So, what's everyone reading? (The General Books Thread)

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Made from the guts of the wild untamed Scottish Tofu.

Actually, it's probably just a bundle of beans and other legumes, no?

[CaledonianGonzo]

Mmmmm....non-fictional

[Mr. Analytical]

Made in Scoatlund frae girders and sheep anus.

[All Surrogate]

I've always found Whit a little confused as to whether he wanted to portray the cult as really evil or just deluded, and that bit especially so. I think The Wasp Factory actually puts Banks views on religion across better, albeit more abstractly.

I don't see the cult as being evil; that the Orthography can be altered "... our Overseer is happy to look back and admit that some of his pronouncements were flawed, or at least capable of improvement" means that it isn't rigidly dogmatic (but it is therefore open to manipulation ... or more open, should I say ... than a fixed text).  Also I think Isis expresses some of Banks' reservations about the modern world: "What I'm saying is that efficiency is a strange way to evaluate how a society is doing ... morality outranks efficiency ... The High Easter Offerance estate is a model of archaic working practices, inefficiency, over-manning and job-duplication, and everybody is extremely happy ... contentment speaks for itself and has no need to worship at the altar of monetary efficiency's false and brazen idol."  Admittedly not-everything is perfect in the Community but you can hear Banks here.

Regarding Iain Banks, he absolutely dominated my teenage reading.  Wasp Factory especially.  I remember being on a bit of a family holiday up in Glasgow and hearing it on Radio 4 by accident  and just being utterly hooked.  And of the other stuff, I loved the Crow Road, and absolutely adored a Song of Stone.  I can't think why the reaction to it in this thread has generally been so negative.

As Marvin said, it's the atmosphere.  For me, the narrator is an over-priveleged vacuum, ignorant of the forces and people around him, filling the story with a desultory miasma.  Which, as I say, may be quite deliberate on Banks' part.

The Algebraist in particular... where is didn't feel like it was revisiting old glories it felt bloated and at times absurdly camp.

Yeah; quite what the Luseferous storyline is doing other than give Banks a vehicle to throw up some gore and cruelty I don't know.

[Anon]

BOOOoo!  I seem to be the only Pynchon fan in the world who doesn't think Lot 49 is the best place to start, or even particularly good.  V was the first one I read, absolutely on a whim whithout ever having heard of him before, and I loved it, and I didn't think the ideas or the structure were too hard to grasp.  The major thing is that, if you're starting to read Pynchon with the intention of building up to Gravity's Rainbow, then the ideas and structure of V are much more similar to the framework of GR than those of Lot 49.  Lot 49 is basically just an elucidation of a probability equation; plenty of funny stuff in it, but not anything like the range of ideas in GR, or the historical sweep of all his other stuff, or the range of emotional tones in V.

If you think about V as a simple opposition between intellectual passivity/pavlovian-ness, as epitomised by bennyprofane, and the structure-instinct and paranoia, as epitomised by Stencil (and the different paths that each of these takes to the creation of the same kind of 'fetish'), then you should have no problems picking up on the relevance of any given scene, and this particular philosophical opposition is the starting point for Gravity's Rainbow, which just goes far far beyond it in terms of allusion and structure and extra ideas.

Personally I think GR is the greatest novel, but V is probably my favourite book, just because I read it first and all my sense of Pynchonian revelation is attached to it most strongly.  Also I suppose because some of the chapters in isolation (the maijstral diaries, the sewer, the german compound and the dancers) are much more brilliant to read in isolation than any passage of GR.

So yeah, I just found Lot 49 completely flimsy by comparison, I wouldn't recommend reading it except out of curiosity.  So many people's only experience of Pynchon is through Lot 49 as a brief part of an undergraduate module, and that's a crying shame.

Has anyone read his new one, Against the Day?  I have a copy at home in England but it's too heavy to put in my suitcase when I come back to Bulgaria.  So I've read bout 3/400 pages over my last 2 trips, and I am enjoying it and seeing a bit of a development to his earlier ideas, but it's just not anywhere near as rich as GR.  Also his slightly naive overt politics are taking over from his actually fairly deft philosophical politics, which makes it occasionally a bit bad-hippy.  Nevertheless, he is great, and V is a perfectly comprehensible book to begin with.

Well V was actually my first Pychon too...I just think that on the whole Lot 49's much better as an introduction.  I also think that if you've read Lot 49 first, you would get more out of the the idea of V as this link between the different times and places of strife given the whole theme of conspiracy that forms a huge part of Lot 49.  But in my experience V wasn't too bad a starting point anyway - and I'm looking forward to the summer holiday so I have the time to get my teeth into Gravity's Rainbow.

[wherearethespoons]

INTERESTING, IVE JUST STARTED SATURDAY, will report back, so far looks very good.

I'll be waiting to hear what you think about that. Finished Enduring Love and have to say I wasn't that impressed though some bits toward the end are well written.

Now about to start Oracle Night by Paul Auster (a writer that is yet to let me down).

[Murdo]

Paul Auster (a writer that is yet to let me down).

Amen to that. Absolutely bloody brilliant writer. If people are curious as to where to start with him, I'd recommend 'In the Country of Last Things'. It's right up there with other classics of the dystopian future sub-genre including '1984' and 'Brave New World'.

[falafel]

So you're actually saying that you weren't disappointed by the execrable Travels in the Scriptorium? A more self-indulgent piece of wank I am yet too read. Shame because generally I do agree that he is rather good.

[Murdo]

Hmmm that's lying in our massive 'to be read' pile beside the bed. Looking at the reviews on Amazon for it it'll take me about a year to get through.

I used to get through a book a week easily, now I'm lucky if it's a month. I drive to work, spend most spare time in the house on the internet or watching films/tv and when we go to bed I'm asleep in about 5min. How does everyone else squeeze reading books into their hectic lives?

[CaledonianGonzo]

I used to get through a book a week easily, now I'm lucky if it's a month. I drive to work, spend most spare time in the house on the internet or watching films/tv and when we go to bed I'm asleep in about 5min. How does everyone else squeeze reading books into their hectic lives?

There's no doubt that a good commute helps.  I used to bus it daily from Edinburgh to Glasgow and was averaging about 2 fairly chunky books a week.  Now I'm working fom home, the internet does a lot of damage to my reading 'schedule'.

Its also definitely not helped by Mrs Gonzo insisting on having a telly in the bedroom, so at night and in the mornings my reading time is impacted by screaming harpies on Big Brother and/or Declan Curry.

[Dark Sky]

Re: Ian McEwan

Now, there's an enigma.  There's no denying the swine can string a sentence together, but sometimes the relentless middle-class milieu can really be wearing.  When you've spent 6 pages of an already lean novel describing the contents of a picnic basket (Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Figs from Harvey Nicks, deepest, deepest blue cheeses), that's when you need a reality check.  Unless, of course, they're all some sort of satire on the wealthy Guardianista upper-middle-class that's too obtuse for people outside of that particular circle to cotton on to.

To me that sounds more like Sebastian Faulks, who can write very well but fails to excite me.  Though I really should read Birdsong.

With McEwan, I think it does seem to depend which one you read by him, because he does tackle a variety of themes.  Something like The Cement Garden could be seen as being more Iain Banks in its exploration of incest and macabre idea of children burying corpses in cellars and the like.  The Comfort Of Strangers has a slight surreal tinge to its characters, not unlike a Haruki Murakami novel. 

Atonement is bit of a bore and makes me glad that usually McEwan sticks to writing very very short books.  Saturday is my favourite of what I've read by him so far...absolutely compelling to read about a man's normal day as one slightly awkward incident leads to much more shocking situations later.  There's a great simplicity to Saturday which makes it work so well, I think, and makes it such a joy to read.

I haven't read Enduring Love yet, but I do have a copy and will get around to reading it someday, I'm sure.

Generally I find that McEwan has the Marmite complex of either being loved or loathed.

At the moment I'm reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, which I presume is one of his earlier ones because it solely focuses on his distinctively Murakami-esque characters without the need for the surrealism which has occasionally thrown some of his books off kilter a bit (thinking Kafka on the Shore here...  I still don't understand the need of the B-story with the man who talks to cats in that book).  So yeah, Norwegian Wood is very nice, but still isn't quite as exciting as the first Murakami I ever read, which was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.  Now there's a beautifully strange and dreamy surreal book.

[falafel]

From what I gathered, Norwegian Wood was the book which shunted Murakami into the public eye in Japan, so I'd assume it was pretty early. It's a very enjoyable book. The thing about Japanese literature is, having visited Japan and done a bit of reading up on the language, it would surely be a very different experience to read it in the original. I feel left out enough reading Satre in translation - Japanese is a whole other animal.

Actually, the politics of translation have always fascinated me. Anyone involved in that sort of thing?

[wherearethespoons]

So you're actually saying that you weren't disappointed by the execrable Travels in the Scriptorium? A more self-indulgent piece of wank I am yet too read. Shame because generally I do agree that he is rather good.

Funnily enough I've only recently bought that. It was a mere £3 for the hardback - nice. It's on my to read pile underneath Oracle Night. I'm hoping it's not as bad as you say.

[falafel]

If you enjoy it I'd love to know your reasons. It's not the heftiest of books; you'll likely get through it in a sitting. It's packed full of injokes and whatnot but I just found it entirely pointless and painfully self-regarding in a way that good metafiction avoids. Not the self-regarding bit, I suppose metafiction is self-regarding by nature, but the painful bit could certainly have been given the heave-ho. Which to my mind would really have meant abandoning the book completely, because it's rather indulgent all the way from concept to execution. I'm not going to spoil the story for you because Auster manages to quite consummately achieve that task all by himself.

Maybe it would have worked publishing it as the back-end of a collection of retrospective essays published somewhere around his 90th birthday, something like that. Maybe my biggest beef is with the work's claim to independence or, more specifically, the suggestion that it might be worthy of standing on its own.

Didn't get great reviews either - pretty poor on Metacritic average for example - but then neither did the new Pynchon, and 50 pages into that I'm having a lot more fun than I did with Travels.

But, ha, I'm sure you won't let my opinion sway you. It'd be surprising if you enjoyed it all that much, though. Perhaps I'd be doing you a favour in lowering your expectations?

[Dark Sky]

From what I gathered, Norwegian Wood was the book which shunted Murakami into the public eye in Japan, so I'd assume it was pretty early. It's a very enjoyable book. The thing about Japanese literature is, having visited Japan and done a bit of reading up on the language, it would surely be a very different experience to read it in the original. I feel left out enough reading Satre in translation - Japanese is a whole other animal.

I do always feel a bit odd reading a translated book, because obviously the beauty of a novel is the author communicating to the reader through their choice of words, and a translation of that by someone else shits over that whole reader/author connection a bit.

Ultimately though, I know that I'm never going to manage to master Japanese well enough to appreciate Murakami as he should be, or Italian to be able to read actual Calvino, or Turkish to appreciate Orhan Pamuk or whatever.  And it does frustrate me quite a bit.

I guess with older texts you often get many different translations...  Like how Kafka has been translated by many different people, and everyone has a preference as to whose translation they prefer.  And I guess it must be interesting reading various different translations of the same book and seeing what combined essence there is between them.  But that's getting a bit wanky.

[non capisco]

Funnily enough I've only recently bought that. It was a mere £3 for the hardback - nice. It's on my to read pile underneath Oracle Night. I'm hoping it's not as bad as you say.

Sadly, it's every bit as bad and then some. If you're familiar with Auster's stories, you'll know the reason why pretty soon in. The best you can say for it is it's brief.

[CaledonianGonzo]

I do always feel a bit odd reading a translated book, because obviously the beauty of a novel is the author communicating to the reader through their choice of words, and a translation of that by someone else shits over that whole reader/author connection a bit.

Ultimately though, I know that I'm never going to manage to master Japanese well enough to appreciate Murakami as he should be, or Italian to be able to read actual Calvino, or Turkish to appreciate Orhan Pamuk or whatever.  And it does frustrate me quite a bit.

I guess with older texts you often get many different translations...  Like how Kafka has been translated by many different people, and everyone has a preference as to whose translation they prefer.  And I guess it must be interesting reading various different translations of the same book and seeing what combined essence there is between them.  But that's getting a bit wanky.

Though I did meet a bilingual Russian who swore blind that Dostoevsky works far better translated than in the Mother Tongue.  He may have been mad, but there is an argument there that a skilled translator could improve an indifferent book.

[terminallyrelaxed]

Just read Coupland's JPod. Took me two days, because half the book is hilariously filled with things like ten pages of prime numbers and lists of acronyms, what a crazy guy. Its pretty much standard Coupland fare, I know the story is just a vehicle for his observation on geek pop culture, but I think we need to send him on a plausible character course.

[buttgammon]

Though I did meet a bilingual Russian who swore blind that Dostoevsky works far better translated than in the Mother Tongue.  He may have been mad, but there is an argument there that a skilled translator could improve an indifferent book.

I've heard the same myself. I've read a fair few translated books including Crime & Punishment, but I often feel I'm missing out on something, especially with an author like Raymond Queneau where the use of language is integral. I've never read anything by Doestoyevsky in Russian for the main reason that I don't even know the bloody Cyrillic alphabet, but Crime and Punishment did seem to work well in English to me. I can't really compare it having only read it in a translated form, though.

[wherearethespoons]

I finished Oracle Night and have was pleased with that. Very enjoyable and kept Auster in my good books.

However, I followed it up with Travels in the Scriptorium and have to agree with other comments here that it is pretty bad. Despite a few decent sentences and ideas it's really not up to much. But, thanks to its length, it's easily outweighed by his previous work.

[The Widow of Brid]

Finished volume one of the Proust. I'm now re-reading (or in some cases reading for the first time) Dave Sim's Cerebus through from issue 1 to 300. (By my reckoning I've until about July the 5th before it stops being about arse kicking, great design and crap puns and starts being about why the feminist-Marxist conspiracy is stealing Sim's laundry).   

[CaledonianGonzo]

I'm now re-reading (or in some cases reading for the first time) Dave Sim's Cerebus through from issue 1 to 300. (By my reckoning I've until about July the 5th before it stops being about arse kicking, great design and crap puns and starts being about why the feminist-Marxist conspiracy is stealing Sim's laundry).

Well - you would say that, being of the female void  - and therefore a devouring, rapacious omnivorous parasite </davesim>

[The Widow of Brid]

Well - you would say that, being of the female void  - and therefore a devouring, rapacious omnivorous parasite </davesim>

I believe the polite term nowadays is "just the box the seed grows in" actually. Though I'll have to consult my fellow living tools of the anti-God on that, obviously.

To stop, metaphorically, poking the seriously mentally ill with a stick for a moment. Reading the early issues of Cerebus now is a very peculiar exerience. An awful lot of the humour is very much of it's time and place and, as that time was 1978 and that place was comics, gaming and fantasy fandom, a lot of the humour is subsequently of the 'ew girls', 'Oh noez, gays!' 'backs to the walls, lads!' stripe. In another comic I'd likely be dismissing it just as the broader early work, but hindsight keeps jumping in and highlighting themes and Sim's initial diagnoses in '79 keeps popping it's head above the water.
It can actually make reading what is, at this point, still very much a comic about a 3 foot tall Conan parody who works for Groucho Marx, a somewhat uncomfortable experience.

[bennyprofane]

Though I did meet a bilingual Russian who swore blind that Dostoevsky works far better translated than in the Mother Tongue.  He may have been mad, but there is an argument there that a skilled translator could improve an indifferent book.

I think there are certain kinds of writers who work well in translation; mainly the ones whose work is primarily about alienation in the first place.  I don't think it's much of a coincidence that Kafka and the french existentialists are just about the first foreign writers any british person reads; being filtered through a second language must help to create that sense of creeping oddity that's so central to all of them.  And of course, Beckett wrote half of his late stuff in French first to kill all the ease and fluency that drags the first draft of anything in English close to cliche.  Generally I guess being in translation helps to give you some distance, so it works well with hopelessness and anything whose start-point is misanthropy.  Although there are a few people I know who say that Kafka in English is much less sorrrowful, and a lot funnier than the German. 
I can't stand the sound of German anyway.  I have a parallel text of a Selected Rilke, and the German word for 'hope' is 'hoffnung.'  Could anything be uglier?   But in English Rilke just seems impossibly vague, like looking at a misty garden through a steamed bathroom window in a mirror in a photo taken with vaseline round the edges of the lens.  I'm sure if I understood the German properly he'd make a bit more sense to me, but lose some of that lovely wooziness.  Thomas Mann on the other hand translates very well because his style, and his utter obsession with 'irony' in style, is so far from abstraction and metaphysics.  I've read three or four versions each of 'Tristan' and 'Tonio Thingy', and some are good and some are bad but they all read very briskly, with all the mockery and the pathos remaining balanced.

The Russians are an odd one though, because people like Dostoevsky are so much about  fervour over sense and intensity over logic, but they read fiercely and seemingly undiluted in English. ONe of my friends who reads him in BUlgarian says she can't stand to feel that proximity to someone who's obviously mentally ill, and I guess I have a much more positive version of precisely the same reaction.  You'd think that the leap to English would dilute that even if the leap to Bulgarian didn't. English is a language that's good for demotic writing or really intese heavy renaissance/modernist literature where the whole thing relies on multiple meanings of words and linked connotations and grouping words by etymology for effect, but that's the exact opposite of the Dostoevsky thing, and he comes out fine.  I've never understood the criticism Nabokov flings his way about cheapness and cliche and genre, and I guess that might be because of the translations I've read, maybe Russian cliche opens out into quite interesting English.  I read a page of The Idiot in Russian last week by mixing my bad Bulgarian with help from one of my pupils who speaks fluent Russian, and I couldn't really get a sense of the difference.  It wasn't a page I remembered from the English anyway.

Actually the most interesting bit of translation-discussion I've ever seen was an interview with the englishwoman who translates Asterix.  I've disliked Asterix for my whole life, but watching her talk was just inspiring, all this stuff about finding appropriate equivalents in the depths of English literature for rendering puns-on-Voltaire from the original.  She said she never replaced an allusion with a non-allusion.  She just struck me as someone in love with translation, which is not something I really connected with at all.  But yeah, her translations were incredibly removed from the originals when she saw the chance to make them better.

But anyway, there are definitely some writers who gain at least something from translation, even if they lose a lot of what you don't know you're missing.  But there are reams and reams of literature on the challenges of translating literature.  I guess the hardest thing must be to resist making improvements and adding connections/allusions in the writing when you see the chance in translation.    To give the writer you love enough to translate a little more credit in the translation than they the original deserve. 
It would interest me greatly to read a translation of Dostoevsky by someone who hated him as much as Nabokov did. 

[The Boston Crab]

It's entertaining to read something informed like that, benny. My stance is similar, certainly the existentialists/absurdists seem to translate well for the most part, it's quite believable that what is for the most part quite 'philosophical' language will lend itself to accurate translation. To take Sartre's 'La Nausee' as the prominent example, his language is always about precision, the excruciating minutiae of his reactions to the world. It's almost clinical. He doesn't attempt multi-layered technicolour allegorical visions, he just puts you unbearably close to the sickness he feels. However, his ability to observe his own reactions with this objectivity always means that the language will remain quasi-scientific, i.e. lending itself well to direct translation.

I'm also re-reading Murakami's Norwegian Wood at the moment, I do rather love it and find myself having to constantly check myself when I'm writing because I end up mimicking his style within a few sentences. Now, I don't speak Japanese but again, the type of character who recognizes his own emotionas with objectivity surely will help the book when it comes to translation. It's this clinical detachment which is possibly even helped by the extra distance to English. See also VW Bookclub's very own TBC-elected 'The Reader' by Bernard Schlink. What is it about those introverted emotionless narrators which clicks with me? Perhaps it's the old Nintendo idea of allowing you to put yourself more into the role of the protagonist if they never talk and just have other characters reacting to them (take Zelda for example).

I'm also re-reading Don Quixote at the moment, and as with any of Garcia Marquez, I just find the original much more 'fun' and lively, perhaps it's simply the sound and spelling of the Spanish language, perhaps it's just the translation I have which I'm not particularly enjoying (a 17th century affair) but whereas with the Spanish I delight in the ludicrous verbosity, the English just makes me want to constantly skip. Perhaps it's an adolescence spent at a relatively poncey school where people would find it ball-quiveringly hilarious old chap to speak in some sort of high-brow, convoluted manner. It just makes me think of shuddering past a bunch of nerds. It's a connotation thing perhaps but some English people still speak in this affected way as a source of instant 'humour', Spanish people don't for various reasons, i.e. their fortunes have drastically changed since the 16th century.

I'm also reading Gulliver's Travels, which is quite entertaining but I got more pleasure so far from the crit introduction than I have from the book itself. Oh, and Spike Milligan's Goodbye Soldier which is a belter of course. I read them when I'm on the toilet or when I have a power cut.

[glitch]

I finally got round to reading Snow Crash last week and loved it. I've started on Cryptonomicon and finding it nowhere as enjoyable.

[Famous Mortimer]

I finally got round to reading Snow Crash last week and loved it. I've started on Cryptonomicon and finding it nowhere as enjoyable.

Stick with it. I've not read Snow Crash yet but Cryptonomicon is absolutely brilliant.

[daisy11]

Having finished 'Black Venus' by Angela Carter, I've now picked up 'Doctor Sally' by Wodehouse.



(What a thread-killer eh readers).

[Toad in the Hole]

That's quite a remarkable contrast in reading material there, daisy11...

I've just enjoyed reading Alan Sillitoe's very fine Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the daddy of all kitchen sink novels and of nice local relevance to me - Nottingham is only about 20 miles or so away.  It also contains one of the rare references to Matlock in fiction.

Whipped through Tony Wilson's 24 Hour Party People novelisation, was OK but didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.  Not really worth it if you've seen the film.

And now reading Richard Ford's classic The Sportswriter, not got going with it yet really.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Having finished 'Black Venus' by Angela Carter, I've now picked up 'Doctor Sally' by Wodehouse.
(What a thread-killer eh readers).

Dunno about it being a thread-killer.  I'm a big admirer of Carter and Wodehouse, yet have read neither of those.  How are they?