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What are you reading?

Started by Talulah, really!, October 04, 2017, 10:07:22 PM

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Serge

I finally got around to Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club, and can't believe it took me so long. I read What A Carve Up! years ago, but somehow never managed to read any of his others until now. I've already ordered The Closed Circle, the sequel, because I want to know where he takes those characters next.

He does sometimes get carried away with his post-modern clever-cleverness - I could do without the 13,000+ word sentence that (almost) closes the novel - but I did care about these characters, and I like the fact that he uses the political backdrop effectively without battering you about the head with it.

A couple of Jonathan Lethem novels that I ordered have turned up this morning - including Chronic City, which was recommended above - but I might wait until I've read 'Closed Circle' to get stuck into them.

holyzombiejesus

I really enjoyed The Rotters Club but had to keep a bit of paper with all the names and their links to each other as my memory's do rubbish. I don't think I've ever even seen the sequel in a shop, let alone read a review or heard talk of it.

holyzombiejesus

Just finished The Dry by Jane Harper. Set in a tiny Australian town in the middle of a record breaking drought, it tells the story of a cop returning to his hometown for the funeral of a childhood friend who, apparently shot his wife and child and then himself, However blah blah fucking blah. I don't normally read thrillers or crime novels or whatever this is classed as but I'd read really good reviews in the end-of-year round ups so thought it might be worth a go. In a way I quite enjoyed it, in the same way that Midsomer Murders or ITV midweek dramas can be enjoyable but, christ, the writing was so bad in parts. Not just the cliches that pepper each chapter but the glaring obviousness of the murderer from about halfway in.

Next up:


Captain Crunch

I'd like to recommend 'Pastoralia' by George Saunders if I may.  Jon Ronson recommended it on this show and it's well worth a squiz.   

Wet Blanket

I'm two thirds into Fire and Fury but finding it a slog. Like a lot of people I've spent so long in the online wormhole reading up on Trump's daily indiscretions that it's already old news, and there's not much in the way of insight, other than Trump's a dickhead and Bannon not as clever as he though he was.

Simultaneously I've been reading former mortuary assistant Carla Valentine's alarming memoir Past Mortems, which is fascinating in its account of the technical details and history of a necessary but gruesome profession, although there's occasional hints of it having a detrimental emotional impact that she never goes into. (or hasn't so far, I'm about half way through). Smashing gore though.

bgmnts

Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves by Susan B Pomeroy.

Some random academic work i picked up at the Roman baths, detailing the role of women in ancient Greece and Rome.

MoonDust

Finished Camus' The Plague and whilst I liked the story and some of the themes, I must admit it was a hard read and perhaps overly philosophical. To the point where it seemed literally everything had to be described in an overly elegant and poetic way. Like just the description of the town being quiet past midnight goes on and on and on, full of eloquent language and metaphor. I realise Camus was also a philosopher, but I nevertheless feel his book could be way less verbose and still retain his underlying themes and ideas.

I enjoyed Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale a lot better, which I also have just finished and powered through in a few days. The style and prose I preferred, and has actually given me some ideas on how to write the sci-fi novel I'm currently having a stab at writing myself. I loved the way Atwood would allude to things in this dystopian future off the cuff, like when the narrator Offred mentions whales, "when they used to exist." No more info given, just a flippant remark in five words which conjures up simply but effectively that this future world is so fucked up that whales are extinct. You can imagine the repercussions yourself of such a thing. With regards to these snippets of world building, rather than in-depth description, the only criticism I have is when she alludes to the civil war that's clearly raging inside Gilead/the former United States. The only belligerent factions Atwood mentions fighting the Gilead regime are religious. She mentions an underground movement of Quakers who help people escape, and a faction of Baptists who were defeated in the hills in some guerilla battle. But these are the only time such fighting is mentioned.

The reason why this bothers me a little is because that, unless the reader is to assume that 99% of the US population prior to the Gilead regime was staunchly Christian, I can't see why that if something like the Gilead regime actually emerges in the USA, then the only people fighting it would be different denominations of Christianity. Just like in Syria now, resistance to Gilead would take the form of not only religious, but political struggle, encompassing all shades of the left-right spectrum, nationalities, idealisms etc.

Whilst due to the very vagueness of the description of the wider politics of Gilead in the novel, I'm only assuming Atwood is painting a picture where the only resistance is religious, nevertheless since religious factions are the only belligerent factions mentioned it kinda paints this picture of a purely religious conflict. Which personally I find unrealistic. Even if just once it mentions that the news is on and it says a militia of Democrats or something were defeated in such-and-such a city, then just that one detail will immediately have made the internal conflicts within Gilead significantly more believable.

Because whilst I was reading it and thinking "okay, I can see why Baptists would fight back as Gilead is against all Christians other than themselves it seems" I was still thinking "but what about the secular people? The atheists? The democrats, socialists, nationalists? Whose side are they fighting on? Surely some of them must be fighting somewhere.."

newbridge

Finished The Fall Guy by James Lasdun. Very enjoyable page turner with a great unreliable narrator who you increasingly realize is unreliable. One for all you voyeurs out there.

Famous Mortimer

My favourite bit of A Handmaid's Tale is when the Chinese tourists come to gawk at the backwards culture the USA now has. Just a little bit, but very effective.

The rest of it's not quite so funny when you're living through the prologue.

holyzombiejesus

Currently reading Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown's vicious and gossipy biography of Princess Margaret. I don't particularly hate the royal family - they generally merely bore me - but HRH comes out of this so so badly. It's brilliant! Brown seems to really delight in shining a light on the ridiculousness of the family and their weird hangers on. I've just finished the chapter where she watches hardcore gay porn with Peter Cook and Harold Pinter.

holyzombiejesus

Ha! Just finished the next chapter, where Margaret gets up on stage at some function, instructs the band to play some Cole Porter songs and sings along. She gets carried away because of the sycophantic applause and starts raucously singing 'Let' s Do It' whilst "winking and wiggling her hips". She eventually has to rush off stage "scarlet-faced" because Francis Bacon is jeering and booing so loudly.

zomgmouse

Read Eve by James Hadley Chase, which was pretty interesting in terms of being a noir but more of the melodramatic side of noir rather than the crime detectivey sort of noir. It's set in the world of Hollywood as well, and written in 1945, so there's a really intriguing atmosphere around it. Essentially it's chronicling male obsession and does a good job of honing in on how psychologically grimy that can get.

buttgammon

Read about half of Han Kang's The Vegetarian this morning, and I was blown away. It's so visceral and yet so beautiful. This is one example of a book that gets loads of attention and acclaim because it actually deserves it.

spamwangler

just zipped through Cormac Mcarthy's Child of God, some nice austere prose, bracingly vulgar, a load of silly nonsense, a snuff boys own adventure, a thoroughly enjoyable load of old rubbish 3/5

zomgmouse

Finished reading Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy, a meticulous and passionate reappraisal of the wrongful execution of a man for the murder of his wife and child - I suspect most people knew more about this than I did when I read it, but it's fascinating and grim. I was really absorbed by the details, especially the analysis of the psychological circumstances surrounding the people involved in the case, and how all these small factors shaped the outcome of the trial and so on. Highly recommend it. Can't wait to see the film.

Serge

I've been horrendously ill recently (still am), so haven't been reading as much as I'd like, but since my last post, I've read:

Robert Forster's Grant And I, his memoir about The Go-Betweens, which was an excellent read. It almost seems that by the end, McLennan is still as much of a mystery to him as he was when they first met. Lindy Morrison comes across as a fairly horrible person, though.

Trevor Noah's Born A Crime, the fairly hair-raising story of his childhood and teen years. Obviously, apartheid plays a big part in it, but there's so much insane stuff that happened to him and his family that it's amazing how he seems to be such a level-headed guy now. Well, alright, not that amazing, when you see how he was schooled in how to behave properly by his mum, but still.

And a re-read of Bill Bryson's Notes From A Small island and The Road To Little Dribbling. Reading them back to back, it's interesting to note how much he lifts and re-uses from the former in the latter, and how it often seems like his heart isn't really in it in the second book.

Wet Blanket

I found Little Dribbling disheartening in its many instances of "it was better in the old days" grumbling. One part stuck in my mind when he describes being in small town traffic, and another car giving way to him and complains "this used to happen all time." It just fucking did you miserable bastard.

Bryson to me is a good example of how fogeyishness and being a bit out of sync with the modern world is attractive in a young man and just fogeyishness in an old one. He's pretty unforgiving about small town America in The Lost Continent but it doesn't have the same sour atmosphere of reactionary grumpiness.

Serge

The bit in 'Dribbling' that still annoys me is when he's on a bus and a young lad sits opposite him wearing baggy trousers and a baseball cap, and he manages to work himself into an angry froth about it, despite the fact that the lad has done nothing more than wear clothes that Bryson didn't wear in his youth and sit near him on a bus. Because of this, Bryson seems to think it's ok to infer that he's gormless, feckless layabout. It did remind me of James Thurber's later work when he would get bitter about aspects of modern culture that he didn't understand.

holyzombiejesus

That bit stuck out for me too. Just came across as a sneering wanker.

I've finished that book about Princess Margaret (which was (mostly) ace) and am now reading Jim Crace's latest, The Melody. Then I might read that collection of Denis Johnson short stories. It's got a real purdy cover.


buttgammon

I was motoring through books a couple of weeks ago, but I'm writing about a million different things at once and am struggling to find the time.

Saying that, I'm just coming to the end of Beckett's Molloy, which is the third time I've read it. It's so bleak and yet so funny, especially when Molloy gets arrested for resting against a bicycle in an indecent manner. Despite having read this a few times, I've never read the other two novels in the Trilogy, so I will be moving on to Malone Dies next.

Wet Blanket

I've just started reading Mark Fisher's long essay The Weird and the Eerie, which is a fascinating analysis of what turns out to be lots of my favourite things: David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, The Fall, Surrealism etc.

I'd never heard of him until somebody lent me this book last week; sad to discover that he died last year. He studied English at the same uni as me too.

I'm going to dive straight into Capitalist Realism next I reckon.

buttgammon

Capitalist Realism is great, I'd highly recommend it.

Twit 2

Never heard of him, but he sounds great.

I like the beginning of this clip where he talks about the parasitical nature of bureacracy and the inanity of work. I can totally see why he killed himself, as his kind of world view can be a lot to carry around with you, which is why you need some lightness too. Michael Foley (whose books balance erudition, cynicism and humour really well) has some excellent stuff about the meaninglessness of most work and particularly the managers who create and monitor it. I must check out Capitalist Realism, though I have a mountain of books to get through first.

zomgmouse

The Midwich Cuckoos was quite good, good sinister writing and very British. Some similarities with The Body Snatchers obviously. Interesting to see how the story developed and the Children were very eerie indeed.

Serge

I finally managed to get out of the house to pick up my copy of Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle and zipped through it in about a day. It's an essential counterpart to The Rotter's Club, as it answers a lot of the questions left hanging at the end of that novel - not least what happened to Miriam - and it's interesting to see what has become of all of the characters by the time they reach the late '90s/early '00s.

And I just read Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, which I'm afraid I wasn't mad about. It's far too long, and the writing is far too pleased with itself. As each new character gets introduced with ever more silly names, I started to get quite tired, and it really badly falls apart in the last 50-100 pages. Although Lethem has claimed a whole host of different influences on the novel, and some people seem to see it as being very Pynchon-esque (I've never read him, so can't comment), at times it read to me like a poor parody of a Paul Auster novel - though that may be the New York setting, and the fact that the relationship between the bland Chase Insteadman and the fizzing Perkus Tooth is strongly reminiscent of the one between Peter Aaron and Leonard Sachs in Leviathan.

mothman

Got a couple of pages into Harkaway's latest, Gnomon, but then decided I wasn't feeling it, so switched to Bristol author Gareth L Powell's new book Embers Of War.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: Serge on February 25, 2018, 04:41:30 PM
I finally managed to get out of the house to pick up my copy of Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle and zipped through it in about a day. It's an essential counterpart to The Rotter's Club, as it answers a lot of the questions left hanging at the end of that novel - not least what happened to Miriam - and it's interesting to see what has become of all of the characters by the time they reach the late '90s/early '00s.


Bearing in mind I found it quite difficult to keep track of the amount of characters in TRC (which I read a good 5 years ago), do you think I'd need to re-read it if I was to enjoy The Closed Circle?

Serge

Coe does put a brief recap of the plot of The Rotter's Club at the end of The Closed Circle, so people can remind themselves what happened. I think it helps to read them together, though, as they are essentially one novel split into two.

Norton Canes

About a third of the way through Dan Davies' In Plain Sight - The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. It's very readable and informative and certainly doesn't skimp on the detail but the events are so recent and mostly pretty fresh in the memory that I'm not really getting a great deal from it. Davies was a confidant of Savile in the offender's final years so there's a lot of Theroux-esque attempts to 'get behind the mask' and suss out the real man. Of course these attempts fail.

The narrative intersperses chapters recounting the media shitstorm in the wake of his death with the story of his life, so you're never far from being reminded of his legacy.

This post has been brought to you on behalf of the Society for Bumping Up the Visitors Stats of Shelf Abuse.

buttgammon

Reading Beckett's The Unnamable at the moment, and absolutely loving it. I laughed too hard at his whole family dying of "sausage-poisoning".