Current Reading - Books best thread

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Elmore Leonard is brilliant. Now I want to go and read one right now.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Started Drew Gilpin Faust's book This Republic of Suffering, about how Americans dealt with death during the Civil War. Her chapters each deal with a specific part of death--dying, burial, remembering, etc.--and how the Civil War challenged and changed American practices of death and mourning. It's very good so far.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Drew Gilpin Faust is a remarkable name.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

She's the new (well, new-ish, I think it's been about a year) president of Harvard.

[Heliotrope]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I had a class on the South taught by her, many moons ago. She was one of those professors who would bring their dogs to class with them.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Never knew such professors existed.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm onto the introduction to Bodas de Sangre now. I read a synopsis of it on (English) Wikipedia when I'd finished and discovered that two of the approximately five words I wasn't quite sure as to the meanings of, were absolutely crucial to being able to follow the plot properly. Which explains why I wasn't quite sure what was going at certain points (the other reason being I've been absolutely exhausted all week)...

[Sundeporino]

Current Reading - Books best thread

We had a teacher who used to bring his dog to school, he used to leave it in his Ford escort van during lessons....it was like something from Shameless. Thank (his) god that Keith Joseph closed the school down a few years later.

Elmore Leonard's the reason Guttenberg persevered in my opinion.

Just finished "War Reporting For Cowards" by Chris Ayres. An overstretched mildly amusing account of his time as an accidental war correspondent in Iraq.
Cant decide between Billy Braggs "The Progressive Patriot" or Jeremy Paxmans "The English" for the journey to work tomorrow. Any suggestions?

[San Bernardhinault]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished Vineland on Friday which opened up floodgates and meant that I read Iain Banks's The Business and half of The Human Stain in the last couple of days.

[boris]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm now about a third of the way through How the Dead Live by Will Self. It's the first Self novel I've read, and so far I like it, although he tends towards turgidity at times. An excellent premise too, about an cantankerous, cancerous old woman, who continues with her ill-temper even after she dies from her cancer. The passage of her actual dying was extremely powerful, and I've just started on the post-death chapters.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

The Golden Gate was mesmerising. A great, great stylist, moving easily between transcendence ans the lightest of light verse, in the tightest of tight structures - even the contents were in sonnet form.

Just finished The Last Llanelli Train by Rob Lewis. I stole it from someone who had stolen it from someone else, because many people I know were eager to read it, and few to give the author money.

I mean no negativity in calling it second-rate David Peace. That's still very good.

Getting close to the end of The Cantos, and have just started Susan Sontag's On Photography.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Relish it. If we were doing a Non-fiction Top 20 it would be way high on my list. Certainly the finest collection of essays on a single medium I've read in the past thirty years. When you're finished I'd be really interested in your opinion.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Then you shall have it It was actually a spur-of-the-moment add-on purpose - Amazon recommended bundling it with Barthes' Camera Lucida, after I'd been so impressed with the last of his I read...

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

So I'm still reading the Stendhal but intermittently as I keep picking up and putting down other stuff. I will spare you the details of various serial killer thrillers. But I did reread Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and I liked it much more this time than when it first came out. I wonder if it's because OTF is much more like the forum he describes, so it seemed more real to me (I think at the time I read it I was spending much more time in the kinds of places where on-topic posts were the exception, maybe).
And thenyesterday I started on Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror which is top stuff. Horribly sadistic 19th-century surrealist dream nonsense, it's brilliant.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just, five minutes ago, finished The Cantos. Finally.

I may start a thread, when I get my breath back. Bloody hell, that took a while.

The push to finish it (them?) has dented my headway on Sontag, but I've started into Sartre's The Age of Reason, which like of all of his stuff is great, albeit pushing way too hard for his wrong philosophy of wrongness. Why didn't Merleau-Ponty write novels?

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Crikey. Congratulations.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Since Lorca I've gone through Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and have now started on Farewell, My Lovely. I've got them in a one-volume trilogy which ends with The Long Goodbye so although I wouldn't normally read three books by one author consecutively* it's going to happen this time...

*Borges excepted, of course.

[goldstone97]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm currently reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, a seriously in-depth look (900 pages) at Nixon and American society based around the elections from '64 to '72.

It's full of interesting detail excavated mainly from his long study of newspaper archives, though much of the material is familiar to any novice student of the period (hardly an understudied one). Unfortunately, at times it feels like reading bits of all the nation's daily newspapers chronologically, interspersed with Perlstein's sometimes clumsy attempts to inject pithy analysis (by following quotes with notes in parenthesis and using exclamation marks! or italics!).)

The writing is a little too forced; whilst I get tired of traditional dry historical writing, there's a little too much effort to insert some colour into every paragraph here. That said, the vast array of anecdotes Perlstein's collected have many gems amongst them.

The central thesis is to emphasise the conservative backlash that developed in the period, and which Perlstein seems to think has been underexamined compared to the counter-culture he also explores, and led to the blue-red divide still with us today.

I'm only halfway through so I'll reserve judgment on it as a whole for now.

[JtS]

Current Reading - Books best thread

SamKelly, if you haven't done so already, you should read Chandler's short stories, they are brilliant.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm making good headway on the Sontag, which is every bit as superb as AdeC says. I'm also nearing the end of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, which is staggering. Having not read him before, I'm definitely seeing why people talk about him with such awe.

[Etienne]

Current Reading - Books best thread

The sociology library at Cardiff is currently doing its summer purge of books, so I'm getting lots of free books, whose analysis is somewhat out of date.

Just read Steve Barnett Games and Sets on the history of Sport and TV, which was very interesting, but being written in 1988 was a different world from today. Think I might start a thread on it in fact.

Am now splitting my time between The First Casualty by Phillip Knightley, a history of war correspondents, which is great, readable and informative, and with some very quotable anecdotes; and Ursula le Guin The Dispossed, which is good fun too. Think I'll be looking for more of her stuff afterwards.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished Sontag and Faulkner, am now embarking on David James Duncan's The River Why (his The Brothers K is pretty much my favourite book ever) and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, which I always feel I skimmed through waaaaay too fast the first time I read it.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Thanks for the recommendation, JtS, I will be doing (although not immediately).

[The Fifth Beatle]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Am stocking up on summer reading and have these in a checkout at Amazon - would like your comments before I click to purchase...

What a Carve Up - J. Coe
The Accidental Woman - Coe again
(I have read and enjoyed Rotter's Club and House of Sleep)

Mother's Milk - E. St Aubyn
Teenage - Jon Savage
White Noise - Delillo
Being Dead - J Crace

Am currently reading 'In Irons : Britain's Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary economy' which is actually really fascinating stuff.

[Etienne]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I didn't like What A Carve Up (having enjoyed House of Sleep a lot), I thought it was a bit like being repeatedly hit with a sledgehammer of liberal outrage - and I'm all in favour of liberal outrage.

I haven't read any of the others.