Current Reading - Books best thread

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I am still on All My Puny Sorrows, not because it's long or bad - it's a lot better than bloody Outline - but because the football season started up shortly after I started reading it, and between that and the proofreading course I've started, I've got less reading time now. Going to head to bed in a bit and hope my reading light doesn't wake my girlfriend up so I can get through some more of it.

[caja-dglh]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Trying to work my way through Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, even though I kind of know enough about it not to bother. Unusually for Lewis he is yet to draw me in to his version of the story - typically he is really effective at that, though it is early days.

[Land Waster]

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I'm enjoying reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's 'A History of Christianity' for the second time.

It's superb, but at over 1,000 pages I'm settling in for the long haul. Perhaps a Biblical target of 40 days would be appropriate.

It's a book that deserves a wide readership, since whether you love or loathe Christianity, it provided the foundation for Western thought for the best part of 2,000 years.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

A second time? Surely the ending's blown by now.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm going through a bad patch for books. I have such high hopes and they keep being disappointed.

War and Peace Fuck me, how has this retained the status of a great novel? Half of it is C-grade Russian love stories among the nobility, and the other half of it is a historiographically revisionist approach to the Napoleonic war which was probably really interesting when it was written and now really isn't.

Empire of Cotton This is one of those "commodity histories", like Mike Kurlansky's histories of salt or cod, only way better researched. Execution is a bit plodding and I wanted to punch the author for continually using the term "War Capitalism" to descrobe basically all capitalism before the Napoleonic Wars, but I learned a lot about slavery, Liverpool, and India.

Vodka Politics: Alcohol autocracy and the secret history of the Russian State by Mark Lawrence Schrad. Actually two books here. One is about the Russian state's reliance on selling vodka to alcoholics to keep the books balanced (apparently a pledge to make the entire country dry at the outset of WWI severely crimped the war effort and indirectly led to the revolution); the other is about how russian rulers like to get drunk. The author tries to weave these into a single narrative. It doesn't work.

Vaclav Havel: A life by Michael Zantovsky. I cannot be objective about this because I love Havel so much (did my MA on him). Tons of fascinating stuff in here but a total whitewash of his role (or lack thereof) in the breakup of Czechoslovakia.

Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse. Interesting but it;s pace is...stately. It;s the book Iain Banks' Player of Games was based on. Preferred Banks' version.

SPQR by Mary Beard. A history of the Roman Empire from the start to about the end of the second century. A bit miffed because that's about the time it gets really good. Not bad, but preferred Greg Woolfe's Rome: an Empire's Story.

The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. I had not read any Borges before. Now I feel like reading all of Borges. Great stuff. However, a story longer than five pages wouldn't go amisss

The Rise of the Gridiron University by Brian Ingrassia. How football caught on in US universities from the 1870s to the 1920s. Some interesting stuff in here, particularly wrt the role of coaches and the whole mens sana in corpore sano stuff (if you;ve read David Winner's "Those feet" you will hear lots of echoes here). Also some interesting stuff about stadium construction in the 1920s and how it was linked to the Great War and patriotism.

Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. This is part of my "read more classic literature" push. On the whole, I really think it's a good thing I didn't live in the Romantic period. If anyone I knew carried on like this protagonist I would probably not stop punching them in the face.

The Silk Road: a new history of the world by Peter Frankopan. Reading this now. It;s interesting but I am disappointed it doesn't actually concentrate on the silk road itself. The best bits are where it helps you understand how globalization worked a long time ago and how economic pressures would flow back and forth across the Silk Road (e.g. silver mines in 16th C America mean excess specie in Europe means extra luxury purchases in China means sudden inflation across the Far East). But it's a little fast and loose with the definition of "the silk road" (turns out it's more or less everything from Xinjiang to Cairo) and mostly leaves out what I had hoped would be the interesting bits (Japan, north Africa.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis Thomas Sugrue. Holy crap this is a good book. Easily the best I've read so far this year. It's about Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s and how the seeds of the city's later destruction had already been planted by the end of World War II, particularly in terms of the city;s racial divide. The stories of how white communities tried to prevent Blacks from moving into certain neighbourhoods are enraging and heartbreaking. And the tale of the city;s unions - with the top leadership supportive of integration but the rank and file often opposed is also well told.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Anton Gramscescu wrote: The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. I had not read any Borges before. Now I feel like reading all of Borges. Great stuff. However, a story longer than five pages wouldn't go amisss

Ah, welcome, Mr Gramsci. What took you so long?

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Beats me. I had a very euro-centric adolescence. It's taken me ages to get around to readin/thinking about.seeing other parts of the world. The trip to BA two years ago was the first time I spent real time in Latin America and I loved it. So just getting around to the region's lit now. Ficciones is up next.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ficciones has a rather difficult (but, the more you read it, totally intriguing, at least to me) opening story, but rapidly picks up thereafter.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished All My Puny Sorrows. It's wonderful. It's about a Mennonite woman who along with her sister has rebelled against the community all her life, and about how her sister's suicide attempts affect her and the rest of her family. In spite of all of this, it's also more than a little bit funny.

Outline (the book I read previous, and mentioned upthread, and didn't like at all) is a book whose author draws on her experiences to write a novel that's irritatingly self-pitying. All My Puny Sorrows is a novel whose author draws on her experiences to write a novel too, and whose experiences frankly would lead one to think 'well, fair enough' if she was being self-pitying, but she's not. It's very good indeed.

Next up... we'll see. It's 2am and I'm going to watch a chess video and maybe an episode or two of University Challenge, so the next book will be chosen tomorrow.

[Exiled off Main Street]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished 'Hit Men, Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business' by Frederic Dannen. Published in 1990. This book delves deep into the corrupt practices of the record publishing industry during the 70's and 80's, payola etc. the connections with organized crime, the personalities running the big players like CBS, MCA, Warners etc. The stories about Casablanca Records in LA surely should be the basis of an HBO Series - oh yeah, we have Vinyl now... Great stories about LP 'cut outs' - and the shenanigans of illegal repressing.

Now reading Appetite For Self Destruction - The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age''. Looking forward to this.

Have sitting on my bookshelf, 'Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped' which amazingly enough in the first page features a story on the CEO of Ticket Master, Irving Azoff, who previously was the dodgy chairman of MCA Records in the 80's and featured a lot in Hit Men.

Also just finished 'Please Kill Me - The Uncensored Oral History of Punk' by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain - which I have to say is a 'Brilliant Read' if, like me, you want to an inside story / oral history of the early to late 70's NYC music scene and the creation of punk, of course mostly focused on the Dolls, Lou Reed, Ramones, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine Patti Smith, Danny Fields and all the famous hangers-on like Babe Buell so on...

I also finished last month 'Shadowplayers -The Rise and Fall of Factory Records' - which again, I couldn't put down. What a story. As someone who was gong to Eric's in Liverpool in 1976/78 - and saw Joy Division, Buzzcocks (not on Factory of course) plenty of times, this filled me on the whole backstory of punk politics in Manchester. Tony Wilson, you Manc bastard/hero. Amazing that Factory managed to pull off what they did, with all the bullshit between the major players going on.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Latest reads.

Olivia Manning - The Levant Trilogy. Following on from her more widely known 'Balkan Trilogy' - adapted for telly as Ken 'n' Em's 'Fortunes of War', Manning follows the same cast through to the end of the second world war. It's a phenomenal autobiographical document, and highly recommended.

Philip Kerr - False Nine. The Bernie Gunther 'Berlin Noir author', having fun writing about the current footy scene. These are Bernie Gunther books, transposed into a modern setting. Enjoyable fluff.

Miles Jupp - Fibber in the Heat. A record of Jupp's attempts at being a cricket journo on a tour to India. Once they found out he was Archie the Inventor from Balamory, it was all over.

John Lewis-Stempel - Meadowland. An interesting concept - the diary of a year in a particular field in Herefordshire. The book club loved it; I wanted to strangle him with a length of home made artisanal rope.

Ruby Wax - Sane New World. An account of Ruby's history of depression and mental illness, and her journey into the understanding of the brain. Recommended.

John Buchan - The Thirty Nine Steps. Downloaded for free and read on a flight from Nairobi to Hargeisa. A proper old fashioned page turner, it holds up well.

[slackster]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just caught up with all the mums book groups and finally read Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.

It's a fantastic page-turner and well written comic-tradegy in the Dickensian style. But I can see why some highbrow critics got a bit sniffy about it's commercial success and gongs, and the rather preposterous coincidences and reveals as the story develops.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

There's a bit of a discussion on The Goldfinch here:

http://www.wsc.co.uk/forum-index/32-books/987136-books-you-d-expected-to-dislike-but-loved

[moo cowe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Last year's Booker winner 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' is very good. It took me a while (100pages or so) to get into the rhythm of the voices of the various characters from whose perspective the events are experienced at various times, but I was sad to finish it.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Current Reading - Books best thread

moocowe wrote: Last year's Booker winner 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' is very good. It took me a while (100pages or so) to get into the rhythm of the voices of the various characters from whose perspective the events are experienced at various times, but I was sad to finish it.

I absolutely loved it.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just had a 25 minute gap in between matches, so got started on Walter Kempowski's All For Nothing. First chapter's about a big house in the east Prussian countryside at the end of the second World War.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Further to the earlier discussions on Chilean Cybenetics - the crazy Star-trek like "command centre" is being reconstructed and displayed at the London Design Biennial this fall. See here (in Spanish but with a great photo)

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Also, two thumbs up for John O'Donnell's Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity. Short, well written, interesting topic (short version: christianity created pagans - the concept makes no sense on its own)

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

That looks utterly fascinating, but isn't available on Kindle yet (from the UK store, at least). Curses.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Whoever it was upthread who recommended The Skies Belong to Us - thank you. Great read. Especially fun to read on day of EgyptAir hijacking. The stuff about the airlines' resistance to security measures was fucking fascinating, as was the glimpse of the Black Panthers' existence in Tunis.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yes, I think Inca started that ball rolling. It was excellent, and I've passed it on to others who've enjoyed it.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Some more recent books, apart from Pagans and The Skies Belong to Us (mentioned upthread)

The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly. Ok, so this isn't the first shot Easterly's taken at the development industry or the World Bank. The title is terrible - he's not actually arguing that intl dev experts "cause" tyranny, he's arguing that they abet it, and he traces this mindset to a general racist, post-colonial mentality. He's got some good points to make here around political accountability around aid programs, but the broader attack on "expertise" doesn't hold much water, you ask me.

Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma. Slim. Covers a few key episodes from the century or so between the arrival of the Black Ships and the Tokyo Olympics and weaves a tale about how the Japanese invented and re-invented their history through this period. Not bad but not a top recco for a japanese history book.

Japan and the Shackles of the Past by Taggart Murphy. Fuck. Me. Hands down best book I've read this year, probably best book I will read this year. I think you probably need to have a little bit of knowledge about Japanese history to get everything out of this, but it is an astonishingly good book which really lays bare how deep-seated historical patterns make it very difficult to rally momentum for change. The chapter on the crash is brilliant. The only false note is the chapter on youth and sexual mores in which Murphy comes off as a bit of a prig. But minor quibbles - this book is fantastic.

Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion by Charles Townshend. It's the centenary, so I figured what the hell. If you're not Irish, the first chapter or two is hard to follow because it assumes a certain familiarity with the "names" of the revolution. After that it's pretty good. Though after you learn how badly the rebels were led, you do sort of wonder how the Irish ever ended up with a country at all (answer: the British were stupider).

1916: A global history by Keith Jeffery. Meh. Twelve stories (one per month, but the relationship between the story and the month is sometimes tenuous) which show how the war was experienced in all the different parts of the world. Meant to be a corrective to a Western-Front-centric vew of the war. Sort of works.

The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young by Somini Sengupta. The author was TIME's correspondent in India in the mid 2000s and she stayed on there until recently, so it's quite current. Basically, her position is that since independence govt and the civil service have been out for themselves and have failed the general population, especially in matters of education. But she thinks the younger generation is much more demanding and that there is an expectations revolution going on - even as very traditional attitudes (especially around family and gender) remain. Subjects portrayed in the book range from Maoist rebels to young tech types (rare in India books - you tend to see one or the other). Not bad. A good book to read if you're heading there, I think.

Diploma Mills by AJ Angulo. I normally leave out my work-related reading from these summaries, but this one is short and accessible and might be of interest to some. It's an eyeopening look at the history of rip-off for profit post-secondary education (Ted Kennedy, for instance, was quite close to the owner of a nationwide chain of correspondence trucking schools in the 70s and early 80s and defended them in congress), which really goes back to the industrial revolution. Very interesting and less than 150 pages.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Phenomenal. Believe the hype.

The Guardians by Susan Pedersen. This won the Cundill Prize last year, and you can sort of see why. It would take a very well-written book indeed to make anyone give a flying fuck about the League of Nations' Mandates Committee, but this book does it more or less. partly, it's telling the story of individual mandates (the stories from New Guinea and Samoa were interesting), partly it's telling the story of the internationalization of discussions about "development" and colonialism, and partly it's telling the story about the drift to WWI (I had no idea that Chamberlain tried to distract Hitler with an offer of major colonies in Africa in early 1938).

The Iran-Iraq War by Pierre Razoux. I could have done without the pages and pages of the order of battle and who got which kind of tank when and from which arms dealer, but it's still a kind of fascinating read, especially the impossibly tangled diplomacy of it all. Also, it helps put Iranian govt behaviour in some kind of perspective - basically, they will do anything to avoid ever having to go through something like that again.

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

WOM wrote: Yes, I think Inca started that ball rolling. It was excellent, and I've passed it on to others who've enjoyed it.

Excellent.

[imp]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Anton Gramscescu wrote:

The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly. Ok, so this isn't the first shot Easterly's taken at the development industry or the World Bank. The title is terrible - he's not actually arguing that intl dev experts "cause" tyranny, he's arguing that they abet it, and he traces this mindset to a general racist, post-colonial mentality. He's got some good points to make here around political accountability around aid programs, but the broader attack on "expertise" doesn't hold much water, you ask me.

Agree with you on the misleading title, but I really enjoyed this - I loved his socio-economic history of that one building in New York and its changing uses down the decades, and I think his points about the importance of transparency and democracy for general prosperity, while not headline news, are worth repeating, and he repeats them well.

Agree with you too on Ferrante - discussed in another thread somewhere, I think. Still resisting volume three of the quartet just to continue enjoying the anticipation.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind.

Loved every page of this. Biskind takes a look at the life, times and movies roughly bracketed by the titular films (so, roughly '69 to '81). Good profiles of Hollywood and movie-making and bullshit and gossip through the tales of Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Bogdanovitch, and about a half-dozen others.