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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2003: What are you currently reading?

  
  

Page: 12345(6)7891011... 19

 
 
Ariadne
13:18 / 27.02.03
'arry Potter et le prisonnier d'Azkaban.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
21:25 / 27.02.03
*gush*
Wuthering Heights rocks massive amounts of nuts.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
08:32 / 01.03.03
Currently halfway through the latest edition of Bill Bryson's 'Troublesome Words', sadly not as entertaining as his travel books but still a good read. Then after that it'll either be the book on the Spanish Civil War or an Iain M. Banks.
 
 
Busigoth
14:43 / 01.03.03
Still reading >>The Tale of Genji<< during work breaks. I'll be leaving that job before I finish. Reading a so-so detective novel, >>Now or Never<< by Elizabeth Adler. Looking forward to reading Val Macdermid' (sp?)>>The Last Temptation.<<
 
 
The Photographer in Blowup
20:16 / 01.03.03
I finished reading 2001: A Space Odissey yesterday, and today i picked up Plato's The Republic: it was for the Univeristy, but after reading the first book, it picked my interest a lot.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
20:57 / 01.03.03
I've just started Iain Sinclair's White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings and it's OK so far. I didn't like Lights Out For The Territory and I think his style is a bit wank, but it's a fairly easy read so far.
 
 
straylight
06:37 / 08.03.03
I finally finished number9dream the other night and if I were currently more coherent I would start a thread about it. Has anyone else read this, or Ghostwritten?

Now I'm on to A Secret Country, continuing my Australian history kick after falling in love with Melbourne. It's tough, though, and tear-inducing, and frustrating, and hard to balance in my head, treatment of Native Americans, treatment of Aboriginals, how things were similar, how they were so vastly different, etc, etc...

Leave it to me to be so ignorant of US history and so interested in that of a country where I spent a total of four months. So far.
 
 
rizla mission
14:51 / 08.03.03
J.G Ballard, The Wind From Nowhere.
One of his early Sci-Fi quickies. Wooden characterisation (never a good sign when the central characters are referred to by their surnames throughout) and surprisingly uninspired prose soon gives way to the true stars of the piece - massive chunks of plummeting masonry, collapsing famous landmarks, gigantic construction vehicles overturning, throngs of ill-prepared refugees, collapsing tunnels etc.
Rather like 28 days Later, but with wind instead of zombies.
 
 
The Strobe
21:46 / 08.03.03
straylight - do a search for number9dream in Books; I tried to kick off a thread but it didn't go very far. God that's a patchy book.
 
 
Shrug
00:28 / 09.03.03
Am currently reading Gabriel's Gift by Hanif Kureshi and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, not very far in either but good enough.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
09:32 / 09.03.03
I'm not enjoying the Sinclair, as his overwritten style is shitting me. Again. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is great, though - so naughty! - and I'm next looking forward to reading Orlean's The Orchid Thief, which I received as a belated birthday present on the weekend. It's good stuff, I think.

Straylight: I've read them both, and prefer Ghostwritten. It struck me as a well-constructed piece, while number9dream was a bit more "I wanna be Murakami" - you know?
 
 
Saint Keggers
22:02 / 09.03.03
140-some pages into clan of the cave bear. Just got all the books in the series..I hope they live up to the hype.
 
 
Trijhaos
00:45 / 10.03.03
I'm sort of in between books right now. I just pulled Cash: An Autobiography off my shelf, but I'm not sure if I really want to read it. I like Johhny Cash, sure, but most auto/biographies bore me to tears.

I've been flipping through this Wal-Mart Department 05 Answer Book also. Mostly, I've just been looking at the pictures.
 
 
Baz Auckland
01:44 / 10.03.03
I'm most of the way through Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, which rocks. I wish I knew years ago all his books were of himself and the same group of friends. It just seems to make them more interesting.

I just started Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon tonight. I read it once 3 years ago, and figured I should re-read it since I've done so much school work on 18th century America this semester. And any book with Jesuit Conspiracies and Mechanical Ducks is amazing anyways.
 
 
Loomis
09:11 / 10.03.03
Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. It's got knights, damsels, castles n' stuff. It's even got Robin Hood in a supporting role. Not quite enough smiting and clefting heads in twain, but I'm sure there's more to come. A tournament was held in which Scott tells us that even though only 4 knights were killed, plenty more were disabled for life, which exemplifies the healthy degree of piss takery throughout. Good stuff!
 
 
Hattie's Kitchen
08:25 / 11.03.03
I'm currently ploughing through Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy"...it makes me want to follow random strangers in the street...last week I re-read Paul Theroux's "The Family Arsenal" and Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body"...and I've also ordered a shed-load from Amazon, including Gore Vidal's "Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta", which I can't wait to get my teeth into, and Saki's "Complete Short Stories". Brain-food ahoy!
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
20:41 / 11.03.03
Counting To None, the Invisibles TPB. It won't be as rollickin' good timey as The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though - anyone know if there's any more TPBs of this planned?
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
01:30 / 12.03.03
And I forgot: I'm about 100 pages into Orlean's book, and think it's great. Not much in the way of brain-strain, but I like it a lot.
 
 
Cavatina
08:21 / 12.03.03
I've just started a novel that was a birthday present from a close friend and (to my shame) has been sitting in the 'must read' pile for a couple of years: Love and Vertigo by Hsu-Ming Teo. It won the Vogel award here in 2001 and the author (Malaysian) is a cultural historian.

Grace, the narrator, an Australian, has just arrived in Singapore following her mother's death. Her descriptions of the circumstances and foibles of her Chinese family are fresh and sharply humorous -- 's good so far.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:26 / 12.03.03
Currently reading Michael Marshall's "The Straw Men"- an America-based serial killer thriller by the skiffy author formerly known as Michael Marshall Smith- at first glance, I thought he'd sold out, then was recommended it by a friend, and the in the second paragraph came across the line "The town sits on the Allegheny River, in the shade of muscular hills, and has more trees than you could shake a stick at unless you had a lot of time and were unusually demented" and thought- yeah, that's MMS . So far, it's bloody good.

Rothkoid- what's with people not liking Sinclair's style? That's the best part!!!
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
17:19 / 12.03.03
Sinclair's style in his fiction has never managed to do anything but irritate me immensely, and I've just managed to crawl through Lights Out for the Territory and some other book he did with the mysterious Marc Atkins in the last two years. I can't describe exactly what it is about him, it's just... gaaah!

Anyway, after reading the Spanish Civil War book, I'm now on A Wizard of Earthsea.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
21:12 / 12.03.03
Stoatie: it's a matter of trying too hard. Like a slightly-pissed second-year lit student on the pull. I have no doubt that I'd punch him if I were in conversation with him for longer than 20 seconds. It's just unnecessarily "look, I'm clever, me!".
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
01:49 / 16.03.03
Finished Orlean's book - pretty good stuff. It is a bit sprawling New Yorker shit, as the movie describes, but there's something kinda good about it.

Now, I'm just beginning John Lanchester's The Debt To Pleasure, which hopefully I'll whip through. Good so far, though.
 
 
rizla mission
13:04 / 16.03.03
Steve Aylett - The Crime Studio

A little more linear than the other books by him I've read.. a little less "so fast and clever it hurts" and a lot less lucid and a lot less Burroughs.. a little more anchored in (urrgh) humourous SF, but largely without the SF. Still makes me laugh like hell though, and still jammed full of absolutely fantastic chunks of prose - "The night fell like an unbreakable plate", "He had a polariod in his pocket of a moment when he was calm" etc.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
13:15 / 16.03.03
I just killed Against A Dark Background - Iain M. Banks and about to pick up on Complicity as I am on a bit of a Banks Spree.

There's some dry technical theory on Infrared Photography that I downloaded from the interweb that I'm finding quite facinating. Also I'm going over Shooting Sex by Bob Carlos Clarke and there are a few other photography books but I'm not sure you can read them as they are a collection of pictures without text.

What's you opinion here. They are books but are they read.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
19:10 / 16.03.03
I read Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera by Alcantara and Egnolff on the train yesterday, which gave me a useful heads up on her life and times, plus a lovely picture of her suited and booted with the women in her family in her late teens.

Skipped through Peter Milligan's Skreemer today, but wasn't that impressed with it, a bit of a mess really.

So now it's the book that makes The Chronicles of Narnia look like the complete works of Aleister Crowley, Left Behind by Tim LeHaye and Woman to Woman by Carol Booth.
 
 
Brigade du jour
20:08 / 16.03.03
Thomas Hobbes' 'Leviathan'

Yo, I love this political literature kick I'm on. Might break it up a bit with Mike Gayle or something.
 
 
rakehell
22:38 / 16.03.03
Finished McSweeney's issue 9 - My first encounter with the publication. I liked it a lot and am going to try to get some back issues.

Currently halfway through Gibson's Pattern Recognition. The best books I've read for ages. Off now to post in the relevant thread.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
01:21 / 17.03.03
Just started Magnus Mills' "The Scheme For Full Employment". Much like most of his others so far. Which is A Good Thing.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:41 / 17.03.03
David Copperfield. I liked Bleak House so much I thought I'd have a go at another Dickens doorstop. I'm about 130 pages in - themes etc. are just starting to kick in, so I haven't quite got to the really satisfying stage where things start to click together. I'm having a wee break from work for the next few days, and the libraries are closing early during the vac., so with luck I'll read a bit more for pleasure than I have been doing - I've missed it.

Potus - think you can probably 'read' pictures both as individual images and in sequence (if they're sequential of course) but it's not the same sort of reading that one undertakes with text.
 
 
La Main Droite
16:51 / 17.03.03
Dickens drives me to distraction.

I'm in the middle of Augustus by Alan Massie, and next I'll be reading Something Happened by Joseph Heller
 
 
MlssMaryJane
17:06 / 17.03.03
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.
 
 
Persephone
16:31 / 18.03.03
This is it, friends... I've got the The Five Red Herrings and The Nine Tailors; and after I read these, there will be no more new DLS for me. I almost can't bring myself to start them...
 
 
Whisky Priestess
20:17 / 18.03.03
Stoat - going back to the beginning of the thread I have both Savage God and Mornington Crecent - although I have never thought of mixing them. An acquired taste, I should imagine ...

At the mo I am mostly reading Courting Shadows by my old Creative Writing tutor, Jem Poster. It's OK but there's an awful lot about church architecture and the main character's a terrible twart.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:04 / 19.03.03
Persephone - my inclination would be, to advise you to read The Nine Tailors last (if you haven't already started it)...

Mr Copperfield is progressing, albeit slowly - I might start a Dickens thread though...
 
  

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