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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2004: What are you currently reading?

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10:09 / 11.06.04

I've just finished Franzen's The Corrections, which was wonderful -very, very funny, brilliantly written, and also long enough that I didn't feel cheated at the end of it.

Probably going to start something by Hesse today, although I haven't decided what yet. It's between Narziss And Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game, so if anyone wants to let me know which is the better I'll save it til last...

10:53 / 11.06.04

Lanark by Alasdair Gray for fun. I suppose it's a bit like Kafka's The Trial meets Auster's In The Country Of Last Things so far, but more bizarre. Am liking it muchly.

Also, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations for that other kind of beard-stroking fun. Highly recommended to anyone interested in language who is willing to put a little work into reading it. It's full of fantastic little nuggets that can give you a radically original perspective on the functions of langauge in all their heterogeneous glory.

13:00 / 11.06.04

Just finished "Vampire Nation" by Thomas Sipos. I really wanted to like it. Promising concept--Communist vampires (website plays "The Internationale" with monster SFX mixed in) in Transylvania. It started as a Boys' Own adventure, a mission to assassinate Nicolae Ceausescu in 1986, but that turns out to be the whole book. The whole vampire thing is just an excuse to call Communists bloodsuckers--"Dracula" written by Ayn Rand. Too bad, since there are some interesting ideas in the book. Romania under Ceausescu was horrific enough without throwing in vampires as a "satirical" element. Gratuitious slagging of liberals doesn't help either. I really wanted to like this. Now a novel about communist vampires turning up long after 1989...

13:33 / 11.06.04

Good move, reviving this one.

I am currently reading the Tripura Rahaysa (Secrets of Tripura), a translation by a Swami Sarawswati, which is great. It's a Hindu mystical text, of the Tripura (Goddess) school but is peppered with short stories and great metaphors (flicking it open at random, I find that "women's good fatih is more fleeting than autumnal clouds" - my apologies). Gives me much to ponder on, ponderously.

I have also just started Mama Lola by Karen McCarthy Brown, which is great. It's an anthropological study of a voodoo priestess, her practice, history and "family" in contemporary (well, 1980s) New York. Wonderful book. I think Mama Lola was the model for the priestess in the early issue of the Invisibles featuring Jim Crow.

Also, to prove it's not all esoteric hijinks, I've just finished Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.Which rules with fists of iron. But you all know that.

14:38 / 11.06.04

Just started reading "Dancer" by Colum McCann. I love the first few lines:

Four winters. They built roads through drifts with horses, pitching them forward into the snow until the horses died, and then they ate the horsemeat with great sadness.

I recently ordered "Distancing" by Martin Kantor, a book about avoidant personality disorder. I can't wait to read it - going through some kind of self-help / self-development phase at the moment. I found a great comment about the book on the internet:

To be honest this is the first stuff about us that I've read that doesn't say things like "the prognosis for AvPD is not good", "change is extremely difficult" and even "risk of suicide for these people is very high".

Yay me!

22:05 / 11.06.04

Just finished reading 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', by Friedrich Nietzsche. I decided to read this to find out more about the origin of the concept of the Uber-mensch, as i wanted to evolve myself into a superman, its a hobby. Anyway, the bloody thing blew a hole in my head. I hated it. there were no superman - well not as i saw them anyway.

On the upside, am halfway through reading William Vollmann's - You Bright and Risen Angels. Loving it. Very trippy and certainly quite eclectic in style. Has some interesting applications of electricity in a global war against bugs. Very conspiratorial. nice even.

12:27 / 12.06.04

Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities". Graet book.

15:29 / 12.06.04

What're you liking about Bonfire Of The Vanities, out of interest? I've seen it in every second hand book shop (indeed, every charity shop) I've been in for the last decade or so, and had guessed that since a lot of people wanted to get rid of it it wasn't that great...

Also spake, I had exactly the same experience when reading Nietzsche, but I went on to write an exceptionally poor essay about his politics.

I'm reading Narziss And Goldmund just now -enjoying it so far but can't comment too much as I'm only 25 pages in!

18:54 / 12.06.04

The Bonfire is a book about New York. I was in NY two weeks ago, as a tourist. It was my first time there, and I got amazed. And most of my interest about Wolfe's book comes from this.

But it's also a book about life, and ambition, and greed. And, although it's about 80's yuppies, most of its elements are still in the present world. Wolfe does a great description of high society, mass media, and how high con you be (the protagonist thinks about himself as "The Master of the Universe" when the book begins), and how low can you fall.

Whe are so many people selling it? I suppose a lot of people buyed the book after watching the movie. The expected the same thing (an easy-reading book for an easy reading movie), and got dissapointed.

12:36 / 14.06.04

I am currently reading The Fairies in Tradition and Literature by Katharine Briggs, which I am thoroughly enjoying. It could be more exhaustive, I think - it is more like a very useful primer than a comprehensive survey. But I am only a third of the way through, so I may change my opinion. It makes me want to read all her other books, which is definitely a good sign, and there are loads of fascinating little titbits. Another thing it makes me want to do (because I recognise so many motifs from my extensive reading of children's and YA fantasy) is set up a website offering weekly reviews of children's and YA fantasy fiction... this year, next year, sometime, never.

On the bus - Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds by Marina Warner, which is jolly interesting but a bit heavy duty for the bus in this weather.

13:45 / 14.06.04

Reading Martian Time-Slip by Phillip K Dick. I've got a collection of five Dick novels in one volume, and have just read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I'm thinking perhaps I should have read something else instead of ploughing straight into another book, because although he's got some great ideas, reading two on the trot does tend to show up his shortcomings in terms of plotting and characterisation.

21:31 / 14.06.04

I fully understand what your saying Sax. I made the mistake of reading a whole lot of PKD's stuff in a row. I started with The Man in the High Castle and ended with Valis. Somewhere in between i read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Game players of Titan. He seems to have a lot of recurring themes, and damned if he doesn't always have someone who can see into the future, or read minds in each of his novels. Repetition certainly breeds contempt.

Still, i cant get enough of his writing. It's proving to be quite addictive, and i absolutely love his take on dystopian societies and drug-use for enlightenment. Great stuff.

Here's a link to his website if your interested.

Henningjohnathan

21:57 / 14.06.04

There is a pretty good new Dick BIO called I AM ALIVE AND YOU ARE DEAD by Emmanuel Carrere (sp?).

I find Valis, A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to be my favorites. I've yet to read Divine Invasion and Transmogrification of Timothy Archer.

Currently reading the excellent and unexpected LITTLE BIG by John Crowley. It's a very unique book.

On my list next should be ANUBIS GATES by Tim Powers. Another interesting Sci-fi writer.

17:24 / 21.06.04

Just finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I found rather enjoyable, and which I'm sure everyone's heard enough of for me to have to outline the plot.

On chapter eight of Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb. You know those books where you wish you would look up from the page and discover that you were, in fact, *inside* that universe?

Yeah, it's one of those.

No star here laces

02:27 / 25.06.04

I've been on a bit of a roll recently, book-wise:

Paco Underhill - "Why we buy: the science of shopping"
Kahneman and Tversky - "Choices, Values and Frames"
Kahneman and Tversky - "Judgement under uncertainty: heuristics and biases"
Steven Pinker - "The blank slate"
Dan Brown - "The da vinci code"
Neal Stephenson - "Quicksilver"
Christopher Brookmyre - "Be my enemy"
Charles Bukowski - "Post office"
Gore Vidal - "Myra Breckinridge/Myron"
Peter F Hamilton - "Misspent youth"
Harry Turtledove - "World war: world in the balance"
Schopenhauser - "Essays and aphorisms"

Out of those, the Dan Brown and Christopher Brookmyre were pretty awful. Myra Breckinridge is godlike. Neal Stephenson, Peter Hamilton and Harry Turtledove were good fun but insubstantial (although Quicksilver a bit less so). Kahneman is crucial, urgent and key - this stuff is the next important step in thinking about what it means to be human, i am convinced of that. The Stephen Pinker is very thought-provoking, although horribly biased. "Why We buy" is very surprising and interesting.

10:23 / 25.06.04

Reading Ring by Koji Suzuki, the book on which the Japanese, American and (I think) Korean movies were made.

Having not seen any of the film versions, I'm enjoying this. Not really a horror story, more of a dark contemporary fantasy, maybe, but some nice chilling and eerie moments. Some rather strange sentences, though, as if they didn't quite come through in translation properly.

For example, there's a scene in the video which shows an old woman talking to camera saying "oh, and you'll be having a baby soon."

Later, the characters are talking about this, one deducing that the person filming the sequence was obviously a woman.

The narrator then points out to us that yes, this must be the case. Men can't have babies.

Just seemed a bit... odd, really.

15:48 / 28.06.04

Finished The Charterhouse of Parma this week. I like it almost as much as The Red and The Black. Is there more Stendahl worth reading? It's funny how I'm sort of gravitating towards books and movies about class and the modes of conduct that are appropriate (watched Renoir's rules of the game this week too, and it's certainly not a stretch to see the continuity of manners from Napoleanic times to the 1930s. It's really strange that I'm interested in and able to relate to this sort of thing, being American and certainly not a social climber.

Started Conrad's The Secret Agent last night but I think I'm going to put that one to sleep. The man, apparently, cannot write. I summarized my objection to his abuse of semicolons, his inability to determine which details are more important that others, and his use of the word "perfectionment" elsewhere, so I won't go into it here, other than to say "ugh." And I was expecting some nice bomb-throwing. Pity.

I'm going to go spend my lunch hour sitting Borders reading the new David Foster Wallace, if they have it.

Red Cross Iodized Salt

04:41 / 29.06.04

I am about two thirds of the way through Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre and it's really not doing anything for me. Even when I'm on my own, I feel like I'm trying to read it with someone else in the room talking to me. The occasional turn of phrase will catch my attention, but the various cliches will have bored it out of me a couple of pages later.

I just finished The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq (I believe the UK publication of the same book was Atomized). I was little more engaged by this initially, but it didn't really seem to go anywhere. Towards the end, I felt like Houellebecq was getting tired of his self-pity and misogyny at the same rate I was.

Also just finished Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson. I really liked parts of it, but a lot of the stuff about Belfast didn't ring true for me (I used to go there fairly often during the period that the book is set...although it could just be that my experience of the city was very different from the one Wilson was trying to communicate) and the narrative seemed to stall part way through. It was something of a disappointment, because Ripley Bogle is one of my favorite books and I'd been meaning to read more by Wilson for years.

Shit, I really need to read something I enjoy soon. Somebody please recommend me a great book.

12:27 / 29.06.04

Interesting. Houellebecq is probably my favorite contemporary author. In fact I'm re-reading Platform right now. I really enjoy his prose. Influenced by Camus I find it masterful, a word I don't throw around. He's great about including little nuggets tangential to the plot. From Platform,

"The will to power exists, and it manifests itself in the form of history, while it is, in itself, radically unproductive."

And he's funny! Describing the plot of Grisham's The Firm,

"Not only was this shit so obviously a proto-screenplay it was obscene, but you had the feeling the author had already given some thought to the casting, since the part [the lead] had obviously been written for Tom Cruise. The hero's wife wasn't bad either, even if she didn't work eighty hours a week... Thank God the lovebirds didn't have any children, which meant we were spared a number of grueling scenes."

Ha!

Jefe, I'm mighty impressed with your list. I've been working on the Pinker in bits and pieces, I'm about 2/3rds in after around 6 months. I'm curious why you call him "horribly biased." One of the reasons I like his book is that he supports his points with detailed, annotated research. I'm no expert on sociobiology, but his arguments seem sound to me.

.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:56 / 29.06.04

Am currently reading, and will probably continue to be reading until forever, since I seem to have about five minutes to read a day at present, and keep getting distracted by "research" (read: teen novels)...

One World, Divisible - David Reynolds' herniating study of the second half of the 20th Century.

The Aeneid - a reread and possible book club choice.

Leviathan - Paul Auster once again writing like somebody drugged his steak.

Oh, and am vaguely rereading Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell's "Moon Country", on the grounds that more poets shoudl mention Gudni Bergsson.

Red Cross Iodized Salt

04:52 / 30.06.04

Interesting. Houellebecq is probably my favorite contemporary author. In fact I'm re-reading Platform right now. I really enjoy his prose. Influenced by Camus I find it masterful, a word I don't throw around.

I've never read Camus, so I wasn't able to make that comparison myself. I have seen Beckett mentioned alongside Houellebecq on a number of occasions though, but aside from the miserablism / nihilism I didn't find this apparent in The Elementary Particles.

I did enjoy the prose, particularly the chapters where the parallel childhoods are described, and the pacing was good until three quarters of the way thorough where I felt it was fumbled and eventually dispensed with. The book did make me laugh on a few occasions, but ultimately the moral emptiness just became wearing (now that I think about it, I suppose the weariness created provides a sort of a parallel with Beckett). I guess what really bored me was the constant wanking and the disposable (literally) female characters.

It was a hell of a lot better than Vernon God Little though. I'm going to give Whatever a shot and see if I like it better.

The Prince of All Lies

15:14 / 30.06.04

I just finished reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, and now I'm reading Bertrand Russell's "Human Knowledge". It's a great book, not fiction, but it's one of those paradigm-changing books...
Other recent books I read are Foucault's "Defending Society" (one of his courses) and Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". I stumbled on that book by sheer chance in a book fair, and I recognized it because it was mentioned as the origin of meme theory, so I read it and it was pretty good in its own terms, it was pretty easy to read and helped me understand the evolution theory, which I had never really accepted. I don't entirely accept it now, either, but I can see the logic in it

I've been meaning to tackle Nietzsche but it's too complicated without putting his works in context. I'll read the Antichrist first, after I read a bio on ol' Friedrich.

21:58 / 30.06.04

I'm reading Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice, which contains disappointingly few adjectives for one of her novels. Enjoying it now, but didn't really engage with any of the characters until about a hundred pages in.

I've also been reading a lot of Tennessee Williams, including The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More which I was surprised to like as much as I did. I'd always heard that his later work was unremittingly average, but Milk Train was far better plotted (I thought) than some of his work in the 50s.

No star here laces

04:25 / 01.07.04

Topper, what I mean by "horribly biased" is that the book is a polemic. Pinker sets out to destroy the idea that the mind is a blank slate, and in so doing deliberately takes aim at a "postmodern" straw man which has elements of "political correctness gone mad" in it.

He comes completely from the "smugly rational" scientist mold, and while I agree that his research is sound, and his statements well supported, he doesn't really engage with the opposing view in any real sense. He says it has become "unacceptable" to talk about biological determinism with respect to gender and race, but one doesn't get the feeling that he really understands why this is the case, or that there is some justification for it.

See the "Left, right" thread in the Head Shop...

Red Cross - if you want a really good, modern novel that actually delivers what VGL (awful) and Atomised (better) promise, try Mick Foley's "Tietam Brown" (better version of VGL). Otherwise you can't go wrong with "The Corrections" or "The God of small things" which are both insightful, gripping and extremely well-written.

Just got an Amazon delivery:

Robert Heath - "THe hidden power of advertising"
Andy Greenwald - "Nothing feels good: punk rock, teenagers and emo"
Tim Lawrence - "Love saves the day: a history of American dance music culture 1970-1979"

The emo one is pretty terrible so far - over-written and not very insightful. Also just finished Batavia's Graveyard which I think someone mentioned upthread and is excellent - it's a history of a brutal (and heretical) mutiny on a Dutch East Indiaman. Totally fascinating, and a good companion to Neal Stephenson's "Baroque trilogy"...

12:44 / 01.07.04

Good point, I see what you're saying about Pinker. I'll check out that other thread as well.

I disagree with you about your estimation of The Corrections, but that's neither nor there

Having finished Platform I'm on to Saramago's The Stone Raft, which I first read some years ago. In it the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European mainland and begins floating across the ocean toward a terrible impact with North America. Saramago's prose comes in blocks. By and large he doesn't set off the dialogue with quotation marks or em dashes or anything of the sort, just running the narration and dialogue together in long passages. It can be challenging but he's gifted enough that the dialogue is set off from the narration by his choice of words. A fine lyrical writer, one of my favorites.

15:29 / 02.07.04

Moonchild by A. Crowley.

I'm about 60 or so pages in, and thusfar it seems like a cross of Thelemic philosophy with Jane Austin or something. There's a lot more satire than I was expecting.

14:55 / 05.07.04

I've just finished The Graduate, which was utterly dire -like a more pointless Catcher In The Rye. With fewer entertaining bits and poor writing. It's just as well, since I've enjoyed everything I've read since April and was starting to worry that I'd just become completely indiscriminate.

Technically, I'm currently reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, but since I'm only a couple of pages in I'll ditch it if I get a better offer soon.

01:48 / 06.07.04

I just finished The Coma by Alex Garland... it was interesting, and a lot better than The Tesseract. I think I'm still waiting for a decent follow-up to The Beach, but it was a good quick read.

09:15 / 06.07.04

I have recently finished The Book of Dead Days, a good, Gothicky YA fantasy by Marcus Sedgwick, and a history of sweets by Tim Richardson, which was v. engaging and a great deal of fun, and has given me lots of pointers to new ways to expand my waistline...

I'm now reading The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd, which I am enjoying very much. I wonder how much of the stuff about Dominus, etc., is fiction and whether there is any historical basis for any of it? It's not my period so I don't really have much of a feel for it (I suspect it's mostly fiction, though). The play on the Canterbury Tales, though blatant, is also amusing. I think though that perhaps the structure is too bitty to make the story really successful...

Oh, I also read Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare, lent to me by ghadis, which was ace and which I thoroughly recommend - made me want to go and read the Thousand and One Nights. I might do just that.

13:52 / 06.07.04

Qalyn lent me The Arabian Nightmare, but I had to stop reading it because I kept falling asleep a few pages in, leading me to believe he (Qalyn) was actually trying to give ME the curse.

I will have to finish it though, but with my muddled brain I'll have to start at the beginning again to get the levels of reality straight...

14:13 / 06.07.04

It might help... I got to the end and had to go back to work out what level I was meant to be at... I think it is meant to be fuddling, though.

Red Cross Iodized Salt

23:21 / 06.07.04

Thank you to Mr. Jefelaces for the recommendations. Read The Corrections and The God of Small Things a while back, enjoyed both as I can recall...I'll definitely try to track down a copy of Tietam Brown though. I hadn't realized that Foley had written a novel, but I really enjoyed his biography from a few years back.

Have just started Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (which I bought without having heard much about and then discovered everyone I know has read). So far I'm really enjoying the mangled English of the Ukrainian narrator, but haven't gotten far enough into it to be able to say whether or not the book has more going for it than that.

Have also just started Waiting by Ha Jin based on the recommendation of a lady at the bookstore who asked me to pass her something from a high shelf. So far it is wryly amusing, detailed and slow-paced. It also seems like it might remain fairly absorbing. Have to read a bit more to be sure.

Finally, I am just about to finish re-reading Boy Wonder by James Robert Baker, which is something of an old favorite. Hilarious, hallucinatory, over the top and constantly outdoing itself. Total trash of the best kind.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

23:53 / 06.07.04

Currently reading "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son", Gordon Burn's book on Peter Sutcliffe. A bit depressing, as you'd expect, but being Burn, it's beautifully written (though I'm not quite sure I'd go as far as Norman Mailer in comparing him to Thomas Hardy).

Also just started Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"... but I've only read three pages so far so feel unable to comment.

No star here laces

03:20 / 07.07.04

Anybody else find it really hard to make book recs, out of interest?

I always end up recommending something really well known that the person has probly read, but I do find that books with lots of hype around them often are quite good...

08:02 / 08.07.04

I find it hard, yes, especially because usually I don't have much idea what the other person's taste is (especially on Barbelith). Trying to think of a hyped-up book which I found totally over-rated...

... Nathaniel's Nutmeg, which I hated. Also I didn't really like Atomised very much. I would say Filth by Irvine Welsh, which I disliked so much I couldn't finish it, but I think that it was generally acknowledged to be quite bad, so doesn't count. But generally I think that I pick big books (i.e. three-for-two type books) only if they look like the kind of thing I enjoy anyway, so... (and the same goes for recommendations, more often than not.)

I finished The Clerkenwell Tales - I enjoyed it a great deal, but found that (Like most of Ackroyd's novels) it was intellectually engaging rather than emotionally involving - lacked heart, basically.

Now reading Little Dorrit to counteract this with a huge access of Dickensian sentimentality.

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