Current Reading - Books best thread

[Amor de Cosmos]

What AdeC said (the book being The Dawn of Everything).

It's my "morning book." Savoured in small doses over coffee, while explaining it's virtues to curious café customers, (the large red type on and orange cover are a masterpiece of marketing.) I'm about half way through. It's hard to pick out particular specifics, but — probably because I live where I do — I found the description of the social and cultural schism between Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest (compared to Mafiosi) and those of California (Puritans.) You have to have the context to see why it makes sense. Overall it does make me realise just how fundamentally Eurocentric a subject anthropology has been, pretty much from it's inception.

[Sam]

I'm about quarter of the way through. It's one of those works that makes you want to grab everyone you meet by the collar and plead "You really gotta read this, you really do!"

What AdeC said (the book being The Dawn of Everything).

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Anyway, I've just finished Agent Sonya by espionage non-fiction specialist Ben Macintyre, a biography of the Soviet agent Ursula Kuczinsky (born 1907 into a wealthy left wing intellectual German Jewish family, and active in Soviet espionage in China/Manchuria, Poland, Switzerland and - as Klaus Fuchs' handler - rural Oxfordshire, before escaping to live out the rest of her life in East Berlin when Fuchs confessed to MI5). I realise I'm not adding much here by recommending a best-seller by a serial best-seller writer, but it really was a cracking read*. Wonderful true life story told very well by a good writer.

* after a slow start: her childhood and early days in German Communist political circles are not particularly exciting, but it really gets going when she and her husband move to China.

[San Bernardhinault]

Yeah. It’s a really compelling book.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

yes, Bad Blood is a hell of a page-turner. Read it a few years ago. I think there was some brief discussion of it either on here or on the Theranos thread in World.

[RobW]

I remembered why I don't read that much fiction. It's because i'm never that bowled over by books other people think are great. Anyway, started reading Bad Blood; Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup which is good timing as I understand Elizabeth Holmes' trial is near finished. It's a real page turner at the moment but fear i'll lose track of all the individuals involved.

[Incandenza]

Quickly read Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller, who has worked on Radiolab and now does a science podcast for NPR. It's partly about David Starr Jordan, who attempted to name and classify every single fish before becoming president of Stanford and then later one of America's biggest proponents for eugenics, partly a memoir, and partly about persistence and how to keep going in the face of disaster and an uncaring world.

[Sam]

Finished The Mermaid of Black Conch today. Wonderful stuff. Highly recommended.

It might be the last book I finish in 2020, for later I shall be starting The Dawn of Everything.

[imp]

Years ago, people on here recommended Roberto Bolano, and finally a couple of years ago I scored a cheap second-hand copy of The Savage Detectives. And the other day, I finally started it and am really enjoying it - though only 60 pages in. Does it stay the course?

[hobbes]

Piranesi is rather good.

Just finished Leviathan Falls (the final novel in The Expanse series.)
They certainly nailed the landing.

[RobW]

Started reading Piranesi by Susannah Clarke. Likely the only contemporary fiction i've read this year. Enjoying it so far. I say this every year, but I really should read more fiction.

[Sam]

Next up: Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch.

About a third of the way into this now, and it is magnificent.

[ale]

The Survivors-Alex Schulman. Tale set in Sweden. Three brothers reunite to scatter mother ashes at holiday home that a cataclysmic event 20 or so earlier years earlier disintegrated their nucleus. The time frame unravels backwards on the day itself & is interspersed with chapters detailing episodic collapse of the family unit. A good read with a denouement at the conclusion that finally makes sense of the doubt previously prevailing throughout the story.

[Sam]

Just finished Princess Bari. A girl who is born and spends her early childhood in North Korea in the late 1980s and 1990s flees to China, and from there to London, all the while trying to understand her gift for seeing and communicating with the spirits of the dead, including her pet dog from Korea. It'll stay with me.

Next up: Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch.

[ale]

How I Learned To Hate In Ohio-David Stuart Maclean. A debut novel and from the author blurb could well include a fair amount of biography. Set in mid 1980s rust belt community that straddles the cultural divide between the academic college and the redneck industry. With a name like Baruch the narrator of this coming of age novel is clearly in the former part of town. He wants to be recognised as Barry. Instead he is bequeathed the sobriquet Yo Yo Faggot. He manages to steer clear of more overt bullying by withdrawal from his contemporaries although this all changes with the introduction of the Singh family into his family life. This triggers a chain of events which see Barry foster unlikely friendships with both the Sikh boy of his age and the hillbilly boy who is repeatedly kept back year after year. It also leads to betrayal from the few people he holds dear in his life. The tale is mainly told in a series of short sharp chapters though when the author extends this rhythm to longer set pieces the results are the most impressive in the book being both challenging & laugh out loud-in particular a scene which uses the countdown to the Challenger shuttle as its backdrop. Prejudices abound-AIDS is just around the corner but by the conclusion set in 1991 the Gulf War is upon the country and the racism is no longer so casual. Tender & intelligent throughout the last chapter is a genuine jolt & causes a re-evaluation of all the previous compassion previously demonstrated. As well as explaining the title. A provocative story well handled. Recommended

[Sam]

Thanks, ursus!

[ursus arctos]

Janet Nelson's King and Emperor: a new life of Charlemagne is widely considered the best of the recent biographies

[Sam]

My girlfriend likes me to read to her as she's dropping off to sleep, and for the last few months we've been going through the Wikipedia pages of the Holy Roman Emperors, starting with Charlemagne. I've gone from having absolutely no idea what a Holy Roman Emperor really was when it was at home to having ... well, something of a grasp, at least. So if anyone has any recommendations they were going to give Levin for proper books on the subject, do throw them my way as well, please.

[Levin]

That seems very Gaiman-y.

I'd like to read about Charlemagne I think. I know so little about Europe in that period.

[San Bernardhinault]

In my attempts to read more modern SF and Fantasy authors I read NK Jemisin's The City We Became. It's a very interesting premise - that when cities reach a certain cultural weight they become alive and their own independent entities; and this is happening in New York. And some of the imagery is excellently Lovecrafty. But it felt like it was trying a little too hard - both to define boroughs a bit too narrowly: Bronx is fighty, Manhattan is arrogant, Brooklyn is creative, Staten Island is reactionary and nothing to do with New York, really. It was delving deep into cliche and became annoying. In other ways, too, it just felt clunky and heavy and trying to hard - you could feel the author trying rather than the book feeling natural and organic.

[Levin]

I've started The King in the North by Max Adams. The subject matter is really interesting (6-7th century British and Irish), it's really useful for recalibrating how to think about borders. Dal Riata just sounds Italian to my ear.

It is a period that has sourcing issues, but I don't have enough confidence in the author. There is a section in the first chapter that made me think of a passage in HHhH by Binet which is about filling in the gaps in history as a historian or author. The Binet passage is so much better written and demonstrates so much more thought.

I don't think Adams is a good enough writer for this to be a really good book.

[ale]

London,Burning-Anthony Quinn. Title is Clash related and more or less covers period Give Em Enough Rope to Cost Of Living EP. Others might see it as period between dog days of Callaghan government & election of Thatcher. It is story telling rather than literature and for most part it works-main characters are are represented by journalism,police force,university lecturer and rather more incongruously the director of a theatre company. The political background is well covered as it should be given it not a contemporary novel of the times. The winter of discontent,the IRA bombing campaign, endemic corruption within the police department. The author manages to allow a sense of ambiguity attach itself to the Irish university lecturer who is unwittingly dragged into centre stage through his friendship with IRA bomber who offers his regrets but denied by his friend within Labour ministerial group. What ultimately lets down novel is the anti climatic conclusion. All wrongs are righted and each man gets his girl who they had previously let slip. While the general shared feeling of Thatcher becoming PM is troublesome-the main characters bar one (the Irish lecturer doesnt give a flying one about English politics) are Labour in legacy but not to extent they are unwilling to give Thatcher benefit of doubt.

[Sam]

We had to read White Noise by DeLillo at university, and I've never wanted to pick up anything by him since. I got, and didn't really disagree with, what he was trying to say with it, and in particular I wish to clarify that I understood that the next thing I'm going to type was the effect he was going for, but the narratorial voice just drove me up the wall. I'll occasionally see that something by him has been released to rave reviews and be tempted to pick it up and see whether my tastes have changed in the seventeen years or so since I last read him, but there's always something more appealing to read, somehow.

[imp]

Gave up Delillo years ago - life's too short for unreadable writers. I took an age over Stepanova's In Memory of Memory (well, about 6-8 weeks), because it was the kind of book worth savouring in short doses, plus I kept falling asleep, which was nothing to do with the book, just my irregular middle-aged sleeping patterns. Am reading Matt Haig's The Midnight Library which is okay, very easy to read, but where you feel the writer thinks he's funnier than he really is. It's reminding me of Sliding Doors and Gwyneth fucking Paltrow and Nick Hornby's terrible novel about the four people wanting to throw themselves off the top of a building (I'd have advised him to cut it to a one-chapter version), and I can feel even early on in the book that we're being very slowly pointed towards a life-affirming conclusion because there's nowhere else for it to go really. Still, it would be untrue to say that I'm not enjoying it.

[ale]

The Silence-Don Delillo. The cover proclaims this a novel though at 139 pages it is stretching the understood definition of such to its most elastic point. There are only two scenes and five characters . Comparisons with a play continue with characters randomly (and for seemingly little purpose or intent) leaving the apartment in which all but the first chapter is set. The first chapter is the most intriguing of the whole tale and introduces a married couple flying from France to America for the purpose of watching the Super Bowl in aforesaid apartment. The assumption as the chapter closes is that the plane is about to crash. The following chapter introduces the remaining 3 characters just as a power failure disrupts the Superbowl TV coverage-this failure is national if not global as immediate society melts down. The plot is initially developed by the couple from the plane actually turning up as expected if a little late-though it is left open and unexplained as whether they are survivors. Even before this the whole story is collapsing on itself and never recovers. There is a lot of meandering aimless dialogue and a sex scene that nearly happens. Hazarding a guess at the authors intentions in writing this story is beyond me though it doesnt provoke or challenge or even dismay. Indifference the main response with the saving grace being the lack of time required to read it.