Current Reading - Books best thread

[Jimski]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ooh, no What A Carve Up! is excellent. My favourite Coe is The Rotter's Club, but for me What A Carve Up! runs The House of Sleep close as his next best.

The only one of his I thought disappointing was The Closed Circle.

Funnily enough, I'm currently close to being finished his latest, The rain Before It Falls, which is a definite return to form.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

What A Carve Up is certainly the most overtly political/satirical of Coe's books but it's also brilliantly plotted and has a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments (for me, anyway). I thought Accidental Woman was okay but nothing special. It was his first novel but the fifth one I read by him so maybe that's what underwhelmed me.

I haven't read any of the others either.

[Jimski]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I think his earlier ones are slighter than 'the big three' but still very enjoyable reads.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Finished Farewell, My Lovely and I'm now onto The Long Goodbye. After that I'll probably have to get down with some MORE spy fiction and read Our Man In Havana, on account of I'm going there in three weeks!

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Enthralled with Why Art Cannot Be Taught by James Elkins, though I realise it won't be of much interest to anyone not involved in art education. Also dipping into the gorgeous Lucas Cranach catalogue from the spring exhibition at the RA. Bedtime reading is Big Money by P.G. Wodehouse. Perfect to nod off with, the plot is tissue thin so there's no worry about forgetting anything, or losing the place, but every page has at least one hilarious paragraph to guarantee you'll fall asleep with a smile on your face.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, which I always feel I skimmed through waaaaay too fast the first time I read it.

I keep picking up A Secular Age at the local bookstore and thinking I really should read this.

And then I remember my classes with Taylor and how infrequently I really understood what the hell he was on about and realizing how little I would likely enjoy it.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I thought Being Dead was awful, I'm afraid.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Waitwaitwaitwait...

AG, you were taught by Taylor.

Fucking hell, SR got taught by Bernard Williams, Inca or Reed by Rorty, and UA by Quine.

I feel all behumbled.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

The equivalent of two full-year courses as an undergrad, yeah. But it was wasted on me, unfortunately.

He taught this great first-year course with two other profs - Jim Tully (who has something of a name in Canada) and James Booth (now at Vanderbilt). They'd pick three texts each term (starting with Plato and ending with Arendt) and just argue about them in front of 150 kids. Tully and Booth were comprehensible, but Taylor's mind was working several levels above where the students were. so you could see his mind whirring along quickly in these discussions and he was just grabbing little bits and pieces of it he thought we might understand. There were nuggets in there, but it could come across as a little disjointed.

Lovely man, though.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm getting stuck into Stephen Pinker's The Stuff Of Thought (fascinating so far) and limiting myself to one helping of What Ho! The Best of P.G. Wodehouse per day. The extract from The Clicking Of Cuthbert with the Russian novelist is my favourit so far.

[Andy C]

Current Reading - Books best thread

PG Wodehouse not bad.

I've just finished Hot Water as it happens, one of the very best of his novels that don't belong to a series.

In parallel I've been tackling The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century story of life in and around the Japanese court written by Murasaki Shikibu. It's heavy going for a number of reasons. Though I'm reading a modern translation, it remains highly stylised. Most of the meaningful exchanges between characters centre upon allusions to Chinese poetry and contain symbolism and wordplay that seems largely lost to the reader in my situation, despite the translator's footnotes. It's also difficult to understand the characters' motivations and morals because the world of the book is so far removed from our own. It's a polygamous society, and the treatment of women both before and after they're seduced is really difficult to understand. The protocols of things like gift-giving and visiting are wholly alien to the modern. western reader. It's pretty much assumed that the reader is familiar with the structures and hierarchy of the court and surrounding society - very much an unwarranted assumption in my case. And it doesn't do enough to help me understand from this great remove the society that it depicts - I don't feel I'm learning very much at all about the way that the Japan of the time worked or what it was like to live in it.

The biggest problem of it is that it's incredibly samey. For the most part it's a litany of affairs, with pretty much the same sequence of events each time: manoevering to get into the woman's (or her relations') favour, the brief contact, and the subsequent responsibility for the taken woman.

Having said all that it remains a remarkable work. The claims made for it that it's the world's first novel are debatable; nevertheless it's an astonishingly accomplished piece of work for one with so few, if any, precedents. It's very long - nearly 1200 pages in the version I'm tackling - and covers a span of maybe seventy years, and yet the consistency with which the author handles the many characters is remarkable. They all age at exactly the same rate, for example.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Aye. Not good, but not bad.

[Kowalski]

Current Reading - Books best thread

John Dos Passos's Manhatten Transfer - I like so far.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Loving the Charles Taylor, and I've just started into William Gaddis' Carpenters' Gothic. A hell of a lot lighter than The Recognitions, but physically and (so far) in tone, but great fun.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I need to get hold of everything Raymond Chandler's ever written. The Long Goodbye is absolutely ruddy brilliant.

I'm now on Our Man In Havana in preparation for my holidays (12 days and counting), and it's quite comfortably the silliest book I've read all year. Very enjoyable indeed.

[ursus arctos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Sam, you need this and this.

But what you really need is to go to Los Angeles and have Inca show you what it's all about.

Impressively obscure pick from Bruno (and one Mann that I haven't read). As much as I may decry their club allegiances, I'm genuinely thrilled that Bruno and SixMartlets are around to disprove the universal applicability of general stereotypes of Milanisti and Juventini.

[ursus arctos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Is it Stephen Mitchell? He's the Paolo Maldini of translators of German into English.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Carpenter's Gothic was dazzling, and hilarious. Much easier to follow than The Recognitions, but without the same erudite depth. I'm about to start Slaughterhouse Five.

The Taylor is utterly great. Incredibly wide-ranging, incredibly learned, incredibly provocative. It's really a major, major work of philosophy.

[ursus arctos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I tried Zauberberg auf Deutsch.

I didn't make it to the first base camp . . .

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

ursus arctos wrote:

Sam, you need this and this.

Thanks, Ursus. Think I'll stick to Amazon UK though. My Christ, books are expensive in the States!

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Our Man In Havana finished (and watched the film with my brother last night). Pity about the final couple of chapters, which are a bit of a rubbish end to an otherwise very good book.

I'm now onto Huckleberry Finn, which I think I've probably read before but can't remember, and I can't have read all of it (an abridged kiddies' version, possibly. I've definitely seen it on stage).

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I loved The Magic Mountain, and intended to reread it like Mann says. But shortly after finishing, I had a serious lung disease, which necessitated an ever-lengthening stay in a ward up at the top of an old hospital. I'm really not sure about going back.

Am loving Slaughterhouse 5, though it's not on the same level as Breakfast of Champions. Yet.

Finished the Taylor, which was nothing at all short of magnificent, and am now reading Freud's "Dora" and "Little Hans" case studies.

[Jimski]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm about 100 pages into Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, and finding it very very good so far.

[JtS]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm reading Frequent Flyer by Kinky Friedman, the writing is ok, but the storyline isn't all that at the moment.

[Fatter Hipper]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'd recommend Sirens of Titan, toro toro. An incredible read that builds and builds and ties together everything perfectly at the end, despite it all seeming rather disparate and all-over-the-place on the way there.

I've just read two books in one sitting, which I don't think I've done before. The first was 'Lathe of Heaven' by Ursula Le Guin, who's one of my favourite authors. A good read, although not in the same league as Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. The premise is good (a man who changes the world with his dreams is used by a utopian scientist) but it's a little clunky in places (the scientist is called Haber- Habermas- and the dreamer is George Orr). The end doesn't quite work either, but I'd still recommend it to anyone after some intelligent sci-fi.

The other was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I know there was a long thread about it on the old board, and I'm afraid I have to join the 'don't get the fuss' group. A great page-turner and a good account of father/son relationship, but I found it very underwhelming overall. I was riveted, but never shocked, never appalled and didn't have my faith in the power of humanity restored like all the reviews told me I would.

It seemed to be in a strange limbo between Samuel Beckett (the old man tapping his cane talking in semi-riddles was straight out of Waiting for Godot) and that ITV post-apocalypse drama 'The Last Train' from about 1998.

I actually think it might make a better film than it did book- and I hear Viggo Mortenson's playing 'Man', so I've reasonably high hopes for that.