Current Reading - Books best thread

[ad hoc]

I think he was a very well known poet in Hungary before the war (and Hungarians love their poets), and then again after it (until he fell foul of the communist regime).

[Satchmo Distel]

'Goldstein' by Volker Kutscher, third book in the Gereon Rath (Babylon Berlin) series. I'm only halfway through and taking it at a leisurely pace. It's solid on procedurals but you get the odd breakthrough that requires a suspension of disbelief that Rath could have reached that deduction so quickly. An underlying melancholy is knowing what's coming for the Jewish police officers in the long run.

I think it's better not to think about how this might translate into the TV series. Enjoy the fact that it's a different art form.

My other reading is academic, inevitably at this time of year. I'm still learning tons about my subject despite starting on it nearly 40 years ago; but that's partly because Sociology has only recently become racially and sexually diverse so missing perspectives are now being filled in and expanded (and thus partly explains why the backlash against CRT and queer theory in Florida is happening now, specifically: white straight supremacy reacting to the new visibility of POC and queer scholars and activists).

[ursus arctos]

I think he was a very well known poet in Hungary before the war (and Hungarians love their poets), and then again after it (until he fell foul of the communist regime).

Ah, I was misled by the sheer length of his career (he only died in 2006, having been born before WWI)

Then it is likely down to diaspora dynamics. I wonder what my collaborationist German teacher thought of him.

[Sam]

Having read books about the history of Kabul and the history of concentration camps back to back, I need something a bit lighter now, so tonight I'll be starting a short one called If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura (translated by Eric Selland).

Got a few pages in and it turns out the narrator of this novel is telling us the tale of the last week of his life, after he's diagnosed with a serious and untreatable brain tumour. I really know how to pick 'em.

[imp]

A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba - a beautiful, reflective, poetic work, exquisitely translated by Lisa Dillman. Several chapters start with the kind of opening line you usually get from the best short story writers:

"Chronicles and narratives are like maps. On the one hand, you have the bold solid colours of the continents - collective episodes that everyone remembers - and on the other, the depths of private emotions, the oceans."

[steveeeeeeeee]

Currently reading "The Lonely City" by Olivia Laing, it's really good. Laing finds herself alone, in New York, after a relationship breaks down and she drifts from sofa to sub-let apartment, unable to connect with anyone in the city. While documenting this, she describes similar loneliness amongst artists associated with New York, I've just finished the chapter on David Wojnarowicz, who I'd never heard of, but it was really fascinating stuff.

Laing is probably my favourite writer and journalist at the moment, she writes high-brow stuff in a very accessible and readable way. In contrast to Iain Sinclair, who approaches similar subject matters, but in a way I struggle to read or fully understand.

[Sam]

I finished If Cats Disappeared from the World on Tuesday night. There's some dark humour scattered throughout but on reflection, given the title, it shouldn't really have surprised me that the last couple of chapters had me close to choking up. It's very touching, a little sentimental but also quite silly, and the narrator matures quite impressively from seeming basically a bit of a selfish arse at first (to my mind, anyway) into a much nicer person by the end.

Tonight I'm going to start Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.

[Sporting]

Tonight I'm going to start Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.

Have you read her other books? If not then you're in for a treat, albeit an unsettling one.

[Sam]

No, this will be my first Highsmith. I was expecting someone to post something along the lines you just did, though, from what I've heard about her work.

[Sporting]

You will love the Ripley novels.

[Jobi1]

I've just started another attempt at A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells. I was supposed to read it on my uni course 20-odd years ago but gave up after about a page and a half as it just seemed old and boring, and it's been sitting accusingly on my bookshelf ever since. Made it a bit further last night at least, but have no idea what's supposed to be going on. I'm sure (or I hope) all will eventually become clear.

Can confirm my first instinct 20+ years ago was correct – it really was not an enjoyable read.

On my first day of a much-needed holiday today, kicking off the reading with Seán Hewitt's fiction-style memoir All Down Darkness Wide, which I've really been looking forward to.

[Satchmo Distel]

Currently reading "The Lonely City" by Olivia Laing, it's really good. Laing finds herself alone, in New York, after a relationship breaks down and she drifts from sofa to sub-let apartment, unable to connect with anyone in the city. While documenting this, she describes similar loneliness amongst artists associated with New York, I've just finished the chapter on David Wojnarowicz, who I'd never heard of, but it was really fascinating stuff.

Laing is probably my favourite writer and journalist at the moment, she writes high-brow stuff in a very accessible and readable way. In contrast to Iain Sinclair, who approaches similar subject matters, but in a way I struggle to read or fully understand.

I've just started reading her on this recommendation. She's fantastic. Many thanks.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Thanks for that Satchmo! Glad my recommendation proved fruitful. Another friend of mine has started reading Lonely City and is enjoying it too. She had a big feature in The Observer last week, interviewing Jarvis Cocker, but I still haven't go around to reading it, might try tonight.

[Satchmo Distel]

Laing's "Everybody: A Book About Freedom" is one of the best things I've read in the last few years. Amazing and full of teachable ideas.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I'm fully booked up! Halfway through Infinite Jest, about a third of the way through The Arabian Nights, and well into Happy Trails To You by Julie Hecht. The Hecht and Wallace I'll finish fairly soon, The Nights might take another year or so, but that's fine. A few pages a week, fully tasted and savoured are just right.

[Jobi1]

All Down Darkness Wide is absolutely incredible. Needs to come with a huge trigger warning, focusing as it does mainly around the traumatic experience of living with a partner who's going through severe mental health difficulties, but the capturing of that is so incredibly powerful. There's something I really love about prose written by people who are usually poets by trade – beautifully lyrical, all words chosen so carefully.

[Etienne]

The owner of the best Indian restaurant in Oswestry (Simla) has invited me to a do next weekend put on to celebrate his niece's book being published. I thought I'd better read it, but was pleasantly surprised by how good it was. The Halfways by Nilopar Uddin. The titular Halfways being three women caught in various degrees of Westernisation from their Bangladeshi roots.

[jameswba]

Currently reading "The Lonely City" by Olivia Laing, it's really good. Laing finds herself alone, in New York, after a relationship breaks down and she drifts from sofa to sub-let apartment, unable to connect with anyone in the city. While documenting this, she describes similar loneliness amongst artists associated with New York, I've just finished the chapter on David Wojnarowicz, who I'd never heard of, but it was really fascinating stuff.

Laing is probably my favourite writer and journalist at the moment, she writes high-brow stuff in a very accessible and readable way. In contrast to Iain Sinclair, who approaches similar subject matters, but in a way I struggle to read or fully understand.

She sounds interesting. The precis of her first book, the one following the Ouse and reflecting on Virginia Woolf definitely reminds me of the idea behind Sinclair's Edge of the Orison, which traces John Clare's escape to Northamptonshire from a 'mental asylum' in Epping.

I've read four Sinclair books, including Rodinsky's Room, co-written with Rachel Liechtenstein and about the mysterious disappearance of a Jewish man from a room above a synagogue in Whitechapel. Liechtenstein actually solves the mystery while Sinclair pontificates on it in ways that make everything seem more obscure than perhaps they need be.

[steveeeeeeeee]

I've only read London Orbital, but also read lots of stuff in London Review of Books. I think he's got worse with the challenging-to-read aspect of his writing. He's clearly a great thinker, in relation to modern culture and politics, and you want to go on those journeys of though with him, but it's too much hard work to be fully rewarding

[Sam]

While reading Strangers on a Train I've made up a nonsense song of the same title, to the tune of 'Strangers in the Night'. It's now got to the point where I can make my girlfriend blurt out a half-annoyed, half-trying-not-laugh 'Oh shut up!' after humming half a bar of it.

Sample lyrics:

Strangers on a train
Staring out the window
Looking at the rain
Asking one another
Will we meet again?
Oooh, those strangers on a train ...

[Jobi1]

Tackling another one that has been sitting unread on the shelf for a long auld time, the collected tales of Nikolai Gogol. Enjoyably bonkers so far...

[ursus arctos]

Virtually every Russian I know has told me that Gogol cannot be translated, but I have still enjoyed his work in translation

[RobW]

Started my first Wodehouse this morning, Thank You, Jeeves.

[Jobi1]

Virtually every Russian I know has told me that Gogol cannot be translated, but I have still enjoyed his work in translation

Always the with reading in translation I guess; you have to just take it in good faith that the translator has done a faithfully good job. I'm enjoying this one (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Granta) – the language is accessible and dare I say it quite fun. It seems to have had some pretty decent reviews.

[Discordant Resonance]

Just finished Hanya Yanagihara's latest, To Paradise, and must confess to finding it rather disappointing. The book is divided into three sections, each set in successive centuries, and suffers from the usual deficiencies inherent in a "concept novel", namely, that some of the more interesting plot elements appear to get rather short shrift, while others tend to drag interminably. The author seems to be trying to replicate Cloud Atlas by carrying character names over throughout the sections, but unlike in Mitchell's oeuvre, the plots and concepts never really knit together, and the work ultimately proves a 700-page mass of fragmented novellas, to the frustration of the reader.