What are you reading?

[Artie Fufkin]

I'm now reading David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue. A book involving musicians, written by a non-musician. Some of it jars with me. But, hey. What do I know. I'm just a drummer.
It's started off ok.

[holyzombiejesus]

I'm now reading David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue. A book involving musicians, written by a non-musician. Some of it jars with me. But, hey. What do I know. I'm just a drummer.
It's started off ok.

Think there's a thread on here somewhere for that.

[Artie Fufkin]

Think there's a thread on here somewhere for that.

Oooh. Ta.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Have put the Pentagon Papers to one side for now (300 pages in) and am halfway through Peter Oborne's The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the emergence of a new moral barbarism. It's quite a slim book (just under 200 pages) and is £12.99 hardback (only came out this year), but it might make any supporter of this government you know who will listen to argument think again. Already feeling angry at Oborne's detailing of the lies this government told in the 2019 election and in early 2020.

Sorry to go all political in this thread.

I don't agree with some of Oborne's conclusions in the introduction to his book, but he is good at calmly laying out the lies and venality of this government. Reading it will enrage you though.

[Captain Crunch]

Think there's a thread on here somewhere for that.

Yer tizz

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,81505.0.html

[Famous Mortimer]

"The Psychology of Time Travel" by Kate Mascarenhas

Must have been recommended on some list or other. Pretty interesting novel about a group of female scientists inventing time travel and the effects it has on society and the women who invent it. Sort of a cross-time murder mystery which is structured in a clever way. I enjoyed it, and it's a pretty easy read too.

[mr. logic]

No one is talking about this- Patricia Lockwood.

Can see this one being very divisive, but I loved it. Nailed the internet and internet addiction quite stunningly. I'm not as 'online' as the author but I sense a lot of the piles on and viral moments she describes are real things and just stepping away from social media and looking at it through the lens of a gifted and funny writer really does make you marvel at its absurdity.

[holyzombiejesus]

All I know about her is that my wife and I saw a photo and agreed that she looked nothing like what someone called Patricia Lockwood should look like.

[mr. logic]

Yeah. I thought it was the lady out of Keeping Up Appearances.

[Mobius]

Just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's "Outer Dark" which I loved. The campfire scene towards the end was very unsettling.

Gonna do "Child Of God" next

[bgmnts]

Struggling with Alan Moore's Jerusalem on Audible at the moment, to the point where I cant remember the plot, if there even is a plot.

Does it actually go anywhere or is it a series of short stories?

[Havmannen]

halfway through Peter Oborne's The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the emergence of a new moral barbarism. It's quite a slim book (just under 200 pages) and is £12.99 hardback (only came out this year), but it might make any supporter of this government you know who will listen to argument think again. Already feeling angry at Oborne's detailing of the lies this government told in the 2019 election and in early 2020.

Sorry to go all political in this thread.

I don't agree with some of Oborne's conclusions in the introduction to his book, but he is good at calmly laying out the lies and venality of this government. Reading it will enrage you though.

Thanks for this. I'll give it a look. He seemed to be one of the few big voices holding Johnson to account at every turn, previously. I also don't agree with him all the time.

I'm currently reading Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. I read Never Let Me Go when it came out and wasn't overly impressed but gave him another try with The Unconsoled which I absolutely loved (I appear to be in the minority on that). So, far I am enjoying Klara. It's well written and is giving out a few nice clues about things to come. There is something really compelling about it even as Klara is standing still for pretty much the entire first part. Top stuff.

[dr beat]

Been reading a load of band biographies over the last year, for which I need to contribute to that thread.  Just started on Rock & Hard Places: Travels to Backstages, Frontlines and Assorted Sideshows by Friend of Chart Music Podcast Andrew Mueller.  Part travel book, part band on the road sort of thing.  Very good so far.  I spent a short amount of time in Sarajevo a while back so it was interesting to read his take on things there in 1996.

[mothman]

I'm re-reading The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault. I've never really been into historical fiction, but as a depiction of the prevailing assumptions about what life was like for an Athenian citizen during the second phase of the Peloponnesian War (the historical events really start to play a part in protagonist Alexias's life in the run up to the disastrous Sicilian expedition in 415 BC), it really does hold up. It's Renault's first true classical-history novel, and the only one I've gone back to time and again - and whereas I'd read her Alexander trilogy as background to my O-level Classical Studies project/coursework, this I discovered by accident, spotting it on my grandparents' bookshelves.

[Pink Gregory]

Struggling with Alan Moore's Jerusalem on Audible at the moment, to the point where I cant remember the plot, if there even is a plot.

Does it actually go anywhere or is it a series of short stories?

Is the audiobook divided into the three volumes or is it all together?

[bgmnts]

Is the audiobook divided into the three volumes or is it all together?

It was actually divided into six downloads but its just one big thing of 43 chapters.

[Pink Gregory]

See the 2nd volume takes a break from that, and then picks it up again for the 3rd

[MoreauVasz]

Just finished Brian Keene's The Hollow.

Objectively, it was shit. The characters are under-written, the book is really badly padded meaning that the pacing is all over the shop. Feels like a padded novella. And yet... And yet... The set-pieces are fun.

Basically, it's about a horror writer whose neighbour unwittingly unleashes a satyr on the local population. Goatboy pulls out his pan pipes, has a tootle, all the boys get the horn and all the girls start craving goatcock. Hits that really unsettling sexy/scary line as Moore's Lovecraft comics.

[timebug]

After watching the (IMO) piss poor* TV version of Roy Grace the other week, I went back to re-read the first book and check what I remembered they had pointlessly changed for the telly show. I was once gain hooked and am soaring through the entire set (again!) at a rate of around one book every two days.

*Piss poor because; John Simm is an okay actor but he is in fucking EVERYTHING. Give someone else a chance eh? His boss is a vicious blue eyed blonde in the book. On TV a vicious lady of colour. For no reason whatsoever,other than filling quotas. The end of the story changed,because the book version would have probably cost a bit more that what they showed instead.
Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.....

[amputeeporn]

After watching the (IMO) piss poor* TV version of Roy Grace the other week, I went back to re-read the first book and check what I remembered they had pointlessly changed for the telly show. I was once gain hooked and am soaring through the entire set (again!) at a rate of around one book every two days.

I just don't get these books. I guess James knows his way round a plot but, for example, if I recall correctly the big solution to the mystery in book one is that Grace

Spoiler alert

either goes to a psychic, who tells him where the buried guy is, or randomly guesses.

[close]

Sometimes James rubs me the wrong way, too, plum posh (the son of the queen's glove maker) and yet living in tax exile because he signed a massive eight figure book deal a couple of years ago. I *hate* that he includes a glossary in the backs of his books to help us decode police slang like 'shit magnet', which we'd never be able to penetrate otherwise. He LOVES the police, never really writes about corruption or bad cops, and actually sponsors a couple of cars in Brighton that have his face on the side of them - and the less said about his dialogue the better. Particularly Grace's 'funny' banter with his black colleague. The tv show just lays bare what the books already are.

Oh, and I forgot all that shit Grace has going on with his wife.

Edit to add: apologies if this looks like an attack. These books just get my goat.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I'm reading the Witcher book series. None of them are particularly good, but I want to do a replay of Witcher 3 and sit there all smug mode when I recognise a character from the books or a reference to something that happened in them.

[willpurry]

"A Dragon's Life" by Walker Hamilton - has some of the same vibe as John Wain's "The Smaller Sky" what I read last year.  "Junk Day" by Arthur Sellings.

[BritishHobo]

I'm reading the Witcher book series. None of them are particularly good, but I want to do a replay of Witcher 3 and sit there all smug mode when I recognise a character from the books or a reference to something that happened in them.

I've started reading these after someone lent me them to plough through before playing The Witcher 3. I unfairly assumed they were going to be generic fantasy guff, and that I'd have to lie about liking them, but the monster-hunting and subervise-fairytale nature of the first one really won me over. Onto the second one now, hoping it keeps it up.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I'm afraid they get steadily worse. I hope you like 50 page chapters, because they're all that long in the later books, almost to the exact number. The first two short story books are the best, but in the main saga there's far too much waffle about things that aren't exactly crucial to the plot. Ever want to know every single excruciatingly boring detail of Ciri's family tree, stretching back over a thousand years? No? Tough shit, because heres a 50 page chapter on it.
I think the five book saga could easily have been cut down into three decent books with the help of a good editor.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I have recently read 'Dead Fashion Girl' by Fred Vermorel and I think you should too. It's subtitled 'A Situationist Detective Story' although situationism is only ever referred to obliquely and in passing. But that's situationism for you. Oblique and elusive. It is a virus. It has infected Fred and I, personally, am riddled with it, all down the left side mainly. We are all of us trapped in the spectacle. Vermorel is a writer of anti-biography, a Pistols insider and a man who knows a thing or two about the dark underbelly, the refracted image, the distorted reflection that offers the truest likeness.

Dead Fashion Girl tells the story of the unsolved murder of Jean Mary Townsend in 1954 but it tells us much, much more than that. It's set in London, the demi-monde; a world of petty criminals, aspirant gangsters, aristocrats, fashionista's, light entertainers, an emergent ravenous youth crawling from the shadows of WWII hellbent on rejecting the shackles and restrictions of their elders, and absolutely shitloads of raving queens. Chelsea Art College balls, Bombsite gangs, showbiz orgies (featuring Bob Monkhouse), the Duke of Edinburgh, the Cunt of the Month club, the twitchy curtains of suburbia, vanishing American Airmen and an ambiguous and surprisingly sinister cameo form Lionel Blair – all circle in unlikely orbit around a corpse in Ruislip. The Krays are there, of course, mere lads at this point, gawd bless 'em, but learning their trade and already fucking horrible. It's lavishly illustrated and beautifully fragmented. Published by Strange Attractor who knock out some right nice stuff. It's a whodunnit of sorts, but as with most of these things I couldn't really give a monkey's who dun. Who shot JFK? Who was Jack the Ripper? Who killed this poor girl? Too little, too late, mate. After all, it was you and me. Oh yes, we are all of us trapped in the spectacle.

I picked this up in a charity shop a week ago as I had a vague memory someone had recommended it but couldn't remember who or where, and I'm so glad I did as it's a fascinating read, I've just finished it now and enjoyed it a great deal so thank you for the above Doomy. I'm amazed it gets away with some of the stories told (especially Princess Margaret and Prince Phillip), but the insight it gives in to life in the fifties and the text in general is extremely captivating stuff.

[Kankurette]

I've gotten into The Wheel of Time in a big way and recently finished The Shadow Rising, which I loved. I'm buying The Fires of Heaven on pay day. I've not read The Eye of the World, I actually started halfway at A Crown of Swords, then Winter's Heart and sort of worked my way backwards. I'm looking forward to the adaptation. Weird gender politics aside, it's a lot of fun, though Rand is an obnoxious tit in the later books.

If anyone else has read the series - how do Brandon Sanderson's co-written books (The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light) compare? I know he had trouble writing Mat and that makes me a bit cagey about them as Mat is my favourite character, along with Nynaeve.

[Fr.Bigley]

That's why- Michael Mcdonald.

The chorus is so fucking catchy.

[Fr.Bigley]

That's why- Michael Mcdonald.

The chorus is so fucking catchy.

Wrong thread. Soz

[Small Man Big Horse]

Little Gods by Anna Richards - Epic adventure set prior to World War II and then during and after it, where the very tall Jean is ostracised by many, including her utterly cuntish mother, but befriends local girl Gloria and after the war moves to the states with her GI husband. It sometimes feels very like Angela Carter's writing and in places the prose is stunning, but occasionally it's also slightly exhausting and the odd bit doesn't quite work. It's a delight as a whole though, and it's a real shame this is so far Richards' only novel. 4/5

[phosphoresce]

I'm reading the delightful Mikhail Bulgakov. I started with The Heart of a Dog, which is a wonderful piece of comic, satirical writing. Now I'm on the collection of stories Diaboliad published by Vintage. I've read the titular short story so far, which is reminiscent of Kafka. Like Kafka it also features a poor sod being persecuted by a nightmareish bureaucracy. Looking forward to The Fatal Eggs, which I gather is a satirical attack on Soviet society, influenced by sci-fi motifs in H.G. Wells.