Really loved Samantha Harvey's the Western Wind - set in a fictional Somerset village in the 15th century over the course of four days preceding Shrove Tuesday. It's told in reverse from the discovery of a body in a river, with the local priest ordered to investigate who the culprit is via the confession box.
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And another recommendation - Broken River by J Robert Lennon. A murder house in upstate New York, internet sleuths, psychotic small-town weed dealers, and then a showpiece dysfunctional family as the main protagonists. With scads of post-modern musings on the role of the 'observer' - the writer or the reader or our overall Creator, perhaps. Insomnia's a pleasure when you've got a book like this to run to in the night.
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Originally posted by RobW View PostReally loved Samantha Harvey's the Western Wind - set in a fictional Somerset village in the 15th century over the course of four days preceding Shrove Tuesday. It's told in reverse from the discovery of a body in a river, with the local priest ordered to investigate who the culprit is via the confession box.
Anyway, i've put the book down cos I wasn't enjoying it, and started reading Hangover Square.
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Lately I’ve been reading sort of serendipitously, books stumbled across rather than sought out. Most I give up on after a few pages but one or two keep me reading.
A Chronicle of Small Beer: The Early Victorian Diaries of a Hertfordshire Brewer I mentioned briefly in the ‘Mundane’ thread a week or so back. I don’t know where it came from, neither does La Signora, but it was on our bookshelf. It’s one of those hobby-books that retired country gentleman once spent their twilight years writing. In this case someone called “Gerald Curtis, OBE, MA.,” whose wife, Decima, (naturally) was a descendent of John Pryor the brewer in question.
Pryor was probably a typical member of the early 19th century English squirearchy. He owned a successful brewery in Baldock, and over 300 acres of farmland around Walkern. Married twice he fathered seven children and lived into his eighties. What’s interesting to me is that the times he lived through were dramatic for a social order that had remained relatively unchanged for several hundred years. Land enclosure, the Poor Law, the coming of railways, rural policing, the potato blight are things we learned about in books, but Pryor recorded them, and their immediate consequences, as they happened. The Poor Law, for instance, broke the established, but unwritten, contract between landowner and worker that operated through each parish. Landowner’s would employ locals to work the fields. If they didn’t need them they gave the money they’d have earned to the Parish who employed them on community jobs such as road-building. The same money also provided housing for the indigent poor. After the Poor Law was introduced the parish was required to turn over these funds for the construction of workhouses in urban centres. So, as Curtis notes, “a crippled Walkern farmworker was now required to walk fifteen miles to Hertford, with his family in tow, to seek relief.”
The Third Person by Emily Anglin is altogether different. It’s an advance reading copy our local bookstore gave me because I’d bought three books, and it turned out to be more interesting than any of them. Nominally a collection of short stories it is, I think, more an exercise in narrative form. As the title suggests each book is both written in the third person, and the stories involve two people whose interactions are interrupted by a third. However, for me, each story also reads as the first chapter of a longer book. Some may find this frustrating — I did initially — as there’s no clear ending to any of the tales. However I began to see it as a baited hook. A challenge to the reader to take a story and run with it. Anglin’s done much of the hard work, so why not? I confess it’s tempting.
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Loved Hangover Square, but wished i'd read it 20 years ago, to shame into drinking less. Not that it will work now. Finished Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith, which was great, though I always struggle with science. Started reading Lucy Davis' The End of the Story.
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- Jul 2016
- 9390
- Dublin
- Bohemian FC Manchester United Mansfield town Torino Berwick rangers
- Chocolate Digestives
Being trying something different from usual recently,a work colleague loaned me Dubliners by James Joyce and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.
Joyce is rightly regarded as a brilliant writer but some of his stuff is pretty impenetrable,Dubliners is his most accessible book,short stories set in the city,mainly concerning deeply unhappy people who want something else in life but mostly have to settle.
The Dead,which finishes the book is one of the finest short stories I've ever read.
I tried Hosseini's book but could only get halfway through, I know Afghanistan has been a difficult place to live for a long time but the unrelenting grimness and particularly the graphic domestic violence just got to,I speed read through the second half so I know what happened in the end but just wasn't for me.
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Just finished Madeline Miller's Circe....The early exposition is worth getting through. Once the story actually gets going it's a bravura retelling of the legend. I was actually disappointed when it ended. I could have kept reading. And I reckon that's a mark of a good book. Keeping with the myth and legend vibe, I'm feeling brave enough to tackle The Once And Future King which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of months now.
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Originally posted by gt3 View PostJust finished Madeline Miller's Circe....The early exposition is worth getting through. Once the story actually gets going it's a bravura retelling of the legend. I was actually disappointed when it ended. I could have kept reading. And I reckon that's a mark of a good book. Keeping with the myth and legend vibe, I'm feeling brave enough to tackle The Once And Future King which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of months now.
Warning - I remember the third section of OAFK, The Ill Made Knight, as one of the gloomiest pieces of literature I've ever read. The first part was mostly a delight, though as I recall the author's high modernist snobbery towards the masses does show through rather in parts (in particular where Wart experiences life as an ant).
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I'm a sucker for myths and sword and sorcery. The legends that Miller fills Circe with were very familiar from my childhood - and John William Waterhouse's paintings so it felt like wrapping myself in a comfort blanket. But I hope that doesn't put you off delicatemoth. You don't have to be familiar with the legends to enjoy the book. The writing is lyrical and full of wonderful moments - "...living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different colour, a different foam-capped height, but always the same relentless intensity pulling towards the horizon..." And the action sequences, the jeopardy and excitement is really well drawn. I looked forward to picking it up.
As for TOAFK, I'm reading it having read H is for Hawk and The Goshawk. So, I'm aware of White's snobbery. But H is for Hawk draws a very sympathetic portrait of White. Wart's and all so to speak! H is for Hawk is well worth a read in any event but especially so for its insight into White.
If you're interested in learning more about the snobbery of the late Victorian/early 20th century writers, I can highly recommend John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. I can't do better than quote from the blurb on the back - "...[Carey] shows how early-twentieth intellectuals imagined the 'masses' as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, DH Lawrence, EM Forster, Virginia Woolf, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, WB Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler"
So, I'd submit that White sits within that class (word used in both senses) of early 20th century. And when you realise that, his writing and politics become contextualised.
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Originally posted by RobW View PostLoved Hangover Square, but wished i'd read it 20 years ago, to shame into drinking less. Not that it will work now. Finished Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith, which was great, though I always struggle with science. Started reading Lucy Davis' The End of the Story.
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Originally posted by Lucia Lanigan View PostCurrent Reading - Books best thread
Ferdinand Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. The idea's great - assembled fragments written under various heteronyms that amount to a kind of anti-book which reflects more closely your experience of life - but each one of these characters is saying exactly the same thing: "*sigh*, I'm a bit separate from it all". It ain't that deep, just a bit enervating. There's been a whole world of fuss made about this guy but I'm about ready to bail.
Also had Volume 3 of Orwell's essays along (1943-45), so at least I had something else to turn to. Not as great as Volume 2 - he sounds constantly bored with the war, and attacks the same targets over and over again (Tories, fascists, communists, pacifists, nut-job leftists, believers in the after-life). But every page contains something worth reading, every column and review is at the very least interesting, at best funny, enlightening and entertaining. These works are so valuable to me that I've considered paying a stupid amount for the four hardcover originals on Ebay to replace my battered paperbacks, bought for a dollar each second-hand some years ago at Chevy Chase library. But I can't justify paying the amount asked for just four books.
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- Jul 2016
- 9390
- Dublin
- Bohemian FC Manchester United Mansfield town Torino Berwick rangers
- Chocolate Digestives
After my recent toe dip into more highbrow literature I'm back at my level, I recently finished THE HITLER DIARIES by Robert Harris. I had a vague recollection of the whole affair but reading it was an eye opener on how stupid,vain and greedy people in positions of power really can be,it takes stupidity of the highest order that cunts like David Irving and Rupert Murdoch come out of whole affair as the sensible ones.
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Supermarket by Bobby Hall / Logic.
Now, how should I put this...uh....this is the sort of book I admire. Full props to him for pulling it off. Fuck it if you can't write; just write anyway. It's outsider art. It's punk. It'll have people reading...who don't normally read. All that good stuff. And I mean all that. Good for you Bobby / Logic. You've done something neat.
You've also pulled off a literary heist. Your book is dogshit. It's terrible. (Yet it's a #1 bestseller!). It's a book about writing, about supermarkets and about mental illness written by a guy who doesn't understand the first thing about writing, supermarkets or mental illness.
Bobby / Logic is a DJ or rapper or something, and 'after a week of binge-reading great literature, decided to try writing a book himself'. And it shows. A book called Supermarket, about a guy writing a book called Supermarket which he's researching by working in a supermarket. And it gets worse from there. Yes, there's a love interest. Yes, there's an antagonist. Yes, there's a narrator / hero. And there's a story and plot and action and all that. There's also some of the worst writing I've ever read. There's also about a million instances of glaring stupidity (i.e., the armed guards come to pick up the store's receipts once a month...totaling $100,000. Now, I'm guessing that just a bit of research would show that grocery stores do about $100,000 a day, and that the armed guards do daily pickups. But that's quibbling.)
Bobby / Logic also breaks the fourth wall from time to time for no apparent reason. But hey, style. He also has issues with standard narration. At one point, our hero and his doctor are walking in the garden of a mental hospital [of course they are] and sit down on a bench. Within a sentence or two, they 'continue talking as they walk in the garden'. But...but...they just sat down.
Dialogue is stilted. Everyone is over-expository pretty much all the time. People say 'haha' when something they say is funny. It's breathtaking at times.
In the end, resolution. It makes no sense. Literally, it just makes no sense. There's a mental illness twist that defies all logic or reason or medical basis. But the books ends, so I suppose that's something.
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The Wall, John Lanchester - oddly unsatisfying dystopia. A bit flat and unengaging.
Cage of Souls, Adrian Tchaikovsky - China Mieville-lite (a little bit Iron Council, a little bit Scar). Reasonable read.
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine - space politics. Not bad.
Wakenhyrst, Michelle Paver - gothic mystery, less horror/supernatural than her previous (excellent) Dark Matter and Thin Air. Good characterisation.
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