What are you reading?

[buttgammon]

Just finished Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. Supposed to be the first in the genre 'modern spy thrillers', it was written in the 1903 - slightly pre-dating John Buchan's Hannay books, set mainly in that confusing string of islands and sea between Holland and Denmark.

It has the feel of a ripping yarn. There are maps (reproduced slightly too small and smudgy to read) which are referred to throughout the text. Lots of stuff about sailing. It's related as a true story, with an epilogue which explains how the manuscript was 'discovered' and how the story foiled a plot to invade England.

Overall, 7/10. Would read again.

Next: the Anthony Powell biography, by Hilary Spurling.

You may well be aware of this but an interesting thing about Childers is that his son (also called Erskine Childers) became the President of Ireland!

[gilbertharding]

I didn't know that, no.

I also had very little idea about the Irish Civil War (and still don't, really. It's like a foreign country)... and just read the wikipedia entry on his execution. Last words to his firing squad after shaking their hands: "Take a step or two forwards, lads, it'll be easier."

[buttgammon]

I also had very little idea about the Irish Civil War (and still don't, really. It's like a foreign country)... and just read the wikipedia entry on his execution. Last words to his firing squad after shaking their hands: "Take a step or two forwards, lads, it'll be easier."

That's terrific - certainly beats the incoherent screaming they'd have got out of me (or most people) in a similar situation.

On a related note, there's a good book about the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Civil War, called The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence by Charles Townshend. I'd also recommend Thomas Bartlett's Ireland: A History, and anything by Roy Foster is good on Irish history.

[Famous Mortimer]

Finally finished "Hawksmoor" by Peter Ackroyd. Took me long enough, but it was really good, and I'm only two months late to take part in that online book group that Duncan Jones was organising. Perhaps I didn't quite buy why Hawksmoor started losing his mind, but it still gives you plenty to think about.

Now having a bash at "The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead, and it's a good 'un. I really got out of the habit of reading in recent months, so I've been struggling a little to get into right frame of mind. This is lighter than Hawksmoor, relatively speaking (neither are cheer-fests, obviously) but I liked the other Whitehead books I read, and I'm enjoying this too. Surprised no-one else ever had the idea of making the underground railroad a literal underground railroad (cue a dozen people giving me other examples).

[holyzombiejesus]

Found myself in the odd position of having nothing to read last night. I always have something lined up for next but haven't bought owt new in ages and couldn't think of anything I wanted to read out of the mountains of unread books that are cluttering up the house. Anyway, I've gone for Ice by Anna Kavan.

[Norton Canes]

That sounds brilliant. Copy ordered. Serendipity!

[marquis_de_sad]

Ice is good.

[Artie Fufkin]

Ice is good.

Grrr! It's disappeared from Amazon kindle store. Why does this happen? I'm writing a letter to the BBC!

[Artie Fufkin]

In other news, James Herbert's The Rats is on Amazon kindle for 99p, currently. Remember reading it when I was about 13. Giggling over the sexy bits. Dark, furry triangles. Mmmmmm.

[buttgammon]

Just finished Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, which was very good. It's her first novel apparently, and there is some serious promise in this. The first part of the novel - which concerns an affair between a young woman and an ageing writer - is one of the best things I've read recently.

I also recently got a book of John Ashbery's poetry, having enjoyed the few bits of his stuff I'd read before, and it's absolutely fantastic.

[thraxx]

Just finished Moneyball by Michael Lewis, really enjoyed it. I love baseball and statistics so it is inexcusable that it took me this long to get round to it.

Fucking brilliant book.  I couldn't give a shit about baseball and know fuck all about it, but I've read this book again and again and still can't get enough.  But then again, it's not really about baseball; just as Trainspotting isn't really about drugs. That's just the context against the book plays out.  The book is about people and culture.

[thraxx]

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.

I grew up in the 80s in a town where Savile (and Jonathan King), had flats and my parents forbade me to go out and play anywhere near those flats; everyone in the town knew, or has at least heard the stories of diddling by that pair of cunts and their cronies.  Every time Jim'll Fix It was on, my father used to start muttering what a 'filthy old cunt' Savile was, my mother was less foul mouthed but wouldn't support Entertainment USA being on.  Hence I've always held a weird fascination forSavile, though not to the extent that Dan Davies was, and read a fair few books about Savile.  This is the best one and goes in depth on, his crimes, his life, his victims and the person.  Fascinating in as much as the author's obsession of Savile, he doesn't get to what Savile is, but he gets as close as anybody. Interestingly, Davies had already started a biog of Savile when the truth hit the news and the book contains some of that tension.

[Ray Travez]

Bill Oddie's Bailey's Remarkable Guide to British Birds
Enjoyed this. Bought it cheap to sell on. Made me laugh in a few places. Learned the difference between crows and rooks, and am now a big fan of some local rooks that I previously had thought were crows. I like his writing; his love of British birds mirrors my own. Nice drawings too. Nine out of t-HEN

Dom Joly- the Dark Tourist
I never thought I'd read this, but I got it as part of a four-books-for-a-pound deal, so there it was. Enjoyed it, pretty informative when he goes to North Korea, and interesting when he talks about his childhood in Lebanon. I know a lot of people here dislike him, but I think he's alright.

Frank Skinner- on the road. Enjoyed this. Read half of it, and I think half was enough.

How to Shit Around the World – Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth.
So-so. Turns out I pretty much already know how to shit around the world.

Ron Jonson- so you've been publicly shamed?
Read this for the second time on a 4 hour flight. Good stuff. 'survival of the blandest' is a good phrase. You can so easily get caught out by a badly-phrased joke, or an 'interesting' opinion from years previously. The bland will prevail!

Johan Hari- Lost Connections
Somewhat overlong with extraneous detail; nevertheless a powerful diatribe against the use of anti-depressants, and a strong critique of the failure of capitalist society to provide meaningful work or a sense of community. Much of it I knew already, and many of his beliefs mirror my own, but still worth reading, for me at least to underline the failings of these drugs and the rationale behind them. The DSM IV treatment of the 'grief exception' is pretty shocking. A description of what happened is at the beginning of this Guardian excerpt from the book-
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/is-everything-you-think-you-know-about-depression-wrong-johann-hari-lost-connections

[Ray Travez]

Hard Time by Shaun Attwood.

Cheers, enjoyed your review. I'll put this on my list when I've got through the few prison books I've got waiting on the bookshelf.

[Dannyhood91]

Bill Brysons the Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

[holyzombiejesus]

Really really enjoying The Overstory by Richard Powers.



The Guardian says "No less a writer than Margaret Atwood has said of Richard Powers that "it's not possible for him to write an uninteresting book". On the evidence of The Overstory, he is continuing a remarkable run that began when he came to prominence in 2006 with the National Book award-winning The Echo Maker. This is a mighty, at times even monolithic, work that combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees that elegantly sidesteps pretension and overambition. Early comparisons to Moby-Dick are unfairly lofty, but this fine book can stand on its own."

I'm only in the first quarter at the moment, getting introduced to the 9 characters that have already had their lives affected in some way by a particular tree. God, that makes it sound so shit. It's not.

[ASFTSN]

Amazingly descriptive stuff so far.  Bit of a shame that Barbusse apparently went from channelling his experiences in the trenches in this, to ultimately being a massive fan of Stalin.  He died before WW2, and I wonder what he would have made of it.

[buttgammon]

Reading (and really enjoying) Gide's The Counterfeiters at the moment. I didn't really expect to enjoy it and just got it because it looked like it might be useful for my thesis, but it's turned out to be excellent so far. He shifts perspectives very well (and very often), using a lot of short chapters that radiate out from one another to look at a whole world of decay. I've heard it described as a cubist novel, and I get that; the way I've thought about it is as though you're looking at a hall of mirrors, in which you see the same images distorted in many different ways. The closest point of comparison I have is the 'Wandering Rocks' chapter of Ulysses, but it almost reminds me of American postmodernists like John Barth, Donald Barthelme and even Thomas Pynchon at times, especially when it goes all metafictional with one of the characters trying to write a novel also called The Counterfeiters.

[mothman]

Just finished The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. It's a bodyswapping tme-loop take on the country house murder mystery. A man wakes up in a different body among the guests and staff of a stately home, one body for each of eight days. He can remember everything that's happened over those past days and must determine by the end of the eighth day who is responsible for the murder of lord of the manor's daughter, Evelyn, by the end of the eighth day - or his memory will be wiped and he'll start again. It's implied he's been doing this for many years without finding the solution. How he gets along in this iteration, and the things he learns and the allies and enemies he makes (he's not the only time-looper on the scene, but the differene is he can remember each of the eight days) why he's different, and the nature of this existence he finds himself in, are some of the mysteries to be solved. It's definitely worth a go.

[Black Ship]

The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin. Being a chef I was fascinated by the title. And it turns out to be a jolly good read as well.

[Famous Mortimer]

Just finished The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. It's a bodyswapping tme-loop take on the country house murder mystery. A man wakes up in a different body among the guests and staff of a stately home, one body for each of eight days. He can remember everything that's happened over those past days and must determine by the end of the eighth day who is responsible for the murder of lord of the manor's daughter, Evelyn, by the end of the eighth day - or his memory will be wiped and he'll start again. It's implied he's been doing this for many years without finding the solution. How he gets along in this iteration, and the things he learns and the allies and enemies he makes (he's not the only time-looper on the scene, but the differene is he can remember each of the eight days) why he's different, and the nature of this existence he finds himself in, are some of the mysteries to be solved. It's definitely worth a go.

From one of the book-cover reviews:

"If Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett had ever had LSD-fuelled sex"

Lee and Herring - "Lazy Journalist Scum"

[marquis_de_sad]

"If Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett had ever had LSD-fuelled sex"

... in HELL!

[mothman]

What? "If Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett had ever had LSD-fuelled sex?" No. Shit, no, man! I do believe you could get your ass kicked saying something like that.

I mean, Jesus, I see your point about lazy journalism, but that is just so wide of the mark it's absurd. Christie casts a ling shadow over English mystery ficton, and the country-house murder mystery in particular (though, and I could be wrong, but I don't think much of her work really fitted that genre anyway?), so I guess there are certainly parallels to be found. But Pratchett? At no point did I get that from it.

[Neville Chamberlain]

Finally working my way through JG Ballard's complete set of sort stories - one story a night.



He's a weird one, is old Ballard. His utterly clinical writing style is simultaneously both annoying and compelling. I guess the fact I keep getting drawn back to Ballard is evidence that I'm a lot more more compelled than I am annoyed. His characters are more like "examples" of people rather than "actual" people, if that makes sense - but then I suppose that bothers me less as the importance of character development has always been kind of secondary for me. But what he lacks in character development he more than makes up for in the environments, landscapes and whole imagined worlds that he develops. The descriptions of Vermilion Sands, for example, as a sort of imaginary resort for rich people and their ludicrous and fantastical playthings and technologies, are just so addictive and alluring that I can't help getting sucked in.

[ASFTSN]

Finally working my way through JG Ballard's complete set of sort stories - one story a night.

They're bloody amazing, those short stories. For the most part, any way.  Looking forward to reading your thoughts on "Answers To A Questionnaire."

EDIT:  Oh yeah, and "The Greatest Television Show on Earth."

[Neville Chamberlain]

They're bloody amazing, those short stories. For the most part, any way.  Looking forward to reading your thoughts on "Answers To A Questionnaire."

EDIT:  Oh yeah, and "The Greatest Television Show on Earth."

I will do! Last night, it was Chronopolis - great story, no flab (quite a relief after the good but excessively long The Sound Sweep), and Ballard's descriptions of the vast, decaying urban landscape were just mesmerising.

[saltysnacks]

Huck Finn. I cannot believe I have put it off this long, the writing manages to be poetic whilst being entirely in dialect and from a child's point of view. Nothing is lost for the reader despite Huck's relative ignorance and the humour derived from him actually getting things wrong. I think the dialect writing has power because it is written from the someone who actually knew it and most likely spoke it, there is nothing worse than inauthentic and patronising dialect writing (there are actually plenty of things worse, of course).

[ASFTSN]

Chronopolis

Is that the one about the society that broke down because of the stratification of all activity into different timezones so as to maximise efficiency?  I love his work but the titles of the shorts all blur into one for me.

[Neville Chamberlain]

Is that the one about the society that broke down because of the stratification of all activity into different timezones so as to maximise efficiency?  I love his work but the titles of the shorts all blur into one for me.

Yep, that's the one.

[gilbertharding]

The recent Hilary Spurling biography of Anthony Powell.

Having read most of his early novels, A Dance to the Music of Time (several times) and his own memoirs, I must say I am finding it both repetitive and fascinating - all of his work is so transparently autobiographical, the ground has been gone over many, many times. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent.

Also - noted in a review I read - Powell as a character is as absent from his own biography as Nick Jenkins is as the narrator of aDttMoT. You only see him reflected in the people he knows, somehow.