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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2006: What are you currently reading?

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20:27 / 16.02.06

just finished "More deaths than one" by Rex Stout -- got put on to Nero Wolffe by an interview with Stout by Alfred Bester which revealed a startlingly canny man. saw the books in the library so have read two now and am quite happy with them.

just read teh "Franny" part of Salinger's "Franny & Zooey" -- nice but not up to "To Esme, with love and squalor"'s stirling standard, to my tiny mind.

about to make a start on "Tono-Bungay" by H.G. Wells. never heard of it before but this snippet on the back cover sold it to me: "Sardonic and hugely derisory, Tono-Bungay can be read as a biting satire on the follies of English sensibilities"

Our Lady Has Left the Building

15:29 / 22.02.06

I've finished Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, a very interesting book on how large sections of mainstream culture for women today involves the holding up of porn and 'raunch culture' as desirable, soft-porn seen as empowering, butch-dyke boi's who emulate the most boorish of men's attitudes.

Now I'm moving on to A Disease of Language by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, with Campbell's graphic adaptations of some of Moore's work, with an interview of the former by the latter.

Baobab Branches and Plastic

20:15 / 22.02.06

Um i'm reading 'searching for the sound' a biography of the Flaming Lips by Jim Rogatis(sic)... just getting started so too soon to call really.

21:46 / 22.02.06

I've decided to read the Bible (I shit you not) for the 1st time in my life, instead of only having bits of it read to me by priesly types. You know, to see what the fuzz is all about (read the Quran and the baghavad ghita already)

I'm also slowly going through a collection of 19th century horror and fantasy short stories. And, man!, did those guys like to overwrite...

13:01 / 23.02.06

This came out a couple of days ago: U.S.! and I'm ridiculously digging it.

Chris Bachelder (Bear v. Shark)imagines crusading American Socialist Upton Sinclair as a kind of political Dead Girl, constantly being assassinated and resurrected even up to the present. The device of Sinclair as embodying irrelevance/persistence of the American Left is somehow *so* obvious and over-the-top that it doesn't feel cheap. Plus Sinclair's just a fascinating fellow to write a book around (California could've had a Socialist governor who believed in ESP!); it's a real shame that your 9th grade history class probably just wrote him off as a guy who reformed meat packing.

16:35 / 23.02.06

Dead Megatron: don't bother with the sequel. he dies in the end. the europeans dunnit, big jewish conspiracy setting him up, dodgy special effects, an appalling deus ex machina, yada yada yada, it's all too hackneyed for words. all of the glory and thunder and cast of millions of the first book is completely lost. this reviewer gives it 1 out of 10, and points out drily that they often give it away for free.

Daemon est Deus Inversus

22:55 / 23.02.06

"The Leopard," Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Favorite quote: "Things must change so they may stay the same."

"Liasons Dangereuse," Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. A classic study in boredom and evil.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

01:32 / 24.02.06

Raw Norton- funnily enough, I was just about to reread Bear V Shark... I may have to check that out instead. First I'd heard of it!

02:38 / 24.02.06

Daemon est Deus Inversus, can you tell me about The Leopard? And Liaisons Dangereux? By that I mean, how are you liking them? Why?

lonely as a cloud...

07:44 / 24.02.06

I read Les Liaisons Dangereux ages ago - excellent stuff. As far as I recall, it's written as a series of letters, which may sound off-putting but actually works. Plus, the film of same (starring John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and young Keanu Reeves and Uma Thurman) is excellent.

Currently, I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. It's a little unwieldy in size - it's about as thick as the Linux bible I have sitting on my desk - but so far, it's quite fascinating. A young Jewish boy from Prague, who was tutored by a magician/escapologist, is sent to live with relatives in New York, in between the two world wars. They later go on to write comics together, but I haven't read that far yet.

12:35 / 24.02.06

cloud - without giving away anything about Kavalier and Clay, I just want to warn you that the ending is ludricrously bad.

lonely as a cloud...

12:40 / 24.02.06

Fair enough. I'm really enjoying Chabon's writing, for reasons that I can't really put my finger on, so I think I can live with that.

pointless & uncalled for

16:51 / 24.02.06

Just recently I have finished Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson, Safe Area Gorazde - Joe Sacco, Dead Air - Iain Banks (no M) and All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye - Christopher Brookmyre, which represents a rather welcome reading spree for me.

Opened Inversions - Iain M. Banks (note M) last night and the queue consists of Look to Windward - Iain M. Banks (still with M), The Confusion - Neal Stephenson and The Old Man and The Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls, both Ernest Hemingway (charity book sale at work $4CDN hardback mint whoot).

That should keep my branes ticking over for a bit. For the uninitiated, Neal Stephenson is exceedingly brilliant in all that he does and rates quadruplets on the I would like to have your babies scale. Iain M. Banks is grossly overweight triplets, although less so when the M is dropped.

08:33 / 25.02.06

I just started A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. I've read all three VALIS books several times, and wanted to read this one before the movie comes out.

Btw, this is my first post here. I'm a bit overwhelmed so a simple thread telling what I'm reading seemed like a good place to start.

15:22 / 25.02.06

hiya and welcome - can you remind me what the other 2 valis books were?

23:16 / 25.02.06

Other two Valis books:

The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Interestingly enough there's a description of an experience a character has in A Scanner Darkly that describes the weird "phosphene light" experience that Dick had that resulted in the Exegesis and the Valis books.

23:35 / 25.02.06

Excited about the movie, starring teh Keanu?

Me? Keanu makes me go "Gleeeushusheshusheush!"

00:40 / 27.02.06

Thread about the Valis Trilogy that maybe you can spruce up with some thoughts.

00:40 / 27.02.06

Another one, little bit more responses.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

05:09 / 28.02.06

The new Stephen King, "Cell"- it's a bit of a departure, in that so far (about sixty pages in) he seems to be eschewing the weighty self-importance of a lot of his more recent stuff and just going for a balls-out horror story. It's more like a Simon Clark novel than anything else so far- it's also dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, and seems to be his attempt to do a NOTLD/I Am Legend-type apocalypse. I kind of get the impression it may have begun as a short story and just got out of hand, because he really does seem to be enjoying himself an awful lot- there's a definite element of "don't stop me now! I'm having such a good time!" to it all (with apologies to both Queen and Shaun Of The Dead).

In short, something transmitted down mobile phones has driven the majority of the population insane. Basically we're talking fast zombies here. It's most enjoyable.

Tabitha Tickletooth

19:21 / 01.03.06

Just finished Richard Ford's Independence Day - hard work, but deeply rewarding. What a beautiful articulation of things just not quite going right in your life. A window into reflections on life, not being what you thought it would be like and not knowing how to make it better. Understanding dissatisfaction for the paltry thing it is, on the grander scale of things, but accepting how crippling it is for you. I can't believe I never read this before. A bit in awe at Ford's ability both with language and his ability to distil the experience of the protagonist's life into something I could share so completely - despite such a massive disparity with my personal experience and where my sympathies might normally lie.

Catching up on things I missed, before that was Birdsong - too heartbreakingly beautiful to describe. The framing device, though, I'm not sure about. Will search for a thread before I say more.

Working my way through This Thing of Darkness - very engaging, but not really seeing a Booker longlist quality there. [Fictional retelling of Darwin's Beagle voyage]

Next up: Moon Dust* by Andrew Smith. He sets out to talk with those who went on the moon voyage. Very excited about this - would love to hear if anyone has read it.

*Health warning and also disclaimer - it has a fucking Richard and Judy book club logo PRINTED on it. You can't even peel it off. Cunts.

10:51 / 13.03.06

Reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It may well become my favourite book in the whole wide world, ever. I think there's probably a Barbelith thread on it somewhere but I don't want any spoilers before I've finished.

11:49 / 13.03.06

There is indeed, Sax. (and, yes, with spoilers)

I started it once, then stopped, as I wasn't giving it my full attention. That was almost four years ago now. What I did read was wonderful, though. I think I've kind of been saving it for a rainy day. Perhaps I should just get off my arse and read it, eh?

Flyboy recently posted what I remembered* to be the opening sequence here. For anyone that'd like a short sample of the text.

*Possibly misremembered.

Baobab Branches and Plastic

15:43 / 13.03.06

erm got a few on the go - nothing truly grabbing.

Hamlet
American Dream - Norman Mailer

and a couple of others that reminded me to do the dishes tem pages in.

17:12 / 13.03.06

Chief, two short questions:

What's the Norman Mailer one about?
Why haven't you found them (Hamlet and American Dream) to be sufficiently grabbing?

Interested to know!

17:31 / 13.03.06

I finished Excession by Ian M Banks whilst in the US, and am now onto The Great Gatsby

Excession I enjoyed a great deal - I'd tried reading Consider Phlebas, but found it all a bit heavy-going and joyless; the perspective wasn't quite right. In Excession, the wide-angle perspective was explained and developed really well, and it was pretty entertaining.

Gatsby I'm enjoying a lot.

Matt: I'm not sure how you can say the end of Kavalier & Clay was bad; I thought it was very good - I loved the book and found the way the ending builds up and builds up and then comes crashing over you was very, very powerful. What was your issue with it?

19:25 / 13.03.06

There's a thread here on Kavalier & Clay if you guys want to discuss it. Please do - it never got very far before. Have to agree with matt though. I thought the ending was tacked on and overblown - threw the whole thing out of kilter for me.

Baobab Branches and Plastic

07:13 / 14.03.06

Eldritch,

N. Mailer's American Dream as far as I can tell is a sort of Horatio Alger story gone awry. Man returns from second world war and becomes part of American high society, affairs, drink, nefarious aquaintances, business, and the academia...

I suppose the book is heading to toward what would have appeared to be rather brutual and harrowing accounts of life at the top. Which when it was written was probably quite salacious reading for the middle classes:

'"I decided the only explanation is that God and the Devil are very attentive to people at the summit. I don't know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew, no great sport for spooks, I would suppose, in a ranch house, but do you expect God or the Devil left Lenin and Hitler and Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge. That's why men with power sometimes act so silly."' (from An American Dream, 1965)

Its the kind of book that I usually quite enjoy, I suppose I'm not getting into it for the rather banal reason that my partner has been staying over a lot recently and having the light on till 1am doesn't go down so well (there is a whole other line of punning there that I'll leave well alone).

Similarly Hamlet - a great play, but something I'd rather read in one go, on holiday, rather than in bi-weekly installments. Why now? Firstly I have never given it a serious read except when I snoozed through it in High school and Secondly I picked it up recently because I think Richard E. Grant's speech at the end of the 'Withnail and I' is from the play. It's a great scene which I think is Withnail echoing sadly Monty's statements about 'coming to a point in a thesbians lifes when you realise that you'll never play the Da(aaaaa)ne' or thereabouts.

11:01 / 21.03.06

I'm currently reading Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre- and i'm enjoying it immensely. I started to read the thread on it- but i haven't finished it and didn't want to spoil it too much. Although the inner scribblings of an adolescent mind took a few pages to get into, i'm certainly enjoying it now- lots of good black humour, the reference to 'Adult Hilter' had me laugh out loud on the tube yesterday.

Prior to this i have read The Lovely Bones- which was a great little read and perfect escape back at work post Christmas. I then read Down & Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind- doing what he did for scorsese etc. in 'Easy Riders & Raging Bulls' to Sundance and Miramax- a very interesting read if you ever intend to make/ pitch a movie (Don't mention flops when pitching no matter how great- Why would Harvey Weinstein want to invest in a Coen Brothers movie- they don't make money!) Then I shot through Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegutt which was a typically black humoured and cock eyed look at the inner workings of spy cum war criminal following orders from either side. Lots of good books this year so far.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:24 / 21.03.06

I'm currently reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds: The Business And Culture Of Online Games, about which I intend to start a G&G thread once I've finished it.

13:16 / 21.03.06

Market Forces by Richard Morgan. A weird polemic on corporate culture and samurai-like economics. The investors kill each other in order to seal the deal. Not a Kovacs novel at all. The politics are as obvious as a sledgehammer in this book. Still entertaining.

Nova by Samuel R Delany. It's a weird Moby Dick-like guys on a mission kind of book. It's also apparently a Holy Grail quest allegory. I admit I'm not liking it as much as I liked Dhalgren. My library at school has most of Delany's nonfiction, so I will be reading that in the future. Delany is a definite "man of letters" like Emerson (but without the optimism)

Baobab Branches and Plastic

07:41 / 22.03.06

Now reading Factotum by Bukowski... I am fond of Bukowski but not the rabid fan many of my friends are. Its gritty but its also fantasy, a weird low-life fantasy (as it says on the back)... very funny though.

pointless & uncalled for

19:09 / 24.03.06

I'd tried reading Consider Phlebas, but found it all a bit heavy-going and joyless; the perspective wasn't quite right.

Banks is one of the less "joyful" Sci-Fi writers and has a tendancy of pushing it home by centering on dysfunction in utopia. I would encourage reading his books in the order of writing because of certain allusions that are included in each subsequent book. None of them are ever storyline critical but certainly of easter egg quality. There is one in Inversions though that, although subtle, has the ability to sew up a lot of detail and is absolutely joyful to discover.

09:52 / 25.03.06

Delany is a definite "man of letters" I've always wanted to read his autobiography, just because of the title - The Motion of Light on Water - and, you not what? - I've just decided, I will.

Currently - faltered half way through Robert Fisk's middle east behemoth The Great War of Civilisation.An amazing read, really compelling but very depressing. Surfing an ocean of blood.

Just finished A Room of One's Own and polishing off The Man who Loved Only Numbers, a biography ofmath genius, Paul Erdos. It has just the right balance of actual maths in stretch but not terrify me - prime number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem, Fibonacci. What a crazy subject. Wish I hadn't been bullied into taking it a level far too tough for me at school, then maybe I'd have enjoyed it more. This is helping cure years of maths phobia.

Also started Ian MeEwan's Saturday which is surprisingly good, even if an incredibly well paid and successful middle class professional is not my idea of the English everyman I feel McEwan was aiming for. Write about what you know, I guess. Still, perhaps this is addressed later in the book.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:03 / 25.03.06

I've also been wanting to read The Motion of Light On Water for ages, and have been cursing myself for the fact that we had a shitload of remaindered copies for two quid each when I was working at F*rb*dd*n Pl*n*et and I never got round to picking one up.

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