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    Current Reading - Books best thread

    Yeah and on that topic can we get rid of the bit in parentheses in the thread title? It's really really really annoying. Really.

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      Current Reading - Books best thread

      Easily done...

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        Current Reading - Books best thread

        meltdowngraphics wrote:
        I've just finished "The Satanic Verses" (at age 54), and it was worth it! Now for some more lighthearted reading – "The Far Corner" by Harry Pearson. Great anecdotes and stories about North-east football. Has anyone else read this?
        Yeah, it's great.

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          Current Reading - Books best thread

          Breakfast of Champions is fantastic. Written in this incredibly blank, childlike fashion, which by never mentioning its moral critique of what it observes at all, points it all the more sharply.

          Loved it loved it loved it.

          Coming to the end of the (wonderful) Murdoch book, and just starting into Beckett's For To End Yet Again. And (still) working through the Cantos.

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            Current Reading - Books best thread

            I just finished The Rebel Sell and will offer a full book report on OTF soon. I'm reading Gibson's Count Zero which is sort of the sequel to Neuromancer, but not really.

            I've got a bunch of stuff on my reading table - novels, graphic novels and other. I think I'm going to re-read the first two volumes of Hellboy soon.

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              Current Reading - Books best thread

              Excellent, perfect...

              Me I'm starting on The Mysteries of Udolpho. I need some thrills.

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                Current Reading - Books best thread

                Working on Mark McKinnon's The New Cold War, which is quite good. I hadn't quite realised the extent to which George Soros and Madeleine Albright were involved in the overthrow of Milosevic, and the extent to which senior Otpor leaders later became "revolution consultants" (paid by Soros) to the rest of the former Warsaw Pact. I mean, great that Milosevic got kicked out when he did (and better the way he got kicked out than by, say, invading Serbia), but still a bit slippery-slope-ish.

                On the weekend, finished Iain Banks' Look to Windward. I had never read any of his stuff before, and I really enjoyed it. I bought a couple of more Culture novels to read on my next insane journey (only twleve days away, o joy o bliss).

                Reed: Count Zero is not bad as early Gibson goes, but I liked Mona Lisa Overdrive better. And Idoru is possibly best of all (though it's a bit later).

                Did you like The Rebel Sell?.

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                  Current Reading - Books best thread

                  I'm glad you liked Look to Windward. I love love love the Culture novels. What else have you got?

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                    Current Reading - Books best thread

                    Er, I'll have to go look...

                    (dashes into the house and up the stairs)

                    Excession and Use of Weapons. You read them?

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                      Current Reading - Books best thread

                      The Beckett is superb, albeit very brief - again, under sixty pages all told. The Murdoch is now done, and was utterly superb - a total mind-changer. She's an absolutely brilliant philosopher, it's quite amazing that such a high proportion of the comparatively small amount of philosophical work referencing her is so appallingly slipshod.

                      I'm about to start Pierre Vidal-Naquet's The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present about which I know almost nothing, save that the blurb is enticing, and it was dirt cheap in the British Library bookshop when I was joining there.

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                        Current Reading - Books best thread

                        "Reed: Count Zero is not bad as early Gibson goes, but I liked Mona Lisa Overdrive better. And Idoru is possibly best of all (though it's a bit later).
                        I have Mona Lisa Overdrive. I'll read it soon after I finish Count Zero.

                        Did you like The Rebel Sell?."
                        Most of it, yes. I've been meaning to write about that, but I have a lot of thoughts and haven't had time.

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                          Current Reading - Books best thread

                          I've recently finished Single and Single by John Le Carré, and am now reading (by pure coincidence, because it just happened to be the next unread book on my pile of unread books) another Le Carré: Absolute Friends.

                          I do like Le Carré's style: very easy to read, very sensible, cerebral, and (unlike, say, Robert Ludlum) for 'spy' novels they concentrate on characters and relationships rather than action and the literary equivalent of SFX. If I'm not careful, I could get to become a Le Carré completist.

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                            Current Reading - Books best thread

                            Since my last post on this thread, too long ago, I've finished Irving and gone through Wonder Boys, which is as wonderful as everything I've read thus far by Michael Chabon. He's a really seriously bloody good writer, that man.

                            That was followed by Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History, in preparation for my trip in July. Very interesting, although the first 450 years take up just under the first half of the book, and the most recent 50 take up just over the second half. Inevitable I suppose.

                            Also inevitably, given that it was published last year, it's now going out of date at a rate the author couldn't have predicted would happen quite so soon.

                            Today, I started Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which I'm enjoying so far. I'm also having a go at Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding in Spanish. Well alright, no need for 'having a go', I'm just reading it. It's incredibly simple language but utterly beautiful.

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                              Current Reading - Books best thread

                              As I figured, I did nothing on my vacation during the day but sit on the beach and read.

                              Pale Fire what a strange and wonderful book. Probably deserves its own thread.

                              Oh Play That Thing A very quick and enjoyable read. I quite liked it too. When is Part three coming out?

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                                Current Reading - Books best thread

                                Les Juifs was fantastic. Really, really enjoyed it.

                                I'm currently in the middle of Roland Barthes' Mythologies, Vikram Seth's quite wonderful The Golden Gate, and The Cantos.

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                                  Current Reading - Books best thread

                                  Just started The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold on the recommendation of a couple of friends. Enjoying it so far, but it is a harrowing read.

                                  Unfortunately, my workload at the moment is so high that I;m not getting a lot of time to read.

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                                    Current Reading - Books best thread

                                    Just finished Tim Moore's "Do Not Pass Go" Its a history/guide to the streets of the London edition of Monopoly. Some interesting stuff included but its way way too long.

                                    Starting Chris Ayres "War Reporting For Cowards" anyone read it?

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                                      Current Reading - Books best thread

                                      .

                                      Vikram Seth's quite wonderful The Golden Gate
                                      Dunno about that, but had to read his Two Lives last year - in light of which dishwater began to take on immense interest.

                                      .

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                                        Current Reading - Books best thread

                                        Right, in the last 2 weeks, I finished Watchmen which I felt was underwhelming; Lee Child's Jack Reacher novel, Persuader; Lucky at Cards a Hard Case Crime novel by Lawrence Block; and on the tube this morning, Double Deuce one of Robert B. Parker's Spencer books.

                                        I've got the Complete Maus to finish, and I'll probably start one of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, another Reacher book, or another Spencer book.

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                                          Current Reading - Books best thread

                                          I haven't read his prose, but The Golden Gate is, so far, a fantastically witty and funny verse novel.

                                          I finished the Barthes, which was excellent, and am now reading Freud's writings on sexuality.

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                                            Current Reading - Books best thread

                                            In Italy I read the first volume of George RR Martin's short stories, which are mostly aces, and also began The Charterhouse of Parma, which is lots of fun so far. And then I chanced upon a French copy in France (who would have thought it) so I took it as a *sign* and I am going to read it in French at the same time. Being as how I need to improve my French sharpish.

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                                              Current Reading - Books best thread

                                              Well, The New York Trilogy is bloody brilliant, but I shall have to read it about five times more before I can even hope to understand it all. It's not what I expected and it's not always easy, but it's very noir and very good, the final story in particular.

                                              I'm now onto giving Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) my full attention.

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                                                Current Reading - Books best thread

                                                I used to eat in the Moon Palace and still don't feel I've got all of the New York Trilogy.

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                                                  Current Reading - Books best thread

                                                  The Freud was a bit disappointing - it's all so widely accepted (or at least known) now as to feel lacking in any really new insight.

                                                  I'm following it with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

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                                                    Current Reading - Books best thread

                                                    .

                                                    Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight. I've seen the film (very good - with George Clooney and J Lo) and was a bit wary of reading the book because I'd seen somewhere that the film was very faithful to it, and therefore I'd already know the story). But it's brilliant - humour and style and sassiness absolutely drip from the dialogues and descriptions:

                                                    (Foley learns that his friend Buddy is going to use a guy called Glen - who likes to wear sunglasses everywhere, even when it's pitch black - to help him break out of prison. Foley phones his ex on the day of the breakout. "Tell Buddy I see this guy wearing sunglasses. I'll step on 'em. I might not even take 'em off him first.")

                                                    I love that kind of stuff.

                                                    .

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