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March 29, 2024, 08:33:04 AM

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Reading a book in one sitting

Started by Keebleman, January 14, 2019, 04:48:44 AM

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purlieu

Quote from: grassbath on January 21, 2019, 08:48:00 PM
Mm, this is the one that jumps out for me too. Around the time it first came out - I would have been 11. I remember distinctly taking it home from the bookshop, going up into my room and being utterly compelled, not emerging til it was finished.
The pace of the book makes it difficult to imagine not reading it in one go.
Quote from: Deyv on January 22, 2019, 12:45:07 AM
Incompetence by Rob Grant of Red Dwarf fame.
Bit of a nasty book
All of his books are! His Red Dwarf novel, Backwards, is full of horrific imagery and this carried on into all of his other novels.

Chalk me up for another Catcher in the Rye one-dayer. I should definitely re-read that.

Also a few Robert Swindells novels when I was a kid. I was absolutely hooked on them. I remember looking him up a couple of years ago and being disappointed that there were so many I missed.

Deyv

Quote from: purlieu on February 02, 2019, 01:10:27 AM
All of his books are! His Red Dwarf novel, Backwards, is full of horrific imagery and this carried on into all of his other novels.

That's true, although I can't remember any explicitly nasty bits from Fat. That has it's own problems, though, namely not being able to tell the difference between Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller and a rushed ending.

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on January 24, 2019, 05:33:12 PM
I liked this but lent it to a couple of people and they didn't.

I remember reading the bit on a train where he's getting served by a priapic guy and having silent shaky lols and trying not to look like a weirdo to the stranger sat next to me.

Yeah that's a good bit, although perhaps there's a few too many chapters all about just getting onto the train. I also liked the prologue being after chapter 4 or something. I may be remembering that wrong. There's also the sticker on the cover which said something like "guaranteed satisfaction or your money back our apologies" which young me found embarrassingly hilarious.

Keebleman

I read Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory in a few hours yesterday.  I've loved the Kubrick movie for decades and it would never have occurred to me to seek out the source novel, but a couple of weeks ago I saw it in the library in a Penguin Classics edition (with a forward by David Simon of The Wire).  The film follows the book's structure pretty closely, but the changes that Kubrick and his collaborators made were fascinating: the book has no central character (Dax, the Kirk Douglas role, leads the main attack but he isn't even present at the court martial); the condemned men in the film and the book are very similar, but characteristics and circumstances are swapped around and combined; the Adolphe Menjou character has no exact counterpart in the book, and the one that comes closest is only in one scene.  Thematically, the biggest difference is that the novel is very definitely anti-war whereas the film isn't, instead focusing on the alienation and moral corruption that is inevitable in hierarchies.

Cobb died fairly young and is really only known as an author of source material used by Kubrick, but the novel is extremely well-written.  It's very bleak - moreso than the film - but not gratuitous, and the experience of warfare is brilliantly described.  Cobb had served in WW1 and there are details which someone who hadn't been through the experience would never think to include, such as the new recruit being the only one to raise his head immediately after a shell explodes nearby, all the veterans keeping themselves flat on the ground, and so exposing himself to shrapnel.

ToneLa

I read No Country for Old Men in one go. Was ace, couldn't put it down, as the birdies started cheeping at 5am. Even took it to the bog, had a slash, holding the book up in my left hand. As you do

Ferris

I read The Fifth Risk in one go a few weeks ago. It was very interesting and I couldn't sleep.

big al

I read Turn of the Screw in one sitting in the bit between Christmas and New year, but as it's only a novella does it count? I also read the vast majority of Dracula over a night, feverish, with my knees drawn up, in the midst of a fairly bad water infection.

Keebleman

Not quite one sitting, but on each of the last two days I have read a novel cover to cover.  I do a lot of stints as a TV and film extra and spent Monday and Tuesday on the Casualty set, either sitting in the green room drinking coffee or lying on a bed in a 'ward', perfect for reading.

Monday I read The Fire Engine that Disappeared, the fifth of the Martin Beck series, while yesterday I chose Salman Rushdie's The Golden House.  I finished the former before we had wrapped for the day, whereas I read the last 80 or so pages of the Rushdie at home.

Whizzing through a fairly hefty non-genre work enables a much clearer view of the book's strengths and flaws than if it was read over a couple of weeks.  In the case of The Golden House I could appreciate how its pace and tone were well controlled, but also how its plotting and themes were badly ill-focused.  What promised to be the most interesting facet of the story - the narrator simultaneously creating a film based on the 'real' events he was telling us about - was lost in the noise fairly quickly.