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    Current Reading - Books best thread

    A couple of years old now, but I've got round to Alex Ross' 'The Rest Is Noise', a fascinating history of 20th-century music with some superb stories (the circumstances surrounding the premieres of Shostakovich's Leningrad are astonishing).

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      Current Reading - Books best thread

      I've got "Touching the void" at xmas by Joe Simpson. It's fair to say that if you can go past the technical bits, it is something rather intense. It is perfectly completed by the movie, if only for the shots of the Andes and the look on Simpson face when recalls what went through his mind down the crevasse hole. The Dawkins Brotherhood will aslo appreciate the stauch atheism displayed by Simpson in the face of impending death.

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        Current Reading - Books best thread

        once I get through Finnegans Wake.
        Good Lord. What's it like? I'm at work and there's a Finnegans Wake seminar going on today. It sounds scary.

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          Current Reading - Books best thread

          Can't remember where I was up to when I last posted on this thread.... anyway, I have recently read:

          'Bearded Tit' by Rory McGrath, which was funnier, warmer and with greater affection for birdwatching than I'd expected.

          'The Atheists Guide to Christmas' - as discussed elsewhere. Some excellent chapters, some entertaining and some which really made me think (something I don't do enough of these days...)

          'Outcasts' by Steve Menary - one for the 'Books about football' thread, but an interesting reminder of the inconsistent workings of FIFA and the hard work that goes on at the lowest levels of international football administration.

          About to (finally) start 'Netherland', with 'Revolutionary Road' and 'To Siberia' (by Per Petterson) lined up to follow, together with occasional dips into the peerless photography of 'Formula 1 in camera: 1980 -1989' by Rainer Schlegelmilch.

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            Current Reading - Books best thread

            Just finished Daniel Deronda, enjoyed it, but still thinking through what I thought about it. Some real strengths, but some flaws too (unlike Middlemarch, which is basically perfect at what it sets out to do, I think).

            Recently read: Roth - The Human Stain and Mitchell - Cloud Atlas.

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              Current Reading - Books best thread

              China Mieville's your man for some decent semi-industrial fantasy with a political edge - Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council (focused on a city, a ship of sorts and a train of sorts respectively) are excellent
              I'm a big science fiction fan, but Perdido Street Station was a deeply unrewarding slog. I kept waiting for the good bits that people kept telling me were in it. Instead it was just unpleasant, horribly overlong and deeply annoying. Too much fantasy, not enough science.

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                Current Reading - Books best thread

                Etienne wrote:
                Just finished Daniel Deronda, enjoyed it, but still thinking through what I thought about it. Some real strengths, but some flaws too (unlike Middlemarch, which is basically perfect at what it sets out to do, I think).

                Recently read: Roth - The Human Stain and Mitchell - Cloud Atlas.
                Etienne, if you're still looking for more Mitchell, I can give you my copy of Black Swan Green on Thursday.

                I'd give you my copies of Number 9 Dream and Ghostwritten, too, if they weren't two of my top ten favourites ever and refuse to let them out of my sight.

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                  Current Reading - Books best thread

                  Cheers AG, but I've since acquired Black Swan Green and it's sitting back home partially read, a victim of the dichotomy between my appreciation of his writing and my hatred of coming of age books.

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                    Current Reading - Books best thread

                    That's *exactly* how I felt about it, too.

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                      Current Reading - Books best thread

                      The Woman in the Dunes. V. good. (My copy has a rather flat introduction by your man Mitchell, as it happens.)

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                        Current Reading - Books best thread

                        Oh wow, who wrote that? I absolutely loved the film. It's quite brilliant.

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                          Current Reading - Books best thread

                          Yeah, it's wonderful isn't it. And a great adaptation: the sand is the real star of the book, and a major one in the film if I remember. I guess one notable difference is that the film has a slightly sexier tone, but that's perhaps down to the capabilities of each medium.

                          Kobo Abe is the author. He was an avant garde writer with a popular readership in Japan. You could see the The Woman in the Dunes as a Japanese response to existentialist fiction (ie partly informed by Buddhism), or a fairy tale for adults, or just a fantastic but simple premise explored in suitably direct prose.

                          I was reminded about him during a recent trawl through post-apocalyptic literature in which I came across his earlier Inter Ice Age 4. Out of print, unfortunately, but it looks great from the excerpt on Google Books: a time-cheating tale about Professors breeding a race of gilled children for the flooded future, which is now the present (the ice caps have melted). Type thing. If anyone spots a copy going cheap, tip me a nod.

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                            Current Reading - Books best thread

                            I finally finished Midnight's Children on the train home today, and whilst it's quite magnificent and evocative throughout I found something slightly flat about the ending. Still loved the novel as a whole though.

                            My next book, to start tomorrow morning, is a biography of a 22-year-old which I'm reviewing for WSC. My first book review. I feel like a proper literary critic.

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                              Current Reading - Books best thread

                              Lucia, there are several dozen copies of Inter Ice Age 4 are for sale on Abebooks, but they all appear to be in North America, which might make shipping prohibitive.

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                                Current Reading - Books best thread

                                Thanks AG, I saw those but the postage is indeed a killer. (Then again, perhaps I've become spoilt by all the best books selling second-hand for 1p & £2.75 P&P on Amazon these days.)

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                                  Current Reading - Books best thread

                                  My next book, to start tomorrow morning, is a biography of a 22-year-old which I'm reviewing for WSC.

                                  Ooh, I love a good guessing game. Is he one of the Mr Men?

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                                    Current Reading - Books best thread

                                    Sam--is it an Aguero book?

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                                      Current Reading - Books best thread

                                      No Inca, he's 21. You're warmer than Jon, though.

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                                        Current Reading - Books best thread

                                        Oh hang on a sec, no you're not. I just realised what Jon meant. Yes Jon. You're right.

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                                          Current Reading - Books best thread

                                          I don't know what a Mr. Man is.

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                                            Current Reading - Books best thread

                                            Can I possibly skip back to Black Swan Green, as I read this over Christmas and there were parts I really enjoyed and others, well, that I didn't...but I'm having difficulty placing what it was I found a bit irritating about it.

                                            Firstly, I've not read any of his other books so how similar and in what way are they, in comparison to BSG...and which one should I go for next?

                                            As an aside, did anyone else have Black Hole Sun as an accompanying ear-worm whilst reading this book? I did, and it sort of annoyed me, any other books that have the ring of a song hook that I should avoid?

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                                              Current Reading - Books best thread

                                              Lyra - it's excellent, but very hard going.

                                              I hated Black Swan Green right up to the end, which he pulled off wonderfully. But jesus, some of it is excruciating. At least a hundred pages are basically a mash-up of those "God, weren't the eighties weird?" TV programmes featuring Phill Jupitus and the wink-wink "you think the Rolling Stones are still going to be touring in forty years?" gag in Almost Famous.

                                              Loved his other stuff, though. Despite thinking that Number 9 dream is effectively a Murakami cover version.

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                                                Current Reading - Books best thread

                                                Inca, I think Jon probably means this. If he does, he's right (although he needs to learn how to spell).

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                                                  Current Reading - Books best thread

                                                  I'm reading an anthology of graphic fiction published by Yale University Press and edited by Ivan Brunetti. Apart from Harvey Prekar and Art Spiegelman, this isn't an area I've ever much explored. For better or worse, the book is opening up a whole new world of expense.

                                                  The Museum of Innocence kept me absorbed right up until the final word of the final line. Next up, Snow.

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                                                    Current Reading - Books best thread

                                                    Pamuk's hundred pages are up, the multimillionaire Nobel winner will be mortified to learn. I'm firmly with the red lantern on this one. It's a pitch, not a novel: the whole situation the narrator's heading into should be fascinating, but it's a marvel to watch the author snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A profound lack of psychological insight, two-dimensional characterisation (particularly of the only living woman, the 'love interest') and an outright smarmy set-up (a poet whose poems we don't get to see, perhaps because they're too "beautiful" as he keeps affirming, and makes her affirm too, chasin' some broad cause she's so "beautiful", to provide relief from the politics). My hopes were raised, briefly, by the transcription of the tape from the Islamist moiderah, which is quite nifty. But even allowing for translation, the rest is just dreadful writing: cynical, patronising, heroically unimaginitive and so fucking clunky. Like Dan Brown if he'd read the "international news" section of the paper so he could show off to people at a dinner party, or something.

                                                    I'm amazed that this kind of thing could bag someone the Nobel prize. Never trust a book that people swear is amazing, when they can't tell you why. If it is, they can.

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