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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2004: What are you currently reading?

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10:21 / 09.09.04

I got a huge bag of books from the family home at the weekend, so am working my way through those -currently reading English Passengers, which is excellent (and good fun). I'm going to finish that today, and then probably read some more Aeneid since the university want it back quite soon, and I'm going to have to post it back to Scotland...

wembley can change in 28 days

07:48 / 10.09.04

I just finished Peter Hall's Diaries, and am simply amazed at how compelling and inspiring it was. A must for any theatre folks, or anyone doing arts administration as well as the art itself.

09:18 / 10.09.04

I just finished reading "Tales of the Black Widowers" by Isaac Asimov, it's a compilation of short mysteries following the ethos of the "golden age" of crime stories. Normally I like my crime books more hardboiled, but these were all entertaining little mysteries.
At the moment I am re-reading "Mama Lola" by Karen Mcarthy-Brown, a seminal book in the study of voodou, which is both informative and well written, the latter being quite rare in anthropology books. Definitely worth checking out.

Brigade du jour

22:08 / 10.09.04

Just started Kerouac's 'On Tne Road'. Yeah I know, Maggie-come-lately ...

But hey I was on the bus, so it was appropriate!

Whizzing through it at a rate of knots so far, very easy read, vivid, full of detail with hints of poetic description. Nice.

09:21 / 11.09.04

This week I'ave mostly been reading:
The Goblet of Fire,
The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time,
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I got One Hundred Years of Solitude a couple of years ago but have only recently been enthused to read on hearing a synopsis of it as "some stupid inbred bastards all with the same name annoying and confusing", well either way I liked the ciclicle (s.p?) nature of the Buendìas, how each family trait seeped through generationally with numerous variations, how off the wall it was, the tradgedy, how at times I, like Ursula found my memory slipping through the countless Aurelìanos and Josè Arcadìos.

The Goblet of Fire is easily my favourite H.P. book so far. Soon I expect Ron to explode belting Harry again and again across the face screaming "Why does it always have to be about you". It doesn't happen in the next book does it?

I'm only half way through the C.I.O.T.D.A.N.T but I'm loving that the focus of the book seems to change half way through into something much more interesting. It's funny and genuine and Christopher is just such an interesting character to read.

Whisky Priestess

11:45 / 11.09.04

Inchoate - have just finished Left Hand of Darkness, really liked it but it was less sf and more fantasy than I expected. Nicely imagined societies though.

You will (have) love(d) High Rise. Like Lord of the Flies in a tower block. I think it may have been one of the first Ballards I read. The man is very much the unsung hero of British (science) fiction.

sjbrhr: Chatterton is great if you like your gothic historical fiction. And if you do, may I recommend The House of Doctor Dee and Hawksmoor, if not The Plato Papers. And Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is great.

I am reading The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Very good, long overdue. I was put off by the oh-christ-we'd-better-publish-it nonsense that was Valis and stayed off Dick for too long, but I'm really enjying this one - set in an alternate world where the Axis powers won WWII - in which a radical author has written a speculative novel about what would have happened if the Allies has won ...

10:24 / 13.09.04

Having finally managed to get myself back to reading after a few months of just not being able to concentrate, I've just powered through Siri Hustvedt's What I loved and AL Kennedy's Paradise. Loved both of them. Now I'm either about to tackle James Kelman's latest or Alex Garland's The Coma.

02:17 / 14.09.04

I'm reading "Soldier of the Mist" by Gene Wolfe, if anyone knows him. I've had it lying around ever since I found it in, of all places, a physics classroom.

Hattie's Kitchen

11:13 / 15.09.04

This morning I bought the new Alan Hollinghurst novel, "The Line of Beauty". I love his writing, it's incredibly poetic and absorbing, and his depictions of gay culture in contemporary times is spot on, IMHO. Have only read the first two chapters but I'm hooked already. Whether it will surpass "The Swimming Pool Library" remains to be seen...

11:02 / 19.09.04

In these days:

-Francesco Petrarca: Canzoniere
-Cicero: Philippics

(I'm feeling quite ancient last months...)

16:48 / 19.09.04

Me and my girlfriend are both reading our way through everything Jacqueline Wilson ever wrote,* with help from two local libraries and Borders, and I am having my eyes opened to just how gay she is (or at least queer, or gay/lesbian-friendly, or something: I have no idea whom JW herself sleeps with, if anyone). Anyway, since I also really like her world-view, her plotting and her characters, I am particularly overjoyed that she's so massively popular: the world can't be that bad a place when good children's fiction/lesbian propaganda is being so widely read.

We both like Lola Rose the best, and think Midnight is a bit weird.

*Well. Everything that's still in print (what happened to the Is There Anybody There? series, that's what I want to know), apart from the adult murder mysteries.

12:04 / 24.09.04

Just finished Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, which was fantastic - apocalyptic Vonnegutian sci-fi and social commentary.

I've been putting it off for 15 years, but I've just started The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer, and I'm already hooked. 1,436 pages of grim history beckon...

unheimlich manoeuvre

09:36 / 26.09.04

Whisky Priestess wrote:
Inchoate - have just finished Left Hand of Darkness, really liked it but it was less sf and more fantasy than I expected. Nicely imagined societies though.

You will (have) love(d) High Rise. Like Lord of the Flies in a tower block. I think it may have been one of the first Ballards I read. The man is very much the unsung hero of British (science) fiction.

High Rise was great, but too short although it's probably good sense to leave the reader wanting more... Yeah Lord of the Flies in a towerblock sums it up succinctly. Just borrowed Millenium People off a friend and looking forward to some more Ballard. From the blurb I guess it'll be about how thin the middle-class social veneer is again.
I'm still pimping Left Hand of Darkness to everyone.

...

I've just started reading Orcs by Stan Nicholls which is fun fantasy and bloodthirsty bollocks.
also on The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles, really just to read Antigone, as it keeps getting referred to by commentators about the current political situation.

21:36 / 26.09.04

Currently reading The Age of Consent by George Monbiot, in which he argues that democracy isn't working as a global idea - at least that's what I think he's doing, I've only just started. Quite interesting so far though.

As a digression I went to see the theban plays when I was at school, all three, in what felt like a 12 hour epic on my young attention span. I can't remember a great deal about them beyond Oedipus wandering around as a blind tramp as myself and my class mates had decided to through treats into the better seats from our up in the rafters pews, but the actor playing Oedipus did creep us all out as we were sure he was looking at us even when he had pulled his eyes out.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:09 / 26.09.04

Currently reading "The Algebraist" by Iain M Banks (gotta love those bookshop friends who get proof copies but don't read SF)- it's ace. Pretty smart alien race, a whole bunch of typical Banks "overly reasonable for the situation" characters... yeah, he's back.

11:16 / 30.09.04

I'm reading The Joy Luck Club on my way to and from work, and A Suitable Boy at home because it's too big to carry around on the train (for a lightweight like me, at least). Quite liking The Joy Luck Club, (the writing is far better than I expected) but it seems a bit disjointed overall just now. And A Suitable Boy is utterly joyous, even if it could be separated into 3 different novels.

When both of those are finished, I'm going to read something which contains absolutely no tender examinations of the mother / daughter relationship...

11:55 / 30.09.04

Tim Moore's Do Not Pass Go is my light way-to-work fluff. I have no serious at-home book, and I feel bad for it. Also, as I'm at work, I've entirely forgotten what I was last reading.

I really need to get my book-shit together. I have an English degree, for Christ's sake.

19:47 / 30.09.04

Oh yeah - my last book was Introducing Logic - which was really good, and I understood most of it. Now have a bit firmer grasp of basic concepts. And Webs of Belief. Erk.

10:57 / 01.10.04

Just finished "The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy" by Robert Anton Wilson. For obvious reasons. I have to say I found it easier to read than "Illuminatus!", but whether that's just because I'm more familar with the concepts now. I shall now start on "The Count of Monte Christo" by Dumas, because I liked the film basically.

21:20 / 04.10.04

Tiziano Terzani - "A Fortuneteller Once Told Me".

In a nutshel:
. 1978, a former war-journalist in 'Nam meets a fortune teller in Hong Kong; the guy tells him to avoid flying in 1993, or he'll die.
. 1993, remembering what the fortune teller predicted, Tiziano Terzani, now a political journalist based in the Far East, decides to avoid planes, and spend one year travelling through the continent by train, bus, car and on foot.

The book is an excellent travelogue, a keen political observation of the East by an expert writer, and a great survey of fortune telling practices in the East.

Personal weird vibe: I bought the book the day before the author died, last spring.
Spooked me no end.

Brigade du jour

00:20 / 07.10.04

Motley Crue - The Dirt.

Oh wow, this was such a good idea! I can just imagine all four band members sitting in a room with a tape recorder and an out-of-work journalist searching out colourful idioms and hyperboles to match the crazy rock'n'roll shit they've got up to. The fact that the form is anecdotal and leaves no festering stone unturned got my attention almost as much as the often revolting and largely unbelievable content did.

I've almost finished it and I'm generating the impression that although every sordid detail described in the book makes me want to dislike the band, I sort of can't help liking them. Especially Tommy Lee who comes across as basically a nice bloke. Shudder.

Fucking thing's even making me want to listen to their old albums. Um ... again. Um ... it's ok, I'm leaving ...

Brigade du jour

22:14 / 07.10.04

... and I'm back, and I'm reading something else!

Stephen Hawking's Brief History Of Time. I do love to have a crack at these supposedly difficult-to-finish books. I finished Ulysses, I'll be damned if I don't finish this!

Anyway, I'm finding it quite easy so far (one and a half chapters in!) but I am reading it very carefully and slowly to make sure I understand it. I may get someone to read it out loud to me actually.

10:21 / 08.10.04

There's a new book from Alan Hollinghurst? Excellent news!
I've just finished James Kelman's latest, You have to be careful in the land of the free. Bit slow to start but I loved it by half way through.
I've just started Alec Garland's Coma but as I was drunk, I'll probably have to reread what I read last night..

Keith, like a scientist

12:27 / 08.10.04

after finishing the last Dark Tower novel (weep...sigh), I'm reading that latest greatest sensation, "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" by Susanna Clarke. Championed by Neil Gaiman fairly publicly, it's a big book. At first it seemed slightly boring, but the world she has created is slowly taking shape, and the it's becoming more and more interesting. It's written like a historical novel, and it has fairly extensive footnotes (that are also completely fictional). I don't for a minute think the writing style is accurate to it's time period, but she does try to use some timely spellings...can't think of one off the top of my head.

unheimlich manoeuvre

23:41 / 08.10.04

i'm now on "the chequebook and the cruise-missile" being a selection of conversations with arundhati roy by david barsamian.

from the foreword:
"[M]ay I clarify that I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king."

04:38 / 10.10.04

Vincennes, Big Big Cheer for English Passengers! What a joy to read. The sarcasm and acute satire directed at the stuffy, pompous, prematurely Blairesque English Passengers and the creditable evocation of Tasmanian aboriginal culture. I could have wept but then I'm a sentimental old sod.

Currently enjoying Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty but not feeling the frisson others apparently have, despite being a contemporary and having lived through the epoch he's deconstructing. Maybe I'll be moved by the time I get to the end.

Been reading lots of Sci Fi, as ever, and have been gorging on lots more Stephen Baxter. The new Time's Eye, heralding a trilogy in partnership with Arthur C Clarke, is fun but his "Watership Down with Mammoths" (the very last live Mammoths, sob) Silverhair I enjoyed immensely.

Up in the home country with family for a few days, I sought solace in Michael Winner's juicy autobiography (Calm down, Dear, it's only a lot of showbiz gossip and psychological scab picking by a serial philanderer and journeyman director-producer) and found pleasures sufficient unto the day therein. But then I've always had a soft spot for the old fucker.

Something, probably duty to the memory of Frank Herbert, kept me going through the lastest Dune prequel: The Battle of Corrin which was a bit of a plod, even for a twenty-year afficionado such as me, and yet I'm still looking forward to the upcoming sequel to the Dune sextet, the seventh book where the Universe ends and Shiva dances. C'mon Shai Hulud, wreak your revenge and substitute crack cocaine for melange. The Revered Matres are a right royal pain in the ass. And there's sand in the Fremen's thongs.

10:11 / 12.10.04

I'm a sentimental old sod

And not the only one... I'm reading The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay just now and have been warned that I will weep like a child at the end of it. It'll be worth it, though.

12:21 / 12.10.04

I got stuck for so long on the Aeneid (which I did finish eventually), and now it's term-time, and I feel as if I've hardly read anything... (there is a thread somewhere in which I whinge about this - might try and dig it out and see what sage advice I was given.)

But it is not true! I have in fact just read The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud, first instalment of a YA crossover fantasy trilzzzzzzz... However, it is actually quite good, and very engaging, owing largely to the first-person narration of the djinni Bartimaeus after whom the trilogy is named. The story is pacy, and I very much appreciated the fact that the central boy figure, Nathaniel, is not especially likeable. I enjoyed it so much I went out and bought the second volume in hardback.

I'm also reading Francis Wheen's latest book, on mumbo-jumbo (i.e. Reaganomics, public hysteria, groundless conspiracy theories, etc.). Illmatic told me that he thought it was going to be like 'Grumpy Old Men', but I think it is a bit better than that. I am only on page 19, and already he has referred to 'the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum', so promises to be an enjoyable read.

14:24 / 12.10.04

Just finished the audiobook of Gary Wills's biography of St. Augustine; am plowing through Zane Grey's seminal Western Riders of the Purple Sage (one of those books that everybody's heard of but no one I know has read; surprisingly fun—evil Mormons!—though some of the geography seems a tad unlikely, a serious flaw in a genre where the setting is one of the major characters), dipping occasionally into Idries Shah's The Way of the Sufi, and gearing up for Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

15:15 / 12.10.04

I've been out of my Bob Dylan phase for a few years now but I picked up his Chronicles Vol 1 and quite enjoyed it. He's a fine prose writer and tells a good tale. This from the Rolling Stone review:

The book opens -- and it closes -- circa 1961-62, in New York. Dylan, still underage, has come to Greenwich Village from the Midwest. He tells this part of his story in vivid language -- plain-spoken yet as distinctive as any of his best lyrics. He conjures up rooms full of living history, full of the famous and the unknown, and he tells us how they walked, talked, looked and why they mattered, from Harry Belafonte and Woody Guthrie to Jack Dempsey and Tiny Tim (the latter whom Dylan shared french fries with when they were both working for food). Through it all, Dylan has intimations that something big might crack open inside him. "I could transcend the limitations," he writes. "It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity." He looks everyplace for ideas: in the ancient histories of Tacitus and Thucydides; in the poems of Ovid, Milton and in Edgar Allan Poe. In the New York Public Library, he settles into reading American newspapers on microfilm from 1861 to 1865 -- the Civil War era, in which America was divided and kinsman killed kinsman. "You wonder," he writes, "how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies.... Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."

.

Haus of Mystery

20:20 / 12.10.04

After a fairly sustained period of non-reading, having been drawing in the studio a lot, and excluding a John Carpenter biography, I have picked up Raymond Carver's 'Cathedral'. Having previously read 'What we Talk About when we talk about Love', I am reminded that he really he is a fucking marvel; one of the very best short-story writers of the 20thC. I love his brief devastating portraits of (usually) men, washed up and in crises. The way he never overstates anything, instead focusing on the mundane and everyday to reinforce the inner turmoil of his protagonists. In 'Careful' for example, an alcoholic (what? in Carver? Quelle surprise!) who has moved out of his home to kick his habit slides further into oblivion. Yet the story focuses upon an ear blockage that's driving him crazy. His visiting wife attempts to alleviate his suffering and Carver manages to encapsulate not only the gulf between the two of them, but also the tenderness and intimacy they still feel. It's a beautifully controlled piece of writing.

He ain't great on happy endings though.

15:14 / 13.10.04

I seem to have loads of books on the go at the moment. I have just finished "Steel Beach" by John Varley, good solid science fiction with plenty of gender swapping craziness and a nice tip of the hat to old Heinlein novels.
Just finally finished re-reading Karen Mcarthy-Brown's "Mama Lola", definitely worth reading if you have any interest in vodou.
I also just finished one of the John D. McDonald Travis Mcgee novels which though dated is entertaining and a nice easy read, kind of a palette cleanser to get me ready for "This land is our land" by Marion Shoard, which is all about the landowning class's attitude to the british countryside. Basically she argues that since norman times the upper class have siezed power over the countryside, dispossessing "commoners" in order to indulge their taste in hunting, fishing & shooting, and that they continue to do so through the manipulation of legislation and political pressure. Very interesting, I highly recommend it.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:22 / 14.10.04

Currently reading Koji Suzuki's "Spiral" (the sequel to "Ring"). And I'm enjoying it immensely, and somewhat saddened by the fact that it's a fairly slim volume which goes at a cracking pace and it'll soon be gone.

To be replaced with... I dunno. I've got a ton of books that I've bought recently and haven't even looked at... and I was looking through a friend's copy of the new biography of Tamerlane, and it's looking tempting.

18:40 / 14.10.04

Just finished The Dark Tower Book VII, and am now beginning Christopher Moore's LAMB: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BIFF, CHRIST'S CHILDHOOD PAL.

Keith, like a scientist

21:11 / 14.10.04

Jack, "Ground Beneath Her Feet" is probably my favorite Rushdie book. well, except for "Haroun and Sea of Stories," cause it's just so dang cute. But "Ground" seems to pack the most emotion of all his books...his last novel was pretty good...I hope he writes another novel soon...

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