much more sombre stuff than i'm used to. There's a lot of stories about bored young men craving exitement, action and danger.
Haven't finished it yet.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
My first post was in books. Alas, it’s been all downhill from then on in.
Anyway, just finished the much-hyped The Art of Fielding. Deserves all the plaudits, I must say.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
I'm reading Wise Children by Angela Carter. It's brilliant, I reckon most people would like it.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Recent reads, digested dismissively:
[ul][li]Whoops!, John Lanchester - very good, very readable, justifiably angry without being incoherent[/li]
[li]The Good, The Bad & The Multiplex, Mark Kermode - oddly disappointing; I ended up wanting more meat about film and cinema, less about him & his views[/li]
[li]Arrival City, Doug Sanders - nice reasoning, but his depictions of individual cities and lives were more compelling than the theory (which was fine, but repeated and emphasised more than it needed)[/li]
[li]How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers - generally poor; way too gimmicky and self-consciously trying to be clever; I've never found anything of his has lvied up to his old Guardian short stories[/li]
[li]Scorched Earth, Black Snow, Andrew Salmon - evocative if one-sided (though not jingoistic; seems more through lack of available sources on the other side), effective portrayal of a neglected war (Korean)[/li][/ul]
Next up: Rodric Braithwaite's Afgantsy (a history of Russia's misadventure in Afghanistan), then some pulp fun with John Birmingham's Angels of Vengeance (book three in a series that posits the disappearance of all life in the USA, followed by a rush to bloody military colonisation by everyone else in the world) and a long wait for China Mieville's new one (Railsea, a steampunk Moby Dick for young adults). And a few others lined up on the Kindle, I think.Comment
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Current Reading - Books best thread
Lucia Lanigan wrote:
I should read more Carter. I loved The Bloody Chamber. Puss in Boots and The Erl-King were real highlights.I'm reading Wise Children by Angela Carter. It's brilliant, I reckon most people would like it.
Since my lack of French stymied finishing The Magic Mountain I gave The Glass Bead Game a go. I got about 20 pages in. I may go back to it but it's not easy to read. Admittedly I'm struggling to read at the moment but even so.
So I read The Rings Of Saturn, which was amazing. I can't really say why though (not great for a LitCrit thread I know) but I want to read it again. It seemed to engender an elegiac mood in me.Comment
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