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What are you reading?

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

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saltysnacks

Quote from: MoonDust on June 11, 2018, 06:23:39 AM
You bastard, now I can't remember who said that too. But it sounds like something I've read recently. So based on that, was it either Rosa Luxemburg or Mark Fisher?
I think it was Mark Fisher yes, thanks.

marquis_de_sad

Jameson?

edit: sorry, didn't see the last post before sticking my oar in

zomgmouse

The Burmese Harp aka Harp of Burma. Quite sentimental though also fairly grim account of a company of Japanese soldiers in Burma and one of them disappearing. It's listed on Wikipedia as a children's novel but there's some pretty dark and existential stuff for a children's novel.

MoonDust

Nearly finished At Swim-Two-Birds. I wouldn't say it's "laugh out loud" funny like wet blanket says, but that's not to say I don't find it funny. It is a funny book, I just have come to realisation that for some reason books simply can't make me laugh. At the very most I will do a single snigger through my nose and smile, but as to a laugh or guffaw? Never happens when reading a book. Not sure why. But anyway, the book is good so far and I'm looking forward to seeing how it ends, but I must admit it is a bit confusing at times with all the characters, which incidentally ends up becoming a critique of one of the characters themselves.

I'm also reading another book at the same time; The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Didn't particularly seek it out, was just browsing the book shop yesterday and saw it on display. The subject matter I remember reading a news article about some years ago, it was about how a giant fungal network had been found in a forest in Canada connecting all the trees up, which I found exciting and fascinating to learn about. And this book is essentially about that and more. It's pretty good so far, though the writing style is sometimes a bit off kilter, but I'm not sure if that's down to the translator or not (original language is German).

Wet Blanket

Quote from: MoonDust on June 17, 2018, 09:19:51 AM
Nearly finished At Swim-Two-Birds. I wouldn't say it's "laugh out loud" funny like wet blanket says, but that's not to say I don't find it funny. It is a funny book, I just have come to realisation that for some reason books simply can't make me laugh. At the very most I will do a single snigger through my nose and smile, but as to a laugh or guffaw? Never happens when reading a book. Not sure why. But anyway, the book is good so far and I'm looking forward to seeing how it ends, but I must admit it is a bit confusing at times with all the characters, which incidentally ends up becoming a critique of one of the characters themselves.


I'm usually the same but there were passages in At Swim that blindsided me and caused me to actually laugh, which like you say is rare with a book. The narrator's baroque way with describing drunken vomiting, the cow-punchers and the Pooka's debates on the kangaroolity of women were all highlights.

I've moved on to Cosey Fanni Tutti's memoir Art Sex Music. I don't actually know much about Throbbing Gristle or Coum etc. but she's a notorious figure from my home town and I worked with her friend Les when I was a student, though at the time dismissed his talk about music and a characters by the name of Genesis P Orridge (who comes across very badly in Fanni Tutti's telling)

It's an engaging read. She has an endearingly matter of fact way of describing such an interesting and in some ways quite depraved life. One minute she's discussing having tea with her mum, the next group sex and avant-garde happenings. 

MoonDust

Quote from: Wet Blanket on June 17, 2018, 01:18:04 PM
I'm usually the same but there were passages in At Swim that blindsided me and caused me to actually laugh, which like you say is rare with a book. The narrator's baroque way with describing drunken vomiting, the cow-punchers and the Pooka's debates on the kangaroolity of women were all highlights.

To be fair you're right here. Beautifully written. The whole Pooka and Good Fairy bits are bafflingly amusing. I don't know why but I just kept finding it funny how the Pooka would break the conversation at random points to ask where the fairy is now, and the fairy would always reply nonchalantly. "Oh now I'm in your keyhole, fine mate, carry on."

Henry James 1886 novel The Bostonians begins in a pretty reactionary way. For the first 100 pages or so, it's an anti-feminist satire in which an idealistic, sometimes fanatical suffragette and her cousin, a  right-wing"Southern gentleman" struggle against each other to influence the mind of a confused, attractive young woman, a charismatic speaker who gives mesmerising, evangelist-style performances on the feminist lecture circuit.
The progressive upper-class Boston scene of that time is depicted as one where ideas which are now commonplace rub shoulders with esoteric stuff :militant anti-slavery and the struggle for women's rights are part of the same milieu as a belief in holding séances. Maybe that's accurate, but the tone of the narrator is still too right-wing; in the earlier chapters, it's the kind of book where the word "vegetarian" is used as shorthand for something self-evidently absurd. The feminists are mostly seen as utopian, dogmatic and over-earnest; the right-wing hero is seen as pragmatic, good humoured and realistic.

However, something changes as the book goes on, as if Henry James forgot his original ideological position and found something a bit vaguer and much better. Gradually, the suffragette becomes a more sympathetic character as it becomes clearer, (though never completely explicit) that she's falling in love with the young woman. The evasive homoeroticism is done beautifully here.
Erotic tensions build up between several of the characters, and there's a brilliantly fraught scene where James uses a word which is usually unintentionally funny in 19th Century novels in a way which I'm convinced is deliberate:
"'You'll have me in New York, you don't want anyone else!'Mrs Luna ejaculated, coquettishly".
Meanwhile, the Southerner's own viewpoint starts to be shown as equally inflexible and dogmatic as his rival's: at one point he makes a speech about feminisation sapping the vigour of society and making it decadent and sterile which seems eerily prescient of modern-day red pillers. I hope James put this in to make him less likeable, but by the end of the book I must admit I have no idea what James' real opinion was.

James' willingness to linger on long conversations, long convoluted descriptions and glacially slow plot developments is sometimes boring, (even some fans of his find this one a bit boring) but I found it very immersive, like a very addictive and beautifully written soap opera. 
There's a depth of contemporary detail that made me think about issues that had never occurred to me before: especially, and this crops up frequently with the Southern character, how white people in the 1880s dealt politely with the fact that some of them had been on the pro-slavery side of the US Civil War twenty years before. Almost all the progressive characters have a go at him for it, but they always do it in a way that avoids being ill-mannered, as if etiquette were the higher priority. I wondered if Germany was a bit like this in the 1960s, a peace maintained through a sort of dishonesty about the past.

the midnight watch baboon

I reading the Outsider, the new Step Hen King book. Really good so far although the sense of a diversion to a so-so supernatural conclusion is inevitable, like Judgment Day or dental suicides.

I read before that, the Dead, by James Joyce, who coincidence has it, is dead too. I believe this is a kind of high concept work that influenced film auteur M. Khan Shymalamanam into writing the Sixth Sense, possibly also the Vast Air-bender.


I am alternating crimey/thriller stuff with more classical stuff, you see. I am really into James Lee Burke, his Dave Robicheaux series is beautifully indulgent descriptions of nature and catfish death and crimes along the Louisiana bayous.

zomgmouse

Elmore Leonard's Cat Chaser, pretty standard but still engaging pulp stuff. Nice to flick through.




Got it because I know fuck all about the immediate postwar era. It's brilliant.

MoonDust

Just finished At Swim-Two-Birds. I reckon I'll try the Third Policeman next.

At the moment though I'm reading both The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle. The latter I've just started reading, the former I'm halfway through, and it's blood fascinating.

Well-researched book on the biology of trees and how they interact with the ecology within a forest. All the latest research about tree root systems and whether trees communicate, whether trees are on some level intelligent or aware, or at least have experience. There's some scientists who liken the root system to the brain for example. Absolutely fascinating book, but very accessible. Certainly makes me want to walk in a forest this weekend.

timebug

Currently halfway through Stephen Kings 'Outsider'. I know
King is very divisive, there are legions of fans and legions of
haters. Finding it okay so far. More a police procedural than
horror, but I know which direction it is going to turn very soon,
it is rather heavily signposted in the story!
But hey, I have read virtually everything else by the man, and
while I am no completist, its just something to read! And it cost
me nothing in the first place (It was a gift, so there!)

New Jack

Quote from: timebug on June 24, 2018, 10:04:53 AM
Currently halfway through Stephen Kings 'Outsider'. I know
King is very divisive, there are legions of fans and legions of
haters. Finding it okay so far. More a police procedural than
horror, but I know which direction it is going to turn very soon,
it is rather heavily signposted in the story!
But hey, I have read virtually everything else by the man, and
while I am no completist, its just something to read! And it cost
me nothing in the first place (It was a gift, so there!)

I bought it but just can't get more than a few pages in.

Keep us (me) posted! Was hoping for a bit of a Mr Mercedes-esque procedural with proper horror at the end, and I don't reckon I've been conned, but as ever he telegraphs so much, which sort of ruins mystery stories... But I'm still interested, so will probably find the enthusiasm to plug onwards.

Actually reading All The Pretty Horses for the first time, my Kindle dictionary needed a workout

timebug

Well, I finished 'Outsider' and my thoughts about where
it was heading were spot on. And there IS a link to the
Bill Hodges Trilogy (Mr Mercedes/Finders Keepers/End
of Watch) if you stick with it! Not his best by a long way,
but very far from his worst!

MoonDust

Just finished reading Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle. It's a pretty good, short, and fun novel on the whole. More deeply it has some interesting themes about evolution, what it means to be "civilised", and is pretty much full of allegory about our own society.

My one major gripe though, is that the fact that throughout the entire novel, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang-utans are collectively referred to as "monkeys". When they're not monkeys, they're apes! The fact the word is in the fucking title just adds huge mystery as to why the translator (originally it was written in French) chose to use "monkey". But then it's not even a language thing, it's a fact thing; chimps, gorillas, and orang-utans are simply not monkeys, and it is incorrect to call them such. No contest.

This pedantry on my part genuinely made the book less enjoyable that it perhaps should have been, unfortunately. But that's just me.

New Jack

Lunes de Fiel by Pascal Bruckner, or in English, Evil Angels, is grabbing me on this hot day.

It became the film Bitter Moon, and is psychologically exhausting and enervating in equal measure. The sheer fucking depth of what it tosses around...

Certainly puts some of my destructive yet fascinating and scarcely believable past relationships into sharp relief. No, I'm not a psychopath, but this is a brave book that seems to be at once a satire and an exploration of relationships, from the insanity of passion to, where I am right now, having to put the thing down due to the depravity and depths of remorselessmess, as it's draining and shocking.

sevendaughters

after someone made a joke on Twitter re: the nerd remake of the Last Jedi ("Pierre Menard's The Last Jedi") I've gone back to Borges and Fictions. of the 8 stories in the first half of the book (this edition comprises Fictions and Artifices, both 1944) I think 7 of them are just incredible, they crack my head open and things start happening in there that doesn't normally happen and I become a little afraid of it and have to put the book down. I love the ones that appear like a fictional literary review, like reading an LRB that's been sent to the team at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Quote from: sevendaughters on June 26, 2018, 02:55:17 PM
after someone made a joke on Twitter re: the nerd remake of the Last Jedi ("Pierre Menard's The Last Jedi") I've gone back to Borges and Fictions. of the 8 stories in the first half of the book (this edition comprises Fictions and Artifices, both 1944) I think 7 of them are just incredible, they crack my head open and things start happening in there that doesn't normally happen and I become a little afraid of it and have to put the book down. I love the ones that appear like a fictional literary review, like reading an LRB that's been sent to the team at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

The best book ever written, IMO. I've never read anything else quite as otherworldly and transformative

Reading 'Berlin Alexanderplatz' and finding it thrillingly unfocused (I like unfocused stuff, I'm a surrealist at heart)

chveik

Quote from: Monsieur Verdoux on June 26, 2018, 03:00:10 PM
Reading 'Berlin Alexanderplatz' and finding it thrillingly unfocused (I like unfocused stuff, I'm a surrealist at heart)

Yes, this is great stuff. You should check out the Fassbinder series if you never have.

non capisco

Just finished 'The Tailor Of Panama' by John Le Carre which I thought was brilliant, possibly my favourite of the ones I've read of his yet. It's almost Le Carre does farce at some points, clearly heavily influenced by 'Our Man In Havana' by Graham Greene but shot through with Le Carre's usual pessimistic disgust at the pointless wrongs we as a species routinely inflict on one another.

Now I'm onto Woody Woodmansey from The Spiders From Mars' memoirs. It's an amiable, fairly flimsy read so far but if you whack a picture of David Bowie on the front of a book and stick it in Dulwich Library I am duty bound to read it. There's a bit in it where Bowie's mum sees Mick Ronson's knob, an incident which I don't think was covered in the more comprehensive Bowie tomes I've previously read, to be fair.


ASFTSN

Quote from: Nice Relaxing Poo on June 22, 2018, 08:04:50 PM



Got it because I know fuck all about the immediate postwar era. It's brilliant.

That looks good.  Semi-related - I've just started this:


Quote from: chveik on June 26, 2018, 03:52:39 PM
Yes, this is great stuff. You should check out the Fassbinder series if you never have.

Will do!

Swift

After reading Peter Ackroyd's The Limehouse Golem, I felt like reading some further Victorian era stuff. Picked up A House to Let from the library, a short story collaboration between Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Ann Procter with all four contributing a chapter each and Dickens and Collins collaborating on the first and last chapter too. Also dipping into Dickens's Night Walks in the Penguin Great Ideas series.

zomgmouse

Quote from: Swift on June 30, 2018, 12:46:54 AM
Picked up A House to Let from the library, a short story collaboration between Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Ann Procter with all four contributing a chapter each and Dickens and Collins collaborating on the first and last chapter too.
This sounds fascinating!!

Small Man Big Horse

#385
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman - A random charity shop purchase because the reviews were so positive, I absolutely fucking hated this book. A basic retelling of the story of Jesus but where he has a brother, Christ, who's not really a scoundrel at all, just easily misled. The prose is tedious and poorly written, and the only positive is that it didn't take long to read. I truly can't understand the praise for this, sure it attacks organised religion and prefers the basic 'god is love' shite, but most of it is a retelling of Bible stories that are even more boring here than they are in the Bible.

sevendaughters



Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai. I dunno much about graphic novels/manga but I have a friend on twitter who proselytises for this series so I thought I'd go in on it. Really enjoying it. Seems reasonably historically-informed for a series about a wandering rabbit samurai.

Swift

Quote from: zomgmouse on June 30, 2018, 09:43:29 AM
This sounds fascinating!!

Unfortunately it sounded better than it actually was. The second, third and fourth chapters (of six) are essentially standalone stories told by one of the characters and only tied into the main narrative very, very loosely.

Artie Fufkin

Quote from: Artie Fufkin on April 30, 2018, 09:07:46 AM
China Mievelle's The City & The City.

Blimey. Finished this the other day. It was a struggle to be honest. Almost gave up a couple of times. But glad I stuck with it. The ending was pretty cool.
I'm now halfway thru

which is SO cool. Lovingly done.
And next up is

Followed by

which was kindly donated to me.

zomgmouse

Quote from: Swift on July 02, 2018, 03:17:58 AM
Unfortunately it sounded better than it actually was. The second, third and fourth chapters (of six) are essentially standalone stories told by one of the characters and only tied into the main narrative very, very loosely.

Hmm. Are they good though?