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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2006: What are you currently reading?

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10:06 / 18.10.06

I just picked up a copy of Ompalos. It's about four hundred pages of three line stanzas
Could you elucidate this a little more? Like, who wrote it and what-not? Is it a novel in verse, something like Vikram Seth's "Golden Gate"?

Kiltartan Cross

07:45 / 21.10.06

Currently moving to Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry. The cover features a large, grinning skull, and the book, I gather, is about the Day of the Dead. It sounds most promising.

...it is a great book. Let us know what you think!

Dense, is what I think. I found it a difficult read, although compelling; an unusual mix, for me, to be so taken with something as to want to read it right through in one go, and at the same time to be forced to go so slowly by the language used.

It was very evocative. How truly it mirrors Mexico at the end of the thirties I don't know, but it felt right; the people, the towns, the atmosphere. And it was tragic; we know the end, more or less, from the start, so the whole is an exercise in fate, doom, despair. Interesting subject matter for a semi-autobiography, at that.

12:41 / 23.10.06

Could you elucidate this a little more? Like, who wrote it and what-not? Is it a novel in verse, something like Vikram Seth's "Golden Gate"?

It was written by Derek Walcott who won the the nobel prize for it. And rightly so. It appears to be a novel in verse and is set in St Lucia. I am trying not to find out anything else about this book and have stopped reading it. I am saving it, along with Ulysses and Quartet For The End Of Time which is classical music but is the only other thing I am saving right now. I don't know anything about Golden Gate

Just finished The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time which is really, really funny. It's about a kid with aspergers syndrome and is a really easy read. Not what I'd usually pick up but I'm glad for having read it.

Under The Volcano is one of my favourite books. Interestingly it can be read from the start of any chapter round to the end of the preceeding one and it still makes sense. If you have the correct reading speed it is almost written in real time- Each of the 12 chapters comprising of 12 hours.
Lowry wrote and re-wrote the book many times over a number of years and upon it's completion got drunk to celebrate and accidentally burnt the only copy along with the log cabin in which he was staying. He began again from scratch.
The letter he writes to the publishers of the book (normally printed in the front of most editions) is priceless, although you should be warned: it is full of spoilers.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:02 / 23.10.06

I'm finally reading M John Harrison's Light. This should be a good thing because it means I can finally give it back to Pegs, whose copy I have now had for some years. However, it's not his copy I'm reading. I found one in a charity shop. I could have given him his back at any point. And indeed will. Sorry, Pegs.

I'm loving it, though. The Earth sections are reminding me a bit of the flashbacks in Luther Arkwright, and the space bits are just mental. Epic, funny and bleak. Yeah, it's great.

Whisky Priestess

13:40 / 23.10.06

I am reading Lee Child's One Shot (borrowed, not bought). It is quite exciting and fairly tense but not as grab-you-by-the-throat compelling as the Reacher thread had led me to believe. Some nice end-of-chapter cliffhanging though.

18:46 / 31.10.06

Against the advice of Whisky Priestess I am reading 100yrs of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is about a family who live in a village and it follows them over many years. It is a beautiful, magical story. It is filled with amazing characters it is lyrical, and is filling my house up with ghosts. I am enchanted so far.

19:41 / 31.10.06

The English language section of my library is pretty small, and therefore populated with Jackie Collins type nonsense plus a few classics. I have selected Moby Dick by Herman Melville and I love it so far.

It feels much more modern than I expected and Ishmael has a great character. Lots of funny lines. Lots of prodding of the mainstream culture of the day (Christianity especially), and a very free attitude to all sorts of things. I can imagine it causing a bit of a fuss in 1851.

I never buy books to keep these days, but if I see a cheap copy of this, I'm nabbing it.

Kiltartan Cross

20:00 / 31.10.06

Mmm, let's see, just been on Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - for which see elsewhere - and Jeff Noon's Pollen. I wasn't as taken with Pollen as I was with its predecessor, Vurt; it seemed thinner, somehow, and less coherent, and although the sense of location was rammed home to a much greater degree it did not have the same effect as the hinted Manchester of the first book*.
I'm now making slow progress through H.G. Well's The Shape Of Things To Come, his "future history" written in '33. It is entertaining in a way, although the greater part of the book thus far has been spent in minutely criticising the politics and philosophies of the Thirties more than telling a story of the future; a mixed blessing. Clever, but a bit long in the tooth. Oh, and I suspect the footnotes in the edition I'm reading have been compiled in some haste**. More later.

*Worse, it's left me with one of those friggin' awful "what book was that?" moments; someone, somewhere says something like "Persephone! Pomegranate seeds!" as a warning to someone else. Grr.
**Ok, ok, I'm basing that on this: they imply at one point that the flagship of the Hochseeflotte at Jutland was a passenger liner. Fnuh? Trust me, it looks weirder in context.

Kiltartan Cross

17:17 / 01.11.06

I feel compelled to quote more-or-less verbatim from The Shape of Things to Come:

"Still further perplexities arose about the laws of war. [...] It was as if the arena of a football match were invaded by the spectators, who began kicking the ball about, chasing the referee, and declining to keep any score as between the original sides in the game.
The military authority recoiled from these devastating riddles of the new age. Such issues, he declared, were not for him. There had always been sides in a war, and there must still be sides. It was for the politicians to define them. He fell back on his fundamental conception of a Power 'imposing its Will' upon another Power, but using now, in addition to the old invasion and march on the capital, the new methods of propaganda, blockades and attacks behind the front, and all the latest chemical and aerial devices to 'undermine the morale' of the enemy population and dispose its government to yield. In the end there must be a march, if only a concluding professional march, through the goal or capital of the losing side. He refused to entertain the inevitable problem of an enemy government not yielding but collapsing, and leaving no responsible successor. That was not his affair. Presumably in that case the war would continue indefinitely."

Sounds about right...

17:25 / 01.11.06

I am finally reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I say finally because I have been trying to get past the first chapter on and off for a year. It didn't work. I even took it on a train with no other books but my brain decided to fall asleep rather than read it.

However.

Last weekend I forced myself to sit and read past the bit I didn't engage with and now I'm onto the second chapter, (which is written in the voice of a different character) and it's absolutely brilliant, like I knew it should be, hoped it would be. I'm really glad I made myself do it.

It's never going to happen with Captain Corelli's Mandolin though. Or Catch 22. Why? Why can I not get into these books?

18:59 / 01.11.06

I'm either about to read Kafka on the Shore, by Murakami, or The Scar, by Mieville. I haven't yet decided. I'm also about to read Wieland, or The Transformation (a book of my own choosing) so I can write a paper on it by the end of the semester.

Kiltartan Cross

20:27 / 01.11.06

The Scar is brilliant, in my humble opinion. It's much more cohesive than Perdido; it has some great twists, some wicked jokes and more sneaky references and bonkers geography than you can shake a flipper at.

Whisky Priestess

21:04 / 01.11.06

Against the advice of Whisky Priestess I am reading 100yrs of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I totally didn't advise against it, I swear! I said you should read it, and here (in your own words) is why:

It is about a family who live in a village and it follows them over many years. It is a beautiful, magical story. It is filled with amazing characters it is lyrical, and is filling my house up with ghosts. I am enchanted so far.

Well, exactly. All I said was that if you were a Marquez virgin, you might want to read Love in the Time of Cholera first - just to get into the swing, as it were.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:28 / 01.11.06

I'm reading the Jack Reacher thriller Without Fail, by Lee Child. I deliberately chose this to read as I started NaNoWriMo, as it didn't have anything to do with anything I was planning on writing, so I wouldn't end up subconsciously stealing from it. However, within minutes of coming up with a wicked plot twist adding a whole new level to my putative novel, I sat down to read Reacher, and half-way through the book there's a twist that puts it bang in the same territory. Grr.

It's very good, though.

21:43 / 01.11.06

I just started "The Gunslinger" by Stephen King. The Dark Tower series came reccomended highly from a friend, so I decided to check it out. I bought the first book, and then, a few days later, at my local library, they had a sweet deal where you purchase a bag for $5 dollars, and you get as many books as can fit in there.

I bought half of Stephen King's back catalogue.

As for "The Gunslinger", I am enjoying it thus far.

22:16 / 01.11.06

I'm really enjoying Gene Wolfes' 'Latro in the Mist' at the moment. A compilation of two novels . The story of a Roman centurian with a head injury, which has deprived him of his short term memory, and his journey to the Great Mother who may help his curse/blessing. His memories are gone when he falls asleep so each morning he has to read what he has written in his scrolls the night before to understand what is going on. His injury also gives him the ability to see, and talk to, the Gods. And they can be tricky things!. Its a wonderful book so far. I can't put it down! The film Memento instantly comes to mind (although the books were written years before) in the way that Latro, and the reader, is led along blindly and with faith, with whatever happens, until the next chapter, when you get to see the unreliable situation.

23:19 / 01.11.06

My favorite quote about One Hundred Years of Solitude is from Jorge Luis Borges, who thought that it would have been a better book if it had been Seventy Years of Solitude.

With regard to Stephen King's Dark Tower books, that's the only King I've read, but I enjoyed it enough to finish the series. It's a little hit or miss. The first book is good, I didn't care for the second but then read on anyway because I alread owned the third. It wasn't as good as the first, but it was good. Then the fourth was even better. The fifth was okay, and the sixth hardly qualifies as a stand alone book (it's more of a bridge between 5 and 7), but the seventh was the best of the series.

Closed for Business Time

09:15 / 02.11.06

Currently inhaling Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which I #think# is the 5th volume of the collected short stories, and concurrently with that, Gene Wolfe's The Wizard, part 2 of the Wizard Knight. Both are lovely, fun, intelligent reads - PKD cuz he's one of the greatest ideas men in modern fiction, and Wolfe cuz he's just one hell of a lyrical writer.
Also peeking at Beyond Neo-Darwinism, eds. Mae-Wan Ho and Peter T. Saunders. 80's alt.evolution tract. Is ok.

14:15 / 02.11.06

Agh. Sorry! I know Whisky Priestess , I just worded that very badly. 'tis an excellent book and I will read Love in the Time of Cholera soon.

I really think I want to read surrealist love poetry soon. I'd recomend it, it reads a bit like beat poetry (some of it)and is also strange. There is a great anthology published by Tate...hmmm...

Any advice on what other titles there are?

Closed for Business Time

14:23 / 02.11.06

And lots and lots of Terry Pratchett. Have read Going Postal, Thud!, Guards! Guards!, Monstrous Regiment and the Night Watch in the last three months, and just got The Colour of Magic, Feet of Clay and Small Gods today, which I'll proceed to wrap myself in asap. That man is not a man, but an emerging infectious disease, albeit a very funny one. Kuru! He's the author equivalent of Kuru...

19:17 / 06.11.06

I've just finished reading The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. I love his travel books, not so sure about his fiction. I envy the rather blunt, impolite manner he uses towards the people he meets on his travels. I always worry too much about what people will think.

I've also recently finished Perdido Street Station, which was brilliant at the start but a bit of a struggle for the last quarter.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

06:45 / 07.11.06

I've just finished In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It's rather slow, it perhaps goes into more depth than is strictly necessary in order to reach a required page length but is still pretty interesting. It's also interesting in that it reads, in a way I can't quite describe, like journalism rather than non-fiction. I don't know whether it's just down to Capote's background but it reads like a very long article that you might get in a Sunday newspaper article and the only other book I've read like that was Hunter Thompson's book on the Hell's Angels.

Now I'm reading A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon. I'm almost 50 pages in and am so far not grabbed by any of the characters, I suspect it's going to be a fairly standard family farce.

18:13 / 07.11.06

After a bout of shallow Fantasy I'm moving to shallow sci-fi, specifically Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. First novel, interested premise (backup storage for consciousness means only the poor die because they can't afford a new body or 'sleeve') tolerable writing, it's a noir detective novel with bodyswapping. Not bad. Next Broken Angels, the sequel, then on to some more space opera sci-fi.
Any recommendations? I want something like Banks' Culture novels really, but there's not much out there to compare.

00:24 / 09.11.06

Currently avoiding prose and focussing on comics: Promethea. Man, that is amazing. The structure, the intricasies, the humour. This might be my favorite Alan Moore work evah! Well, maybe not better than the time Batman fought Swamp Thing - man those were good times.

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:39 / 09.11.06

Just finished Brian Magee's "Clouds of Glory", an exhaustive account of growing up in pre-war Hoxton. It's a fascinating read, perhaps more so for me because I'm familiar with the very different Hoxton of modern times, and a useful reminder of how very recent our apparently eternal modernity is, and how unsustainable.

That was a gift from a Barbeloid, and I've started another one - "The First Psychic" by Peter Lamont, an account of the life of Daniel Dunglas Home. Early days, but the intro's a cracker. Quote, on the omission of Dunglas Home from a list of the greatest Britons compiled by the BBC:

If it were possible to go back in time [and who's to say it isn't, eh, comrades [sincerely]), I would choose to attend a séance with Home. For me, he is the most interesting person who ever lived. He is more interesting than Jesus, Caesar or Napoleon, who immediately spring to mind as interesting dead people.

I want that on my gravestone, or more precisely the alcohol-resistant tag they will place on the inside of my jar after my decease. "Tannhauser Schuster-Slatt. Interesting dead person".

18:29 / 10.11.06

I'm reading Quin's Shanghai Circus, by Edward Whittemore. It's quite good. It's basically like Pynchon without the elliptical sentences. From the back of the book:

On a winter's day nearly twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an enigmatic man named Geraty walks into a bar in the Bronx and picks the pocket of a young man named Quin, setting into motion a grand adventure that takes readers from medieval Japan to the dazzling debauchery of Shanghai in the 1930's. Together, the curious pair travel to Asia so Quin can find out what happened to his parents, who disappeared in the closing days of World War II. He learns that they, together with a pederastic priest, the one-eyed head of the Japanese secret police, and a Russian anarchist pronographer, succeeded in uncovering Japan's military secrets and changed the course of the war.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:33 / 10.11.06

I'm ploughing my way through Peake's Titus Groan at them moment. I never got further than halfway through Gormenghast, but I picked up a nice second-hand set of old 70s Penguins of the lot, so I figure now's as good a time as any.

19:49 / 11.11.06

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Loving it. I want to put on a ra-ra skirt and dance about with pompoms. He takes the time not only to propound his own atheist viewpoint but to demolish the customary and historical "proofs" trotted out by clergy of various stripes.

Incidentally, dedicated to his lovely wife Lalla Ward, once Mrs Tom Baker and erstwhile Doctor's companion: Romana.

21:29 / 11.11.06

Strange, if flimsy, parallels.

Milan Kundera observes, offhand, toward the end of The Joke, that a man's destiny can end long before his life. David Schickler demonstrates same without comment in Sweet & Vicious, an unsustainably fun story of the whirlwind marriage and philanthropy of an inconveniently moral small-time thug and a woman who can only generously be described as a wet dream.

David Simon's second book about the darker side of Baltimore (and by proxy, urban America), The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood is a stunningly eloquent and tragic look at how American society has written off so much of itself, and how urban poverty and the drug economy have fed off of each other to an extent that even those who grow up skeptical of the drug trade and the corner can't escape--and how the problems are now too massive and too entrenched to really comprehend, much less fix. Michael Lewis's The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game purports to be a history of the left tackle position and the evolution of american football as relates to protecting the quarterback, but instead focusses on a single story, that of Michael Oher, uneducated virtually homeless overgrown child of a mother long gone to alcoholism and a father simply long gone, who manages to escape the traps of gang life by virtue of a crippling shyness and staggering amounts of sympathy and charity from virtually all who surround him,--mostly because he had the good fortune to grow into the rare physical type to play left tackle in the NFL.

And now Amin Maalouf's Crusades Through Arab Eyes, which promises to be wonderfully self-explanatory.

23:31 / 12.11.06

I just finished reading Fight Club. It's probably the 8th time I've read it by now, and it still grabs me.
I don't have the urge to go and start my own fight club now, like I did when I first read it, but it's still an amazing book.

I'm just about to dive into Michael Moorcock's The English Assassin. Seeing as just about every comic writer that I enjoy references Jerry Cornelius in one way or another, I figure I should actually read one of the books.

This year I've also tackled In Cold Blood, On the Road, and Hell's Angels. Getting my fix of Classic American Fiction... which is odd, 'cause I'm Australian.

18:51 / 16.11.06

I really love the Fight Club film but just didn't like the book in the slightest. I tried another one of Chuck Palahnuiks "Diary" but I thought it was one of the worst books I'd ever read. Anyone else read anything by him?

18:54 / 16.11.06

Oh and I'm currently reading At Swim Two-Birds

20:46 / 16.11.06

I really love the Fight Club film but just didn't like the book in the slightest. I tried another one of Chuck Palahnuiks "Diary" but I thought it was one of the worst books I'd ever read. Anyone else read anything by him?

Compared to his other works I kinda think that Fight Club isn't that well written, so I can understand if it didn't grab you. And yeah, Diary is terrible. And that's coming from a Chuck fan.

His best books are his first 4:
Fight Club
Survivor
Invisible Monsters
Choke

Choke is my personal favourite.
Jump on Amazon and check out the synopsis of each and see if one of them might grab your fancy.

20:54 / 16.11.06

At Swim Two Birds is fantastic, but The Third Policeman is really where it's at.

22:00 / 16.11.06

Ah god yeah I nearly died when I was reading The Third Policeman, think its possibly my favourite book. Its just, well perfect

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