Current Reading - Books best thread

[jameswba]

I bought Assembly by Natasha Brown in our local bookshop a couple of weeks ago. It had a bit to live up to, as I don't think I've ever seen quite so many positive review excerpts on a book cover before.

It centres around a successful young woman of Jamaican descent, who observes and documents the racism around her. It's about assimilating (the word is used with spitting contempt) into a society that puts signs on vans telling you to go home.

The narrator has just gained a promotion at work, 'because of diversity initiatives', as one of her passed-over male colleagues tells her. She is also about to spend the weekend at her boyfriends' parents country estate. They are celebrating a wedding anniversary and her presence will help them burnish their liberal credentials. She is in no doubt, however, that much of the family wealth is attributable to slavery.

She is also ill. Paradoxically, it is this, rather than money, success or aristocratic connections, that seems to give her most agency over her own life.

It's a slim book, at only 100 pages, and a technically interesting one, a kind of collage made up of snapshots of the narrator's own life, the history of slavery, and the everyday experience of black people in Britain.

The narration is (very deliberately) distant and impersonal. It will say more about me than about the book if that means I struggle to remember it in a few months time.

[Incandenza]

Recently read The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman one after the other. I had started Either/Or and after about 30 pages I got the sense that it was the sequel, so I found out that The Idiot came first. They are about a young woman at Harvard named Selin, who comes from a Turkish family and was the first one born in the US, and it's about her entering the adult world and all of that.

The author, Elif Batuman, is also a Turkish-American woman who went to Harvard, and the books are set in the mid/late 1990s, when she was also in college. Draw whatever connections you will from that.

Selin is a very funny narrator. I found The Idiot a bit frustrating in parts because of her decisions, same with Either/Or, but I really enjoyed both of them and I hope there are more books to come about her.

[Sam]

Ah, thanks for the reminder about that, WOM. I heard about it just before it came out and wanted to wait until the Kindle price dropped a bit, but forgot to add it to my wish list.

[WOM]

Just finished The Wager by David Grann, he of The Lost City of Z and Killers of The Flower Moon.

A marvellous ship/ shipwreck / mutiny / survival tale, deeply researched and expertly told. Very much recommended.

[Gangster Octopus]

Cold Comfort Farm is excellent.

[jameswba]

Around Christmas time, I spotted Enbury Heath by Stella Gibbons in our local independent bookshop. I knew of Gibbons as the author of Cold Comfort Farm, but I'd never read that, nor been aware of anything else she'd written. The premise of Enbury Heath was interesting enough though, so I bought it.

It starts off with a sister (20) and brother (about to turn 16) at their father's funeral. We learn that the father - a drinker and serial adulterer - had been the indirect cause of the mother's death six months earlier. Another brother is absent from the funeral, but a parade of relatives, some overbearing, some dissolute, are present. Everyone is curious about the dead man's will, and some of the older relatives are keen to control the siblings' lives and finances for them.

The siblings, believing they have a unique bond, find themselves in a position to snub their uncles and aunts in favour of renting a cottage together.

It's set in the 30s, so the Depression, though rarely referred to directly, casts a shadow, as does the suburbanisation of the areas around London. Sofia, the sister, tries to convince herself she's living a rural life, with her descriptions of walks on the heath and references to the 'village', but signs of the city closing in are everywhere. More widely, so are signs of a reality less pleasant than her youthful imagination had allowed for.

Definitely worth a read, and it's pushed Cold Comfort Farm up my list of priorities.

[imp]

Reading Directorate S by Steve Coll, about the US and the CIA inside Pakistan and Afghanistan, 2001-2016. It's a dense read at 680-odd pages, but forensically researched and endlessly fascinating and educative. I've been on it for a month, though, and still have around 300 pages to go - the level of concentration required to keep track of all the intelligence and governmental organisations and the individuals within means that I usually fall asleep after about two or three pages...

[RobW]

Started reading my recent birthday presents, so have already finished Working Class Heroes: The Story of Rayo Vallecano which is helpful regarding the history of the club, mixed with various match reports and stories from the 2017/17 season when they had been relegated to the Segunda. I'd have liked a bit more history, but it isn't a long book.
Have started The Basque History of the World which I did ask for, but now realise I bought it on kindle for 99p last year. Oops.

I finished The Basque History of the World at the weekend. Very interesting and excellent overview. Onto John Robb's history of goth music now.

[delicatemoth]

Circe by Madeline Miller. It's great. The Times quote on the front describes it as "blisteringly modern", which is true (in a good way). It is also beautifully clean and clear, and a joy to read.

[Sam]

Interested to hear what you make of [Milkman]; I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought/hoped I was going to, but couldn't put my finger on why. Didn't click with the style perhaps.

It's taking me a while, partly because it sends me to sleep even when I think I'm not that tired at night (which, given my recent sleeping patterns, is not an unwelcome effect). It feels a bit like a narration searching for a story at the moment, and is reminding me a lot of Extinction from a month or two ago, albeit it's not as irritating as that. Maybe it'll pick up ...

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Finally getting around to 'Remain in Love'; by Chris Frantz, one of 15 unread music books piled in my office.....

Currently reading this too, having picked it up in the White Rabbit sale towards the end of last year.

Last night I read the bit where they are staying at the Portobello Hotel on the 1977 Ramones tour, and he says the night barman was Damon Albarn, who was telling him he was in a band too. That would be Damon Albarn who would have been nine years old at the time. I was starting to do the whole "if he's got that wrong what else has he got wrong", but a quick Google search brings up an interview from the book launch in 2020 where he owns up to it being what he claims is the book's sole error (they did meet, but in 1988). It could have been easily edited out for the paperback release though.

[Jobi1]

Friends bought me this non-fiction best-seller a week or so ago and I've been devouring it in spare moments ever since. Very good indeed, and I've learnt some pretty fundamental things from it about life on earth:

Entangled Life - Wikipedia

If you're enjoying that, I'd highly recommend Guy Shrubsole's The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which I think I mentioned up-thread when I read it a year or two ago.

I'm now reading Milkman by Anna Burns.

Interested to hear what you make of that – I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought/hoped I was going to, but couldn't put my finger on why. Didn't click with the style perhaps.

Staying on that particular island, I've just finished Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín. The premise is fairly self-explanatory – taking a look at the fathers of those literary heavyweights to give a little more colour and context to their origins. An interesting look at Dublin society of the era too. I enjoyed it, and it's relatively short so doesn't get too heavy, and auld Colm himself can certainly turn a phrase.

Also this week finally got round to reading Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant, which is performing strongly at all of this year's poetry awards. It's a fascinating idea (putting Othello into contemporary locations situations, as Allen-Paisant himself), but I didn't quite connect with it in the way I did for example with Seán Hewitt's latest collection, I guess just because it's not my life experience (while Hewitt's – gay, Northern-born, half-Irish book dweeb, basically me – definitely is), but nonetheless the writing is very, very good, and the collection deserves all the accolades coming it's way.

[scratchmonkey]

Finished The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison. It takes the form of switching between two main characters, who have a relationship where they can't quite connect with each other, within the greater context of being "lost people" in the sense that they have little to no connection to anybody else, or a role to play in a post-Brexit British society portrayed as a kind of a hollow egg, a collection of shifting backdrops to late-stage capitalism and reactionary back-constructions, with an underlying theme of conspiracy and secret lives loosely based on Lovecraft's Innsmouth mythos. A large portion of the writing is spent on geography, you could make the case that the River Severn and the Thames are prominent secondary characters, and while the book has quite a lot to say about broader society, it does it all within the interiority of the two main characters and especially their disconnection from themselves and the world at large. Not for anybody who needs a book to be tightly plotted or for events to be clearly laid out.

[Sam]

Finished Inside Qatar the other night. It is very good indeed, as imp rightly said. Highly recommended.

I'm now reading Milkman by Anna Burns.

[Patrick Thistle]

I've just finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

It made me feel very sad. What he might have done if he had lived longer.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Fucking Hemingway, don't get me started. When I read For Whom the Bell Tolls, I was staggered. This macho crap is what people have been raving about for decades?

Finished it during my recent flight to Tijuana. Once the story kicked in, it was predictable. Due to the solo narrative, it was clunky. Worst of all, the old man is a dumb decision maker, of course the sharks were going to attack the marlin.

[via vicaria]

I've been reading Satantango, the novel which (I'm led to believe) has been pretty much unchanged in Bela Tarr's critically acclaimed 7 hour film*. (I think at least one of our cinephile members - DD, Nef or Felicity - has seen the film)

I really tried my best with that one, but something just didn't connect. It was a few years back so I should maybe give it another go - definitely a book I should love, so it was surprising when I didn't.

Currently reading Mud Sweeter Than Honey, a book which collects oral histories and general stories from those who lived through Albania's Hoxha years. Loving it at the moment.

[Etienne]

I enjoyed the Basque History of the World

[RobW]

Started reading my recent birthday presents, so have already finished Working Class Heroes: The Story of Rayo Vallecano which is helpful regarding the history of the club, mixed with various match reports and stories from the 2017/17 season when they had been relegated to the Segunda. I'd have liked a bit more history, but it isn't a long book.
Have started The Basque History of the World which I did ask for, but now realise I bought it on kindle for 99p last year. Oops.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Friends bought me this non-fiction best-seller a week or so ago and I've been devouring it in spare moments ever since. Very good indeed, and I've learnt some pretty fundamental things from it about life on earth:

Entangled Life - Wikipedia

[ad hoc]

I've been reading Satantango, the novel which (I'm led to believe) has been pretty much unchanged in Bela Tarr's critically acclaimed 7 hour film*. (I think at least one of our cinephile members - DD, Nef or Felicity - has seen the film)

The book is one of those challenging bit incredibly rewarding novels. The sentences are incredibly long and winding, which sometimes makes them difficult but creates an amazing sense of pace and inevitability. It's absolutely riveting. The first 6 chapters create this amazing sense of place and approaching storm (the one about the doctor is one of the most brilliant things I've read, ever). The second 6 (apparently the forward 6 backward 6 is the tango of the title - I don't know enough about the dance to really understand this structure) I'm halfway into and I'm still gripped (though to a large extent the climax of the novel is in the centre).

*the one thing I can't really work out about this "unchanged" thing is that the film , made in the mid 90s, is often mentioned as a portrayal of post-communist societal collapse, whereas the novel was written in the early 80s, decidedly not post-communist in Hungary.

[imp]

Fucking Hemingway, don't get me started. When I read For Whom the Bell Tolls, I was staggered. This macho crap is what people have been raving about for decades?

I've just devoured Rona Jaffe's 1958 pre-feminist classic The Best of Everything. She was in her mid-20s when she wrote it, it was her debut novel, and it sold millions, mainly to women who for the first time could enjoy an accessible writer who identified with the chauvinistic shit they had to put up with every day. It's set in the NY office world, starting in 1952, and centres around four women who work at a trashy book publisher. Apparently, men at the time didn't like the way they were portrayed. It's very telling that in Mad Men, there's a scene where Don Draper's reading the book in bed - there's a lot of this novel in Mad Men, so that was a clearly a grateful nod of acknowledgment. Which reminds me that I must go back and finally watch the last few series. I stopped around series 5 or 6 a decade ago (possibly longer - these things always take me a while), but so much of it has stayed with me that I don't think I'll have a problem picking it back up.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Started reading "The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway at the weekend. It's the first Hemingway I've read and I was expecting pace, action and adventure. But the first 20 pages have been Paulo Coelho style wishy washy bollocks. I can't see how it's going to improve, but will crack on as its only 100 pages long.

[Jobi1]

Finished Isaac and the Egg by Bobby Palmer last night, a really interesting piece of work. Not easy to describe without giving too much away, but it centres around a man (Isaac) struggling to process severe grief after the loss of a loved one, while also dealing with what appears to be an alien presence. It's funny and surreal in places, but achingly sad in others. The story itself is perhaps a little predictable (to describe it as a traumatic, adult E.T. is a bit reductive, but... yeah), but Palmer has a really nice touch, and the balance between silly and sad is pretty much spot on I'd say.

[imp]

I reviewed it for Soccer America, but may well have pasted the review in on the World Cup forum, where we were all talking about how we never read books about the World Cup when there's a World Cup actually on, thus exposing decades of publishers' folly that they surprisingly took no notice of - there's a batch of European Championship-related books ready for market.