Current Reading - Books best thread

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Not that there is anything wrong with SF and Fantasy but more peopel would read it if it was on the same shelves as strict non-scifi like Margeret Atwood.

Is that true? I mean I think it's likely that a wider range of people might read it, but in terms of sheer numbers is it so? Also are The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake in SF sections as well as general fiction, because you could equally argue that they lose readers if they're not?

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Amor de Cosmos wrote:

Not that there is anything wrong with SF and Fantasy but more peopel would read it if it was on the same shelves as strict non-scifi like Margeret Atwood.

Is that true? I mean I think it's likely that a wider range of people might read it, but in terms of sheer numbers is it so? Also are The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake in SF sections as well as general fiction, because you could equally argue that they lose readers if they're not?

I do think that a book would be exposed to more people as well as a wider range of people if it is in the general fiction part of a bookshop as opposed to a genre section. But you are right Oryx and Crake isn't seen in Sci Fi and Fantasy and is unlikely to be so in the future.

But then, thinking about it more these books are still in the bookshop to be bought and it's the fault of the buyer if they don't stray from the part they are familiar with. It does seem odd that fiction can be broken down into Sci Fi & Fantasy, Crime, Classics and everything else.

Apart from Hatchards that is, who have a Historical Fiction section.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've finally finished "My Name is Red". From page 250 to page 400, it had to be one of the most boring books I've ever read. However, the rest of it was pretty good, but those "I am Master Osman" chapters, holy f*ck they were dull.

I read the first 50 pages of "Erasure" by Percivil Everett this afternoon and I'm loving it. Light and intellectual, just my kind of thing, I'm really looking forward to the novel within the novel part of the book ("My Pafology").

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

We pulled it out of the bag.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

And I don't want to be all, "Books? Rubbish!" but Marcel Bénabou's Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books isn't shaping up too well. The whole Oulipo thing looks great at first, but lawdamercy they're some unimaginitive tweeds at heart. Imagine a band of proggers who'd bought a pack of Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards and done exactly what they were instructed to, at the expense of their own intuition. George Perec has his moments but tests your patience pointlessly in the end (which you can't say about Robbe-Grillet, who tested it to great effect, in shorter novels to boot).

I'm talking to myself here, aren't I.

[WOM]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Sorry, dear, did you say something?

Anyway, I've just finished the utterly compelling Game Change by Heilemann and Halperin, about the 2008 US election and the run-up thereto. Fascinating, well-researched and lightly written. It's a page turned in both topic and form.

Hillary comes off looking much worse than you'd think, and Palin much better (in the sense that you gain some sympathy for how far out of her depth she was, yet carried on out of a sense of duty).

[Incandenza]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I just finished Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers. It's a nonfiction book about a Syrian-American man and his family in New Orleans. He decided to stay in the city during Hurricane Katrina to check on his rental properties and his contracting business' clients' homes. His wife and their children left. The book is about his experiences, and what happened to him after the storm. I don't want to give it away, but I'll just say that it's probably the best indictment of the Bush Administration and the domestic and security policies in that dark point of American history. The book is equally heartbreaking, angry, and inspiring.

If you only know Eggers from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, read this. I doubt anyone back then could have imagined what he's done since--his work in the 826 foundation, his book What Is The What, a fictionalized memoir of a Sudanese man's experiences, and now this.

Read Zeitoun. Read it now. Easily the best book I've read in years.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Having finished The White Tiger very comfortably before my flight - it's bloody good isn't it - I started on Monday a more ambitious attempt for what is now a two-week read: Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, which I may have mentioned further up thread when I first bought it, having waited however many years for his second novel to be published after the brilliant Carter Beats The Devil. 60 pages in (out of 500-odd, in large hardback) so far and enjoying it thoroughly.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I finished "Erasure", which I really liked, but the main character was a bit too cool for school in my opinion. I then read "Falconer" by John Cheever, which I was very disappointed with, it made prison sound like a holiday camp for intellectuals.

Now I'm onto "Last Evenings on Earth". Is it possible to dislik Roberto Bolãno, he could write about any subject and I'm sure I'd find it interesting.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

In amongst the usual parade of crap I read More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss which I think wants to be the new We Need To Talk About Kevin, but for me was nowhere near as successful. Similar 'controversial' themes about modern American families blah blah blah. Too much stuff about race, too, but I guess that's part of writing about American society.

now I'm reading The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton which is fascinating and fabulous.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Have any of you read Andrey Platanov's The Foundation Pit? I only started it today, but already it's looking phenomenal.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I just finished The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge by Adam Sisman, which was excellent. Fantastically well-researched and -written account of the relationship between the two and their families, wives and friends. Fascinating as always to trace the erratic path of Coleridge's procrastinating genius and Wordsworth's progress from Revolutionary firebrand to dull reactionary. A remarkable view of an age's politics through two equally remarkable personalities.

I'm hovering around Isabel Allende's House of Spirits now, but it appears to be a bit magical realist and I'm not sure magical realism and I are friends.

I think it was steveeeeeeeee who didn't like Falconer; I remember it beng pretty good, but I like Cheever.

[Ginger Yellow]

Current Reading - Books best thread

But you are right Oryx and Crake isn't seen in Sci Fi and Fantasy and is unlikely to be so in the future.

That's where I found my copy in Blackwells.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

What else could you recommend, Ignatz? I really want to like him after reading some excerpts in LRB, which I loved. The problem I had with Falconer was the freedom the main character had inside prison, I enjoyed a lot of the passages where memories of his past are triggered, it was just the prison stuff I found a bit unbelievable. It appeared less rigorous than boarding-school, not that I've experienced either.

I've almost finished "Last Evenings on Earth", which I've absolutely loved. I'm glad I read this after "The Savage Detectives", I think a few of the stories would've irritated me had I not known his style/personality beforehand. What I love about Bolaño is that I never get the impression it's fiction, it just reads like a diary of events that have happened to him or people he knew, and all of those people are absolutely fascinating when described with his pen, even though I'd probably find them completely mundane if I were to have ever met them.

Once that's finished, I'm going to have my second stab at reading Fernando Pessoa. The first stab was "The Anarchist Banker", which I had to put down after 5 pages. The next attempt is with his book on Portuguese language.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

You could try some of his short stories; the Swimmer for example is magnificent. And miles better than what Burt Lancaster did to it. There's a fantastic and beefy one-volume edition of his stories which is a treat to dip into.

Novels, I really like The Wapshot Scandal, The Wapshot Chronicle and Bullet Park. They're very, very good. He has this mix of the elegiac and the highly peculiar that I really love.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Cheers, I'm pretty sure it was The Swimmer that I read the extracts from, I'll see if I can find a short stories collection on book depository.

[Guest]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just in case you want a taster, The Swimmer's here.

[Third rate Leszno]

Current Reading - Books best thread

On a non-fiction binge at the moment - just finished 'Crashed and Byrned - The greatest racing driver you never saw', which is the story of Tommy Byrne, a man who grew up (in his own words) 'a knacker from Dundalk' but became one of the most naturally gifted racing drivers there has ever been.

Tommy was a contemporary of Ayrton Senna in his rise through motor racings junior formulae, and by all accounts he was every bit as talented.

Unlike Senna though, Tommy never made it in F1 (beyond a few races in an uncompetitive tail end car), and reading his book, you alternately wince at his self-destructive and occasionally chippy attitude, and feel for him as he's passed over for less talented (but less outspoken and more monied) drivers.

It's a highly entertaining romp through Tommy's often chaotic life, but there's so much packed in here that I was left feeling a little short changed at times, and occasionally wished that Tommy (or contributor Mark Hughes) could have expanded on the reasoning and motives behind some of his more questionable decisions.

Overall, highly recommended, especially if you have a passing interest in motorsport.

[wildtalents]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Thanks Incandenza for the recommendation of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. I wasn't very complimentary about You Shall Know Our Velocity a while back, and justifiably so, but that sounds much much better.

Among recent reads hereabouts have been GB84 by David Peace, which is sometimes gruelling but a worthwhile read and strangely timely. The striker's journals are very moving. I did think that several of the characters seemed to have the identical "tone of voice" (clumsily expressed I know) which just isn't very convincing. Enough there though to make me want to tackle the Red Riding novels some time.

Raced thru a very lengthy and very ordinary John Irving, Until I Find You. Painless reiteration of his usual formula.

Got around to reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, but wished I hadn't. The autistic/affectless narrative voice is so irritating. Of course this is convincing in its way since the narrator is a biological clone reared solely for her internal organs but I didn;t feel the slightest bit sorry for her, and I feel that's the author's fault for making her such a cardboard cutout.

I really enjoyed The Pregnant Widow though, Martin Amis's latest, and thought it his best book since London Fields. Can't think of any particularly interesting reasons why though, it just is.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Dipped into Grace Paley's Collected Stories today, and now I can't dip back out. She's unbelievably good; I can't imagine anyone not loving these stories. They're the best I've ever read, and I've read a lot of the little buggers.

[Purves Grundy]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I gave up on GB84. There comes a point where a novel crosses the line to being little more than an ostentatious assertion of the author's cleverness. GB84 was some way beyond that point, for my money.

Right now I'm reading Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, a factually-based story of a Berlin couple's low-level resistance against the Nazi state. Set in 1940, it was written at some point between 1944 and 1946, and, some claim, clandestinely, while the author enjoyed Goebbels' patronage.

Whatever the truth of it, it's a suffocatingly claustrophobic account of how it is to be a normal man with a functioning moral compass, trapped in a totalitarian gangster state. So far it definitly seems worth mentioning in the same breath as The Trial, 1984 and Darkness at Noon.

[Carcass]

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I struggled with 'We' but will probably give it another go. Just read 20 Jazz Funk Greats 33 1/3 and half way through Reign In Blood 33 1/3.

I'm reading the new Pullman Christ The Scoundrel next for work and Zeitoun next for pleasure.

And... [drumroll] I got my first couple of things published in a book last month. Stool Pigeon, a paper I write for celebrated its fifth birthday with an anthology of articles called Grace Under Pressure. A feature on Marilyn Manson and one of Grace Jones. Feels good being involved with a totally independent, DIY publishing venture.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Purves Grundy wrote:

Right now I'm reading Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, a factually-based story of a Berlin couple's low-level resistance against the Nazi state. Set in 1940, it was written at some point between 1944 and 1946, and, some claim, clandestinely, while the author enjoyed Goebbels' patronage.

I read this last year (although the North American title was "Every Man Dies Alone"). The foreward to my edition was quite definitive in stating that it was written in the summer of 1945. Fallada survived the nazi period in part by pretending (?) to be mad - when the war was over, an editor who was familiar with the case and had come into possession of the police dossier gave it to Fallada and said: you have to write a story about this. Which he did in the space of sometihng like six weeks. But perhaps there are other versions of this book's genesis.

The speed of writing probably accounts for the total lack of subtelty in the writing style...it's sort of like if the story of the White Rose were told in the style of Emil and the Detectives.

Still, great book. Though I'm not sure I would put it in the same league as Darkness at Noon.

[Purves Grundy]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Yeah, but it's the absence of stylistic tricks and fancy-dannery that gives it its sense of airlessness. Which is entirely apt.

Probably not in the same league as Darkness at Noon, true, but definitely worth mentioning in the same breath - totalitarianism seen from within.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

So I finally finished Finnegans Wake. Dizzying, revelatory stuff - every cliché you've heard, positive and negative, is true. Completely exhiliarating, though I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. You already know if you'd like it, and whether you've got the time and patience.

I won't try and catch up with the stuff I read "on breaks" from FW. I've just finished Rob Jovanovic's book on Big Star. It's pretty good, but that's mostly due to the quality of the underlying story, and notably bits of that (Chilton's heroin addiction is nowhere mentioned; and that New York period is presented as a sobering-up period after getting out of Memphis) are kinda passed over in silence.

I'm also reading the Vampire himself, Leo Strauss's The City and Man. It's tough going, tougher at the moment, because of the three texts he covers in remarkably detailed close-reading fashion (the others being Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics), I have no familiarity with Thucydides. But it's excellent, very subtle stuff. Completely wrong, but quite brilliant - nothing at all like the imp[ression you'd get of him from his neocon acolytes.