Current Reading - Books best thread

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Pierre Albert-Birot - The First Book of Grabinoulor

A lovely little book, and a typically vivid translation by Barbara Wright. For once the blurb gets it right: "Smart, joyous, playfully philosophical and completely without despair, the novel follows the character Grabinoulor — "the happiest man in the world" — a child-like, satyric, and comical Parisian as he visits other planets, travels through time, and finds poetry wherever he goes."

Um, he was another proto-Surrealist, and the first to publish various Dadaists and Futurists in the journal SIC ("Sounds Ideas Colors") during the war. After which he published this, became a schoolteacher, and was largely forgotten about until the 1980s.

I've also read some amazing Austrian novels which I'll blether about over on the Eastern/Mittel European thread one day.

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm nearly done with Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. It's been good bus reading.

I had no idea about the crazy shenanigans going on at Number 10 during Harold Wilson's second term as PM, with Marcia Williams causing scenes and (apparently) blackmailing Wilson and his doctor offering to bump her off. Wilson also apparently asked the Foreign Office to look into assassinating Idi Amin. It all sounds just as loony as the Nixon White House.

[Jobi1]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I just finally got round to reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a novel written entirely in verse. Really quite a feat, I would encourage everyone to give it a go.

[The Exploding Vole]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Started in on Just My Type by Simon Garfield and think it's wonderful. But I'll never look at Gill Sans the same way again.

[Gangster Octopus]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Does it mention Eric Gill's, er, interesting life style?

[The Exploding Vole]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Indeed it does, Mr Octopus.

Continued experiment with dog ... and found that a dog will join with a man.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

When I heard about Gill's ways I switched to serif in disgust.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Wuthering Heights is good, isn't it? I can see what Kate Bush was on about now.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

But she'd only seen the TV series when she wrote the song — or so she said at the time.

Nevertheless, great book, and one I believe every man ought to read, but rarely does — unless it's at school, which is never really going to work.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Absolutely, it's a sensational read.

It was on my English BA list, but back then "reading" meant "ploughing through while taking notes, in the knowledge that I have to do the same to Moby Dick and translate an Old English poem about a rood by Thursday". Now I just read 'em.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Current Reading - Books best thread

There are poems about roods? Would that be like an ode to a millimetre?

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

It's pretty much all anyone wrote back then. "This Cross Was Once A Tree", "I Done a Dream About a Cross" and "Oh Look, a Cross" were among my favourites.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Ooh. The phrase "ode to a millimetre" delivers a perfect googlewhack to this page. Well done, AdC.

[Levin]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've now read 11 pages of 'The Radetzky March' and am prepared for disappointment. It can't possibly be this good all the way through.

[The Purple Cow]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've just finished reading a debut crime novel called 'Plugged' by an Irish writer I've never previously heard of called Eoin Colfer.

It's actually very good, reminiscent of (and clearly highly influenced by) Elmore Leonard, before he started phoning it in. It's main protagonist is Dan McEvoy a former soldier who has moved to New Jersey after being invalided out of the Irish army with P.T.S.D. and is scraping a living as a casino door man/bouncer.

There's lot's of sharp dialogue, serious violence, the stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold character, an Irish gangster who's not actually Irish, two lesbian cops and an overly talkative ghost. It's good stuff, I've got a feeling this won't be the last we hear from Dan McEvoy, and I'm looking forward to more.

Colfer has written some kids books previously according to the blurb.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I finally finished reading The Woman In White last week, and have now started (again) on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Enjoying it much more this time (my previous attempt at it was during my degree. See LL's comment above).

[Crusoe]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm dragging my heels finishing Manituana by Wu Ming. It's not bad, but Q and 54 were better. It's less fantastical, perhaps because the period it's describing feels a bit more familiar from other books and films.

Next up is Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day, I think because someone up-thread recommended it a while ago.

[Diable Rouge]

Current Reading - Books best thread

The Purple Cow wrote:

I've just finished reading a debut crime novel called 'Plugged' by an Irish writer I've never previously heard of called Eoin Colfer.

It's actually very good, reminiscent of (and clearly highly influenced by) Elmore Leonard, before he started phoning it in. It's main protagonist is Dan McEvoy a former soldier who has moved to New Jersey after being invalided out of the Irish army with P.T.S.D. and is scraping a living as a casino door man/bouncer.

There's lot's of sharp dialogue, serious violence, the stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold character, an Irish gangster who's not actually Irish, two lesbian cops and an overly talkative ghost. It's good stuff, I've got a feeling this won't be the last we hear from Dan McEvoy, and I'm looking forward to more.

Colfer has written some kids books previously according to the blurb.

Colfer wrote the Artemis Fowl series of kids books and also wrote the Hitchhiker sequel that came out a few years ago. Currently reading William McKern's biography of Hunter S. Thompson, seems a fairly even-handed verdict, but posters who've a better knowledge of his work would be able to gauge that.

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Reading John Waters's new collection, Role Models. Entertaining so far, but perhaps not quite as good as Crackpot. He does mention that he picked up an obsession with striped socks from Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, and it's made me realize that it's probably where I picked up my love for striped socks, too.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I've had a couple of brilliant South American books on the go.

On Elegance While Sleeping by the Argentine Viscount Lascano Tegui is a little beaut. It's been getting a lot of (justified) praise on the blogs since Nicholas Lezard's recent big-up, which captures it rather nicely. Diary entries of a very eloquent madman, every sentence surprising, many really funny, with a lovely poetic tone. It's both lighter and sharper than the blurb might suggest - you'd be forgiven for anticipating a nihilistic work of decadence or something, but it's too fresh and original to fit that bill. He was no more a genuine aristocrat than he was a minty biscuit.

And I'm halfway through The Obscene Bird of Night by Chilean José Donoso. The first quarter is this incredible, labyrinthine tour de force; I've not been so immersed in a book for ages. The second quarter has eased off a little, but kept me hooked. It's been called a key work in magic realism, but it's a lot more bracing than the twee, 100 Years Of Solitude kind of thing you might associate with the term. Body horror, identity slippage, wound theft - I've not read anything quite like it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Amor de Cosmos wrote:

There are poems about roods?

Pugin could have written a few. Do you have a copy of Clark's The Gothic Revival? He quotes a bit of incredibly overexcited prose consisting mostly of names for parts of churches.

Great book, if you don't have it. He was only 25 when he wrote it.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I didn;t know the new Wu Ming had been translated yet. My brother in law has it in Italian. I'm kind of curious to see how they deal with areas that are (literally) right around the corner from me...

[Ginger Yellow]

Current Reading - Books best thread

There are poems about roods? Would that be like an ode to a millimetre?

Yep. Bloody good it (The Dream of the Rood) is too. It also earned me my (unintentionally) funniest ever comment from a tutor.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Come on then.

The poem's really good or good enough for us to make us feel our ancestors weren't thick savages?

Bit of exaggeration there, but you know what I mean.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I remember it being good. You should have seen the poem they wanted to make, though. It wasn't a rood, believe me.

I'm halfway through Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus. It's incredible, an eye-bulging dreamlike extravaganza presented in a very precise, vivid style that makes it all seem quite natural. There's nothing else quite like it; Robbe-Grillet and Perec ripped it off to varying degrees, but they're nowhere near as enjoyable. Remarkable novel, too few people in this country get to hear about it.

And, probably more up Tubby's street, Sophocles, the ones about Oedipus and that. Very good, well done the Greeks.

(I gave up on Donoso in the end - he doesn't half go on.)