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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2007: What are you currently reading?

  
  

Page: 123(4)56789... 10

 
 
GogMickGog
10:06 / 19.02.07

Am currently chugging my way through Jonathan Coe's What a Carve up! I felt I owed it to the fella as I scored rather well in a finals paper last year, in which I compared a snippet from this with a chunk of Ballard (the news reporter in 'Day of Creation', I think).

Next up are the much-touted At swim with two birds and Huxley's Antic Hay. Early Huxley drives me gaga and this is one I seem to have overlooked. Very excited.

--------------------------------

I have also just put Paul Willetts' Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, a biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross, to bed. For those unfamiliar, he was a literary figure most prominent in the 40s and perhaps best remembered as a Soho dandy who mixed with the likes of Dylan Thomas and Alestair Croweley, rather than for a very mixed body of work. At it's best, his work drew plaudits from Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh.

His life story is that of a great British failure: he has been called a 'mediocre curator of his own great talent' and paid the full price for a lack of control and basic common sense: even at his most cash strapped he insisted on travelling by taxi and living in luxurious surroundings.

The latter half of the book descends into a series of debts and unmet deadlines, but one rather gets the sense that this is how Maclaren-Ross' later years played out.

I suppose the main reason I wanted to bring this up is that he remains a rather marginal figure and unjustly so: his stories are as vivid and fresh as the day they were written: his humour, cynicism and canny nack for a kind of scruffy, direct street vernacular should see him up with the Hemmingways et al. Ho hum.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
07:21 / 21.02.07
I've just finished rereading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for a book group. I'm sure that when I read it for the first time as a teenager I enjoyed it, maybe I was more of a goth back then or something. It's Romantic Luddism annoyed me intensely, making me want to scream at the author "No, sometimes scientific progress is great, just think, a few hundred years later we have the speedboat, which could have saved your husband's life, and medical advances which could have saved your mother's life and the rest of your family, so stop complaining!" It's harder to tell at a remove of several hundred years, but the impression I get is that Mary Shelley doesn't actually understand how people who aren't like her thinks, the young Victor isn't able to really explain why he wants to do things, so she skips over motivation and has him just driven by the desire to do them, so she ends up rather lamely having him excited to create the monster right up to about a second after he brings him to life, then suddenly realises his mistake and then exists fairly passively throughout the rest of the book while the monster does his thing.

I'm now reading My Husband Betty by Helen Boyd, which I will hopefully enjoy more.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
16:10 / 23.02.07
About a third of the way through Angela Carter's The Passion of the New Eve, which sings even if it is a particularly nasty song. A friend of mine is the teaching the book in one of his classes, and the students are apparently rebelling against it because of the castration scene. I'm really enjoying the book, although at times I find her use of symbolism is a bit textbook (...and cue entrance to the underworld...) but that's more of an observation than a criticism. I think the heat of the piece is in its prose work.
 
 
penitentvandal
10:03 / 26.02.07
I just finished off Lint by Steve Aylett, an unbelievably funny pseudobiography of a minor SF author. Infuriated the hell out of my wife by constantly laughing out loud while reading it.

Also just got done with Johnny Come Home, Jake Arnott's new one, which was a bit blah and not as good as either of his first two, The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers. Beginning to think of Arnott as the Oasis of British crime novelists.

Currently on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Can't believe it took me so long to get into this book.
 
 
Janean Patience
10:57 / 26.02.07
Stoat: It's the book Tarkovsky's movie Stalker was based on, though they have little in common other than the basic premise- there is a Zone where the laws of physics are mutable, and it's littered with strange alien artifacts. Stalkers are people who risk their lives entering the Zone to bring back these objects. It's ace.

This is exactly the plot of M John Harrison's Nova Swing, the sequel to Light which i wrote about on the thread for the latter... so maybe I was missing all kinds of references and homages and even an entire plot lifted.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:13 / 26.02.07
Janean Pictures- hmm, interesting. Must check it out.

I've just finished the Natsuo Kirino, which was excellent, though, as expected, very bleak and left me feeling a bit down, really.

In a further atempt not to get any laughs, I've just started Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which is looking damn good so far.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
04:24 / 27.02.07
Passion of New Eve rocked, if only for Carter's absolutely wonderful mastery of the paragraph-long sentence, winding back and forth like a snake hinged on commas. Truss might say that nobody should use that many commas but this book had some beauties in it, competing with the glorious elephants passage from Nights at the Circus.

Should be picking up Rudy Rucker's Mathematicians in Love on Wednesday, looking forward to flexible universe shuffling loveyness.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
12:20 / 02.03.07
Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin, excellent book; the members of a family cope (or not) with sin, hypocrisy and redemption, racism and religious ecstacy. Told in a series of flashbacks from each of the characters, very gripping.

Also Say You Want a Revolution, which I guess needs no introduction here (I should probably say, I wasn't entranced by it, although it shed a little light on Barbelith!), Green Mars (reasonable, a bit too drawn-out, maybe) and Blue Mars (more of the same), and the biography of a vague relative.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
21:21 / 02.03.07
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (born 1500, Florence) - he's famous for creating that famous gold salt cellar, but his life is amazing. He gets involved in all sorts of war and intrigue and so on, firing cannons, getting in with popes, sleeping with hundreds of men, boys, women, girls...

Collected Stories of Nabokov. Again, really amazing. Does things with the short story form - particularly his characters - and the idea of Russianness, and is always angry at fate.
 
 
_pin
21:31 / 02.03.07
In a further atempt not to get any laughs, I've just started Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which is looking damn good so far.

I'm gonna go out on a giant limb here, and say that I'm the only person who found this book really funny. There's, like, a whole page about a cat stuck up a tree! And all that stuff about bullet physics! A literally every line delivered by every character, esp. the sherrif's wife! Every scene in Mexico! Every scene in offices! Every scene that comes after a shoot out!

I honestly think I'm the Seth of book-reading.

In other news, I'm currently touching Ken MacLeod in the there place. Stone Canal, The is spiffy! I dug Star Fraction, but that way every character had a giant hole in their knowledge to get the exposition rolling wore a hole in my head, and it kind of made me want to play Metal Gear Solid, which is an unforgivable crime.

This next one's awesome, though! Back and forth through time! Reads like an awesome dream! Basically feels like I'm canning three eps a night of an improbale BBC2 drama from the late Eighties, which is yum.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
19:21 / 04.03.07
My Husband Betty by Helen Boyd is really for women that are partnered up with trannies and trannies themselves, so I didn't really get a huge amount out of this, other than some female perspectives on male-to-female transvestites. But it's very much of it's place, what's it like if you are a young-to-middle-age white professional couple somewhere in one of the more blue bits of America where a man in woman's clothes needn't expect to get the shit kicked out of him. I'm not sure that a woman would get much out of this that's of genuine use other than being reassured that a sense of anger is valid and that her husband may be clueless as to the actuality of female life. However, the title is misleading, I bought this because I thought it was going to be more about a woman discovering her husband was a transvestite and what happened next, it's more rambling than that. I also think it might make people think it's about a transsexual, it's only made clear in the introduction.

Now I'm reading The Island by Victoria Hislop.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
20:01 / 04.03.07
In other news, I'm currently touching Ken MacLeod in the there place.

FINALLY, someone else on Barbelith joins me in the MacLeod lovin'!

Yeah, Stone Canal fucking rules. Don't worry- no spoilers from me, but I love that his books very rarely actually have bad guys in them. Yeah, there are people who will kill each other over stuff, but pretty much everyone has the best of intentions, just very different ways of achieving their ends.

Given that Gibson's taking several years between books, so until another one appears I'm not sure I can call him "current", I'd have to say MacLeod's my favourite SF writer currently operating. Met him once, too. Lovely bloke.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
05:05 / 05.03.07
Mathematicians in Love is quite good, all things considered. I am occasionally bothered by the lead character's physical attractiveness but can't decide if it adds to his fleshiness to be so stuck up about it or if it's a somewhat laboured inversion of the "nerdy mathematician" stereotype to have some blond studly surfer playing numbers, an inversion that falls flat on its face.

Interesting, though. Roland Haut, the thesis adviser, seems to be a PKD character forced to be supporting cast. So far I've been more intrigued by him and Leni, the vlogging media mogul hatchling, than I am by the main trio - Alma, in particular, suffers from not having much to do.

Anyone read any other Rudy Rucker stuff? I tried to read Realware a couple weeks ago but could not get into it.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
13:46 / 05.03.07
Tau Zero, Poul Anderson; an interesting jaunt through some of the implications of relativity. The characters came across as plausible and the plot was quite compelling, although the author's perception of gender-roles is, ah, rather dated.

Babel 17, Samuel Delany; an exploration of the effect of language on perception from a master of the art. The setting is a well-drawn space opera, complete with ray-guns and boarding parties, with a number of more idiosyncratic musings on group sexuality, perception-operated starships &c. Oh, and some properly alien aliens, too. Good book.

Now just starting Grass, Sheri Tepper; not a promising beginning (fox-hunting in space! aie! Joshua Calvert'll be along any moment!) but I have high hopes.

(No prizes for guessing who overspent on "SF Masterworks".)
 
 
_pin
17:22 / 05.03.07
Stoat his books very rarely actually have bad guys in them. 'Cept for Greens and sabs, obv.

Unless something lovely is happening on earth in Cassini Division, which I should start tomorrow, Greens have bene good for about two lines of dialogue at the end of Star Fraction and animal rights don't even get that.

How are you finding No Country?

(And the plot doesn't make any sense)

Still loving it though!
 
 
Aha! I am Klarion
21:50 / 05.03.07
Reading "the last temptation of the christ"....very goodso far
 
 
Corey Waits
02:24 / 06.03.07
I've just finished rereading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for a book group. I'm sure that when I read it for the first time as a teenager I enjoyed it, maybe I was more of a goth back then or something.[...]

I've just started rereading Frankenstein as well, the last time I read it was for a Romanticism course I did at Uni.

I've been enjoying it this time around as much as I did last time, but I do understand your concerns. I think Shelley probably realised that Victor's story wasn't the interesting one, so she got it out of the way as quickly as possible.
I do however, also agree that she probably didn't have a very thorough understanding of the thought processes that other people might experience - the characters are all emotionall homogenous. (I'm not sure if I'm making sense, I know what I'm wanting to say, but I don't know if I'm getting it across...).

After Frankenstein I should probably try diving back into Infinite Jest... but it's still daunting.
 
 
Blake Head
23:28 / 06.03.07
Procrastination's Mercury: believe it or not, there is a thread devoted to Kazantzakis here. Your thoughts would be most appreciated.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
09:50 / 12.03.07
Grass was excellent, fairly hard SF, perhaps a slight feminist slant, excellent characters and some impressively realised aliens; something reminiscent of Dune, or 40,000 in Gehenna. I highly recommend it.

Now onto Ubik, PKD, which isn't anything like as much fun. Just seems a bit... lifeless.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
14:15 / 12.03.07
Probably aren't far enough in yet, K. I remember UBIK starts to rev up later on.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
15:23 / 12.03.07

I've never read any of his fiction, but I highly recommend Rudy Rucker's non-fiction. There aren't many "wow maths!" books out there, but he's written at least two of them.

I'm currently re-reading William Gibson's Virtual Light and Idoru, because I noticed on the original back cover blurb for VL that it was set in 2005 (which I think has since been changed to 'near future').
 
 
haus of fraser
17:59 / 12.03.07
I've not contributed to this thread yet this year- but have read lots and lots of interesting stuff. Just ploughing through this thread has nodded me towards the Neil Cassady biog and reminded me to read all the pretty horses as it gathers dust in a pile of books to read.

I started the year with The March by E L Doctorow a fictional account of General Shermans March across the Southern States at the end of the American civil war- told from a variety of perspectives (as well as General Sherman we have a deserting soldier, an expectant slave girl , a destitute plantation owner etc.)

I really enjoyed it- being English i was fairly ignorant of this period in history- and was given this as a christmas present. It wouldn't have normally been the kind of book i'd check out- but it was a really worthwhile read. The biggest critisism is that it had a lot of characters that i wanted to know more from and characters that you have invested several chapters in are bumped off at random.

On the plus side the huge array of characters added a sense of scale to the war, its problems and also the mortality of people in this period- so balanced up a pretty good read.

Next up came The Accidental by Ali Smith- You can't move in a book shop without being offered this one in a 3 for 2 these days- so i thought i'd better check it out!

It follows holidaying young smug profesionals and their family and the arrival into their lives of Amber and the impact that she has on each of them.

It was an ok read- kind of Ian Mcewan-esque, stalkers and uncomfortable family secrets - that aren't really secrets. Its told from each member of the families pov- something that starts well with clearly defined styles for each member of the family- but as the book and plot progresses these styles/ devices seem to slip into more regular writing styles.

This was followed by another borders 3 for 2 Julian Barnes Arthur & George.

I loved this book . It follows the lives of sherlock holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji- an introverted solicitor from the midlands and a miscarriage of justice that brings them together...

A huge hunk of a book but beautifully written and an incredible page turner- i can't remember the last time i demolished a book so quickly i literally couldn't put it down. We flip between their two worlds- one of privilege and adventure- the other the simple life of an outsider; gradually the two worlds meet and then drift apart again with life altering consequences.

Next up came Nigel Slater's Memoir "Toast"- i know this got loads of praise and there's nothing more i like than a slater recipe idea from my observer on sunday- but the book gets very very samey and i really can't say that i warmed to him.

The idea of the book is simple- a childhood memoir told through food. While he had it pretty tough loosing his mum very young and then his dad as he was leaving school- i find it hard to feel sorry for him- maybe his own defense mechinisms have left him not wanting to play the victim- rejoicing in his freedom. while i don't doubt that he had a very lonely upbringing- it still doesn't mean i warmed to him, i found him too self centred and wondered wheteher at times he was looking for drama where there was none?

Next up came Running with Scissors Augusten Burroughs controversial childhood memoir set in the 70's- it has a couple of similaritys to Toast; young gay men discovering their sexuality and terrible parenting, but it never wallows and the story is so fast paced you barely register one tale before the next outlandish one comes along.

We follow Burroughs through his parents divorce and eventual adoption by his mothers crazy psychiatrist. Going from an obsessive compulsive child into polishing silver till his fingers bled to sharing a house where the doctor lets kids make their own structural changes to the house, offers random drugs at will and encourages a suicide bid in order to be signed off school. inevitibly this changes Burroughs- in a thoroughly entertaining way- great fun i just watched the trailer for the movie (which isn't out in the uk yet,,) not sure if it looks any good- it was a great little book but i'm not sure how well it would translate, anybody seen it?

Which pretty much brings me up to date- i'm now reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak- a fictional tale of Nazi Germany narrated by Death- i'm enjoying it at the moment- i'm about a third of the way in so i'll say more when i've finished it.
 
 
Dusto
13:46 / 14.03.07
Finally finished Against the Day, and I'm about halfway through The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Both very good.
 
 
haus of fraser
17:28 / 14.03.07
Tell us more dusto... what are they about? what is the writing like? Who are the authors? What did they remind you of? Why should i care?
 
 
Katherine
18:19 / 14.03.07
Not really a book more a booklet called One Eyed Grey I got from Atlantis Bookshop in London. It's a modern day version of the penny dreadful or at least that's what they term themselves as.

It takes old folklore surrounding London and turns them into new stories for us to read. The book begins with a group of people meeting up to remember an old friend who had died the before, as their discussion turns to friends they haven't seen in a while the chapters in between tell what has happened to them.

In the case of one friend he dies at the hands of Jenny Greenteeth, which in this tale is a mermaid, although my old folklore knows her more as a green hag that inhabits streams or water to drag people to their deaths. Although considering the guy's ending I guess both are fairly reasonable.

The stories and sub-stories are all London based and the publishers are appealing for stories which are london based. I really enjoyed this booklet and it didn't last long enough for me which means I am now eagerly awaiting the next edition out in June.
 
 
Dusto
18:40 / 14.03.07
Against the Day is by Thomas Pynchon. It has its own thread at the moment and has been mentioned a few times in this thread, which is why I didn't say much about it.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa also has its own thread somewhere (which I started a while ago), but that's not a very popular one. It's basically about a Walloon guard in the 18th Century who is trying to get to Madrid. But he keeps getting distracted by gypsies, cabbalists, Spanish inquisitors, wandering jews, geometers, and two lovely Muslim ladies claiming to be cousins of his, who want to marry him (or at least sleep with him), though they may in fact be the reanimated corpses of two hanged bandits. It was written in French by a Pole in the late 18th and early 19th Century. It's pretty funny. And it has lots of stories within stories.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
21:57 / 14.03.07
Based on your synopsis, Dusto, I talked to one of the librarians at work and got an inter-library loan request in for Manuscript - we haven't got it in the system, and there appear to be only two libraries in the database with copies.

At the moment, I'm taking home Finnegan's Wake today so I can see if I can pretend to read it or at least glean some meaning from the thing.
 
 
Make me Uncomfortable
04:26 / 15.03.07
Lets see. Currently I am in a bit of a rereading phase. Thanks to some therepy and self-help confluence, I've been working through The Artist's Way as well as getting myself back onto the Getting Things Done boat. They are both excellent books- Artists Way is a twelve week workbook in recovering creativity and creative potential, while Getting Things Done is a practical system for organizing and motivating yourself- breaking projects into next actions, processing incoming email, papers, etc, effiently and often, etc.

I've also been rereading China Meiville's Perdido Street Station and William Gibson's Patern Recognition.

The former is an amazing fantasy book set in a sort of alternate, slighlty magical, slightly steam-engine-y London-like city, about a scientist trying to apply the Unified Field Theory of technology/thaumergy to a specific problem- flight. And then crazy monsters happen.

The latter is sort of present-day sci fi- it's written like science fiction, but its set around 2003 or 2004: an advertising consultant who is literally alergic to terrible marketing campaigns is hired by a mysterious billionaire to track down the author of a series of online videos which are either the incredible works of an unknown garage savant director, or the greatest guerilla marketing thing to ever be done but which has somehow kept quiet, or both, or neither, but fascinating.

I highly recommend all four books- they are some of the best I have ever read.
 
 
Make me Uncomfortable
04:35 / 15.03.07
Papers: I read some of his stuff a long, long time ago and one thing recently. The Hacker and the Ants, and most of the 'ware series: Hardware, Software, and Wetware, I read those years and years ago. They were good, if a little over-sexualized. The hacker and the ants, especially, because of the part with the fnord, the demon robot, and the truck-cow. I've also read The Fourth Dimension much more recently. It is in fact my bathroom reading- there's something weirdly plesent about trying to mentally move things ana and kata while on the can.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
14:17 / 19.03.07
Telephones- I'll mull over starting a bathroom reading thread if there isn't one already, because I do have a fair canon for that particular room.

In the midst of Dracula, which is intriguing mostly for Jonathan Harker's weird obsession with Carpathian cuisine and his unquenchable thirst from paprika chicken. I had always thought the Brides were a creation of the movies, but there they are, a group noun, singular but amorphous.

On the other hand, while I was travelling this weekend I found a 1969 edition of Harlan Ellison's The Beast that Shouted LOVE at the Heart of the World, with its intriguing title and back-cover blurbs. Ellison always gets the best back-cover blurbs: "The dizzying notion of a Jesus who has a strange, obsessive relationship with Prometheus." I'm reading the Stoker but I might stray in the middle to read the Ellison.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
13:19 / 20.03.07
Ubik, well, I still wasn't bowled over by the end of it, although I'll concede it improved from a slow start. Just not my thing, I guess.

Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, was great. Not particularly complicated or clever, but it gave what seemed to be the perfect atmosphere of the mysterious Zone and hapless Stalkers. On which note, and by purest coincidence, I was delighted to see that a) there's a game (loosely) based on the book and b) it's just been / just about to be released.

Now on to Rumo, which is just plain bizarre, although as noted earlier a bit gleefully bloodthirsty. I've not quite finished it yet, but it feels like someone has taken Young Legionary and a random half dozen or Roald Dahl's books and thrown them into a blender for an hour or so. Enjoyable!

I thought the Manuscript found in Saragossa was great, by the way, although just a little hard to navigate due to its several layers of narrative.
 
 
Dusto
12:26 / 22.03.07
I'm really enjoying Saragossa. I'm a little over 3/4 of the way through it now. In some ways it feels like Potocki's guide to life, especially after reading the Wandering Jew's discussion of Egyptian Mystery religions alongside the explanation of the geometer's "system." I hope you dig it, Papers.
 
 
Mistoffelees
14:44 / 23.03.07
I finished Living next door to the god of love by Justina Robson today, and am disappointed. Robson supposedly is a writer of the New Weird genre, but that book wasn´t weird at all. There were Superheroes, vampires, gods, hybrids et al, but it was derivative and bland. All the fantasy and SF was only a front for a romance novel. Now looking at the title, there was a strong hint, but the back of the book said different. "One of the very best of the new British SF writers", but it read like a daydream of a teenager, fantasising about being a beautiful princess with a god as a lover, living in a huge castle surrounded by woods filled with fantasy beasts.

There was no suspense, not much interest for the generic characters. At the end of the book, one character appears out of thin air, without any explanation, after he fell to his death a couple of pages earlier, and his reappearance doesn´t matter anyway.

I guess, I´ll try some other NW authors before I pick up one of Robson´s novels again.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
11:33 / 24.03.07
I've finished The Island by Victoria Hislop which is bland to the point of translucency. A Cretan family in the 1940s and 50s, the ungrateful daughter that marries into a wealthy family, the hard-working daughter that gets leprosy and is banished to the leper colony on The Island. It's not badly written but the characters are all stock-types, largely from the 'peasant' box.

I've just started reading What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick but I suspect I'll be a bit delayed in finishing that as I have a big pile of graphic novels to read too.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:47 / 24.03.07
Mist- that's a shame. The only Robson I've read was Silver Screen, her first novel, which was a really good cyberpunk thriller, and I've been meaning to check out her other stuff.
 
  

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