Current Reading - Books best thread

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

No, Johnny Come Lately here foolishly assumed he wouldn't be into it. I bet it was great, their big exhibitions are pretty spectacular. (Missed the Bowie one, too.)

[MsD]

Current Reading - Books best thread

It really was good. I always thought I "got" McQueen and liked him (I have a few pieces .. only one dress, as he doesn't design for bosoms, and the shoes are unwearable, but I have scarves and had a bag) .. the exhibition really brought out the ideas and themes in his work. One or two of the rooms were quite overwhelming.

It made me more receptive to this book - obviously I have always been into fashion, but even I didn't really think it as valid a field of cultural enquiry as, say, literature. Maybr because some of the fashion people I've known have been as deep and thoughtful as Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yes, the fashion world is dizzyingly daft and amoral on the whole, isn't it. I guess the form of most fashion writing is naturally dictated by that and it's difficult not to come across as a pseud if you try to squeeze meaning out of something so nebulous and fast-moving. But what a big part of everyone's everyday life it is; many people's primary connection with design and even performance.

I'm a sucker for pagan and uncanny irruptions in pop and everyday culture, so the subject matter of this book is so far up my street it's relaxing in my shed and puffing a pipe. McQueen's aesthetic echoed the era's music, I think, whether that was Bjork and Tricky in the Top Ten or Coil et al underground. (Most people dressed like sacks of nowt at in the 90s, of course, but perhaps twas ever thus.)

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

One book it brings to mind is Marina Warner's inspired survey Phantasmagoria. Partly because it has a chapter with that title, which introduced me to this catwalk show from 1999 - great theatre, a bit like Kraftwerk and their robots.

[Land Waster]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Crusoe wrote:

Just finished reading Roger Crowley's 'Constantinople - The Last Great Siege', a gripping account of the Ottoman capture of the city in 1453.

We all know the end result, but it was a close run thing. The sights, sounds and smells of late medieval warfare are brilliantly captured.

Crowley's new one is just out, about the Portuguese exploits in the Indian Ocean. They were bastards.

He does write a good history.

Yeh, I'm going to check out some more of his books. I was really impressed with his attention to detail which added to the drama of the narrative.

Like the fact that the most disturbing sound for the defenders on the walls of Constantinople was not the Islamic drums or chanting drifting from the Ottoman camp, but rather the sound of Christian liturgy.

A horrifying reminder that amongst the Muslim hordes who besieged the city were thousands of Christians.

[imp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

gyp wrote: Just finished the first book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend and was pretty blown away. It's a beautiful, angry book about young girls growing up in post-war Naples. The story of the two central friends is used both to explore the tensions and beauty of friendship and to illustrate the oppressive ways that poverty, patriarchy and tradition play out in women's lives. There were a few slow stretches, and you sometimes got the sense that you were reading the first book in a series rather than a standalone novel, but it's packed with insight, tenderness, brutality and more.

Count me in the Ferrante fan club in a huge way - just devoured the second of the Neapolitan quartet, The Story of a New Name, and am itching to start the third, but am going to hold off for a week or two, just because... I want to look forward to it for a while. Everything gyp says is true - these are just stunning, captivating works of literature, spotlighting the gender and class chasms in Italian post-war society through a story that blows you through to the end (and the inevitable minor cliff-hanger).

[ursus arctos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, she's terrific

[laverte]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've got 80 pages left of the fourth and final part, I'm going to have that empty feeling when it ends.

As you might expect from a work whose last chapter is entitled 'Old age', there are no awakenings or epiphanies. There is only struggle. The neighbourhood is changing from one type of hellhole to another; the revolution is not happening; and the reader finds more and more reasons to disidentify with the narrator and distrust her viewpoint.

Ferrante is brilliant at getting us (or, at least, me) to give her characters the benefit of the doubt. She shows us the honesty and nobility in them and plays on our longing for those aspects to win the day. It's nothing like a spoiler to say that they don't.

[MsD]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Hmm, I may order the first one as my next Bedtime Reading Book.

[Mr Beast]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just finished Homicide by David Simon. At times harrowing but it was an excellent read. I think it originally came out in 1991 but I was unaware of it until 2 weeks ago, rather than being a very slow reader.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished A Short History of Nearly Everything earlier, and I'm now starting The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, continuing my long-term decision to work my way (periodically rather than all in one go, obviously) through the whole Holmes canon in the order they were all published.

[delicatemoth]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished Viv Albertine's Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys. It's absolutely fantastic. If you're thinking "oh, another punk memoir" then think again - her unsentimental prose deftly describes the whole life of a fascinating and inspiring woman.

[imp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Great book, isn't it? I think it's discussed over on the Current Music Reading thread, started up by a deviant 'Current Reading' splinter group.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes a short while ago (for those who don't know off the top of their heads, it's the collection whose last story is 'The Final Problem'), and have now started All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which I became aware of a couple of weeks ago after seeing it had won the Pulitzer for fiction this year. Promising start after 15-ish pages - just another 515 or so to go.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman. It's fiction, so it took a few weeks. Didn't blow my doors off or leave me gasping for more, but a nice story. It's about Tooly Zilberburg, a young/teenage/adult woman told alternately in 1988, 1999 and 2011. It's mainly about the cast of revolving people who are, in turn, raising her or hanging on the periphery of her life, and why they are. It's well told, but I'm not sure what its big idea was.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

About a hundred pages into All The Light We Cannot See now, and it's very good indeed. There are two storylines told in alternating chapters which follow two people through the second World War - one a blind French girl, the other a German boy recruited into the army. I like the writing, I like the scope of it and so far I'm enjoying the story.

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett. Very enjoyable, in a China Mieville sort of way (politics, cities, guns, trains, magic in the form of religious miracles). It's set in a vast, poor city formerly the centre of a polytheistic content, since overthrown by the smaller godless nation they previously enslaved and all mention of gods forbidden. The main characters represent the oppressed-turned-oppressors, the plot a whodunit turning into something bigger about victors rewriting history. Read it in two days flat and looking forward to the next one out in January.

[Land Waster]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Land Waster wrote:

Just finished reading Roger Crowley's 'Constantinople - The Last Great Siege', a gripping account of the Ottoman capture of the city in 1453.

We all know the end result, but it was a close run thing. The sights, sounds and smells of late medieval warfare are brilliantly captured.

Crowley's new one is just out, about the Portuguese exploits in the Indian Ocean. They were bastards.

He does write a good history.

Yeh, I'm going to check out some more of his books.

I've now read another two:

'Empires of the Sea- The Battle for the Mediterranean' is a gripping account of the 16th century struggle for control of the sea lanes between Islam and Christianity.

'City of Fortune: How Venice won and lost a naval empire' is also a lively history of the infamous city state and empire.

They were up against some stiff competition, but the Venetians must surely be in the top ten of 'biggest bastards of all time' countdown.

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Read his book about the Portugese. Right bastards. The concept of "merdimboca" is a queasy one.

[via vicaria]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Jan Morris' Venice book is a good read too if you're after thalassocracy related readings.

Just finished John Keay's China: A History. Really good stuff. I was looking for something accessible and while it's a brick, it's never boring and really quite engaging.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I can confrm re: Keay. Very good.

Three other good books on relatively recent Chinese history: Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen Platt, which is about the Taiping Rebellion (the biggest conflict you've never heard about basically - 15M dead at about same time as American Civil War). Julia Lovell's The Opium War about...well, you know...is not as good as Platt but covers a subject which is arguably more critical to understanding modern China. And there's Forgotten Ally, China's World War II by Rana Mitter which is flat out great and fills a huge hole in the literature on WWII.

Best recent book on present-day China is "In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China's Ascent in the Next Decade", by Damien Ma and William Adams. Not a brick in the least, but covers the main issues in China's economy very well.

I just finished Evan Osnos' Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which was decent. Helpful in understanding how nationalism is evolving in China, anyway, and in understanding how cynicism can erode the party's role even if it faces no overt public opposition. Currently reading The China Booom: Why China will not rule the World. Only about a quarter of the way in, but an interesting historical argument about why capitalism took off in Northern Europe and not China in the 17th and 18th centuries (basically: English govt. was wholheartedly behind merchant class and legislated in its favour but Ming China did not).

[Gangster Octopus]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Welcome back.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Thanks. I may just stay in the books section for awhile, see how things go.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Oh great...Mr I Read Three Books Per Flight is back...

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

One book per flight. But three flights a week.