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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2006: What are you currently reading?

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ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!

03:19 / 28.05.06

I've just read all of the Dark Tower series except the last one, and I'm pissed off at Mr. King for actually making me be interested in all his other works. "oh, yes. This is just the core story - this is happening in every book ever!" Fuck off.

I don't have time to read the man's entire back catalogue. Or any of it, really.

But I will!

I have also read some absolute rubbish: Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, which I can't even remember, really. It's got people acting like social insects in it. Throughout space and time.
Actually, it wasn't pure rubbish, the book was interestingly conceived, but the way it was written bugged me for reasons I can't put my finger on.

Also: Al Franken's "Lies, and the Lying Liars who tell them", which was great, because it's always nice to have something that is so clearly in your corner. If I were not a filthy lefty, I would probably have hated it, but since I am, I found it quite funny and a worthwhile read.

I also read True Country, a book by Kim Scott, an Indigenous Australian author. It's a really well constructed and executed book, following a sort of maybe mostly white/maybe mostly Aboriginal teacher's experiences in an Aboriginal community, somewhere in the middle of this country. Watching the way the narrator's voice changes as his experience develops, and the chapters which take someone else's voice entirely, is really interesting - it is, to an extent, an attempt to express an oral culture in text, without reducing it to just text on a page. That's a bit hard to explain, without a lot more words than I can make at the moment, especially since it is just words on a page, but if you read it (or my essay on the subject, maybe), it will make sense.

01:26 / 29.05.06

Kafka on the shore by Murakami, interesting writting style and quite an addictive read.

Generation Hex brilliant, I love it, cool disinfo magic book.

Kiltartan Cross

01:08 / 30.05.06

Jutland, the German Perspective by V.E. Tarrant. Surprisingly enough, it's an account of the Skagerrakschlacht, written in a minute but readable style. If the Devil truly has all the best tunes then Warspite and Seydlitz must top the charts, and if you share my fascination with these beautiful instruments of death, read this book.

11:59 / 30.05.06

I read Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World a few years ago and really enjoyed it. I must try some of his other stuff..

Currently reading Soldiers' Pay.. I decided to start reading Faulkner with his first novel, for some reason (I don't think I'll get through all of them). Then I saw that there are some big fans of The Sound and The Fury here. Anyone have any other Faulkner recommendations?

14:41 / 30.05.06

As I Lay Dying is fucking fabulous. I read that in January at the same time when I was reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton(!). Anyway, As I Lay Dying is a simple story of a family trying to take their dead mother to another county for burial. It's told in first person by twenty people. What's great about it is that the characters are saying extremely complex and sophisticated things using simple Southern dialect. Their thoughts on death are quite complex and well-articulated. Their mother is also a fish.

15:15 / 30.05.06

Psst! Click here to perform some necromancy on Faulkner!

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:06 / 03.06.06

Well Air was a bit disappointing, though I freely admit that was probably all due to me reading it in little bits rather than finding the time to read it in large chunks. I completely lost track of the plot about two-thirds of the way through. Suddenly there was all this stuff about the village being flooded. What?! Where did this come from?!

Anyway, now I'm on to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Rather dull characters but I quite like how the two main characters are being kept apart, wonder if that was an inspiration for Heat?

Next up it'll Fun House by Alison Bechdel.

06:35 / 04.06.06

What have I been reading?

Tim Powers: Last Call was the first of his that I read, and now I'm working my way through whatever I can lay my hands on. Expiration Date was fun, but I think I like The Drawing of the Dark the best so far...

A friend got me started on George R. R. Martin's stuff... I have A Storm of Swords sitting on my kitchen table and tempting me.

Richard Morgan: Yes.

Has anybody read something titled Vellum? I was debating picking it up based on the first couple of pages, but it didn't quite suck me in

All Acting Regiment

22:13 / 04.06.06

Does this have to be for new books? Either way, I'm reading The Soft Machine and Cities of the Red Night by Burroughs, the former being another repeated kick in the tootsie with cut ups and knives whiel the former is more novellistic in style, I reccomend 'em both...Brainwashing by Kathleen Taylor is a damn good look at all sorts of power politics and mechanisms, both from a historical/social view, and then, intriguingly, from a neurological direction...

Gulliver's Travels and other writings, by Swift, is also good. You probably read a kid's version as a kid- read the proper one too. Lots of relevant and acidic political satire...catching up on Hamlet...

Anthony Burgess of Clockwork Orange fame wrote his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God: The Confessions of Anthony Burgess in two parts, I'm reading the first one- really good, read it. Also read the new one, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, by Andrew Biswell, a fine scholar who kindly put up with as a student for the past year...

10:42 / 05.06.06

Well, now that exam fever has passed I'm kicking back with a few choice morsels:

For a light squeeze now and then I'm digging The third mind which is a bunch of Brion Gysin and Billy Burroughs' cut-up pieces printed alongside interviews and transcripts. It's all engaging stuff, even if the theory behind some of it makes more sense.

Am also testing my endurance with three books at once: Huxley's marvellous Point counter point, Celine's Journey to the end of the night and the grand, mythic beast which is John Cooper-Powys' A Glastonbury Romance. The last one would prolly appeal to many a barbeloid, concerning as it does an attempt to found a grail religion and also the pantheisitic structure by which chapters are sometimes narrated by the sun and other elements. Ace!

16:21 / 05.06.06

Working on A Scanner Darkly and liking it a lot. Complicated. I like how Dick is making me think of the cop-criminal symbiosis in another way. A hallmark of excellent sci-fi is the myriad of implications and extrapolations the reader is supposed to make.

I finished VALIS the other day and was thrown for a loop. I didn't expect it to be so... complicated. I really thought the book picked up after the introduction of the film.

Also working on The Sound and the Fury, as I said further upthread. It takes me awhile to read things because I read so many novels at once. Very very difficult this novel. Finished the Benjy section and thought, Hey, the hard part is over. Let's enjoy the ride, but the following section, Quentin, is just as hard, but in a different way!

Kiltartan Cross

15:39 / 09.06.06

"What if the tree really bleeds? What if the witch comes out, and runs after us?"

Just finished Wicked, the revisionist history of Oz; China Mieville has it on his "50 sff books for socialists" reading list, and my goodness, Toto, after reading it I see where swathes of Perdido, The Scar and especially Iron Council came from! Well, it's that or blind coincidence, at any rate. I liked it; there was even a certain undercurrent of trans- about it which appealed, and I found the alternative Oz interesting, if unrelentingly unpleasant.

News from Nowhere up next.

foolish fat finger

21:58 / 11.06.06

I just finished 'black like me', by John Howard Griffin. it was amazing. a white man in late 50's america, Griffin decided to see how racism affects black people in the deep south by darkening his skin, and mixing with both black and white society. his findings are shocking, and the book (and indeed the author) became an important part of the struggle for civil rights in 60's america.

the book is both a fascinating story, and a great lesson about prejudice. recommended.

00:02 / 12.06.06

I just devoured Possible Side Effects, Augusten Burroughs' new essay collection, and then Dry, the only other of his books that I hadn't already read. I love Burroughs, I think he's very funny and likeable and honest in the way he tells his memoirs & anecdotes. What struck me about Dry is that it was A Million Little Pieces, written earlier and much better.

I've near done with Middlemarch, which I picked up specifically after reading the Barb Books thread of the same name. I've quite enjoyed it... Eliot does a great job of exploring the failings of ordinary humans in marriage, career, familial relationships. All of her characters and situations could so easily exist today that it's still an amazingly relevant novel.

And now I'm just starting The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong, since I'm also reading her book The Great Transformation as I noted upthread. This one is her memoir about leaving a convent to study English Lit at Oxford and end her life as a nun... only through the Preface so far so I'll see how it goes.

23:31 / 12.06.06

I finished Never let me go and although I liked it, I probably won´t read it again. It´s a very sad novel ... The protagonists know from early childhood on, what terrible destiny awaits them, still they go along with it, and never even once seriously think about escaping it.

Just finished this myself, and I tend to agree. There is the question of why at least one of them wouldn't have tried to bolt for freedom at some point, anything being better than the possibility of the 'horror movie stuff' after the fourth donation, but, as in 'The Remains Of The Day,' in any case, that's Ishiguro's thing, I suppose. Characters trapped in hellish circumstances they could avoid, but don't.

You sort of wonder about what must have happened to Ishiguro as a younger man (It might have something to do with where he studied Creative Writing; it was in Norwich, I believe) but I did enjoy this. Although, like yourself, I think hell will freeze over before I read it again.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:21 / 13.06.06

Fun House by Alison Bechdel was good. Her family sounds like one that it wasn't much fun to grow up in, all the worst elements of middle-class life. It sounds like neither of her parents were particularly emotionally demonstrative to the children, being wrapped up in their own affairs, but it's great how each chapter will circle round to the death of her father from whichever angle she's been talking about. Powerfully done.

I'm currently re-reading Iron Council by China Mieville. I liked this the least of his three Bas Lag books when I first read it, he can get a bit carried away in describing things and I disliked the sheer multitude of things that aren't explained, 'colourbombs' and the exact nature of the Tesh for example. But that doesn't bother me this time for some reason and I'm really enjoying it.

Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent next.

Whisky Priestess

18:08 / 13.06.06

JUst read Forgotten Voices as research for a short story set in WWI, and it was great; very interesting and idiosyncratic, lots of transcripts of soldiers and support people (nurses, munitions workers) from all sides talking about what it was actually like. Some lovely details I shamelessly nicked and inserted.

Good to know where and when my man was at the time of telling - I even went to First World War.com for battle maps, geekchild that I am.

Kiltartan Cross

21:12 / 13.06.06

I disliked the sheer multitude of things that aren't explained, 'colourbombs' and the exact nature of the Tesh for example. But that doesn't bother me this time for some reason and I'm really enjoying it.
I find that that sort of thing just washes over me, in a "colourbombs, yeah, they sound nasty, whatever they might be" sort of way. I get the impression that Bas-Lag is something like a Van Gogh; it might look hastily or randomly thrown together, and I guess some of it is, but you can be sure there's a lot been planned underneath. Personally, I rate The Scar highest, with the other two pretty much on a level.

If anyone has read both Wicked and Iron Council - which I'm sure many of you must have - I'd be interested to hear what you think of the similarities.

17:47 / 14.06.06

Am tackling John Gray's Straw dogs, which is proving more than mildly diverting, not so much for the text, but for the fact that it has me out checking other texts looking for the weight (or otherwise) behind his arguments and asking other questions. Grey matter thoroughly buzzing.

Just before that, was finishing some Modesitt, the eleventh book of the Recluce Saga. I'm trying to alternate Fiction and nonfiction at the moment for variety.

10:43 / 16.06.06

I´ve read the first 200 pages of Perdido Street Station, and it´s fun so far. Before I started reading it, I was worried, it could be too much: all those different races, and drugs, politics, art, different city districts, body modifications, magic, science, etc.

But it´s written very well, I can keep track easily of what´s happening, and it is the first time ever, I´ve seen someone work social commentary in fiction, where you don´t expect it, and it works!

11:29 / 19.06.06

I'm reading Dorian by Will Self at the moment. Picked it up in Oxfam for 2euro. I've read the original and eventhough its exact details fade in memory a little this still seems to be a more than excellent spin on it. How Wilde would have explored it if he could, maybe?
Wotton/Dorian, of course, offer Self a wonderful outlet for archness and quippery. And the great sea-change over the 80s-90s time period in gay culture, addiction, abject hedonism, the wasting lurgy of AIDs are all tropes explored. The novel did however leave me reaching for the dictionary at its begining (which can be a bit tiresome) but luckily that seems to have pettered out.
I was struck by how dissimilar the style was to Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo, the only other example of Self's writing that I've encountered, as, I suppose, the short story format offered a greater remit for roving/lyrical writing and all encompassing metaphorical grotesqueries than Dorian could. I missed it a little but his apptitude/skill of construction and intelligence shine through in both and left me very entertained.

Next up; Books I abandoned during the year: The Stars My Destination/Empire of the Senseless/Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust. Also finally found Michael Scott's Magician's Law (talked about on pg 4) (in the very same Oxfam). Very excited so must get to that at some point too.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:19 / 19.06.06

I'm reading Tim O'Brien's novel/short story collection/somewhere in between The Things They Carried. I've always had a thing for books on the Vietnam war, and O'Brien's always good- this is widely held to be his best, and it felt a bit silly not having read it. The title story is utterly heartbreaking (of course, the "things they carried" weren't limited to just the painstakingly, almost lovingly-listed items of equipment, or even the photographs of sweethearts back home), and I'd forgotten just how great the guy's prose was.

I think the reason I was putting it off, after reading In The Lake Of The Woods (a kind of existential thriller, almost, which deals with the psychological fallout of the war years later, and a fictionalised My Lai) and If I Die In A Combat Zone (O'Brien's memoir of his own experience) was that having discovered how great the guy was at fiction, and at recounting his own experiences, I was a little wary about how he'd write fiction directly based on his own experiences. Stupid, I know, but I really had nothing to worry about.

You never know, I may check out some of his non-Vietnam-related stuff next. I hear The Nuclear Age is excellent.

01:17 / 22.06.06

I read Lies and the Lying Liars who tell Them, (which I picked up at a ook sale for a quarter) in two days, and I nearly died of laughter several times. Now I'm reading Beginning Python (A programming tutorial) and Paradise Lost.

05:18 / 23.06.06

Still working on The Sound and the Fury; I only have the fourth or the "Dilsey" part to finish. I'm fucking loving this book. I'm going to write a ton about it once I finish.

Also working on James Clavell's Shogun. I started reading this when I was 12 or 13 and I never finished it, but I loved it. I am endlessly fascinated by Japanese (all Asian) cultures and this is a great book that shows in minute detail the workings of their lives. I love it. I plan to, at some point in my life, read all of Clavell's novels. Next will be Noble House, about Japan in the 1960's.

Reading is currently slow because I am working two full-time jobs, no exaggeration.

Kiltartan Cross

08:32 / 23.06.06

Just read Vance's classic fantasy (ish) short story Morreion to while away a half hour. The titular wizard is missing in outer space searching for the source of the fabled IOUN stones, and his scheming magical peers set out to "rescue" him.

Tabitha Tickletooth

12:14 / 23.06.06

I'm reading Night Country by Stewart O'Nan and I'm really liking it. The pervavise melancholy and sense of an inescapable doom (doom, I say) is very nicely done. Never read his stuff before, but if this continues quality until the end, I might even start a thread on it! (The novel and related issues, that is, for it is quite a slight tome.)

12:44 / 23.06.06

It does. Continue to the end. The quality, that is. Start a thread!

I read it at Hallowe'en and it was simply super.

20:19 / 23.06.06

Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong. I am still in the middle of The Great Transformation. But this one's a memoir about her years as a nun in England in the 60s. It is completely riveting and hard to put down. She struggles horribly under the rule of an extremely ascetic Order, and it takes such a toll on her mind and body that she eventually has a breakdown and has to leave. Immediately that after I read the sequel, The Spiral Staircase, written much later in 2004. This memoir chronicles her entry into secular life, her failure to really fit in or succeed in life for the next thirty years, and finally her big breakthrough to happiness when she discovers her passion for studying comparative religion. The subject is rather near and dear to my heart so I don't imagine everyone would have the same reaction, but for me it was intensely sympathetic, and ultimately breathtaking in its clarity and wisdom.

Right now I'm reading Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's very funny and entertaining though rather depressing at the same time. Ehrenreich is a writer who poses as an unemployed PR person and exposes the very bizarre industry of career coaches and career services that cater to unemployed white collar workers.

10:53 / 24.06.06

Pickign through the neglected ends of my bookshelf, I have just finished the first book of Robin Hobbs Farseer Trillogy and am now hip deep in the second and loving it. These didn't click the first time I attempted them, I know not why, but this time, once I hit the more interesting bits with the fool and Chade, they thoroughly gripp-ed me.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:59 / 24.06.06

I'm reading Night Country by Stewart O'Nan and I'm really liking it. The pervavise melancholy and sense of an inescapable doom (doom, I say) is very nicely done. Never read his stuff before, but if this continues quality until the end, I might even start a thread on it!

Ooh, I've got The Speed Queen but I've never got round to reading it. May have to dig it out. Although I still think the guy has a rude name.

Tabitha Tickletooth

16:50 / 24.06.06

A quick follow up note to say Night Country does indeed impress right up to the very last sentence. I cried (but not weepy or cheesy tears) at the end both because it is so awfully sad and because it is superb. I will start a thread on this once I've had a think about what I want to say. But what I can say right now is READ THIS BOOK! (add extra exclamation points as your punctuation abuse threshold permits).

And yes, Stoatie, I can write it, but I can't say the author's name with out sniggering. Fitfully.

Next: M John Harrison's Things that never happen. Short stories by the man who destroyed and delighted me with the density of Viriconium. Short stories? I quake with equal parts anticipation and raw fear.

10:09 / 26.06.06

The Magus and Don Quixote, currently.

10:29 / 26.06.06

Not reading Don Quixote in the original spanish by chance, liberetto?
Also, is The Magus' reputation deserved thus far?

11:44 / 26.06.06

Barbelith has a quick convo about the Magus

I fail to produce meaningful discussion about John Fowles in general and receive only two replies, one of which is off-topic

11:51 / 26.06.06

Not reading Don Quixote in the original spanish by chance, liberetto?
Ha, not this little black duck. Though I sure could use the street cred.

Also, is The Magus' reputation deserved thus far?
Most definitely. I'm in love.

Thank you for the links, Black Mattam, I'll certainly take a gander.

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