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So, what's everyone reading? (The General Books Thread)

Started by surreal, June 11, 2007, 07:11:33 PM

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Marvin

Will give it another go, I want to like it actually, was just really unimpressed to start with.

surreal

You should - The Time Travellers Wife is a good book, it does start a little slow and odd but it will grow on you.

Murdo

Quote from: Dark Sky on June 12, 2007, 11:41:27 PM

I guess it's where Danielewsky got the idea for House Of Leaves from.  Though House Of Leaves is insufferably dull, sadly, despite its amazing concept and execution.

What! That's one of my favourite books ever and would recommend it to anyone here who is in the mood for a complete head-fuck horror.

Toad in the Hole

I enjoed Lanark, though I did find the Sci-Fi stuff a bit hard to get through in all honesty.  Took me much longer to read the last 150 pages or so than the first 2/3 of the book.  Have you read any of Gray's other stuff?  The only other one I've read is '1982 Janine' (I think I've got the title right), which is a  much more standard run through an S & M relationship.  A bit more Iain Banks-y, if you will.  Not that that's a bad thing - The Crow Road is one of my favourite books of all time.

buttgammon

Quote from: Toad in the Hole on June 13, 2007, 10:39:30 AM
I enjoed Lanark, though I did find the Sci-Fi stuff a bit hard to get through in all honesty.  Took me much longer to read the last 150 pages or so than the first 2/3 of the book. 

I found exactly the same. It was a great read to start with, and I motored through the first 70 or 80 pages during one evening in the bath, but the end really dragged. I liked the bit of fourth wall breaking where Gray and Lanark have a conversation about the story, but I generally preferred the first book (book 3, I think) and the Duncan Thaw bits.

CaledonianGonzo

I can vouch for Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, a bit of a light-hearted romp meets Frankenstein in Victorian Glasgow.  It has big old themes, but its an easy and charming read.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Murdo on June 13, 2007, 09:38:43 AM
What! That's one of my favourite books ever and would recommend it to anyone here who is in the mood for a complete head-fuck horror.
I'm with Murdo on this one, "House of Leaves" is an amazing book.

All Surrogate

#67
Quote from: Marvin on June 12, 2007, 08:13:30 PMWhat is it with Iain Banks and incest? He seems obsessed with it, it's in this one, Walking on Glass, Song of Stone, Whit and probably others I've forgotten.
Yeah; is it known whether Banks had a crush on a cousin?

The Wasp Factory has an unusual family / sex situation, but then it's just an unusual story all over.

In WoG, I think the incestuous relationship is meant to reflect (or is caused by, via the time-travelling-telepathy) the Quiss / Ajayi love-hate relationship: "... he wanted to grip her, squeeze here, to impale and imprison her, to shake and pummel her; mark her".  It's such a confusing book.  I mean, there's the convolution of fiction and fact: Quiss and Ajayi live in a castle built of books, so is that relationship merely the literary projection of the incestuous relationship, "... mark her", meaning WoG is in part a projection of that projection?  Heh, I've just noticed that the book is dedicated to Banks' parents!  What did they make of it?!

The Crow Road, like TSAtG, Prentice is attracted to his cousin Verity, who ends up with his brother Lewis, but that's really as far as it goes, whereas TSAtG goes much further at the end - in fact even further than WoG.  Bit of a shock that.

Whit ... mmm, I like the book a great deal, but that moment near the end, between Salvador and Isis ... I still don't quite understand that.  Salvador is clearly a highly sexual man, but he's not a monster.  Why attempt to go to that extreme?  Perhaps Banks is making a point about religion and prophets.

ASoS -  there's something that I don't like about that book.  That might well be deliberate, given that it's in the first-person; Abel (Morgan also) is a decadent aristocrat, and the relationship fits in with that.

Incest doesn't really come up in Banks' SF, though in Against a Dark Background, there's Geis and Sharrow, and I sometimes wonder about Zefla and Dloan.

So all-in-all, a bit of puzzler.

Borboski

I'm reading reams of information on corporate governance.  I've had about enough now so am going to stop.

Do you know (it says here) that no country has ever achieved a sustained reduction in levels of obesity, other than in times of famine and war (and even then it wasn't sustained long term).  We're getting fatter and fatter until we pop!

Funcrusher

Quote from: non capisco on June 11, 2007, 11:39:23 PM
I really like Pelecanos' stuff, and I agree the Derek Strange stories aren't his best books, as readable as they are. I prefer the earlier Nick Stefanos books (you can buy all those in one doorstop sized volume for about a tenner, really good value) and the 'D.C quartet' (I don't know if he originally intended those four books to be grouped together like that, it seems like a publisher's decision to invite James Ellroy comparisons to me, but they are his most satisfying novels, especially 'King Suckerman')



I'm a Pelecanos fan as well. I'd agree that the earlier Strange novels aren't his best, although they're still a great read, but the last one that's set during the 60's riots in DC is one of his best books for me. His last two non-series books, Drama City and The Night Gardener, I really liked. I'm currently re-reading various books by the worlds greatest living crime writer, IMO, Elmore Leonard.

CaledonianGonzo

Quote from: non capisco'D.C quartet' (I don't know if he originally intended those four books to be grouped together like that, it seems like a publisher's decision to invite James Ellroy comparisons to me

Whoever thought of it should be given a sharp rap on the knuckles - it's a comparison that does George P no favours.  I quite like his books generally, but placing the DC quartet next to the LA quartet, they come across as a bit low-caff.  But then I'll admit that Ellroy tore my head off when I first read him, so much so that I've pretty much given up reading crime novels cos I really don't see anyone ever matching him.  (I'd welcome any suggestions that I'm wrong in this supposition, btw, though I'll laugh heartily at anyone who suggests I try Ian Rankin.)

Did anyone read David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, btw?  Always wondered whether that title was a publishers decision, but then the novels themselves are much more in hock to Ellroy than Pelecanos.  Laughably so, in the case of 1974, though by the time of 1980 I was grudgingly impressed.

CaledonianGonzo

Quote from: All SurrogateYeah; is it known whether Banks had a crush on a cousin?

I know someone who knows him, so I'll see if there's a subtle way they can ask.

On the topic of Banks, am I the only one who thinks he's overrated?  Among a certain class/age-group of Scottish people, you can't walk into their living room without seeing that shelf-full of black and white book spines.  The Wasp Factory and Espedair Street are the good 'uns, The Crow Road's passable and I remember quite enjoying the tv adaptation of it, but I've really not liked any of his other books (not read the new one, though).

There seems to be a bit of Caledonian brand loyalty with him which makes people keep buying them even if they've not enjoyed them for years - the same, I assume, also applies to Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin et al.

Perhaps that explains why I keep reading them, as well.  Though I just go to the library, rather than fork out hard-earned cash for literary punishment.

The Widow of Brid

Just finished re-reading Roadside Picnic and now I'm having trouble holding my attention to any one particular thing, so I'm currently flipping between The Exchange: Paul Magrs, Saint Leibowitz and the wild horse woman: Walter Miller JR, and a couple of academic bricks about Socialism and education in the British working classes between the wars.

Quote from: All Surrogate on June 13, 2007, 03:43:15 PM
Whit ... mmm, I like the book a great deal, but that moment near the end, between Salvador and Isis ... I still don't quite understand that.  Salvador is clearly a highly sexual man, but he's not a monster.  Why attempt to go to that extreme?  Perhaps Banks is making a point about religion and prophets.

I always thought he was making a fairly broad point about unquestioned power, particularly given that - as you say - Salvador isn't shown as being a monster, but he is shown as self-centred, and with a hell of an ability to kid himself on in the face of temptation.

morgs

Quote from: MojoJojo on June 12, 2007, 09:38:02 AM
It picks up a lot in the second book when Jonathan Strange starts to do magic; his spells are fascinating. The third book ... is ok, better than the first.

Glad to hear it - I'm an avid reader but struggling to get into this one - about 120 pages in as many days, it feels!  Will continue to plough through then.

Dark Sky

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on June 13, 2007, 10:45:30 AMI'm with Murdo on this one, "House of Leaves" is an amazing book.

It's amazing, yeah!  Doesn't stop it from being desperately boring once the gimmick has worn off.  One of only two books in the last fifteen years which I've given up reading halfway through.  (The other was Ignorance by Milan Kundera...which I might give another go now I'm older and read and enjoyed The Unbearable Lightness of Being.)

Quote from: Toad in the HoleI enjoed Lanark, though I did find the Sci-Fi stuff a bit hard to get through in all honesty.  Took me much longer to read the last 150 pages or so than the first 2/3 of the book.

Yeah, same here...  I kinda stopped understanding it but assumed it was all good really.  Still...who wants to completely understand something first time round?  Nice to have some mysteries to come back to...
Not sure I'll be leaping to read anything else by Gray, either...not for a while, anyway.  On to pastures new, I say!

The only Iain Banks novel I've read which hasn't been mentioned already is Dead Air, which I enjoyed very much as a bog standard thriller (despite a more arty beginning which could've gone anywhere).  Very different from my standard view of him as being a writer of psychological examinations of slightly twisted families with macabre tinges, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it; especially the set piece where the narrator has to break into someone's house to delete an answering phone message.  It's one of those clichés of thrillers (and sitcoms!) and yet it was nail-bitingly tense, which is something I'd never really experienced from a novel before.

All Surrogate

#75
Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on June 13, 2007, 05:37:58 PMI know someone who knows him, so I'll see if there's a subtle way they can ask.
Heh "So, d'you fuck your cousin, ya perv?"

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on June 13, 2007, 05:37:58 PMAmong a certain class/age-group of Scottish people, you can't walk into their living room without seeing that shelf-full of black and white book spines.
Check, though I'm not Scottish.  The new ones spoil it.

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on June 13, 2007, 05:37:58 PMThe Wasp Factory and Espedair Street are the good 'uns, The Crow Road's passable and I remember quite enjoying the tv adaptation of it, but I've really not liked any of his other books (not read the new one, though).
The Crow Road's ace!  I did think I'd be bored - a relatively long book about a Scottish family - but it utterly engrossed me.  And the SF: Excession was the first book of his I read; perhaps not the best start from an understanding point of view, but I love that book.

Quote from: Mrs Trousers on June 13, 2007, 06:09:42 PMI always thought he was making a fairly broad point about unquestioned power, particularly given that - as you say - Salvador isn't shown as being a monster, but he is shown as self-centred, and with a hell of an ability to kid himself on in the face of temptation.
Yeah, that makes more sense.  I think I might dip into Whit again soon.  But ah, the books to be read! Lanark is on the list, but I still have to read Do Androids Dream ... and Slaughterhouse 5 for pity's sake.  Mmm, reminds me, finished not long ago The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod, which plots the disastrous consequences had Al Gore won in 2000; little bit of politics (actually, most of it is politics), and a great sadness and anger, I think, which makes it a top book.  Plus it mentions Walsall.

QuoteTears sprang to her eyes, as they always did when the thought struck her that particular prerogative was back: the right of the sovereign to condemn, to put to the question, without due process and for reasons of state; that on that sore point all the Revolutions in Britain and America had been for nothing,  That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her.

Marvin

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on June 13, 2007, 05:37:58 PM
I know someone who knows him, so I'll see if there's a subtle way they can ask.

On the topic of Banks, am I the only one who thinks he's overrated?  Among a certain class/age-group of Scottish people, you can't walk into their living room without seeing that shelf-full of black and white book spines.  The Wasp Factory and Espedair Street are the good 'uns, The Crow Road's passable and I remember quite enjoying the tv adaptation of it, but I've really not liked any of his other books (not read the new one, though).

There seems to be a bit of Caledonian brand loyalty with him which makes people keep buying them even if they've not enjoyed them for years - the same, I assume, also applies to Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin et al.

Perhaps that explains why I keep reading them, as well.  Though I just go to the library, rather than fork out hard-earned cash for literary punishment.

I dunno, I'm a big fan of his, have said shelf full of the black and white spines and I'm not Scottish. I'm happy to admit he's been coasting for awhile but he's only written one truely bad book (Canal Dreams) and while he's written some mediocre stuff of late I think it reflects the fact that he's getting too content in life really.

That said, The Bridge is probably one of the best novels I've ever read, it's just masterful, and the imagery is incredible. I've read it countless time. The Wasp Factory is another of the best novels I've read, and then Espedair Street, Complicity, The Crow Road and Walking on Glass are all books I end up reading once a year just because they are the kind of books that are effortlessly enjoyable to read, and that's before you've got started on his SF stuff. He's a real different class to Welsh and Rankin, but he peaked a long time ago.

All Surrogate, I agree with your summary of Bank's incest themes. Also I'd agree ASoS is probably the most unlikable of his books, it's not badly written in the way Canal Dreams is (which is just a dull action film of a book really) but there's a real atmosphere to it that makes it not overly enjoyable.

I've always found Whit a little confused as to whether he wanted to portray the cult as really evil or just deluded, and that bit especially so. I think The Wasp Factory actually puts Banks views on religion accross better, albeit more abstractly.

Captain Crunch

Three of my recent reads:


Neil Strauss - 'The Game'  I enjoyed the first half, it was really interesting.  Then he seemed to panic and crowbar some semblance of plot into it and it fell apart from there really.  Er, not much else to say, s'alright I suppose.  I'm sure someone has a more solid opinion on this than I do.


Victoria Beckham - 'That Extra Half an Inch'  Bought purely out of curiosity and may I be the first to say by CRIKEY that woman is out of her tree.  The book reads like the ramblings of a demented child, she has serious problems.  And, she seems to think everything she says is hilarious.  Here's an example from memory, not a direct quote:

QuoteRight so now, creams.  You really want to be using different creams for face daytime (Boris & Boris do a nice one for about £100), face night (slabs & co. is my favourite, so fruity!), hands (Jock Brothers 'sticky mitts' is my favourite, I always have one in my handbag), cuticles (Clarins do one that is ok for everyday use), body (I really cannot live without Body Shop Body Butter seriously I could eat it you know how lovely the shop smells when you walk in well it's like that all over you absolute heaven!), feet (try Gink's 'hoof oil' it's a bit pricey at £450 for 50ml but really works wonders especially if you like your sandals as all modern girls do.  Just don't put it on the soles of your feet because then you might slip over!) eyes (just plain old Elyelle is fine for most skin types) and special cream for dry areas (try McFadden's 'Wonder Balm' you can only buy it from Greeks on Cornwall Road in EC1 but it's worth the trip)...

And it's pretty much like that all the way through.  She is mad, she lists product after product then goes through her daily routine which is essentially applying all these products twice a day.  She must have skin like putty.  I'm not knocking her as a person or anything I am just stunned at the level of, well product use.  It's crazy.

But I do confess to raising an unplucked eyebrow when she said she was a fan of seamed stockings.  Always the quiet ones.  Or loud ones in this case.


Lois Lowry - 'The Giver'  Excellent book, I would recommend this one.  Nice simple dystopian story with good attention to detail.  I only realised after I'd finished it was written for children.  Still a good book though, read it if you like that sort of thing.

surreal

Quote from: Captain Crunch on June 15, 2007, 03:25:34 PM
And it's pretty much like that all the way through.  She is mad, she lists product after product then goes through her daily routine which is essentially applying all these products twice a day.  She must have skin like putty.  I'm not knocking her as a person or anything I am just stunned at the level of, well product use.  It's crazy.

Christ - sounds like American Psycho....

bennyprofane

Regarding Iain Banks, he absolutely dominated my teenage reading.  Wasp Factory especially.  I remember being on a bit of a family holiday up in Glasgow and hearing it on Radio 4 by accident  and just being utterly hooked.  And of the other stuff, I loved the Crow Road, and absolutely adored a Song of Stone.  I can't think why the reaction to it in this thread has generally been so negative.
But the last 3 or 4 books I've read by him have underwhelmed me more and more each time.  Up to the point where I saw him at Hay on Wye lit-fest while I was stewarding there this year, and was quite taken with him as an interviewee, but squirming miserably throughout his reading.  It was just so clunky, borderline inept writing, no ideas to it, no style... ach.  I'm studiously avoiding the pressure to go back and re-read the three of his books that I loved, to investigate whether or not they were all this bad and I was just crushingly immature.

What I'm reading at the moment is a book of short stories by Thomas Mann.  It's utterly fantastic, I remember trying to read one or other of his novels a few years ago and being washed over rather boredly, but the short stories are fantastic, even if they are all about exactly the same thing.  I haven't even got to Death in Venice yet, which is allegedly the peak of his work in the form, so I'm quite looking forward to it.  He has slightly disappointed me though, as I had a great thesis in mind about how central sister-incest is to the great Austrian/German writers of the 20th century, (Musil and Bernhardt more than most) but no real sign of it yet in Mann.  A bit of a shame, if only he were Iain Banks.

Also I just finished reading Just in Case by Meg Rossof, who's a kid's writer whose debut novel How I Live Now is the best kids stuff I've read since the Northern Lights trilogy.  Just in Case isn't quite as good, but still has all sorts of fantastic interesting stuff about existentialism and physics that you don't get in Harry Potter or Jacqueline Wilson.  Rossof's great, I sincerely hope she is the next children's author to fluke a millionairity, but she's basically too good. 


The Widow of Brid

I started reading A la recherche du temps perdu (the Lydia Davis translation) today. Great stuff.

wherearethespoons

Quote from: Dark Sky on June 12, 2007, 11:41:27 PMI hope to whizz through it so I can stuck into some more Ian McEwan

Have you read Enduring Love? I've just started it and am not keen on it at all.

Quote from: Murdo on June 13, 2007, 09:38:43 AM
What! That's one of my favourite books ever and would recommend it to anyone here who is in the mood for a complete head-fuck horror.

Somebody recently recommended that to me but I haven't been able to find a cheap copy.

CaledonianGonzo

Quote from: bennyprofane on June 15, 2007, 08:38:10 PM
It was just so clunky, borderline inept writing, no ideas to it, no style... ach.  I'm studiously avoiding the pressure to go back and re-read the three of his books that I loved, to investigate whether or not they were all this bad and I was just crushingly immature.

You might have hit on my problem with Iain Banks (note lack of M. - never managed, unlike Bill Bailey's twin, to chew my way through one of the sci-fi ones).  They just seem so trivial, so adolescent.  That first sentence of The Crow Road - "'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor" does little but annoy.  Exploding grannies.  LOLZ Random!  It's an impressionn re-affirmed by a recent re-reading of Whit.  I was trapped at my folk's place and picked up my old copy of it.  A read halfway through it was enough to confirm that it was nothing special, if not actively bad.  LOLZ Haggis Pakora!  Having said that, I last revisted the Wasp Factory about 6 years ago, and that did hold up well, so maybe I'm just being uncharitable.

QuoteIan McEwan

Now, there's an enigma.  There's no denying the swine can string a sentence together, but sometimes the relentless middle-class milieu can really be wearing.  When you've spent 6 pages of an already lean novel describing the contents of a picnic basket (Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Figs from Harvey Nicks, deepest, deepest blue cheeses), that's when you need a reality check.  Unless, of course, they're all some sort of satire on the wealthy Guardianista upper-middle-class that's too obtuse for people outside of that particular circle to cotton on to.

Borboski

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on June 15, 2007, 11:11:29 PM
MCEWAN

Now, there's an enigma.  There's no denying the swine can string a sentence together, but sometimes the relentless middle-class milieu can really be wearing.    Unless, of course, they're all some sort of satire on the wealthy Guardianista upper-middle-class that's too obtuse for people outside of that particular circle to cotton on to.


INTERESTING, IVE JUST STARTED SATURDAY, will report back, so far looks very good.

bennyprofane

Quote from: Anon on June 11, 2007, 10:00:20 PM
I'm only familiar with The Crying Of Lot 49 and V, but Lot 49 is definetely a much better plce to start from - it's just a snappier, more straight-forward tale (well compared to V it is anyway), and has some brilliantly witty scenes in it.  So yes, read The Crying of Lot 49.

BOOOoo!  I seem to be the only Pynchon fan in the world who doesn't think Lot 49 is the best place to start, or even particularly good.  V was the first one I read, absolutely on a whim whithout ever having heard of him before, and I loved it, and I didn't think the ideas or the structure were too hard to grasp.  The major thing is that, if you're starting to read Pynchon with the intention of building up to Gravity's Rainbow, then the ideas and structure of V are much more similar to the framework of GR than those of Lot 49.  Lot 49 is basically just an elucidation of a probability equation; plenty of funny stuff in it, but not anything like the range of ideas in GR, or the historical sweep of all his other stuff, or the range of emotional tones in V.

If you think about V as a simple opposition between intellectual passivity/pavlovian-ness, as epitomised by bennyprofane, and the structure-instinct and paranoia, as epitomised by Stencil (and the different paths that each of these takes to the creation of the same kind of 'fetish'), then you should have no problems picking up on the relevance of any given scene, and this particular philosophical opposition is the starting point for Gravity's Rainbow, which just goes far far beyond it in terms of allusion and structure and extra ideas.

Personally I think GR is the greatest novel, but V is probably my favourite book, just because I read it first and all my sense of Pynchonian revelation is attached to it most strongly.  Also I suppose because some of the chapters in isolation (the maijstral diaries, the sewer, the german compound and the dancers) are much more brilliant to read in isolation than any passage of GR.

So yeah, I just found Lot 49 completely flimsy by comparison, I wouldn't recommend reading it except out of curiosity.  So many people's only experience of Pynchon is through Lot 49 as a brief part of an undergraduate module, and that's a crying shame.

Has anyone read his new one, Against the Day?  I have a copy at home in England but it's too heavy to put in my suitcase when I come back to Bulgaria.  So I've read bout 3/400 pages over my last 2 trips, and I am enjoying it and seeing a bit of a development to his earlier ideas, but it's just not anywhere near as rich as GR.  Also his slightly naive overt politics are taking over from his actually fairly deft philosophical politics, which makes it occasionally a bit bad-hippy.  Nevertheless, he is great, and V is a perfectly comprehensible book to begin with.

falafel

I got Against the Day for my birthday a couple of weeks back, but I haven't started it yet. It does look pretty appealing. I'm in the middle of re-reading Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys, which is an excellent tale indeed. Also recently read DeLillo's latest. As a huge fan, I was slightly disappointed. Considering the subject matter, it's really quite lightweight and noncommital. Although he still has that knack for drawing huge significance out of funny little happenings - the problem is that Falling Man reads kind of like a series of disjointed episodes more than a coherent novel. Like he had lots of ideas about how to relate to 9/11 and then put them in a vaguely-connected chain. Still good, but my least favourite book of his, and as far as I know I've pretty much read the lot.

As for House of Leaves, come on, it's bloody creepy and absolutely stunning. I recently leant Only Revolutions to a friend - not sure what to think of it on reflection; with the timeline, the random flora/fauna references, it begs decoding (for want of a better word - interpretation) but I have a sneaking feeling an awful lot of the parallels are arbitrary. I mean, that's wonderfully postmodern and everything, shattering the illusion of coherence, inviting readers to draw conclusions from chaos and whatnot, but for me, once I imagine that to be the case, the search for meaning becomes futile (you've got to at least pretending what you're doing is somehow relevant, surely?) and the book becomes that bit less enjoyable.

The Widow of Brid

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on June 15, 2007, 11:11:29 PM
LOLZ Haggis Pakora!

I really do think you're being deliberately disingenuous as well as uncharitable there. Surely it's fairly obvious that, rather than just being a pointlessly wacky motif, the fusion cookery is there to underline the fact that the entire environment that Isis has grown up in is actually the result of a series of protective, pragmatic, domestic actions taken by the immigrant sisters rather than a divinely inspired plan on Salvador's part?

CaledonianGonzo

Quote from: Mrs Trousers on June 16, 2007, 01:13:39 PM
I really do think you're being deliberately disingenuous as well as uncharitable there.

Oh, totally.  I'd had a few drinks in me.  Funnily enough, haggis pakora is fast becoming a staple in Indian restuarants up here.  Very nice it is too.


Mr. Analytical

Iain Banks is steadfastly middle-brow.  Never as clever or as funny or as well written as it should be.  His early SF work is superb and I think he did quite a lot to re-invigorate the Space Opera sub-genre but his last three SF books have all been pretty much terrible.  The Algebraist in particular... where is didn't feel like it was revisiting old glories it felt bloated and at times absurdly camp.

I'm not a big reader of straight fiction but I've never been a huge fan of Banks' work.

At the moment I'm reading Richard Morgan's fantastically named Black Man and while there are some interesting ideas buried in there, I'm struggling with the bloat and the fact that the ideas are so spread out across numerous plot-lines.  A while ago I read Roadside Picnic and that was really good.  It's about 150 pages long and it's full of ideas and humanity and drama.  After reading that a book three times as long with less interesting ideas is more a pain than anything else.

fanny splendid