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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2008: What are you currently reading?

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11:25 / 30.05.08

Just started reading The Monk by M G Lewis - classic gothic melodrama that achieved notoriety in the late 18th century. So far it's started out with a surprising dollop of light-hearted humour (it's genuinely amusing in fact) but I get the feeling that things are about to turn darker.
The problem with the edition I'm reading is that it comes with an introduction (which for once I read) that spends ages talking about what a bad writer Lewis was and how the book is really being reprinted only for historical interest. Somehow that snootiness has spoiled my enjoyment of the start - which seems perfectly good to me - and makes me feel all low brow and stupid for not hating the prose.

11:36 / 30.05.08

Ah, think nothing of it. Lewis is deeply readable. I loved The Monk and you're right, it does all get a little gooey. If you want bad Gothic, however, try Walpole's Castle of Otranto, a work so camp and overblown, it makes Lovecraft read like a Ken Loach flick.

Whisky Priestess

13:27 / 30.05.08

Have you read Hugh Laurie's book about the reluctant hitman?

That would be The Gun Seller - a really good read IIRC, and miles better and cleverer than the toss that passes for Fry's later fiction (although The Hippopotamus is fab).

All Acting Regiment

13:36 / 30.05.08

Otranto, Otranto. A classic of the 'need more pages - add secret door' genre.

17:22 / 01.06.08

My second John Banville novel. I loved The Sea, so I was happy to see The Book Of Evidence pop up in my library.

This is the account of a man who commits a murder and the events before and especially after this, but this violent act seems to matter as little to the book itself as it does to the perpetrator. Rather the meat of the story is the self-absorbed examination of his own thoughts, memories and sense perceptions, written in a lovely, accurate and clear style. The murder itself is described in a horribly clear-eyed way and yet the man feels no remorse, and so in the story structure it becomes a weird negative space. Maybe this avoidance of meaning is a reflection of the shocked state of mind of the murderer, seeing as the book is written after the fact as a confession of sorts.

I love the style, very clear and steady. You can feel him choosing each word carefully for the effect it will have rubbing up against the words on either side. I find a similar feeling from everything that I have been reading lately, specifically various Murakami and The Road. This is obviously what is floating my boat right now.

I didn't comment on The Sea at the time, but I highly recommend that as well.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

04:36 / 03.06.08

Accelerando is taking forever to finish and may have actually lost its own point about fifty pages ago (even if it got a bit META a little while ago and randomly referenced Warren Ellis of all people, in the narrative), but it's getting there. I enjoyed the earlier stuff with Manfred and young, rebellious Amber to the later stuff with older Amber and her son Sirhan, who is the height of boring.

After that, I have Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons, but I could use some clean crisp magic realism to wash my brain out so I don't have bits of Singularity fiction sticking to everything. Might take a break to fire through some Jack Kirby omnibuses to have a proper cleanse.

11:32 / 03.06.08

After reading The Monk, I recommend Melmoth the Wanderer. Those two go well together.

14:12 / 03.06.08

even if it got a bit META a little while ago and randomly referenced Warren Ellis of all people

Yeah, I chuckled when I read that bit.

It's worth sticking with, but I prefer The Atrocity Archive and The Greenhouse.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:45 / 03.06.08

I was seduced by the first section, "Lobsters," when I read it in an anthology. At one point, a character accuses someone in the family of referring to people as "masses to be manipulated," and I think that's what's bothering me as I approach the end; the personal interactions have sort of ceased, and they only seem to talk about mass-movements and end-state politics.

That said, it really strongly reminds me of Asimov's Foundation and those big-scale space epics that don't quite feel like space operas per se.

I might pick up Glasshouse at some point, but I think I'll leave Stross for a while.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

19:01 / 03.06.08

Hot shit, but Of Love and Other Demons is great so far. A city wrapped in despair, running on deceit, despair, and closet hate. A pale nobleman beset by bats that leech his blood each night, while he sleeps. His daughter, bit by rabid dog. The Divina Pastora Asylum for Female Lunatics, next door.

10:32 / 04.06.08

After reading The Monk, I recommend Melmoth the Wanderer. Those two go well together.

I was actually in two minds as to which of those books to get and plumped for The Monk, I'm sure the other will soon follow.

simulated stereo

21:58 / 15.06.08

I just started reading Jorge Luis Borges' collection, Labyrinths. Can't believe it has taken me this long to get into his work, but I'm head over heels for the man now. I owe it all to that first Doom Patrol trade.

18:44 / 24.06.08

I always associate The Monk with The Castle of Otranto after reading one after the other in a blitz of Gothic fiction. Both are fantastic, but I haven't gotten around to reading Melmoth yet.

Right now I'm reading "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". I've been reading lots of science-fiction lately. Philip K. Dick's "Ubik" and "Martian Time-Slip" as well as Bester's "The Stars My Destination". Not sure what I'm heading to next...

Blue Eyes Not Innocent

15:00 / 27.06.08

Currently, I'm reading The Book of a Thousand Sins, which is a collection of Wrath James White's short fiction. It's good. After this I'm moving onto Bryon Morrigan's The Desert, and then I think I'm overdue to dive into some classics, like The Monk, Dracula, and The Three Musketeers.

09:07 / 01.07.08

I recently completed Sue Woolfe's Leaning Towards Infinity as part of my required course reading, a story about three generations of women that harbours secret mathematical genius and the family ties that bind us. I found it boring, convoluted and the main characters completely unsympathetic until page 307 when all the intricate threads of the book came full circle and tied up in a beautiful final narrative (ignoring the needless diary endings added as an appendix). Some of the descritive passages are beautiful and the non linear narrative disconcerting at first, beautifully realised in practice. Well worth completing, though I was the only member of my class who saw it through to the end.

I'm currently half way through Robin Hobb's sublime Twany Man conclusion, Fools Fate. I've screwed up reading these slightly, I read the Assassin trilogy and then moved onto this without reading the Liveship Traders. Hasn't spoilt my enjoyment. Without spoilers, Fool's Errand reduced me to a quivering mass of snot and sorrow, some of the writing towards the end of the book was equisitely painful and I'm absolutely gutted I've nearly finished the trilogy.

In the wings to douse my emptiness sits George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones. Looking forward to this one, especially given the 'characters so venomous they could eat the Borgias' claim by the Guardian.

Finally, I picked up Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at a recent talk I attended by his publisher about translated literature, in particular crime fiction (was I suckered by the event, not sure yet?!). This is a bit of a departure for me, but apparently it features an extremely interesting young female heroine and intricately constructed plot so I'm looking forward reading.

Janean Patience

16:03 / 01.07.08

London: City of Disappearances, a big anthology edited by Iain Sinclair and with all his mad mates (and his wife) in it, is just the thing for Iain Sinclair fans, for Londoners and I'd guess a few of the Temple people here. It's a very IS trick to chart the city by what's not there anymore, and it's a triumph of literary architecture. Everything there was, there is. Everything that's gone has a reflection in the present day. It's incredibly wide-ranging. The list of contributors at the front is jammed into a single spaceless block, and they're not named until after their pieces so there's a sense of occulsion; being led you don't know where by a shadowed guide. Though obviously some writers are instantly recognisable, especially the editor.

JG Ballard has an apocalyptic fragment, Rachel Lichtenstein has a verbal history of the Yiddish community, Alan Moore has a big bit about his old mate Steve Moore who got him into comics and magic (and, y'know, tip of the hat to Steve for doing so, though he sounds like a bit of a shut-in), and Chris Petit, Brian Catling, Stewart Home, Bill Drummond (disappointing), Will Self, Renchi are all included. It's 600 pages in paperback and never dull.

Into The Wild, which I expect a lot of people have read, I read after seeing the film. Which isn't a masterpiece and suffers from some terribly cheesy visual direction (as opposed to the direction of actors) but hooked me somehow. Chris McCandless seems so singular in his needs that I couldn't stop thinking about the story. The book tells it as more of a journey of discovery, CMC tracked by the few traces he left behind, and comes closer to an understanding of his actions, though the last chapter lacked impact.

And I've read two Moomin books. Which were obviously great.

museum in time, tiger in space

12:53 / 06.07.08

I've just finished Rene Leys by Victor Segalen, which made quite an impression on me. It was written in 1922, but it seems much more recent than that. The narrator (also called Victor Segalen) lives in Peking and becomes obsessed with a young Belgian man who claims to have all sorts of inside knowledge about the Forbidden City.

There's certainly a heavy homoerotic element to the story, although what Segalen really seems most in love with is the idea of secret knowledge - it's been described as 'the novel of the Impossibility of Knowing'. The way he describes the city made me think of Calvino's Invisible Cities, especially when he says things like:

Pei-King is not, as one might think, a chessboard whose game, fair or foul, is played on the surface. No -there is an Underground City complete with its redans, its corner forts, its highways and byways, its approaches, its threats, its 'horizontal wells' even more formidable than the wells of drinking and other water that yawn up at the open sky ...

Segalen seems to have been a fairly odd guy. He lived in China for a few years, and the book apparently does have some autobiographical elements. He died in 1919, and according to the little biography at the front of the book "his body was discovered in a Breton forest, bloodied, though the only apparent injury was to his ankle, with the Complete Works of Shakespeare opened to Hamlet alongside".

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

13:54 / 08.07.08

I'm reading about three or four different books right now, having just concluded Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold. I'm reading another of hers, What I loved, and you can certainly see the dialogue that takes place between her books and those of her husband, Paul Auster; of the two, I think I may actually prefer Hustvedt's, and I'd put The Blindfold up there with The New York Trilogy, although she seems to manipulate a degree of subtlety that Auster does not -- which is not a bad thing on either side. What I Loved does not grip me as much as The Blindfold did, there's a certain distance to the narrator's voice that I can't reconcile just yet, but it still intrigues. The Blindfold, by contrast, practically swims along and you're just caught in the prose tides -- I also like it's form, interlinked short stories that jump around in time (and are folded into each other in ways that make our heroine, Iris, seem a very unreliable narrator). Once I'm finished this one, I may be inclined to start a thread up about her work in general, if anyone's interested.

Also rereading our own Dusto's Icelander, more for inspiration than anything else.

Michael Chabon's book of essays, Maps and Legends, kicks along at a good pace. Some of it I'd read before -- he includes one introduction cribbed from one of the McSweeney's collections -- but he demonstrates some awareness of his own pretensions and the prose is funny and smart. He's very reflective. There's a good piece of Will Eisner, one on Howard Chaykin's American Flag!, golems...

And somewhere in there is Ali Smith's contribution to that myths series that Margaret Atwood fired up with The Penelopiad. Smith presents one of the Metamorphoses as Girl Meets Boy. I'm only a page or so in, but the voice is jaunty, if you can imagine that.

17:22 / 10.07.08

I really enjoyed City of Disappearances. If there was a duff thread in there, it was soon forgotten. I even liked Bill Drummond's piece, though possibly as I'm always keen to hear more about Gimpo (Crucify me Again was a formative teenage text in these parts).

FINALLY read Master and Margarita, which was a lot of fun. The madcap spirit of the whole thing overcame all the Russian puns which seemed to whizz overhead on a page-by-page basis.

Then sped through Ballard's Rushing to Paradise which re-heated his usual themes with skill, and felt oddly pertinent given my current obsession with Shipwrecked on T4 (I'm hoping the series draws to its end in a similar display of bloodshed and primitive violence).

Meantime, have been savouring some of Aidan Dunn's bonkers poetics (think of him as the Withnail to Ackroyd's uncle Monty) and am drawing to the end of A.L. Kennedy's Day; it's a brilliant work, my first of her novels and it shan't be the last. Written from the perspective of a WW2 airman reliving his experiences years later on the set of a prison-camp film, it draws on emotions which are, at times, unbearably sour.

I'm interviewing her tomorrow and am now more than a little apprehensive.

The woman knows human frailty.

17:49 / 10.07.08

Last time I was at the bookstore I bought three books: His Dark Materials Trilogy by Pullman, The Shock Doctrine by Klein, and Finnegan's Wake by Joyce. (I also got the first two "Absolute Sandman" slipcases from Amazon for re-reads - I'm a sucker for beautiful volumes....)

I started HDM and finished the Golden Compass and am a chapter into The Subtle Knife. I was impressed by the movie, but adore the book. So dark. I've always loved Children's Literature, and this ranks up there. Easily as good as A Wrinkle in Time by L'Engle.

The characters as so well fleshed out, especially their relationships with their Daemons. The writing is simple in a good way, eloquent and to the point.

I also have some other pick-up-when-I'm-in-the-mood books going on as well: The Power of Myth by Campbell, and True Halucinations by McKenna.

TPoM is an easy to digest volume of big ideas in Interview form, although sometimes the interviewer, Bill Moyers, irks me as he seems to ask alot of erudite questions in a way that seems he's showing off rather than making serious inquiry, IMHO

TH is alot of fun: McKenna's recollections of Mushroom and Ayhausca trips taken in the Amazon with his brother and friends, and the philosophical insights gained from them. Written with an enthusiastic humour and optimism which borders on the naive, it makes me want to go out and try my second mushroom experience, this time with a new world-view...

10:40 / 17.07.08

Just (yesterday) started The Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester - it's a very short collection of inter-related chapters that are probably too disjointed to be called a story although I guess I'll be able to be more definitive on that point by the end. Quite controversial when it was written no doubt it's a mixture of horrible shitty death, sadomasochistic sex, fairy changelings and I don't know what else. It's very readable and has some lovely bits of description and moments of surprising humanity amongst the deliberately shocking bits. He was quite an interesting guy Alfred Chester I understand - I'd like to give some of his other stuff and his criticism a go after this.
Also slowly working my way through London: City of Disappearances which is a(nother) compilation of London based musings from Iain Sinclair. Lots to this from various authors but also newspaper stories and all kinds of ephemera - most of it interesting. Quite difficult to digest in large servings though.

11:11 / 17.07.08

Oops just noticed that City of Disappearances was mentioned in more detail above. Oh well.

15:22 / 20.07.08

Hi all, I am currently reading Liber Malorum Children of the Apple, woven by Sean Scullion. It is a book made of 23 different (but all related) stories written by 23 different (but all related) authors, and it is really wicked and challenging and amazing if you are into Reality (Tunnels) and into anarcho-pagan-magickal-philosophical-theory & activism =)
have some here read it already?

love,
nuit

00:54 / 22.07.08

I have for the first time developed an interest in american novels (independent of coursework). I've started with Henry James. So far enjoying 'the portrait of a lady' though find it excruciating at times. I think I'll keep reading him, probably 'the ambassadors'.

Closed for Business Time

17:50 / 22.07.08

nuitlove: how about telling us more about the book? The Temple has a lot of relevant threads if you want to talk about the magical ideas contained in it. If you want to discuss it from a lit.crit. view you're already in the right forum.

I see some rather well-known* names credited as co-creators. If one is familiar with the Chaos/Discordia canon, does it bring anything new to the table? Is it a good read, in literary terms? Who is it meant for? What does it say? More, please.

*To a certain audience...

19:16 / 23.07.08

I am 6% into Against the Day (T.Pynchon), and I'm really into it so far. Only my second Pynchon, after Gravity's Rainbow (which I loved but thought was harder work to start with). I saw this in my library and even though I wasn't really in the mood for a 1000+ page whopper (I've been reading a lot of comics lately), I had to grab it there and then as I was never going to buy it. It's a brand new virgin copy as well. It should make a good summer read. I am spending 10 days on holiday with my old folks and there could be a few early nights so this will come in handy.

More thoughts, if I have any, in the dedicated thread.

Janean Patience

20:41 / 23.07.08

Against The Day was the best thing I've read in recent years, no doubt. Enjoy it.

09:36 / 24.07.08

I am 6% into Against the Day (T.Pynchon), and I'm really into it so far. Only my second Pynchon, after Gravity's Rainbow (which I loved but thought was harder work to start with). I saw this in my library and even though I wasn't really in the mood for a 1000+ page whopper (I've been reading a lot of comics lately), I had to grab it there and then as I was never going to buy it. It's a brand new virgin copy as well. It should make a good summer read. I am spending 10 days on holiday with my old folks and there could be a few early nights so this will come in handy.

I just started Gravity's Rainbow a couple of days ago actually and I am....bear with me....11.86% of the way through it thus far. Like you, I'm also planning it for summer holiday reading as I'm spending the next week in a cottage in the countryside with my girlfriend and she's going to be doing a lot of health stuff at a nearby spa thing leaving me plenty of time to myself to drink red wine and read books. Seems good so far anyway, in terms of the other Pynchon things I've read (V, Vineland, Crying of Lot 49) I would say it seems more accessible in the first few pages although its size makes it more daunting than any of them. A few moments of humour in the book brightened my otherwise dire journey to work, standing up stuck in a crush in a bus stuck in a traffic jam - anything that can take me out of that situation is alright by me.

18:56 / 26.07.08

Full Frontal Feminism, by Jessica Valenti. I'm about four-and-a-half chapters in. It's good. I've found it a bit preachy to the choir so far as I already am a feminist/agree with feminist thinking but it's been good to go back to basics and to have a full primer that highlights things I might miss or not even think about (being a dude). One, horrid, stand-out is when she brings up the idea of women living on a Rape Schedule; that is, unconscious/not-so-unconscious rituals and measures women take on a daily basis to avoid being raped. When I realised the immensity of the idea it was like a cup full of ice water.

00:17 / 28.07.08

Against the Day is great. I really want to reread it. It might end up being my favorite Pynchon. Though I hope you're reading the paperback. The hardcover was riddled with typos. Not to mention plain errors, like mistaking one character's name for another.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

18:24 / 02.08.08

Why did I not make it very far into Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union the first time I tried to read it? Because it's brilliant and funny, sad and faintly ridiculous all at once. I guessed the twist on the dead man's past a little early not based on any evidence but because this is a Michael Chabon book, so of course the shameful secret was dot dot dot, but I'm still really enjoying it. Landsman's a solid noir detective protagonist and the presence of his best friend/partner Berko and his ex-wife/boss Bina really crackle. Bina in particular fascinates me.

And among other things, it has this great scene, this great accidental dinner scene between Landsman and Bina, where they're exes, and they're trying to avoid each other, but they can't. The dialogue is hilarious and felt really -- lust/regret-addled.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

02:34 / 03.08.08

Still about that old forgotten English chestnut, Norman Collins.

13:48 / 07.08.08

I'm about half-way through Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

What a fantastic book, if you haven't read it - I implore you to read it NOW.

Couple of quotes from this classic:

"The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainly that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as. . .the frog?"

"Yossarian was sorry to hear that they had a mutual friend. It seemed there was a basis to their conversation after all."

07:20 / 08.08.08

"Yossarian was sorry to hear that they had a mutual friend. It seemed there was a basis to their conversation after all."

Ha ha, I'd forgotten that one.
Right, finished Gravity's Rainbow and have opened both Tristram Shandy and Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel and still have London City of Disappearances lying around somewhere. Got a long journey this afternoon and I reckon that I will embark on Locus Solus, from the precis - incredibly advanced scientist showing off his inventions in his ludicrous estate - it seems kind of similar to Tomorrow's Eve by Villiers de l'Isle Adam and I've also heard it was an influence on the Quay Brothers film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes which I enjoyed so I'm looking forward to this one.

12:31 / 08.08.08

Just started in on the collection of Fritz Lieber's Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser, it's good. I/m a sucker for Heroic Fantasy, and this is bloody good stuff.

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