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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2008: What are you currently reading?

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10:12 / 06.03.08

The whole wanky back thing in Dog Days seems to have passed me by. Distressing.

About 450 pages deep in Foucalt's Pendulum after much Lith' recommendation and a happy chancing across said tome on an Oxfam trawl. I feel a little mired in the Templars right now, the excellent first 350 pages having rather slowed off into timelines and facts and general rambling. However, am assured it all pays off so shall continue through till the end.

Also recently read Walter Mosley's Fortunate Son, which rocked until the syrupy ending and a proof of the latest Simon Gray Smoking Diaries. Gray's getting a little Meldrewish, but retains a sharp wit and a wonderful way with delivering an anecdote. Plus, I always like to hear about his chummy dealings with Pinter.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:39 / 23.03.08

It's not in my hands, it's on a screen, it's just electrons, really (but what isn't, honey?), but I'm in the middle of Peter Watts's Blindsight. Zombie post-humans riding a living ship, led by an engineered vampire. I'm enjoying it although occasionally it's a bit difficult to track.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

02:40 / 24.03.08

...and it's still pretty good. Lots of exploration of neuroscience and language. A crew assembled from the dead, all of them retooled in strange ways to make them more than human. Really worth the sit down, even if it occasionally has problems with too much going on (or, conversely, a very simple-but-slow plot).

Anna de Logardiere

10:31 / 24.03.08

I have just finished Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child and am now reading Resistance by Owen Sheers. Both have been good, the Lee Child was filled with hilarious moments, often punctuated by Reacher's choice of clothing and latent insecurity. Other reading material from 2008 that I enjoyed and would recommend has included The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin, My Booky Wook by Russell Brand and The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone.

12:10 / 27.03.08

Finally put Foucault's Pendulum to bed. Hard going towards the end, with the characters endlessly revising their "unifying conspiracy theory of ultimate madness"(c). Still, a clever wee romp.

Really enjoyed Daniel Bennett's All The Dogs, out on Tindal Press. It's very lith-friendly with communal squats and chemical living both being central themes. Poetic without being flowery, and respectful to some pretty niche politics and views. A strong debut.

Also been on a sort of agrarian ghost story kick, revisiting The Children of Green Knowe and a collected M.R. James. My dreams are now plagued with demon trees and twitching, gibbering bed sheets. Marvellous.

10:34 / 30.03.08

I´ve just finished Kafka on the Shore from Haruki Murakami. It´s kinda strange, complicated, and definitely worth of reading

.

All Acting Regiment

13:44 / 31.03.08

Aha! Congratulations on the James. I suppose you're on the lookout for a dead face with living eyes, or a living face with dead eyes? Hehehe.

16:57 / 04.04.08

Just reading a collection of tales by E T A Hoffman including The Sandman, a gothic horror thing that greatly influenced Freud in his essay on the uncanny. The first story, Mademoiselle de Scudery, is a kind of mystery story and according to the blurb in the intro contains most of the elements present in Murders in The Rue Morgue - published twenty odd years later and often quoted as the first detective story - however, I feel that that is a slight exaggeration as the "detective" doesn't so much solve the mystery as simply have it explained to her.

Rebellious Jukebox

02:17 / 05.04.08

I've been on a huge M.R. James kick myself, working my way through the two anthologies recently released by Penguin Classics collecting all of his previously released supernatural works (are his scholarly works or guidebooks still even remotely obtainable?). Holy Fucking Christ The Footnotes!!! Worth twice the price of both books combined, not to mention the recommended texts and introductory notes. S.T. Joshi is unstoppable.

I'm on the second anthology, "The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Ghost Stories", which collects the work he put out after being elected to Provost of Eton, and while it's undeniably a bit weaker somehow, it's still massively compelling stuff and I think it gets a bad rep. Also contained are his translations of twelve medieval ghost stories from their original latin, and an appendix full of his essays reflecting on his ghost stories and the writing of ghost stories in general, so it's really just as essential as the previous anthology collecting together all the "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" stuff.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

18:36 / 13.04.08

In the midst of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods now, which I happened upon in the shop yesterday after a particularly brow-beating day at work. Once you get past the early, futuristic society expostion -- a lot of disjointed expository definitions of robots and things -- it breaks through into a cleaner, more poetic science fiction. It's much like how I felt about Boating for Beginners, but about evolution rather than Genesis. There's some interesting societal sexuality stuff in there as well.

09:02 / 14.04.08

I just started reading La-Bas by JK Huysman - so far not too much happened but very readable and the relish with which he describes a horrific painting of Jesus on the cross seems to bode well for later when things start to kick off....

15:20 / 14.04.08

This last month's reading has been fantastically augmented by my discovering this wee marvel:

Read it Swap it.

So far I've ditched a number of books from my 'kicking about the house but prolly never going to read again' pile, in exchange for fresh matter. I've picked up a couple of real oddities (the very 60s Bug Jack Barron) and a few others I've wanted to read for ages.

Among these has been Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts which, although deadpan to the point of insanity, accumulates comic energy at a manic rate. Dotted with absurd repetitions and bearing a great, slow-brewing sense of menace, it plays a bit like Auster's Music of Chance with added laughs (ie. some). Apparently there is an un-released film adap. with Rhys Ifans and Ben Whishaw floating about - can anyone shed light on the status there? It surprised me to learn, because the book seemed essentially unfilmable.

Also breezed through Less Than Zero. It was my first Easton Ellis novel - seen the flicks before and read The Informers. Not as visceral as I expected and I must admit, all the vacuousity got to me by the end. But then that's probably the point, eh?

Next in line was going to be The Ginger Man but then I stumbled across a bundle of Moorcock in my local Oxfam and am sorely tempted to buy up the lot and head for the hills....

14:43 / 15.04.08

After years of recommendations, I'm finally reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series (just started in on the fourth book, The Citadel of the Autarch), and I'm kicking myself for not having read it earlier.

21:23 / 15.04.08

I just recently read Book of the New Sun. I probably posted about it somewhere on here. Really good stuff. I also finished Darconville's Cat, which I posted about earlier, but at the the moment I don't have the energy to say what needs to be said about it.

23:52 / 16.04.08

I'm reading Koji Suzuki's "Loop", which is the last book of the Ring trilogy but doesn't seem to have anything to do with the first two volumes (at least from what I've seen in the movies [the japanese versions], haven't read the books), this one is sorta sci-fi'ish and deals with themes like artificial intelligence and the (what a clichet) highly contagious disease that threatens all sorts of biological life on Earth. It's kinda pretentious and feels like it was written by a teenager but still I want to see how it finishes, probably only to hate it more effectively after I set it down on the shelf.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:39 / 18.04.08

I reread Jonathan Lethem's story, "Vivian Relf," in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, and was again blown away by it. Consequently, I went looking for more Lethem to read at a local secondhand bookshop -- and the only one I found was Motherless Brooklyn, about a orphaned detective with Tourette's. The premise, oddly enough, was mentioned in the introduction to Astonishing Stories. So I have that to read.

Also, I picked up Alice Hoffman's Local Girls, because Hoffman's books are like wistful, magic candy.

Blue Eyes Not Innocent

16:11 / 19.04.08

Right now, I'm into the last hundred pages or so of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and after that...not really sure what I'm going to read. It's a toss-up between Dark Hollow by Brian Keene, The Desert by Bryon Morrigan, or something else entirely(possibly The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte).

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22:16 / 21.04.08

Books I've read since Jan. 1 2008

1. "The City and the Pillar" (Gore Vidal) (finished Jan. 3)
2. "Sway" (Zachary Lazar) (finished Jan. 9)
3. "Paradoxia" (Lydia Lunch) (finished Jan. 12)
4. "Eden Eden Eden" (Pierre Guyotat) (finished Jan. 23)
5. "Jack the Modernist" (Robert Gluck) (finished Jan. 25)
6. "The Maimed" (Hermann Ungar) (finished Jan. 25)
7. "The Stranger" (Albert Camus) (finished Jan. 26)
8. "Less Than Zero" (Bret Easton Ellis) (finished Jan. 30) *
9. "The Torture Garden" (Octave Mirbeau) (finished Jan. 31)
10. "Zombie" (Joyce Carol Oates) (finished Jan. 31)
11. "The Atrocity Exhibition" (J.G. Ballard) (finished Feb. 7)
12. "Play it as it Lays" (Joan Didion) (finished Feb. 10)
13. "The Blind Owl" (Sadegh Hedayat) (finished Feb. 10)
14. "La-Bas" (J.K. Huysmans) (finished Feb. 15) *
15. "Against Nature" (J.K. Huysmans) (finished Feb. 22)
16. "Moravagine" (Blaise Cendrars) (finished Feb. 29)
17. "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell" (Doris Lessing) (March 14)
18. "In a Glass Darkly" (Sheridan Le Fanu) (finished March 18)
19. "The Weaklings" (Dennis Cooper) (finished March 22)
20. "The Mage's Holiday" (Tom Champagne) (April)
21. "Invisible Cities" (Italo Calvino) (finished April 9)
22. "Exercises in Style" (Raymond Queneau) (finished April 17)
23. "The Wild Boys" (William S. Burroughs) (finished April 21)
24. "Downstream" (J.K. Huysmans) (finished April 21)

* = book I've read at least once in the past

Currently reading: "The Crying of Lot 49", "The Dice Man", "Pasquale's Angel", etc.

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00:44 / 22.04.08

D'oh! Forgot to put an asterik near "Wild Boys."

01:55 / 22.04.08

God I wish I could read that many books. I just can't find the time. When I took the bus I read that much, but with a car...? Nosirree.

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02:48 / 22.04.08

matthew, well, a lot of books I've read this year are pretty short (the book "Downstream" which I read today was like 70 pages). The thing is, ever since I got a job at Barnes & Noble as a bookseller four years ago I stopped being the constant reader I used to be. 2007 in particular I barely read anything at all, so for 2008 I made the resolution to read at least 50 books, and for the most part new books. I wanted to get to Pynchon in particular, but I got sidetracked by 19th century French decadent literature though now that that's out of my system I feel I can tackle Pynchon. Next year it'll be either De Sade, Genet, or Acker. We'll see.

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02:51 / 22.04.08

Idol Rich, "La Bas" is great... one of my top ten favorite novels ever. I've been reading quite a bit of Huysmans work this year. He's probably one of the most sad-sack negative writers I've ever come across but there's something almost funny about his constant negativity. Too bad his later religious books aren't nearly captivating as his more decadent work (such as the classic "Against Nature" which could very well be the "American Psycho" of it's day).

08:41 / 22.04.08

“for 2008 I made the resolution to read at least 50 books, and for the most part new books”

Ha, sounds just like me actually - in a roundabout sort of way anyway. I read this thing in one of the end of year papers with this film critic saying that he had watched about 300 films during 2007 and I thought to myself that I would have expected a film critic to have seen more than that – in fact (I thought to myself) I reckon I could watch more than that. After I’d decided to watch more than 300 I decided that the obvious target was one a day – 366 as it’s a leap year – and I’ve set about that with a vengeance (I’m a little behind at the moment having watched 103 so far but I reckon I can make it up). Anyway, to keep up with that I started noting the films I’d watched in a database and seeing as I was doing that I started noting the books I was reading as well, and, noticing that I seemed to be reading them at a rate of more than one a week, I decided that I might as well try and read a minimum of 52 in the year as well. Read twenty so far I think so without actually trying I’m ahead….

“Idol Rich, "La Bas" is great... one of my top ten favorite novels ever. I've been reading quite a bit of Huysmans work this year”

Interesting as well, you’re the second person who has said that when I mentioned I was reading La-Bas. I don’t think that I can be quite so positive though, I enjoyed the book and the tone of the writing but I must say I was expecting a bit more meat in the actual Satanism and stuff, I think basically, I wanted more to happen. I don’t mean to be overly negative because every minute of reading it was a pleasure, I just think that maybe I had built it up a little too much. I certainly liked a lot of the debate of realism and the like that presumably represents something close to the author’s actual feelings.

11:49 / 22.04.08

I'm also creating a database with films I've seen. I'm at 65 so far for this year.

13:15 / 22.04.08

I'm also creating a database with films I've seen. I'm at 65 so far for this year.

It's very sad but I feel an enormous (ok, maybe not enormous) sense of satisfaction every morning updating my records.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

13:21 / 23.04.08

The bedtime tome this month--for really for the next week and a half--is London Fields by Martin Amis. Considering this is my first time out with the author, I'm afraid something about it makes me a bit wary.

14:00 / 23.04.08

The bedtime tome this month--for really for the next week and a half--is London Fields by Martin Amis. Considering this is my first time out with the author, I'm afraid something about it makes me a bit wary
I didn't enjoy that book so much, possibly because I read it in pretty much one sitting on a flight to Canada with free booze available and I think I may have a missed a lot of it due to a slightly drunken stupor which descended on me for the later stages.

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17:12 / 23.04.08

Idol Rich,

Well, the thing about Huysmans is, not a whole lot ever happens in his books. "Against Nature" (don't know if you read it) was about a dandy who locks himself in a house away from the rest of scociety and pretty much the whole book is just a catalog of his possessions, his favorite writers/artists/poets/scents and so on, lots and lots of obsessive detail (hence why I refer to it as the "American Psycho" of it's day). "The Cathedral", one of Huysmans' post-conversion religious books, is pretty more like a 300+ page tourist guide about one particular church rather than a fast-moving novel. That's one of the things I like about Huysmans though, his obsession with detail and his utter disregard for conventional plotting, storytelling, narration, etc. Yet as uncommercial as his work seems nowadays, he was actually a bestselling author at one point during his days, as both "La Bas" and "The Cathedral" found enormous success with the public.

10:49 / 24.04.08

Well, the thing about Huysmans is, not a whole lot ever happens in his books.

All good points. Like I say, I didn't mean to come across as too negative as I found the book a pleasure to read. I haven't read Au Rebours or whatever it's called yet but I'm sure I will at some point.
I've just started reading The Illuminatus Trilogy this week and I was pleased to notice some references to La-Bas which I wouldn't have got if it had been a few weeks earlier that I was reading Illuminatus. I'm sure that most people on here have already read it but on the subject of Illuminatus I'm loving it at the moment. At first I though that the pace was too fast and that the book was silly (which it is) but the book is so much fun that it's easy to forgive. It's as though he's just splurged all his ideas on to the pages as a big beautiful mess and it's very very exciting. It's also nice every time you recognise something that he mentions and you can give yourself a mental pat on the back - and worry about how many things you're missing. I reckon the ratio of things I can "grok" to things I can't is probably fairly small.

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01:20 / 27.04.08

Yeah, I should read Illuminatus! again one day, haven't read that since 2003, I'd probably get more of the references now than I did back then (such as all the Ayn Rand satire, which probably went right over my head the first time I read it).

11:35 / 28.04.08

Ha yes, just read all that Telemachus Sneezed malarkey.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:54 / 28.04.08

Now that I've finished Motherless Brooklyn (and thinking about what to post about it in the Lethem thread), I've started J.G. Ballard's short story collection War Fever, which is quite enthralling. The title story is disturbing, and each one so far seems a mini-apocalypse.

Whisky Priestess

20:10 / 28.04.08

Ballard does love his end-of-the-world scenarios, to be sure ...

Currently reading The Shadow of Sherlock Holmes which is a nice obscure little Wordsworth Classic of Victorian-era detective stories. There are some of the usual suspects in there - The Purloined Letter, one by Wilkie Collins, a bit of Raffles - but a lot of it's new to me and interesting even if some of the stories aren't especially good. Also includes possibly the world's first female detective, a near-contemporary of Holmes called Loveday Brook who was (IIRC) written by a female author using a male pseudonym.

Interesting stuff - I'm about halfway through so far.

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03:54 / 29.04.08

Well, took the plunge into Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" today, a book I've had on my shelf for some time now yet never finished... the last two times I tried I never got more than a few pages in (which is weird because I loved "The Name of the Rose." I had the day off today so I read like 200 pages of it, which wasn't easy as my allergies have been killing my eyes as of late. I find that when one starts a long book one should read as much of it as they can on the first day. Anyway it's very good, and even though Eco has a tendency to ramble on at times I still find it endearing.

I'm also reading at the same time Alistair McCartney's INCREDIBLE first novel "The End of the World Book" which I think is one of the most ingenious books I've read in a long time now. It's exhausting, both in scope and also in brilliance, as every page has some fine turn of the phrase or poetic imagery worth savoring. A very impressive first novel, from what I've read so far.

Anna de Logardiere

08:27 / 29.04.08

This week I finished Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago. It was interesting, I specifically enjoyed the first half of the story, which charted the problems that a society might encounter if its citizens stopped dying.

I am now reading Nothing to Lose by Lee Child. Jack Reacher has just thrown a bar stool.

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