What are you reading?

[mr. logic]

Glad you're liking them, I started a thread about him in Comedy Chat about a year ago as I was such a fan. Which ones have you read, out of interest?

I read the one with novella about the guy coming back from the twenties and being deeply let down by his script doctoring great nephew Simon Rich. Thought that was brilliant actually- twists and turns brilliantly and has actually stayed with me, something which you don't often find with comic short stories. And I read the one about relationships, which is also hilarious. Any I'm missing? Did you enjoy his novel?

[markburgle]

Ian Kershaw - Hitler: Hubris (1889 - 1936). You read about history's most notorious Adolf and you're reading about humanity in general, in some sense. Interesting how he essentially never changed from the lazy, impulsive drifter he was as a teenager. No ability to focus or apply himself, no curiosity, no discipline, no talent really for anything apart from rousing a mob. Couldn't hold a back and forth conversation, would just monologue people, usually at great length, brooking no contradiction. Took very little active role or even interest in running Germany, just loudly broadcast his "world-view" to his cronies and the country at large, and the personality cult around him did the rest. People so-inclined would act on their own initiative, either doing things they guessed he would like in order to climb the ladder, or using Nazism as license to act out their own worst impulses, usually meeting no sanction and often being rewarded.

(To be clear this is not the argument that says he was ignorant/innocent of the holocaust, as the book makes clear violent antisemitism always was a central pillar of that world-view. He was a real jerk)

[Small Man Big Horse]

I read the one with novella about the guy coming back from the twenties and being deeply let down by his script doctoring great nephew Simon Rich. Thought that was brilliant actually- twists and turns brilliantly and has actually stayed with me, something which you don't often find with comic short stories. And I read the one about relationships, which is also hilarious. Any I'm missing? Did you enjoy his novel?

That'd be Spoiled Brats, which I think is my favourite out of all of his, and I was surprised that they turned the novella it in to a pretty decent film with Seth Rogen, an actor I often struggle with but who I liked here.

I've not read the relationships one yet but have bought it and will do soon, and I'd recommend Hits and Misses, the collection that came after Spoiled Brats and which I really loved as well. I've only read one of his novels, Elliot Allagash which I liked a lot but is perhaps a little simplistic, but haven't read "What In God's Name?" as I've seen the tv version and want to have it less fresh in my mind when I get round to reading it.

[mr. logic]

That'd be Spoiled Brats, which I think is my favourite out of all of his, and I was surprised that they turned the novella it in to a pretty decent film with Seth Rogen, an actor I often struggle with but who I liked here.

I've not read the relationships one yet but have bought it and will do soon, and I'd recommend Hits and Misses, the collection that came after Spoiled Brats and which I really loved as well. I've only read one of his novels, Elliot Allagash which I liked a lot but is perhaps a little simplistic, but haven't read "What In God's Name?" as I've seen the tv version and want to have it less fresh in my mind when I get round to reading it.

Yep, I read Hits and Misses, and The World of Simon Rich. That's the thing- you zip through them.

Re. the novels, I'm concerned his style won't sustain over the course of an entire book, his ideas are fiendishly clever and kind of in and out things but could perhaps wear thin if stretched to breaking point. But if you liked Elliot Allagash I will give that a shot.

It was great thinking how he and BJ Novak are alike and guessing they were probably best Hollywood buds only to have Novak cameo in one story utterly irritated by Rich outside of a nightclub. I don't know, it's one of those things that could easily be considered wanky and faux modest, but his style is so playful and impish anyway that the humour of the moment really landed for me.

One year younger than me, the bastard

And, oh, wouldn't mind a link to that thread if it's convenient. That may even be where I first heard of him

[Small Man Big Horse]

Yep, I read Hits and Misses, and The World of Simon Rich. That's the thing- you zip through them.

I know what you mean, Free Range Chickens and Ant Farm are even shorter than the others and basically scripts rather than short stories, The World Of Simon Rich is a kind of best of his early work so I don't think there's any need to get either of them.

Re. the novels, I'm concerned his style won't sustain over the course of an entire book, his ideas are fiendishly clever and kind of in and out things but could perhaps wear thin if stretched to breaking point. But if you liked Elliot Allagash I will give that a shot.

I think he manages to make Allagash very readable, if anything I just wish it was a little longer, as in some ways it feels like Rushmore-lite, even though it's quite different in many ways from the Wes Anderson film.

It was great thinking how he and BJ Novak are alike and guessing they were probably best Hollywood buds only to have Novak cameo in one story utterly irritated by Rich outside of a nightclub. I don't know, it's one of those things that could easily be considered wanky and faux modest, but his style is so playful and impish anyway that the humour of the moment really landed for me.

Likewise, and if you haven't seen it I'd recommend Man Seeking Woman (which is based on The Last Girlfriend On Earth), and Miracle Workers, the latter is a bit patchy but still really good in places, the second season especially. And I really liked the one episode of The Simpsons he wrote too, and think it's a rare example of a decent late era episode.

One year younger than me, the bastard

And, oh, wouldn't mind a link to that thread if it's convenient. That may even be where I first heard of him

Of course, it's here: https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=80871.0

[Mobius]

I'm reading The Grey Man which is about a former special forces/CIA guy who is just like a Jack Bauer total badass guy.

Just finished the Terminal List series which is about a former special forces guy who goes rogue and is really cool.

And before that I read the American Assassin series of books which is about another cool army man beating the living fuck out of terrorists and getting betrayed by his own government.

I'm a man of varied tastes and culture.

[Pink Gregory]

currently on Eminent Domain by Carl Neville, one of the few fiction titles on Repeater.

not finding reading very easy st the minute as we're kind of lurching between mental health crises at home, so it's very slow going.

It's basically a speculative fiction slow burner about some sort of tech-assassination plot in communist led europe (the People's Republic of Britain)

it's got one of those house styles where there's no traditional dialogue and interactions are done in prose, but it's structured as short passages under character name headings.

It helps, but it feels a bit of an unecessary stylistic device.  intentional coldness?  Not sure.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm a man of varied tastes and culture.

I've been hoping someone would take on a reading project and report back - the 600+ novels in the Mack Bolan shared universe. I mean, look at this cover. I can't imagine the stuff inside being anything less than perfect.



EDIT: I'm pretty sure I talked about this with someone on here relatively recently (apologies, my memory isn't what it was). There's a podcast called "Paperback Warrior" which discusses this series (and others), sounds good.

[QDRPHNC]

Just finished The Aleph (the book) by Jorge Luis Borges, never read him before. He's interesting, isn't he? He seems to write these stories to exorcise these little ideas that are gnawing at him, and in the process creates something kind of delightful and unexpected.

[Artie Fufkin]

Beautiful!
This reminds me that I've been meaning to re-read George G Gilman's Edge series. Old school western thing that ran for ages. I read loads of them when I was about 12/13 and absolutely loved them.
I would put a picture of a cover up, but I'm a fuckwit and not sure how to do it.

[Twit 2]

Just finished The Aleph (the book) by Jorge Luis Borges, never read him before. He's interesting, isn't he? He seems to write these stories to exorcise these little ideas that are gnawing at him, and in the process creates something kind of delightful and unexpected.

Deffo. Get hold of Labyrinths at once.

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.

[QDRPHNC]

Deffo. Get hold of Labyrinths at once.

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.

Thanks, I'll get going on Labyrinths tonight.

[Kankurette]

Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews, but fuck knows if I'll finish it. It's so melodramatic and overwritten, with the grandma going on about how the kids are the devil's spawn and not wholesome because

Spoiler alert

their dad is also their mum's half-uncle

[close]

. Golly lolly!

[Johnny Foreigner]

Right. What is there to say about Richard Jefferies? An atheist who believed in the soul, a man who loved nature, a learned man who cared little for learning, a poor man.

Jefferies lacked the wherewithal to live off his writing alone and was condemned to toil in menial city jobs or dusty old archives. It frustrated him, especially as he felt claustrophobic in towns and wanted to be outside in nature as much as he could. Flowers, grass, hills and rivers all spoke to him; in his spare time, he walked for many hours across the hills, merely to catch a glimpse of the sea and communicate with it.

Unsurprisingly, most of his writing is about nature, village life of days gone by, but without romanticising: he was fully aware what a rural life of drudgery and poverty entailed. His novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, bewrays biographical shades: here is the story of a girl growing up with, on the one hand, a father who has come down in the world and now aggressively adopts rural ways, even speaking in an exaggerated dialect, and, on the other hand, a London-born mother who loathes and detests him for it and would much rather go back to her erstwhile bourgeois existence in the comforts of the city.

In The Story of My Heart, essentially a lengthy essay in twelve chapters, Jefferies embarks upon an ambitious project to explain his philosophy, a project that had apparently taken him thirty years. I don't know what to make of it: he says there is neither evolution nor creation. 'Soul', for want of a better word, is what he calls psyche or awareness, yet it does not equal 'mind': he believed future ages would discover new ways of thinking, extra dimensions if you like, and that everything we know now (i.e., in the year 1883) will ultimately prove as useless as the myths of Ancient Egypt. Burn the papyri, knock down the pyramids, for these are but meaningless superstitions. Nature does not care about man, for nature does not know man: some rather modern, existentialist ideas in here. But he dithers: he acknowledges he knows he cannot be certain his yearned-for 'soul-life' exists; it is merely something he craves passionately and, by his own admission, struggles to explain.

A sexually-repressed man, like all Victorians. Does it really take seven or eight pages to describe Felise's gracile motions and the curvature of her body ('The Dewy Morn')? Of course it does. He goes off on a tangent about Greek sculptures, but we, the readers, know full well this is merely sublimation. His last works were dictated from his sick bed; in his final years, this outdoor rambler was confined to his humble abode; in these works, tragic nostalgia is all-pervasive.

A vicissitudinal author. At his worst, he was a tedious hack, stringing clichés together. At his best, he was able to describe trees and birds and grains of sand for page upon page without ever droning.

[Kankurette]

Your father is your brother
Your sister is your mother
You all fuck one another
The Foxworth family

VC Andrews really liked her some incest (this isn't a spoiler, Flowers in the Attic is well-known for having a lot of incest in it).

Like

Spoiler alert

Chris raping his sister.

[close]

[willbo]

Medical Grade Music by Kavus Torabi & Steve Davis.

Yeah. They write alternate chapters about their favourite bands/albums etc., and what turned them on to 'alternative music'.
I'm preferring the Kavus side of things, writing wise.
He's 3 years younger than me, but when he writes about listening to Maiden's Number Of The Beast for the first time, and getting into 2000ad, well.....that's me! Takes me right back, so it does.
I enjoyed Davis' chapter on Gentle Giant, and I've been re-listening myself. Good stuff. He's a serious (not boring) record collector, that guy.
It's interesting (not boring) that while Kavus gets into music via Stray Cats & Maiden, Steve's way in is Magma!

I got that from my local library a few months ago, really enjoyed it. I loved how he described the Smiths concert as being more threatening and macho than the Maiden concert.

[Artie Fufkin]

Hah! Yeah!
I loved(?) Kavus' last chapter about Tim Smith. Got a bit dusty about that.

[Johnny Foreigner]

The Man of the World, a wildly popular comedy by Charles Macklin from 1792. About eight years ago, at the Birmingham Museum, I noted an old print that advertised a performance of this play; naturally, I diligently wrote it down and have now got round to reading it.

Charles Macklin (26 September 1699 – 11 July 1797), (Gaelic: Cathal MacLochlainn, English: Charles McLaughlin), was an Irish actor and dramatist who performed extensively at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Macklin revolutionised theatre in the 18th century by introducing a "natural style" of acting. He is also famous for accidentally killing a man during a fight over a wig at the same theatre.

Born in County Donegal in the Irish region of Ulster in the north of Ireland. He was raised in Dublin, where he attended school in Islandbridge after his father's death and his mother's remarriage. Macklin became known for his many performances in the tragedy and comedy genre of plays. He gained his greatest fame in the role of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Macklin enjoyed a long career which was often steeped in controversy before dying aged 97.

The Man of the World survived in manuscript. I am currently in act II. One thing is clear: this sort of thing could not be performed now-a-days; it is static, verbose and prolix. The play is a satire of Scottish nationalism (the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion still being a relatively recent event), intermingled with all your usual intrigues about marrying something you shouldn't marry. Poor orphan Constantia will probably turn out to be some nobleman's long-lost daughter and therefore not poor after all. This stuff has been done thousands of times.

Macklin had clearly never heard the maxim 'show, don't tell'. It is completely unnecessary to say: 'Look, here they come!'. The audience can see that they are entering. Too many words, too much exposition. It is sad to see how the English theatre had deteriorated since the days of Dryden.

The only good thing is: I am now toying with the idea of parodying this kind of static 18th-century drawing-room play. Bound to get a few laughs.

[Ray Travez]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Read it in the bathtub, over the course of several baths. It's a good bath book; my wife coincidentally also read it in the tub though I didn't know this at the time.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Born Weird by Andrew Kaufman - I really liked Kaufman's first novella All My Friends Are Superheroes, was annoyed by his second, but thought I'd give one of his proper novels a go and now enormously regret doing so. It starts off well and for the first thirty pages I was enjoying it a fair bit, but then it plummets downhill horribly quickly, the prose is smug and its not even close to being as clever as it thinks it is. It also suffers a lot from repetition, the character's become increasingly unlikeable as the novel continues, and the ending is full of trite moralising and a final message which is so patronising (and ill considered) that I thought about throwing the book in the bin. Still, it's short at least, and now I know never to read anything by Kaufman ever again. 1/5

[Artie Fufkin]

Born Weird by Andrew Kaufman - I really liked Kaufman's first novella All My Friends Are Superheroes, was annoyed by his second, but thought I'd give one of his proper novels a go and now enormously regret doing so. It starts off well and for the first thirty pages I was enjoying it a fair bit, but then it plummets downhill horribly quickly, the prose is smug and its not even close to being as clever as it thinks it is. It also suffers a lot from repetition, the character's become increasingly unlikeable as the novel continues, and the ending is full of trite moralising and a final message which is so patronising (and ill considered) that I thought about throwing the book in the bin. Still, it's short at least, and now I know never to read anything by Kaufman ever again. 1/5

Blimey. Glad I only paid 99p for this, then.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Blimey. Glad I only paid 99p for this, then.

I paid £3.99 in a charity shop (Traid, the expensive bastards that they are) and regret £3.98 of it.

[Artie Fufkin]

I paid £3.99 in a charity shop (Traid, the expensive bastards that they are) and regret £3.98 of it.

Dog faeces through their letter box?

[Small Man Big Horse]

Afraid I had to put the whole bloody dog through the thing.

[Artie Fufkin]

Well, that's their fault, isn't it.

[Artie Fufkin]

I've just started reading Follow You Home by Mark Edwards.
Read about the first 30 pages. Not the best writing, but keeping me interested.
Pulp horror kinda thang.

[Johnny Foreigner]

The History of Henry Esmond, by Thackeray. Thackeray pretended he had 'discovered' the book and it was actually some 18th-century memoirs, initially printed with 'periwigs' in Queen Anne font and period spelling. I am rather disappointed Penguin chose to adopt the boring 19th-century spelling instead.

My girl-friend got the book from a charity shop, started reading and then gave up on it; I don't see why, because it's fascinating.

[bgmnts]

Only have three novel/fictions left, and one of them is The Silmarillion so it barely counts as a novel with a plot right? It's more just an in universe guide to peoviee background and context to the lotr universe? Unsure.

So, in preparation, I impulse bought the first volume of Cicero's letters to his mate Atticus. I was thinking yeah it's going to  be like a time capsule back to the 1st century bc and enlighten and engross me, but it's probably just a load of boring latin shite innit?

[chveik]

haven't read much roman stuff but the Satyricon and Twelve Caesars are good

oh and the Golden Ass

[Ray Travez]

Fartology- The Extraordinary Science Behind The Humble Fart - Stefan Gates (Quadrille, 2018)

Really gets to the heart of what makes a fart so dirty and dangerous.

what have we learned?

• 25% of a fart is swallowed air.
• Women fart less than men, but their farts tend to be smellier, and also more flammable due to the production of extra methane in the gut
• Although herrings and kangaroos fart, the Portuguese man 'o' war cannot as it doesn't have an anus
• There is a branch of physics that studies anal acoustics
• The most flatulence producing food is the Jerusalem artichoke, due to the presence of indigestible inulin.

Gates also includes recipes that will create extra-stinking flatulence, one of which, a meal consisting of mostly artichoke, onions and garlic, he has been banned from ever making again by his wife.