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What are you reading?

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

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Twit 2

Quote from: jobotic on December 23, 2019, 02:16:17 PM
Wittles boy, I need wittles.

GE is the only Dickens I've ever read, other than our Mutual friend at school, which I found unbearable.

Almost all canonical English literature makes me react like this.

surreal

I am bloody determined to actually properly read some books this coming year as I've fallen deep into the Netflix / Amazon trap the past year or two.

Starting with the Roger Moore 007 Diaries: making Live and Let Die.  50 pages in and great fun so far, didn't realise how many of his stunts he did (and got injured doing).  A bit 1973-racist in places, but there is a disclaimer about that.

Famous Mortimer

Just finishing up vol.2 of "The Dark Tower", then on to "Dead Fashion Girl: A Situationist Detective Story" by Fred Vermorel, which I think was recommended by someone on here. It looks fascinating, just from a quick flick through the pages.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on December 27, 2019, 02:42:52 PM
"Dead Fashion Girl: A Situationist Detective Story" by Fred Vermorel, which I think was recommended by someone on here. It looks fascinating, just from a quick flick through the pages.

That's one of the books I got for Christmas. May wait until the new year to start it as that's when I get time to read. Yeah, it does look great.

garbed_attic

Quote from: Ray Travez on December 12, 2019, 02:49:04 AM
Paying For It- Chester Brown (graphic novel)

Recommended by Gout_pony a while back. I thought it was good. Not quite what I was expecting. The author takes us through various encounters he had as a john, a punter paying for sex. In the intro he explains that some of the conversations he'd had with the prostitutes were edited to avoid giving away personal details that would make them recognisable. This is laudable, but I think the book suffered a little due to this- the women's characters were flattened somewhat. Still I found it interesting, and I've ordered another of his off the back of it. The ending was not what I expected, and rather touching I thought. The afterword contains a lengthy diatribe in favour of the legalisation of prostitution, which made a lot of sense.

heh I was probably criticising him... there are definitely some disquieting moments in it (such as when Chester thinks one of the sex workers might be underage, but decides just not to think too much about it)... meaning that, at times, it serves as more of a psychological portrait of himself than I believe he intended. However, it is doubtlessly interested and I enjoyed seeing Joe Matt in a different light. Artistically he is nothing is not an accomplished draftsman, but I rather miss his looser style of old. I prefer him formally to Seth though.

Twit 2

Hiroshima by John Hersey. Bit of light holiday reading.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: gout_pony on December 28, 2019, 12:05:46 AM
heh I was probably criticising him... there are definitely some disquieting moments in it (such as when Chester thinks one of the sex workers might be underage, but decides just not to think too much about it)... meaning that, at times, it serves as more of a psychological portrait of himself than I believe he intended. However, it is doubtlessly interested and I enjoyed seeing Joe Matt in a different light. Artistically he is nothing is not an accomplished draftsman, but I rather miss his looser style of old. I prefer him formally to Seth though.

I thought he came out of the book looking like a sleazy creep although much of that may have been down to my views on prostitution and those who pay for sex. I much prefer Seth (and Joe Matt) to Chester, so up yours.

garbed_attic

#817
Quote from: holyzombiejesus on December 28, 2019, 01:13:10 AM
I thought he came out of the book looking like a sleazy creep although much of that may have been down to my views on prostitution and those who pay for sex. I much prefer Seth (and Joe Matt) to Chester, so up yours.

For saying there are disquieting moments which inadvertently servers as a psychological portrait and that I was probably criticising him? I actually think Joe Matt comes across pretty well in it, though I don't think he's normally far preferable to Chester considering his confessions of hiding in a bedroom to watch someone have sex and of hitting his girlfriend. Seth's clearly a better human, I just dislike his linework and find his stuff boring.

magval

Quote from: surreal on December 26, 2019, 11:58:08 AM
I am bloody determined to actually properly read some books this coming year as I've fallen deep into the Netflix / Amazon trap the past year or two.

Starting with the Roger Moore 007 Diaries: making Live and Let Die.  50 pages in and great fun so far, didn't realise how many of his stunts he did (and got injured doing).  A bit 1973-racist in places, but there is a disclaimer about that.

His book Last Man Standing is really just a succession of famous-pals anecdotes but it's really good. If you liked that, you'll like this. Great projection of personality. Still need to get round to reading his actual autobiography, think I've read all the rest.

Artie Fufkin

Finished Doctor Sleep. Not his best book ever, but enjoyable. It was nice to find out what happened to Danny post-Overlook.
I'm now on to The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers.  I'm really enjoying this. Grim. Took me a little while to get into his style and rhythm, but think this is gonna be a nice but nasty one to finish off 2019.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: gout_pony on December 28, 2019, 08:45:30 AM
For saying there are disquieting moments which inadvertently servers as a psychological portrait and that I was probably criticising him?

Sorry, the 'up yours' was an unfunny joke.

Inspector Norse

I'm about 100 pages into The Tunnel by William H Gass. So far, my feelings are "bloody hell".

buttgammon

Quote from: Inspector Norse on December 28, 2019, 06:14:06 PM
I'm about 100 pages into The Tunnel by William H Gass. So far, my feelings are "bloody hell".

Read that about five years ago and it still feels like I'm recovering. Bloody hell indeed!

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Doomy Dwyer on September 12, 2019, 05:21:01 PM
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 from 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.
Found the recommendation that made me want to read it, and I'm glad I did. Well, I'm about halfway through it at the moment. Well written, lots of interesting anecdotes, and while it wanders quite a long way from the case it's supposed to be about, it's not worse for it. I agree with Doomy about not giving a toss who actually did it, partly because I didn't really know about the case until I read about the book for the first time.

garbed_attic

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on December 28, 2019, 12:06:37 PM
Sorry, the 'up yours' was an unfunny joke.

Nae worries! I was confused because I basically agree with what you wrote.

I'm not trying to think if there are any male autobio comics people who became famous in the '90s who resolutely //don't// seem like creeps. I'd still take Chester over David Heatley.

Quote from: Twit 2 on December 28, 2019, 01:00:53 AM
Hiroshima by John Hersey. Bit of light holiday reading.

The 'This is Your Life' episode mentioned in the book is freely available to view on YouTube and is just as awkward as described https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPFXa2vTErc

Small Man Big Horse

The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissel - This is The Room star Greg Sestero's version of events as to how the film was made, and how he met Tommy Wiseau in the first place. It's a very well written affair (possibly due to Bissell's input) and initially sympathetic and warm towards Wiseau as it flits between Greg telling the story of how he first met Tommy and the actual making of the film, but the problem is that from about a third of the way through Greg keeps going on and on about what a fucking weirdo Tommy is in both timelines, so it's impossible to have sympathy for him as he clearly already knew how crazy Tommy was, and yet he still takes advantage of Tommy's accommodation and money in ways which made me quite strongly dislike him and feel sorry for Tommy. I'm sure Tommy was a nightmare, the stories of the making of the film certainly suggest this and some of the tales are truly bizarre and fascinating to hear, but Greg spends way too much time insulting Tommy that it stops being fun.

After I finished it I watched the film, and it's pretty bloody poor, so I wouldn't bother with it personally.

buttgammon

After hearing of his death yesterday, immediately went headfirst into Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine, a book I last read about eleven or twelve years ago. It's an unbelievable book, which is essentially a lonely alcoholic businessman's sexual fantasy, filled with digressions. Some of it is hilarious, some of it is grim, some of it is just plain bizarre, but the interweaving of fantasy narrative, quasi-stream of consciousness and depth-plumbing psychodrama is so compelling and original that it's hard to put down. I'll definitely go back and read Lanark again as well.

Mister Six

Just got done with Disco 2000, a short story collection from 1997 that's themed around the turn of the millennium, with contributions from Douglas Coupland, Grant Morrison, Robert Anton Wilson, Bill Drummond, Douglas Rushkoff, Neal Stephenson and others. It's quite quaint in some ways - tapping into that weird post-Trainspotting vibe when writers were all scribbling about raves and MDMA, even if they didn't actually partake themselves (Drummond good-naturedly calls out the book for being a cash-in on Irvine Welsh's success in his story - and indeed, the previous collection, Disco Biscuits, featured a contribution from Welsh).

As with many such collections, it's very much a mixed bag. Stephenson's entry is just a chapter from his book Cryptocomnicon, which is disappointing, and while Drummond and Wilson's entries are fun, they're curios for the fans more than anything. Morrison's piece, "I'm a Policeman" - the reason I bothered tracking the book down in the first place - is a sister story to his Invisibles short "And We're All Policemen". It's intermittently funny, but didn't inspire outright guffaws in the way the comic version did. Coupland's thing is yet another in the long annals of American Gen X yarns about antidepressants, although coming after pages of people doing drugs for funsies, it did prove a bit of an antidote.

And many of the others are just sort of there. A trio of pieces - Poppy Z. Brite's "Vine of the Soul", Doug Hawes' "A Short Chronology of the Chemical Age" and Helen Mead's "Game On" - in particular amount to not much more than a bit of drugs and sex. Which is fine, but as someone who has done drugs and had sex, I'd like a bit of a story too, y'know?

However, the book did turn me on to a couple of authors I'd not heard before, and whose contributions were great fun: Margaret Miller, whose "Divine Flower of the Radiant Heavens" is set in an S&M club but is buoyed up by a cheerfully lighthearted whimsy; and Steve Aylett's "Gigantic" has some stunning imagery concerning giant, cathedral-looking interdimensional craft married to an amusingly off-kilter yarn about millennial "crazies". I'll definitely be looking into their other work.

Famous Mortimer

I finished "Dead Fashion Girl", and hope you don't mind me banging on about it a little.

The first half, where he goes through the case, roughly (with many diversions) is by far the most successful. There's a strange bit where he gets annoyed with the internet for there not being enough information about a 50s fashion designer on it, berating Wikipedia for having more about Paris Hilton than (whatever his name was). Like, every person nominated for a best makeup Oscar in the mid 50s has had oceans of text written about them.

But it's fine, by and large. I think he does a good job of exposing the other side of London (one which, if you'd read about Profumo and other scandals, probably wouldn't be that unusual to you, but whatever) and I liked his style. I am fascinated to see what happens when the files are eventually unsealed in 2031. It's the second half which I was a bit puzzled by, where he just does chapters about people who definitely didn't murder her, as if he was saying to us "I did the fucking research, so you lot are going to read it". Then he just does a bunch of smaller chapters about stuff from the 1950s, like bomb sites, and that's where his philosophical leanings come more into it. It felt like he he was 100 pages short of what his publisher wanted so he just knocked out a bunch of these. This last section is boring and doesn't say a lot - like, he criticises sweeping generalisations of "the fifties" but makes a huge number of them himself.

I'm glad I read it, definitely, but I don't think I'll ever revisit it (unless I've still got this copy of it in 11 years).

Buelligan

I'm not really reading this, just dipping into it occasionally.  I'm rather interested in military history and have been given a pocket phrasebook - What you want to say AND How to say it IN French (War Edition) - it's a tiny pocket dictionary and phrasebook produced for R BRAVE BOYS going to the trenches in 1915 and subsidised by Colemans of Norwich.

The pleasure in it, apart from its physical tinyness, the utilitarian design and the fact that it rested in the pocket of some person now long dead, is its insights into the lives of people living then.  So far joy and surprise from phrases like

  • You must iron my collars and shirts without gloss (Laundry)
  • Put the irons on my moustache (At the Hairdresser's)
  • Where can I arrange to get straw for the men to sleep on? (Billeting)
  • Do not take us to any vulgar places (About Town)
  • Where is the enemy's artillery ... cavalry? (Enquiries about Route)
  • Bands which the book translates in French to ceintures, which means belts in English but I've never heard of bands used in English like that, ever
Lots of pleasure being had from all of this.

gilbertharding

#831
    Quote from: Buelligan on January 06, 2020, 11:56:16 AM

    • Bands which the book translates in French to ceintures, which means belts in English but I've never heard of bands used in English like that, ever

    Closest I can get is 'bandolier', but I've never heard of it shortened to 'band' either.[/list]

    gilbertharding

    Quote from: Famous Mortimer on December 18, 2019, 04:53:08 PM
    I read the Mumbo-Jumbo one, and it was alright until he started banging on about his mates and how smart they all were. My old probably faulty memories of it indicates it was rather guilty of a lot of both-sides-ism too.

    Strange Days covers 'both sides' - of course it does. I know what you mean about 'ism', but his use of Benn's diaries as a source (for instance) is quite objective, and used to illuminate paranoid lunacy on the parts of Wilson, Marcia Falkender and others, as well as his own (justified) paranoia about MI5 and extra-political organisations from the left AND the right.

    Thing is - I don't think you have to be a centrist to slightly despair about the state of The Left in this country, or in history.

    I'll re-read Mumbo Jumbo soon to see what you mean.

    Small Man Big Horse

    The Humans by Matt Haig - When a mathemetician solves a complex problem that could advance humanity in astonishing ways, an alien arrives to kill him, take over his life and destroy all evidence of his work. Except that the alien slowly becomes enamoured with humanity, which is going to cause all manner of problems for him and us. It's a funny read, which examines what it means to be human in mostly amusing ways, and if it's very slightly patronising on occasion the majority of is enjoyable stuff.

    Jerzy Bondov

    Quote from: buttgammon on December 22, 2019, 04:52:15 PM
    Wanted to get stuck into a big novel I haven't read before over Christmas, so I'm midway through Middlemarch at the moment. As you'd expect of an 800 page monster, it has boring bits, but it's such a witty, funny novel with so many great characters (Dorothea, Lydgate, Edward Casaubon) that it's well worth plodding along through them. The thing I'm enjoying most of all is that a big, serious novel about the state of England at a time of great change is also so funny and entertaining.
    Here's a CaB thread about Middlemarch which you might enjoy

    Ray Travez

    Quote from: gout_pony on December 28, 2019, 12:05:46 AM
    heh I was probably criticising him... there are definitely some disquieting moments in it (such as when Chester thinks one of the sex workers might be underage, but decides just not to think too much about it)... meaning that, at times, it serves as more of a psychological portrait of himself than I believe he intended. However, it is doubtlessly interested and I enjoyed seeing Joe Matt in a different light. Artistically he is nothing is not an accomplished draftsman, but I rather miss his looser style of old. I prefer him formally to Seth though.

    heh, wasn't certain if you'd recommended the book, maybe should have made that clear! Memory is such an unreliable tool.

    I found myself interested in his lack of shame or even much difficulty with his chosen lifestyle. I'd be filled with shame were I to write a novel about adopting this kind of behaviour (might be worth mentioning that this isn't my kind of behaviour!) so it was intriguing for me to read an account of someone who had very different feelings.

    buttgammon

    Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on January 06, 2020, 03:21:29 PM
    Here's a CaB thread about Middlemarch which you might enjoy

    Brilliant, thanks!

    Started on Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction today. It's a harrowing account of the bombing of Germany in WWII that I probably shouldn't have started reading in the current climate.

    Panbaams

    Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry's Helter Skelter, about the Manson murders. It's a grimly fascinating read.

    Norton Canes

    Just finished Jamaica Inn. A bit melodramatic in places but dark as hell.

    Famous Mortimer

    Quote from: gilbertharding on January 06, 2020, 02:04:26 PM

    Thing is - I don't think you have to be a centrist to slightly despair about the state of The Left in this country, or in history.

    The state of the left would be a lot better if people like him didn't spend quite so much energy attacking it.