Current Reading - Books best thread

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Renart wrote:

"Ready Player One", Ernest Cline

Cline lives right around the corner from me. He has a DeLorean. I've been meaning to read his book simply for those two reasons.

Just finished it. Really, really enjoyable. Maybe not Booker Prize material, but it's a fast-paced mix of 80s film and videogame references, MMO gaming, and a dystopian future. It's Scott Pilgrim meets Snow Crash in tone.

[matt j]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've finally finished George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, which means I've listened to the series back-to-back-to-back... since January. (If I remember correctly.)

Anybody feel the need for a dedicated thread? So much hate to share for Cersei Lannister.

Yes it's incredibly long, and you definitely want to tell Martin to get the fuck 'on' with it, but it delivers a couple of great moments just when you need it.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Crusoe wrote:
Just finished it. Really, really enjoyable. Maybe not Booker Prize material, but it's a fast-paced mix of 80s film and videogame references, MMO gaming, and a dystopian future. It's Scott Pilgrim meets Snow Crash in tone.

So, like Reamde set fifteen years ago?

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ha, sort of. But most of it is played out in a Warcraft-style virtual reality game.

[Wyatt Earp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've hit a good run of late: The Master and Margarita, Camus' The Outsider and now a late Eric Ambler I'm really enjoying.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Some good music books:

Luke Haines - Bad Vibes. Bad music too, but this is better than any comic novel published this millennium. If you weren't where it was suppposedly at in the 90s, that it. Hadn't noticed that his surname (if it is his) is French for 'hate'; amusingly apt, not least because he's no love for French culture but will accept their fleeting adoration due to his band's name.

Mark E Smith - Renegade. He starts off speaking a lot of interesting sense, ends up sinking into some slightly lazy alcoholisms. Mostly a great read all the same.

England's Hidden Reverse - David Keenan. A fascinating slither through the vast and varied endeavours of three connected groups: Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93. They're all excellent speakers and assiduous scholars of surrealism, outsider art, mystic religion and, in David Tibet's case, Enid Blyton. I had no idea any of this was going on while I was listening to Wu Tang, whose gnostic world makes a nice analogue.

[ian.64]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Started off Shane Ross's The Bankers last night about Ireland's financial car crash and from the word go it's already a litany of disaster before the real downfall begins. Slightly surprised to find cuddly Ken Bates's name mentioned early on (although perhaps I shouldn't be), and got a hint of why he's still around, doing what he always does - a man like that can go a long way when spineless wankers simply refuse to say 'no'.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

His crack at a gothic/ghost tale: a middle-aged, philandering landlord prone to nighttime hallucinations thinks he might have seen a ghost, even though he's not one to go in for all that. It's great, really well constructed and some lovely writing about hypnagogic perceptions (shapes, lights etc).

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ian, is the Bankers non-Ficton? I've seen a couple of fiction books by Irish authors on the bubble, fiction but heavily based on reportage.

I'm currently reading two books.

Peter Weiss - The Aesthetics of Resistance. Which is mind numbingly deep, it starts with a discussion about the workers consciousness of Pergamun and the downfall of the kingdon and has now moved on to an overview of leftist politics from the revolution to the late 30s in Germany as the narrator prepares to join the international brigade. There is just so much to take in that it's a bit tiring to read. Also, the text consists of multiple page long paragraphs so its hard to dip in and out of.

But I'm mesmerised by it and already a bit annoyed that the 2nd and 3rd volumes haven't been translated.

To break that up a bit I've just started on London's Overthrow - China Miéville. I'm only a couple of pages in but I'm struck by this

"Cameron first denounced, then dismissed the day's action. For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects."

[ian.64]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yes, it is, and it's a brisk read which, luckily for a superthickie like me, keeps any complex financial detail to a manageable yet solid flow of readable simplicity. The greed, avarice and pure pig's-trough character of its antagonists, though, is as plain as night follows day.

It's worth it.

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm really enjoying Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May series. The adventures since 1940 of two aging detectives (one a cantankerous Holmes, one a reasonable Watson) solving the more unusual murders in London (which always appear supernatural, but have a more grounded explanation). Easily digestible without being Dan Brownesque, and a real love for London history.

[Edie St Pierre]

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Currently halfway through 'A Pin To See The Peepshow' By F Tennyson Jesse. It is brilliant.

Bought it because i've got a bit obsessed with the Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters trial recently and reading loads about it has had a huge impact on me. Maybe I need to get out more, I dunno.

[Wyatt Earp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

You're an Ambler fan, Mat. What do you make of his late stuff? The book I've just finished was from 1981.

[Edie St Pierre]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Was it called 'The Care of Time'? I haven't read that. The latest one i've read by him is a mid 70's one called 'Send No More Roses' about financial criminals in Switzerland. That was top-drawer.

[Wyatt Earp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Spot on. It was excellent, as well.

[sw2borshch]

Current Reading - Books best thread

So this is where all the Ambler action is these days.

[Slightly Brown]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue. Set in and around a vinyl-only jazz/soul/funk record store on the titular street. Brilliant in large chunks, although I found the characters didn’t take up lodgings in my brain the way that, say, Kavalier/Clay or Landesman did (and still do a bit, in the former’s case). Some righteous love of the great American leisure-suit in it, though.

[ursus arctos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

That's good to hear.

I'm saving it for my next trip west (during which we always spend some time on Telegraph).

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Telegraph Avenue was a very sad shadow of its former self the last time I was there.

I'm curious about Chabon's book, though. I liked The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, although I felt it lost a lot of its energy and interest once Joe comes back from Antarctica.

[Slightly Brown]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Renart wrote: Telegraph Avenue was a very sad shadow of its former self the last time I was there.

I'm curious about Chabon's book, though. I liked The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, although I felt it lost a lot of its energy and interest once Joe comes back from Antarctica.

I agree with that, although I think that’s partly due to the middle section being so utterly thrilling. This book is certainly has a more mellow feel to it; like the gait of one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, or something. I’d be interested to see what you make of it.

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Well now that you've brought up the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, I'll have to check it out! (Freewheelin' Franklin is the one you're thinking of, I suspect. My father knows Fred Todd, and childhood trips to Rip Off Press HQ when it was still in San Francisco were a highlight of my youth. I used to have a Wonder Warthog T-shirt, but I wore it to shreds. I still have and treasure a bunch of their comics, including Jaxon's incredible Texas history books like Comanche Moon. But I digress . . .)

[Slightly Brown]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Renart wrote: My father knows Fred Todd, and childhood trips to Rip Off Press HQ when it was still in San Francisco were a highlight of my youth.

Man, that's cool; my biological father used to take me to the garden centre - if I was lucky.

(Note: he didn’t have particularly green fingers, as I recall. I think it was his way of introducing me the Great Outdoors. It was certainly the only place he took me to that didn’t have a dartboard on the wall.)

[alyxandr]

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Just finished The Third Policeman, thanks for the push. Any obvious next choices after this and At Swim-Two-Birds?

Also: Something i love about O'Brien is how much of his writing sounds as if it was an overly-literal translation from some other language --

The dawn was contagious, spreading rapidly about the heavens. Birds were stirring and the great kingly trees were being pleasingly interfered with by the first breezes.

The night seemed to have reached its middle point of intensity and the darkness was now much darker than before.

Then, in the Afterword, i discover that Flann/Myles/Brian was an Irish speaker; could any such here tell me if this might have been one of his actual techniques, occasionally writing in Irish and then translating into literal English, to get that effect?

Extra credit for an explanation of where th' hell "pancake" (= problem, conundrum) came from -- besides the Stump album this is the only place i've seen it. Is it a local thing, or Ireland-wide?

[Levin]

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I'm reading Roth's Hundred Days and was really surprised to see a fleeting reference to the sexual abuse of a boy who runs away to the army. Now this was written in the 30s so its not that old a book. Am I just being naive or is it strange for this to be mentioned in a book published pre say 1960.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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A "project" book I've been reading, which may also be of interest to some here — Lucia, Mat, perhaps Tubby — is Alex Seago's Burning the Box of Beautiful Things. An account, with extensive interviews, of doings at the Royal College of Art from the mid-40s to early 60s, illustrated mainly by pages from various issues of ARK. Together with Michael Bracewell's book on Roxy Music, Re-Make/Re-Model, and Lisa Tickner's Hornsey 1968 — both also excellent — it provides the fullest account of the place of post-war art-schools/students in British cultural life up until the 1970s.