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[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, she was brilliant. Even the books she wrote in her twenties knock the shit out of anything you see in newspaper books sections these days. Going to write an article about her soon (and by soon I do mean two months late).

I recommend The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (catchy title) for the full A Clockwork Orange / Side 2 of the first Roxy Music album spectacular.

[Edie St Pierre]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Published postumously 'Wise Children' was. I read it about six months after she died. Mainly set in Brixton, I seem to recall. I was living in Haggerston when I read it.

Read one of her really early short stories the other day. 'The Man Who Loved A Double Bass'. She was a teenager when she wrote it. It's fucking brilliant.

[delicatemoth]

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Just finished Crude World by Peter Maas, wherein the author visits lots of different oil-producing countries and sites, and talks to people involved with them. Vivid depiction especially of what sounds like hell on earth in the Niger delta.

I ALWAYS forget about Angela Carter even though I'm 95% certain she'd be completely up my street. I'll traipse off to the library once I've finished this book about Queen (the group, not the monarch).

10^7 guests wrote:

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.

I love Sebald to bits. His prose seems to simultaneously sharpen and diffuse what it's talking about, like looking through both ends of a telescope. The Emigrants is, if anything, even more poignant than Rings.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, "Bard Road" in Wise Children is Shakespeare Road, SW2. I lived in Brixton for years, so I get that little extra out of it.

She's great at using South London in her books. There's a vivid scene in The Magic Toyshop where this couple are in a moonlit wasteland populated by headless statues, like a de Chirico painting. Years after reading it I found myself in Crystal Palace for the first time - those headless statues are real.

I'd put money on you liking Angela Carter, delicatemoth.

[Edie St Pierre]

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Really, there's a park in Crystal Palace like that! Fucking A. I want to visit it.

The big park in Brixton with the Lido is great in Summer. I always wished someone would spend a bit of money on the Lido though.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

They have, and now I can't afford to go in there. They did a really good job, though, it looks as grand as it must have when it was built in the 1930s.

Brockwell Park. Probably the best place on earth.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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I've been able to gorge myself on rec-reading recently for the first time in years. A couple of the more interesting books I'll come back to but I'm currently balancing Kenneth William's Diaries with Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill.

The latter has some glorious, and all too brief, pastoral writing around an English child's summer. Puck is an interesting character but not in the stories enough, he's just an interlocator. It's a shame because the historical tales, which are the guts of the book, are just a bit on the dull side. The characters are OK but if you imagine the Just So Stories without the unique prose style you'll catch my drift.

The Williams book is quite depressing. So much so I can only read it in small bursts. His bi-polar, or so it appears, emotionally conflicted life is leavened a bit by the bitchy comments about C-list Brit celebs of the 50s and 60s, (anyone else here remember Yana?) He was clearly a very bright guy who felt wretched about the niche he had carved out for himself in life. He needed love, intellectual challenge, and attention but was only ever able to find the latter. Sad.

[Edie St Pierre]

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Really, they charge you for using the Lido now? Rotten bastards. It's a public park it should be free, innit.

It's got massive family significance, Brockwell Park, for reasons i'd feel a bit awkward explaining on the internet.

[Wyatt Earp]

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Garamczy Antal wrote:

You've forgiven him for the New College of the Humanities?

No, why?

[Anton Gramscescu]

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I recalled you using terms like "treason" and "being done with him" in relation to him (and others involved), but you're still really well-enough disposed to give him a nice review.

It was very mild teasing - I know you're fair-minded enough to appreciate an argument even from someone you dislike/with whom you disagree.

[Wyatt Earp]

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I do think the New College thing is a kind of trahison des clercs, yeah. (For some reason putting "des clercs" after it makes it sound, to my ears, a less overheated description.) But that's a separate issue, I think.

[Diable Rouge]

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Very disappointed by Eco's latest offering The Prague Cemetery - a hotchpotch of intertwining plots cobbled together without ever making a notable thematic point. The central character is a fanatically Catholic rabid anti-Semite, who does sidelines in anti-Freemasonry pamphlets and celebrating black masses, Eco's purported aim being to disgust the reader as much as possible. In between, we get a potted history of the Risorgimento, but given that our anti-hero spends the novel in exile in Paris, this sideplot proves only a McGuffin. It's hard to see what satirical point the author is trying to make, if it's a general appeal for tolerance towards minorities, he could have chosen a far less arcane method to do so, and if it's to poke fun at ancestral prejudices, again he's chosen a plot that, quite frankly, general readers won't care less about.

[Wyatt Earp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just read Le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy, what with being about to go to Hong Kong. And you know what? I really liked it. I hadn't read him for years; although I loved The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and am a sucker for a good Le Carre adaptation, I'd somehow got it into my head that most of his books weren't up my alley.

And I can see why: there's a lot wrong with them. The tradecraft stuff goes on and on, and I'm forever getting my bearleaders mixed up with my lamplighters. The dialogue often lapses into "Damn it, John!" territory. And his female characters, with the exception of the excellent Connie Sachs, are (as it were) ciphers, there to provide reasons for the male spies to do plot-servingly unprofessional things.

But for all that: what a page-turner the thing was. Four-hundred odd pages and they flew by. I'm getting Smiley's People now.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Why at Last! wrote:

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.

Just finished it myself. What don't you quite buy (or did you change your mind by the end)?

I kind of like the idea of a moral Flynn Effect.

[Wyatt Earp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Well, a lot of it is very speculative, as is often the way with his stuff.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, maybe. A lot of the questions he's trying to answer are strictly speaking unanswerable without a time machine, though.

The standards of the genre basically say that if you stack enough correlations together, you get if not proof, then at least a book deal. This one was better than most in terms of how rigorously thought-through the hypotheses were.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Well, a lot of time on the road lately, so lots of reading lately.

Lots of love for You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting, which is a lovely book about Japanese baseball. I kind of wonder, actually, how many of the pioneers of the "learn-about-a-foreign-country-through-football" genre - Simon Kuper, say, or David Winner - read this book before writing their own. There's actually some remarkable parallels. It probably could have been about 50 pages shorter, but that's true of most books.

Made my way slowly through A History of Japan by Mason and Caiger, which is supposed to be one of the standard texts. I found it distinctly meh - I'm not sure how much I would have retained had I not already been listening to a somewhat chaotic (but amusing) History of Japan podcast by some Australian dude. At least I get the whole periodization now, and can locate major figures on a timeline. Also on Japan was Murakami's Underground, which is basically just a set of interviews of suvivors of the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks. It's better than meh, but the whole trademark Murakami-laconic thing gets irritating after awhile. On the whole, I'm happy I didn't read this until after I'd left Tokyo. Also, Japanese Higher Education as Myth which is a weird sort of screed about how useless education is in Japan because in the end it's all about work routines and obedience. Obviously, a pretty specialist tome, but it was interesting how much of it echoed "You Gotta Have Wa" - especially when it comes to the role of foreign teachers.

I've just started Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, but that one's going to take awhile.

On other topics, I've gone through a bunch of pop econ stuff. A number of short kindle singles - Ryan Avent's book The Gated City, on how anti-density activism in the US is not just driving people to the burbs and the sunbelt but actually hindering economic growth by driving up labour costs in high-growth cities. Also, Race Against the Machine, which is about how technological change is destroying jobs - and interesting counterpoint to Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, actually. It's worth reading just to scare yourself shitless about many jobs for which humans used to be considered unreplaceable are not within reach of being routinized and being done by computers. And a longer, much more optimistic book by Phillip Auerswald called The Coming Prosperity
. Significant chunks of it are BS, but he's right to point out that there are enormously more sources of potential innovation than there were a few years ago (albeit mainly in the developing world) and that historically, western countries almost always think we're facing ginormous unsolvable short-term problems, when in fact the long-run track record for growth and innovation is pretty awesome. One to read when you;re sick of Paul Krugman, I guess.

Also, a couple of football books, but I'll put those in the proper thread.

[The Exploding Vole]

Current Reading - Books best thread

My copy of You Gotta Have Wa arrived this week. But I'm not quite finished with Roger Angell's Once More Around the Park, the best baseball book I've ever read.

[Eggchaser]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Why at Last! wrote:

I've just read Le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy, what with being about to go to Hong Kong. And you know what? I really liked it. I hadn't read him for years; although I loved The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and am a sucker for a good Le Carre adaptation, I'd somehow got it into my head that most of his books weren't up my alley.

And I can see why: there's a lot wrong with them. The tradecraft stuff goes on and on, and I'm forever getting my bearleaders mixed up with my lamplighters. The dialogue often lapses into "Damn it, John!" territory. And his female characters, with the exception of the excellent Connie Sachs, are (as it were) ciphers, there to provide reasons for the male spies to do plot-servingly unprofessional things.

But for all that: what a page-turner the thing was. Four-hundred odd pages and they flew by. I'm getting Smiley's People now.

I've just started Tinker, Talior, Soldier, Spy which you can get on Amazon along with The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People in an anthology going under the rather silly of name of Smiley versus Karla. It's got Gary Oldman on the front to tie in with the recent film.

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished reading Glen Duncan's Tallula Rising, second in his series on modern day werewolves. It's strong stuff, compelling and slightly discomfiting (do I mean discomforting?) with its vision of motherhood.

Embarrassingly, I think I missed the most critical point, the realisation towards the very end as to who the mystery character is and the importance of the incorrect verb. If anyone else reads this, can you shed some light?

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Oh, the one I read before that: Roger Crowley's Empires Of The Sea, a rollicking history of the war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans for the Mediterranean in the 16th century. It focus on the siege of Malta and the battle of Lepanto, two events I knew nothing about, and manages to evoke the horrendous spectacle of both. Much more a military account than Crowley's straight history of the Venetian Empire, and enough to put his history of Constantinople on my reading list.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Not sure how this tumbled to page 2, but just a couple of recent books of note:

Edward Luce's Time to Start Thinking was among the better "the world (or in this case the United States) is going to hell in a handbasket" books I've read in awhile. I don;t agree with all of it, but as an overview of the depth of the structural challenges facing the US, it;s pretty good.

Iain Banks' Stonemouth. Scot-fi rather than Sci-fi. A shockingly happy ending, for Banks.

Tyler Cowen's An Economist Gets Lunch. I didn't enjoy this quite as much as I thought I would, because it's a little heavier on actual cooking than I thought it was. But there's still some great stuff in here both in terms of the economics and history of food. I think Wyatt in particular would enjoy it.

[Mumpo]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm almost through with Empires of the Sea, after Crusoe's recommendation, and like him I'm tempted to go straight out and get Crowley's prequel on the seige of Constantinople.

I remember a holiday on Malta when I was about 14 - I'd love to go back and see the harbour peninsulas at Valetta. Checking Google Maps, St Elmo's fort looks incredibly well preserved.

Thanks, Crusoe.

[Mumpo]

Current Reading - Books best thread

'Thrusoe.'

Dammit! Couldn't resist.

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've been on holiday so lots of books to report on.

The Map and the Territory
Running Away
The Truth About Marie
Taras Bulba

I'll cover the others later but I just wanted to say that Taras Bulba was terrible. I like Lost Souls but this was nothing like it, sub Scottian rubbish. And unremittingly anti-Semitic. Not just the people but the narrator as well.

Added to that it had an introduction by Robert Kaplan which left me speechless.