BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2007: What are you currently reading?

  
  

Page: 1(2)34567... 10

 
 
Aha! I am Klarion
01:02 / 12.01.07
xk

pick up "Burning Your Boats" it has all of Carter's short fiction (that were published in previous collections). I look forward to rereading that book myself.
 
 
Evil Scientist
11:13 / 12.01.07
Currently going all mainstream with "Dreamcatcher" by Monsieur King. Zipping through it as I do with all of his stuff, but it's enjoyably light sci-fi guff with plenty of gore and not too much of the lingering on sequences in the childhood of the main characters (which irritates me in the King-ster's work).

In a moment of pure synchronicity (or perhaps because it's being sold cheap at the mo') I'm onto "Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrel" next as well.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
12:12 / 12.01.07
Just finished Automated Alice, Jeff Noon, which for some reason took months for Amazon to find and deliver. Maybe it's unusually popular. Anyhow, having loved Vurt and been less impressed with Pollen, I was delighted with this one; the whole thing is written in very fair faux-Carroll, the city has been oddly twisted again, and there's a constant stream of witticisms. Smugly clever, yet not at all irritating. A very quick read, too.

Now on to Nymphomation, also Noon, good so far.
 
 
symbiosis
13:36 / 12.01.07
I'm about done with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 which has been a really fun read. I never get enough of HST's perspective, even though I enjoy neither speed nor guns.

But what I've just started is really, really, really challenging me morally, ecologically, economically, politically, etc.

Endgame Volume II: Resistance by Derrick Jensen

You can get the his ideas pretty well from here:

http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/1-Premises.htm

I will probably start a thread about this book soon.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
01:35 / 13.01.07
I gave up on Hardboiled Wonderland... this time 'round because the opening failed to grab me sufficiently. I'll pick it up later and try again.

Right now I'm halfway through Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which I stopped part way through last time after a particularly bad bout of food poisoning because I couldn't bring myself to keep reading after staying up all night in the loo with it while throwing up occasionally...never mind...anyway, I'm back on track and loving it. It reminds me of a high-tech Charles De Lint in a weird way, but I can't quite work out why. Something about the way the characters speak to each other.

I've got Justina Robson's Natural History in the queue for afters.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
02:43 / 13.01.07
Just finished 'Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins', Rupert Everett's autobiography. The sense you get is that the guy's had a good time, and that he writes well about it. In a sort of John Waters, JG Ballard-esque kind of a way. Recommended.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
04:56 / 13.01.07
I just read two books by David Baldacci, The Camel Club and The Hour Game, which were... well, not quite rubbish, but the $2 I paid for each of them was a pretty fair price for the mediocre 'thrillers' that I received.

I also read a book by Greg Iles, 24 Hours, which was rubbish and I wish I hadn't paid $2 for it. I'm assuming the author is a christian, which is not problematic in and of itself, but everyone, everyone, including the kidnapper/rapist main villain, explicitly call on an interventionist god in an unexamined and a bit troubling way, and none of the characters react at all to the way god is used in the book. Basically everyone assumes everyone else is a christian all the time, even when it makes no sense at all, and it's puzzling to me. the story is shit, too.

On the other hand, I re-read Zodiac by Stephenson recently, which was a good idea, and has inspired me to get out Snow Crash (as has Enki coming up in conversation at the pub last night) from the library this afternoon. Also to eat more fish, which I suspect is a slightly idiosyncratic reaction.

Whilst at the library, I accidentally also got:
Cryptonomicon, also by Stephenson, which I own, but cannot locate currently. I'm very much in the mood for maths made interesting, at the moment, and I haven't re-read it since his Baroque cycle, I want to see all the link-ins.
A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, David Foster Wallace, which seems like a pretty good set of essays so far (I've read through the first essay, and a big chunk of the second, which is the best explanation for the love/hate of TV I've seen).
Last words and Wising up the marks, Burrough's journal and a book about him, respectively, neither of which I have yet read, or even looked at, but both of which are probably very interesting.
The kingdom of the wicked & the clockwork testament, both by Burgess, because I feel it is time to read through big chunks of his work, and I'm on holidays.

Also a book of the best magazine writing in america in '04, which I picked up because it was pretty-looking, and I'm looking to broaden my horizons a bit.


Hopefully these will keep me from making too many bargain-books mistakes out of desperation, for the next week or so. I can't be having any more Greg Iles type experiences.
 
 
AnonProphet
10:21 / 13.01.07
Papers: I totally get the Doctorow /DeLint connection, in my case it was trying to remember who Doctorow reminded me of, and now, thanks, I realize. Don't ask me to go digging through DeLint again to try to figure out why though.
 
 
Ticker
13:04 / 13.01.07
thanks Procrastination's Mercury!
 
 
Chiropteran
00:49 / 14.01.07
Like a lot of people, I expect, I'm rereading the Roberts Anton Wilson and Shea's Illuminatus!. It's been a long time since I last read it all the way through, and while I always found the subject matter fascinating, I think I'm actually enjoying it more this time, from a literary viewpoint - appreciating the writing as much as the written about.
 
 
Aha! I am Klarion
13:19 / 14.01.07
I am reading Nabokov's "Lectures in Literature" after just finishing "Mr. Timothy."
 
 
Jackie Susann
21:34 / 14.01.07
I'm reading Power without glory by Frank Hardy. It's a thinly fictionalised version of the rise of John Wren (John West in the book), a gangster who ended up with near total control of the Australian Labor Party in the mid-20th story. It isn't brilliantly written, but the scope is pretty awesome - it follows him from poverty in the recession of the 1890s through to 1950, and takes in pretty much every significant event in local history. The subtext is Hardy, a communist, commenting on the historical failure of the ALP to be anything but a machine for accruing personal power to it's members.

When it was originally published, Hardy was charged with criminal libel and there was a huge trial. (The 50th anniversary edition I'm reading has 'The book that tore Australia apart' emblazoned on the cover.) It's pretty awesome.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
01:11 / 15.01.07
Starting Natural History but Justina Robson. Starts off intriguingly, with a woman in deep space who is also a starship in deep space, experiencing First Contact. At times her sentences are a bit dense - heavy on the sci-fi and suitably alien, therefore - but she manages to pack a lot of poetry into her prose.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
07:22 / 15.01.07
Justina Robson's Amazon reviews (for "Keeping it Real", there's only one for "Natural History") are an interesting mix of "brilliant!" and "awful!" Anyone care to comment? Wiki has her down as hard SF, which sounds promising.

(..meanwhile, finished Nymphomation, which was ok, although a bit of a mishmash at the end, and onto Hinterland, Sax, which has a thread of its very own otherwhere to which I'll probs. post when I finish it.)
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
17:14 / 15.01.07
I really enjoyed Living Next Door to the God of Love, which seemed to have Robson take various MUDs and make them real physical spaces - it starts out in a rather intriguing superhero world where there's social tension between those who choose to become corporate-owned pre-existing characters (Spidermen and Batmen) versus those who come up with their own identities. The book went all over the place. Natural History didn't grab me partly because I found her descriptions a bit vague and unclear -- I couldn't quite grasp what sense of scale I was supposed to take away from it, for example. I got about five chapters in and then gave up because it wasn't quite doing it for me. Next Door suffered at times from a terribly urgent plot but no sense from the characters or prose that there's any real immediate danger, and the ending was intriguing but a little vague.

I'm going to switch over to some Rudy Rucker for a bit and see where that takes me. Realware's at hand so I'll start there.
 
 
Ticker
18:19 / 15.01.07
I just finished Blood and Thunder by Mark Finn and as a biography it kicked major serious ass. As a scholarly work it was well researched and the author's points about looking at his subject in context of when and where really opened my eyes to a lot of the bullshit surrounding Robert E. Howard.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough and it is worth reading even if you have no idea who Robert E. Howard is. The writing alone is brilliant and it is a great story of a creative giant who has been much maligned.
 
 
Aha! I am Klarion
22:13 / 15.01.07
Currently, just started "All the Pretty Horses" --hope to finish tommorrow night
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:59 / 15.01.07
Currently, just started "All the Pretty Horses" --hope to finish tommorrow night

I trust you intend to follow it up with The Crossing and Cities Of The Plain?

All The Pretty Horses is fucking wonderful, there's no two ways about it. Cities Of The Plain is pretty damn good as well, but The Crossing is one of the most beautiful and sad books I have ever read in my life. That trilogy is one of the most amazing pieces of writing it's ever been my pleasure to read.
 
 
Raw Norton
14:07 / 16.01.07
Read most of Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper over the long weekend, will probably finish it tomorrow night. I've really enjoyed it. It feels like some kind of 1960s experimental fiction throwback: metafiction, funky typesetting. Like a lot of such books, I half-wished the author had written a "straight" book; he creates this fascinating world of grief-riddled quasi-Catholic Mexican immigrants and then goes and mucks things up with all this self-conscious concern for form & style. Not that the "straight" version would be better, necessarily, but you can't help but wish to deal with the plot & characters w/o all that pomo hoo-ha. To his credit, though, Plascencia manages to pull off said hoo-ha with genuine & credible sentiment, which act of writerly acrobatics is pretty tough to pull off.

Incidentally, the use of "Saturn" in this book reminded me of Barbelith (the satellite, not the site) itself.
 
 
Kali, Queen of Kitteh
16:44 / 17.01.07
pick up "Burning Your Boats" it has all of Carter's short fiction (that were published in previous collections). I look forward to rereading that book myself.

My copy of Burning Your Boats has many many passages underlined. I'll get around to using them as epigrams for a story one day.

"He was filled with sad proud air of a king of a rainy country."

"There are some eyes eat you."

"Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation...."

Just finished Daughter of Hounds. Not too bad.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
20:29 / 18.01.07
I'd also highly recommend Angela Carter's creative non-fiction works, collected in Shaking a Leg. Wide range of articles all with her sharp, sharp tongue. Black Venus is a really effin' good short story collection as well, and one that I return to ever so often because there's always something else to pick out.

Right now I'm in the middle of Cory Doctorow's A Place So Foreign & Eight Others, which is really good. I have to admit that some of the stories click more than others - the last one, with its cure for AIDS, is brilliant - but I like Doctorow's writing on the whole. I've been reading selections of his latest collection, Overclocked online - they're available here in various formats. He's been quite the inspiration for my writings lately...
 
 
deja_vroom
11:49 / 19.01.07
Finally got around to reading "The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman". It's fun all the way, even if it's more in a Phil Sebben "ha-HA!" way than in a "OMG LOL" kinda of way most of the time. Being a book about writing that book as well as about pretty much everything else that someone could come up in the XVIII century, it also makes you furious if you have to try to explain its subject to a hott girl that just happened to sit by your side on the bus (as it happened to me today) and asked you what it was about. Chances are you will either sound like a douche, a dork or a spaz, depending on how you try to approach the subject. It ends in awkwardness and an ardent desire to shoot oneself in the mouth.
 
 
Dusto
16:13 / 19.01.07
You should have just told her it was about a cock and a bull.
 
 
deja_vroom
20:25 / 19.01.07
Godammit.
 
 
Aha! I am Klarion
23:41 / 20.01.07
currently, jumping back a forth between "the rules of attraction" by Ellis and "faust" by Goethe. I liking Ellis's better, but not proud of it.

I was underwhelmed by "All the Pretty Horses," but it is going in my re-read pile and I'll read again next year to see if I can enjoy it more.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
08:38 / 21.01.07
Stone Heart, Charlie Fletcher, a children's book set in a semi-alternate London populated by living statues (the gimmick being that they're all real ones to be wandered around and looked at) and a handful of curious figures, much as per Neverwhere. The world is rammed home with some force, "this is an x, they do y" kinda explication, but the characterisation is nicely done, there's some ambiguity about what is really supposed to be going on, and there's a piece of misdirection about the baddies which had me missing the wood for the trees. Cute.

Savage Night, Jim Thompson. Well, ho-hum. It was alright, I s'pose, just didn't seem very plausible, 'specially the ending. Interesting as a cultural snapshot, though.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
13:41 / 22.01.07
I've finished, finally, thankfully, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. It's not terrible, but it's a couple of hundred pages too long and very, very pleased with itself in a smug, throwing in massive amounts of unnecessary detail about Communist and Middle-Age Europe.

Now I'm starting Break It Up: Patti Smith's "Horses" and the Remaking of Rock N Roll by Mark Paytress.
 
 
Raw Norton
15:34 / 22.01.07
Recently started T.S. Eliot by Craige Raine, part of Oxford University Press's "Lives and Legacies" series. I've had very mixed experiences with these series where publishers say "esteemed author + interesting, assigned topic = publishing gold!!!" Seemingly bound by editorial directive, the book tries to be erudite, but accessible and short. Which, it does succeed at being short. If you're looking for serious academic criticism, look elsewhere. Likewise, if you're completely unfamiliar with Eliot, his work, and the usual responses to his work, this probably isn't the book for you.

Anyhow, Raine identifies a couple of competing major themes that run throughout Eliot's body of work, and spends two chapters on these themes, discussing their place in about twelve or so poems, each poem getting about 3 pages discussion. He then moves on to an extended discussion of The Waste Land (which chapter I've just gotten to, and have a raging hard-on to read), then Four Quartets, the plays and the criticism. In an appendix, Raine defends Eliot against the usual charges of anti-semitism. I'll see how that goes.

So far, Raine does a good job. He avoids speculating about biographical details, and has an unflagging conviction that Eliot can do no wrong (which wins him points in my book). Raine's own experiences as a poet bring some pretty interesting insights, and his academic familiarity with the relevant Victorian & modernist poetry & critical theory proves indispensable.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
16:50 / 22.01.07
Procrastination's... I was underwhelmed by "All the Pretty Horses," but it is going in my re-read pile and I'll read again next year to see if I can enjoy it more.

Don't give it a re-read. Read The Crossing. Completely new story. The two only converge in Cities Of The Plain. All The Pretty Horses is pretty much backstory to Cities..., though The Crossing is the best of the three, imho. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. Also incredibly ugly. Sometimes simultaneously.
 
 
GogMickGog
18:32 / 22.01.07
Wodehouse.

I love Wodehouse.

Stiff Upper lip, Jeeves, thank you, Jeeves and Right ho, Jeeves are among the beauties I have polished off in the past few weeks and dash it if they haven't been amongst the bonniest reads yours truly has ever perused. The heart was in the m. at every turn. Each has been as effective at prying splutters and chuckles from my otherwise pursed lips - perfect for eliciting concerned looks whilst traversing the outer rim of the commuter belt.

To read Wodehouse is to be ut totally at ease: he is such a consumate stylist - his nack for description and linguistic vividity is superb. Likewise, he manages to pull off the feat of maintaining a formula, delivering plots in which the twists are often brightly forecasted, and yet having the reader (well, perhaps just this one) giggle in anticipation. Love it.

Next up is some Paul Auster and then, I fancy, I shall finish of Colin Wilson's The Occult and tuck in to a side portion of Flann O'brien.
 
 
Corey Waits
21:29 / 22.01.07
I just started Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I was really starting to enjoy it, and then the end-notes started...

They're already annoying me, but I figure I'm just going to have to persevere.
 
 
Mistoffelees
22:19 / 22.01.07
I started IJ too, recently, and stopped at about end-note 25. I might restart, but it was very frustrating.

Instead I got curious about the Cormack McCarthy vibe, and started and have so far read 2/3 of Suttree, a sad and humane story about people at the fringes of society in the 1950ies USA. Although the characters have a very self-destructive tendency, they have many moments were they enjoy their life. All this squalor and madness is surprisingly not depressing, more mesmerizing maybe.
 
 
Mono
14:19 / 27.01.07
I am seriously getting my Brontë on. Just finished Jane Eyre by Charlotte and re-reading Wuthering Heights by Emily and longing for wily, windy moors...

Also reading The Summer Book and A Winter Book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame). They are simply beautiful.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
15:16 / 27.01.07
Blood and Thunder, as per above it's an excellent biography. Howard comes across as a far more admirable type than his mate Lovecraft, and I've come away resolved to track down some of his non-Conan fiction.

Bridget Jones's Diary, well, ok, sue me. I had to read something while I waited for the Burning flippin' Crusade to install. And y'know, I kinda liked it, through a fervent and possibly misguided haze of hope that the snobbery was a property of the character and not the author.

Now Natural History, which I'm enjoying so far and is definitely resembling a more technically-minded Neal Asher.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
15:36 / 27.01.07
China Mieville's Looking for Jake, which is extremely uneven. Some of the stories just feel very...I don't know. "by-the-numbers unsettling?" I really liked "The Tain" and "Foundation" was quite good but I'm finding that the quality goes up and down and almost makes one seasick with its wild oscillations. "An End to Hunger" is good, though, and reminds me of Cory Doctorow to the point where it seems a pastiche, which is highly unlikely.
 
  

Page: 1(2)34567... 10

 
  
Add Your Reply