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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2004: What are you currently reading?

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08:26 / 02.04.04

About thirty pages left in 'Geek Love'. I must say I've been enjoying this book and am surprised that I had to read a travelogue by Chuck Palahniuk of all things to find out about it. I especially love that it really just boils down to being about families in that juicy underlying archetypal way.

Just started Flann O'Brien's 'At Swim-Two-Birds' which I am having to work hard not to read aloud in a brogue (which probably sounds more Scotch than it does Irish, much to my shame).

In the middle of reading Clowes' 'Caricature', I'm afraid more out of a sense of duty to my comicbook reading contemporaries than any actual enjoyment. I've read two of his others before and I realise he is an artist of some skill but I have difficulty wading through his leagues of self-loathing drenched narrative to get to it.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:32 / 02.04.04

"Geek Love" is one of my favourite books ever.

Currently reading the new Robert Stone, "Bay of Souls" (at last)- it's fucking marvellous. Morbid introspection, dark humour, Third World political shenanigans... it's very good indeed.

15:23 / 04.04.04

Currently reading;

The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson - it's as good or bad as all his other books depending on your take on the man.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson - I'm really enjoying this, it's very dense but doesn't lose it's train at all. I've been on and off reading it for a few months now, and every time I pick it up again I get back into it very quickly

Also, started reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, but found the style very flat and have put that one down for a later date.

Have finished Joyce's Ulysses (made me hate books for a while) and Chuck Palnhuk's Survivor (quite funny sorry if spelling is wrong).

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:40 / 04.04.04

The Stone having been as good as I expected (and then some) I'm now embarking on David Peace's "Nineteen Eighty". Ten pages in, and I already feel grimy. How the fuck does he manage to write so beautifully about such ugly subjects?

19:47 / 04.04.04

Almost total Brit Hard-SF here. Earlier this year I finished Alastair Reynolds' [i]Absolution Gap[/i] which was of course brilliant. I enjoyed Ken Macleod's [i]The Star Fraction[/i] very much and is currently reading (put aside for the moment) his [i]The Stone Canal[/i].
I just had to get the new Peter F. Hamilton and he delivers with [i]Pandora's Star[/i], some of the best space-opera I've read in ages (except Reynolds). Currently reading Richard Morgan [i]Market Forces[/i] which is a sort of anticapitalist techno-thriller. I'd prefer if he'd continued with his "Takeshi Kovacs"-series, but his next book will.
Non-SF: I actually read one good fantasy book this year: Steven Erikson's [i]Midnight Tides[/i] of his Malazan-series is among his best and the series perhaps the best "modern" fantasy I've read!! Only time will tell if George RR Martin will deliver this year

Just started on Zdenek Vana's [i]The Life of the Ancient Slavs[/i] and it seems highly interesting.

Haakon

21:40 / 04.04.04

wow, so many people wondering whether or not to read thomas pynchon! pick it up, stand on chair and intone aloud every wondrous word! even if it just to your privileged hound...

gravity's rainbow is an astounding work in the canon of humanity's creative output.

must say, his punctilious 'mason and dixon' is proving a labour; though entirely of love!

and as well i have just started michel houllebecq's atomised; and i intend to follow it with platform. i have been told of the latter's precience of the bali terror attacks. i am enraptured by his voice. it is beautifully written! i am rather keen to get on, as it happens, so off i toddle.... : )

astro : )

The Photographer in Blowup

09:01 / 05.04.04

I'm enjoying Juan Rulfo's short-story anthology 'El Llano En Llamas' (can't really be arsed to find out the official title in English) and I find it very similar to Hemmingway in that it's a very dry and devoid of description type of prose, but I guess this effect is more to reflect the emptiness of the Mexican desert where the stories take place.

As soon as I finish this, I'm going to start on Lord Of The Flies

23:26 / 05.04.04

Just started reading David Foster Wallace's "Everything And More", an essay on the history of infinity. I've always wanted to understand Cantor better and so far he's doing a great job of rendering him comprehensible to a non-math guy such as myself.

10:40 / 06.04.04

This weekend I finished The Very First Light (at last!) and Do Not Pass Go, which was about London and Monopoly. As with all travel type books, I kept wondering if there was a point somewhere I was missing, but it was very funny and full of worthless trivia, both of which are good...

The next things to read are probably going to be St. Augustine's Confessions - which I will definitely finsh this time round, even if it has taken me two years to get to the halfway point - and 31 Songs, to see if Nick Hornby's redeemed himself after How To Be Good.

12:34 / 06.04.04

I have finally finished Religion and the Decline of Magic, only, ooh, two months since I started it (almost to the day). It wouldn't have taken so long but I kept getting distracted by sleepiness, bed, snoozing, etc.

I'm still plugging through the Inferno and will contribute something to Jade's thread as soon as my brain is in gear, IpromiseIpromiseIpromise.

I'd like a nice fat novel though, something to get stuck into. Quite fancy some Dickens or something like that. I also quite fancy that Viktor Pelevin novel that chaps have been discussing... sounds very tasty.

08:41 / 07.04.04

Stuff that - the last volume in Garth Nix's trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael and now Abhorsen) is finally available in the UK and I have purchased it with my ill-gotten gains. Sadly I am already half-way through it and will probably have finished it by tomorrow. It is really very good, though suffers a little from the 'third book, watch me tie up all my plot threads' symptoms common to third volumes of fantasy trilogies (except His Dark Materials). Ties in quite nicely with all the stuff about the afterlife, Death, Hell etc that I have been thinking about in relation to dante as well.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:20 / 07.04.04

must say, his punctilious 'mason and dixon' is proving a labour; though entirely of love!

Yeah, I found "Mason and Dixon" hard work... but some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. A truly lovely book.

Only eighty pages in, David Peace's "Nineteen Eighty" is proving every bit as (if not more) wonderfully written and sordid as its predecessors. At least this time around the main character actually seems redeemable... whether that's true or not has yet to be seen. (Apart from the fact that they'd almost certainly be shit, WHY has nobody picked these up for movies yet?) Dark, dark books. They're great, but give yourself a while between each one to come up for air. Books that delve the inhumane written by (as far as I can tell right now) a guy who's anything but.

solid white in water

21:45 / 08.04.04

I just read The Davinci Code followed immediately by Focault's Pendulum in the space of four days. It was a bit like entering the U.K. pavillion at EPCOT and emerging in Hyde Park without a passport or plane tickets. Reccomended. Funny how nobody on the Temple board has mentioned Chapel Perilous selling union jack shirts with Goofy on them.

11:38 / 09.04.04

31 Songs, in case anyone was thinking of reading it, is painfully self-indulgent. I'm not sure that I really expected anything else (it's a book in which someone expounds upon the music they like and the correct way to listen to it, I think there's some element of the self-aggrandising there from the start) but it's not even particularly well written. Indeed, one of the chapters ends with the question, "And isn't that a bit like life?". This would be a weak enough final sentence as it is, but it also sounds suspiciously like the primary school really easy way to do English homework - take the title of whatever you've been given to write, add the words "I see that in one way / It is a bit like life", and tell everyone it's a haiku.

Anyway, I've finished it, so from now on it's St Augustine all the way...

14:24 / 09.04.04

I'm plugging away at Brian Magee's Clouds of Glory, which is wonderful. It's the first volume of his autobiography, and focuses on the sights and sounds of his childhood in Hoxton in the '30s. I picked it up because I recently moved just down the road, and it really is an evocation of a vanished world. I'm only a few chapters in and already I'm nostalgic for things that I never experienced - tin baths in front of the fire, the smell of the horse shop, the bustle of the local market (the centre of the before post war prosperity provided us all with 'fridges and so on). Really great stuff.

21:25 / 09.04.04

FOR SCHOOL:
Just finished - Candide, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Merchant of Venice.
Just started - Chronicle of a Death Foretold

FOR PLEASURE:
Just finished - Cat's Cradle
Just started - Slaughterhouse Five
Planing to Start - 1984, Surviver (by Chuck Palahniuk)

07:13 / 11.04.04

Just finished LIFE OF PI. I highly recommend it to....well, anyone and everyone. It goes on for half its length being one thing, then turns 90 full degrees and becomes something COMPLETELY different. Very strange, very sad and funny and scary. Wonderful book.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

21:54 / 11.04.04

Yeah, zardoz, I thoroughly enjoyed Life Of Pi; it manages to end up being a totally different book to the one that you started reading, and does it so entertainingly and with such ease that you leave the book quite stunned.

Currently reading the tour de force, Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. The quality of writing is only outshone by the prodigious imagination this man displays.

To make such outlandish characters and concepts seem credible to the point that there simply is no disbelief to suspend is such an outstanding acheivment that this book will remain in my list of favourites for years.

Highly recommended to anyone who can read.

22:28 / 11.04.04

Rereading Thundersqeak by Ramsey Dukes for the first time in a few year. It never ceases to amaze me what a staggeringly good book this is.

Also it's getting me in the mood to try some of the Phil Hine I have not read yet.

07:03 / 17.04.04

Have just finished Middlesex, which was so awesomely page-turningly gripping that I read it in a day and a half (with time off for sleeping, working etc). And am back on Sven Nadolny's Discovery of Slowness, which is less gripping but more fascinating, and makes my brain hurt with some of his concepts. But worth persevering with.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:32 / 17.04.04

Perdido Street Station does indeed rock like a motherfucker.

Just finished Nineteen Eighty- am taking a break with Victor Pelevin's The Life Of Insects before immersing myself in Nineteen Eighty Three.

Anyone else here read Bear V Shark? It's a totally Barbelith book- pretty much the whole thing consists of people arguing over who would win in a fight between a bear and a shark. It's like a Pynchon novel written by Palahniuk.

(Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the author- I've lent my copy to mono.)

No star here laces

15:53 / 17.04.04

Recently read:

Tricia Sullivan - "Maul"
Entertaining sci-fi about a world lacking men. Is pretty fun, although the blurb on the back makes it sound excruciating. A good one for a hungover sunday.

Marty Beckerman - "Generation S.L.U.T."
Utterly terrifying account of the sex lives of US teenagers in the 21st century. He writes well, although it is fairly adolescent. Chock full of good statistics, and sure to make you think there is no hope left for America when this lot grow up...

Haruki Murakami - "After the quake"
Not vintage Murakami but utterly fucking amazing nonetheless. He's just so far ahead of any other novelist I can think of writing today. A bunch of short stories all related to the Kobe quake. All thoughtful and affecting but without the emotional punch of Norwegian Wood or the weirdness of "Wind-up bird chronicle".

Daniel Kahneman - "Choices values and frames"
Nobel prize winning scientist, it's basically about decision theory. Wouldn't recommend to anyone without a background in science, but very good if you are used to reading this kind of thing. Basically it's about the mechanisms of decision making and the counter-intuitive things that people do when making choices.

Scott Plous - "Introduction to decision theory"
A more general, more entry level book about the same stuff. If you're interested in the area, it's definitely a good one to get.

"12 bar blues"
Book by the guy that's written that book on hip hop that illmatic was talking about a month or so ago. It's basically a story about jazz. It's nice, the characters are kind of entertaining, but it's a bit clunky and stereotypical. Good for a holiday with your parents.

Arthur Schopenhauer - "Essays and aphorisms"
He's so on it. Fucking love the guy, although he was a racist asshole. The dialogue about religion is killer. Schopenhauer is essentially just very perceptive about a lot of stuff.

20:35 / 17.04.04

Naked Lunch - it's right fucked and i'll have to go through it all over agian when i'm done.

The serpent and the Rainbow -Wade Davis / I 've only just started it.

A Drink with Shane Macgowan-Shane MacGowan(the Pouges)-I plan to start it when I get some free time but just glancing through it it consists of mostly question answer format with his girlfriend and it's wild stuff.

09:39 / 18.04.04

Pushkin's Button, by Serena Vitale, about the the duel that killed (surprisingly enough) Pushkin.

Enjoying it a great deal, but think that Pale Fire made more of an impression on me than was healthy. I keep getting the impression that I'm not reading a book about Pushkin, but a novel about someone writing a book about Pushkin. Achingly meta, I know, but here's something about the slightly lurid way that she writes, and the way that she writes as if she knows what the characters were thinking, that comes across as a little obsessive...

15:31 / 18.04.04

Currently on my reading pile:

"Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics" by Richard Holloway.
"History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell.
"What is Literature?" by Jean-Paul Sartre.
"The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth" by Michael Bracewell (the joys of £2.99 hardbacks from crummy bookshops)
"Hey Nostradamus" by Douglas Coupland.
"Shampoo Planet" by Douglas Coupland (both have been recently reissued in paperback, and the former was very cheap).
The Complete Works of Horace (mainly for the Satires, but the rest has it's moments).
"Beyond Good and Evil" by Nietzsche.

No star here laces

01:44 / 19.04.04

Also:

Charles Bukowski - "Women"
First Bukowski I ever read. Shit, but he's good. Got a lot in common with Schopenhauer, also.

Edward Bunker - "Dog eat dog"
Crime fiction from "Mr Blue". A great read - gripping characters, "un-putdownable". Don't start reading it if you've got to get up early the next morning.

11:55 / 19.04.04

The first volume of Andrew Collins' autobio/diary excerpts, "Where did it all go right?", a rather pleasant, slightly whimsical trip into normal 70s suburbia, and the joys of a happy, pleasant childhood. He obsessively kept diaries as a child, which he now annotates as an adult, and that's certainly interesting. It's also pretty funny. Enjoying a lot, even if it is basically a comfort/transport book at heart.

14:26 / 21.04.04

BiP - Diana Wynne Jones is wonderful isn't she? I read her books a lot as a young teenager coz my english teacher was her son. In the end I wrote to her, making her promise she wouldn't tell my teacher, and we had a lovely correspondence for about a year. She used to send me books too - usually ones that were out of print. One was called "A Sudden Wild Magic". It was a bit of a departure from other stuff she's done, but it was very funny. Women trying to take over a planet (or something similar) by using techniques such as kamikaze sex!

I'm reading Haruki Murakami's "Wild Sheep Chase" at the mo. It's the first of his that I've read, and my god I've been missing out! What an utterly fantastic writer. I dissolve into his prose every night before sleep and dream about Japan!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:14 / 21.04.04

The Pelevin seemed ace, but didn't QUITE match my mood... I had to fine tune it, but I eventually realised that what I needed to be reading was "Falling Out Of Cars" by Jeff Noon. It's lovely. It's very, very Jeff Noon. Basically, if you like him, you'll love it. If you find him irritating (as apparently some people do- not sure how this could be so, but this is what I've heard) it's really not gonna be the one to convert you. The surrealism is done in a different way this time round- this time there's a basic concept of weirdness (and I ain't gonna attempt to explain it, but there are certain thematic parallels with Mieville's "The Tain") and everything else progresses logically. Well, for the first 150 pages or so... couldn't tell you what happens after that, as I haven't read it. I get the feeling I'm gonna cry at some point, though- somehow he manages to make the absurd seem so poignant.

Makes me think of Wim Wenders movies. Only much more immediate (if that's not a contradiction. Or even if it is).

14:52 / 22.04.04

I'm reading Pelevin's Babylon at the moment (except I keep wanting to call it Babylen, since that's the character's name), Russia and advertisements, seems quite cool so far.

(In response to the Bear V Shark question previously.. I've read it, and am a shark supporter.)

Oh, and Jeff Noon should hurry up and write some more books.

15:18 / 22.04.04

Am reading a variety of John Wyndham books. I'd forgotten how much I liked the novella, long enough to have a proper plot and character development, but short enough to finish in an evening. I've just read "Webs", "Chocky" and "The Trouble With Lichen". All very good. I think I'm going to re-read "The Kraken Wakes" which is possibly my favourite Wyndham for its' grim darwinistic viewpoint.

18:00 / 22.04.04

I'm currently working through

Art and Visual Perception
Rudolf Arnheim
The author presents a schema of the percepts of art. Well-written. Seems helpful.

Joy of Music
Leonard Bernstein
A journey through the nuances of music.

Pale Fire
Vladmir Nabokov
A very intriguing read, so far.

09:46 / 30.04.04

I've just finished Oryx and Crake, the new Margaret Atwood book and that was fantastic.

I then started to read David Peace's GB84 which I gave up on a third of the way through. I was put off by a) The fact that it was so like James Ellroy's American Tabloid in style and structure and b) It moved so fast I realised I hadn't got the faintest idea of what was going on.

I'm now halfway through Ian McEwan's A child in time and finding it so-so.

stephen_seagull

21:32 / 22.05.04

I'm currently reading GB84 by David Peace. Or at least trying to. You can take that as 'it's not going very well at all'. Peace's decision to have two narratives running simultaneously means that with the little time I've had spare to invest in it, I haven't really gotten anywhere at all. Now all my essays are done though, perhaps I might get somewhere... perhaps not.

15:39 / 23.05.04

Plato's Republic is keeping my grey cells ticking over.

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