General Book Thread

[Gentleben]

I've picked up three books to ready while I'm travelling to Poland this week (29hr coach trip)

 

They are all light hearted holiday reads, but look quite enjoyable.

 

The Tent, the bucket and me

I left my tent in San Franisco

Digging in America

[jayseven]

How's y'all getting along with your reading?

 

I'm still gnawing away at the Iain M. Banks stuff. I would say they genuinely get better and better for the first four Culture novels, thyen the next one just completely blows open the possible direction the books were going - then the one after that -- Look to Windward -- hints further still and supra-universe stuff that just boggles the mind.

 

Culture-wise, I've got Matter and Surface Detail left.

 

If anyone is interested, the Culture books can generally be read out of sequence as they are rather self-contained and (mostly) do not have shared characters. I am willing to send people one of the books if they wish to whet their appetite - otherwise I would highly, highly recommend recommend reading Player of Games or Use of Weapons first. The first book (consider Phlebas) isn't bad, it just isn't as great as the rest that follow.

[Ganepark32]

How's y'all getting along with your reading?

 

Not great, if I'm honest. Bought Island by Aldous Huxley some weeks ago and have managed about 40 pages of it total. I am interested in reading it, and more books in general, but I just lack any sort of enthusiasm for reading as the 'rush', if you will, isn't as immediate (obviously) as that which I'm getting through finding new music and watching new TV shows or movies.

 

I'll get round to reading it eventually as I'm interested to read more about the eastern-philosophies-meets-western-science utopia that is Pala in the novel but there's no point in forcing it if I'm not feeling it.

 

When I do get back into the habit and finish that, I'm looking to pick up Erewhon by Samuel Butler as a nice contrasting read, as the whole utopia/dystopia thing is something I find interesting, even if it has been done to death.

[Cube]

I'm currently waiting for:

 

[jayseven]

SO I've basically read all of the Matter books by Iain M. Banks now. Srsly, srsly good stuff.

 

Next up I have two paths; Game of Thrones (and the 2nd book) that a friend lent me, and/or some stuff by China Mievelle, who has been recommended to me for 7 years or so. I've always kept an eye out for his books but they were hard to find -- luckily he's just brought out a new book so my local waterstones has all of them in stock. Plumped with King Rat and Perdido Street Station, which won most of the big sci-fi/fantasy awards when it came out. Has anyone read him?

[dan-likes-trees]

SO I've basically read all of the Matter books by Iain M. Banks now. Srsly, srsly good stuff.

 

Next up I have two paths; Game of Thrones (and the 2nd book) that a friend lent me, and/or some stuff by China Mievelle, who has been recommended to me for 7 years or so. I've always kept an eye out for his books but they were hard to find -- luckily he's just brought out a new book so my local waterstones has all of them in stock. Plumped with King Rat and Perdido Street Station, which won most of the big sci-fi/fantasy awards when it came out. Has anyone read him?

 

I have one of his sat on my bookshelf. I always loved sci-fiish fantasy-ish books when I was a teen (Mortal Engines anyone?) and he seemed somewhat like an adult equivalent. Alas I haven't given it a go yet, dauntingly long, you'll have to report back on what it's like!

 

Had absolutely no time to do any reading aside form that on my course, though I'm halfway through the The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes, which is really good so far (I say so far, it's only 100and something pages, probably should have finished it. Also bought the new Jeffery Eugindes - The Marriage Plot - after enjoying The Virgin Suicides.

 

Read various bits for my course, Joyce's Dubliners, Mansfield's Collected Stories, Braine's Room at the Top, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, Osbourne's Look Back in Anger, Conrad's The Secret Agent, half of DH Lawrence's Women in Loveand reread Orwell's 1984 and others which I forget. Varyingly great to okay.

 

EDIT: Hmm, assumed I'd posted in here more recently but nope. Read a few bits over summer, most of which I can't remember right now but

 

 

Gets top marks from me and I recommend it to you all (despite it's slightly shit title). All about the passing of time, flicks around between time and generations, loosely centered around the music industry. And there's a 80 page-ish section told via powerpoint slides, which isn't nrealy as shit or gimmicky as it should be. Quite moving in fact. Weird.

 

Also bought a book of David Foster Wallace essays (As I'm not going to trick myself into thinking I'll read all of Infinate Jest) which was good, particularly as a Tennis fan.

Edited November 13, 2011 by dan-likes-trees

[Paj!]

I only ever read when there's a bigger purpose to doing so these days. I was rereading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons as I got to Uni, but then it had no reason to be reread so it was lost.

 

I read Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber which was very enjoyable, but for a project/research - now am alternating between Film Art (really just a very readable textbook) by David Bordwell and Lynch on Lynch by someone who is interviewing David Lynch. But both are obviously for research, and I'm somewhat skimming the latter for certain nuggets of info in any case. Like I'm half-way through the book after only a few hours of reading.

[jayseven]

The Bloody Chamber - the short story or the short story collection? :P Feminist takes on fairy tales. Meh.

 

Wise Children is a bulbous, lewd and entertaining short novel that she wrote (last before she died, iirc?)

 

Dan; I read like 3 pages of King Rat and it was just... gripping stuff. Fantastic use of language already. Distant, hazy, overly analytical... going to be a great read, I can tell already.

[Paj!]

The Bloody Chamber - the short story or the short story collection? :P Feminist takes on fairy tales. Meh.

 

The collection.

 

I liked it. They were beautiful little stories (some). Hardly feminist manifestos.

[jayseven]

You're such a feminist. Offended because I used the word feminist.

[Paj!]

- I very rarely see it used in any way other than negative/derogatively, though you didn't actually use it that way explicitly, I noticed. I felt like posting anyway.

[ipaul]

I recently read this:

 

 

It was fascinating. Usually I'm a very slow reader but this I sped through in about 3 days. I'll just say that if you genuinely think that North Korea seems like an alright country...then read it.

 

I'm also about to start reading this:

 

However this may well take me to a while as I have lots of uni essays due in quite soon, as well as working twenty hours a week. Plus I'm getting Halo Anniversary and a 3DS before the month is out....

[killer kirby]

The Brothers Karamazov

A brilliant masterpiece of literature, everything about seems so thought out, time to time I really thought that this was all based on a true story, everything about just went so smooth, the whole concept, the characters the suffering and torment about our beliefs just brilliant, the book comes to a great end which made you want more, only to know there will never be another book from Dostoevsky

The book is just God Tier of books and I am so glad I can now say in my life I have read the book.

9/10

 

American Psycho

Another book that I could not put down from start to finish, every page just got better and better the anticipation to see how it all ended was done brilliantly and the ending was just wow, truly wow. To the details in what the characters were wearing to the details of the murders and even how it describes the music that was in the backround, it just flowed so well.

So another excellent book I have read here which if I ever get the time to again, would love to read again.

8/10

 

Reading the Count of Monte Cristo right now, take me a fair while to get through me think

Edited November 13, 2011 by killer kirby

[ipaul]

The Brothers Karamazov

 

American Psycho

Another book that I could not put down from start to finish, every page just got better and better the anticipation to see how it all ended was done brilliantly and the ending was just wow, truly wow. To the details in what the characters were wearing to the details of the murders and even how it describes the music that was in the backround, it just flowed so well.

So another excellent book I have read here which if I ever get the time to again, would love to read again.

8/10

 

As much as I enjoyed it, I wouldn't say that about it. I mean the tangents the guy goes on...really strike you as getting better and better all the time?

 

Though I suppose all of it does just keep adding. It certainly got more enthralling for me towards the end. Dam it's been 4 years since I read the thing...perhaps I should revisit it.

[bob]

I decided about a year ago that my level of literature knowledge was rubbish, and that i should read through some of the classics. I had a look at the BBC big read list thingy, which has the top 100 books as decided by the public and set myself the challenge to read all 100, by which point i will have accrued all this knowledge of the classics, and be a whizz at every dinner party i go to.

 

Unfortunately, it seems my taste in books differs somewhat from everyone elses. As i got through book after book, i found most of them really boring. I read about 35, and the majority of them I disliked. It got to the point where I dreaded picking up the next one, and I found i wasn't enjoying having a good read anymore.

 

The shit hit the literary fan when i started Ulysses. Fuck me. I have no idea what that book is on about and i don't want to find out. I got through about 10 chapters and after that i changed my mind. I'm just going to read books that I like, and any snooty book snobs can bugger off.

 

Currently I am reading through the entire Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson) in anticipation for the final book in the series coming out in March. It's going to be AWESOME.

 

After that, I have the Game of Thrones book ready to go, and another book by Brandon Sanderson, the Alloy of Law, which i'm looking forward to, as his Mistborn trilogy was really good.

[jayseven]

Recently finished Between a Rock and a Hard Place [127 Hours], after dragging myself through the film. The book goes into further detail about Aron's previous outdoors experiences, from white-water rapids to rock climbing 14,000 feet mountains solo during winter. He covers a lot of his previous 'near misses', and also towards the end of the book it stitches together some a posteriori detail about how his friends and family got some sort of rescue effort together.

 

It was interesting enough to see how the movie dropped elements and combined others in favour of flow or narrative, but I was generally put off by Aron's "I learned from this experience that it is who you are, now what you do, that defines you, and it's about friends and family, not bragging about cool shit" moral of the story, which kinda countered his bragging about his outdoorsman lifestyle, excellent piano skills, job credentials... which is in a way fair enough to the guy for being awesome - but what bothered me most was how his efforts to write in third person about how his friends, colleagues and family went about noticing his absence was still remarkably self-centered.

 

But hey - props to the guy. An inspiring story altogether. The book's epilogue grounds the whole thing into reality a bit more, and also gives away something that I either didn't notice from the movie, or wasn't in it at all;

 

In the book, the disgusting water Aron drinks from after exiting the canyon and rapelling tastes, to him, better than the fresh bottled water he later gets from the family he encounters. Later on, while recovering in hospital, a climbing buddy of his visits, having been to the spot where Aron was trapped, to retrieve some of his things.

 

His buddy asks him "did you really drink from that water?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Didn't you notice that dead raven floating in it?"

 

A nice unchased symbol of spirituality... which made a nice change from the silly God stuff.

 

 

Oh! I also read Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms pretty much in one sitting. A paranoid, neon-tinted look at the self-immolating movie industry in Hollywood; a story about a self-centered writer who returns to L.A. and delves back into the partying lifestyle. His friends since childhood have all had successes that can largely be based upon the fact that one of them wrote a book about their lives 20 years earlier, which got adapted into a movie, and set them up to be writers, producers, actors, and so on. The ouroboros effect of an industry defining the characters then destroying them if they decide to go against their new-found 'nature', with secrets and hearsay spreading, the book is dark, noir, seedy and... yeah.

 

I read it pretty quickly, so it's really been sinking in more since I put it down. May read it again.

[soag]

Just finished The Walking Dead: Rise Of The Governor, great read that moved me to the point to tears at bits.

 

Really must start getting the graphic novels now to read the rest of Brain Blake adventures as the Governor.

[dan-likes-trees]

I'm also about to start reading this:

[/size]

 

How did you get on? Bought that recently from a charity bookshop after a seminar tutor claiming it's Orwell's best book.

 

--

--

 

Finished and highly recommend The Sense of an Ending, short but really interesting. Growing old, the way you look back on the past... really well written.

 

On this at the moment

 

 

For my 'Great American Novel of the year' fix. All about baseball, sort of. Couple hundred pages in, pretty enjoyable so far, coming from a non-baseball fan (as I presume most people in England / here would be).

 

Oh yeah also read

 

 

Which is bloody great. I'm up and down with McEwan but it's just incredibly well written, a study of a family man in London throughout a day. Reminds me of A Single Man in structure. Actually I've not quite finished it, got a seminar in a few weeks so saving it..

[Supergrunch]

 

Which is bloody great. I'm up and down with McEwan but it's just incredibly well written, a study of a family man in London throughout a day. Reminds me of A Single Man in structure. Actually I've not quite finished it, got a seminar in a few weeks so saving it..

Ugh, that's actually my least favourite thing I've read by McEwan (have also read Atonement which started out outstanding, and got progressively worse as it went on, and On Chesil Beach, which was pretty good). I'll go into detail when I'm more awake/sober, but essentially I think Saturday is McEwan's (perhaps unconcious) expression of his terror of getting older.

[dan-likes-trees]

Ugh, that's actually my least favourite thing I've read by McEwan (have also read Atonement which started out outstanding, and got progressively worse as it went on, and On Chesil Beach, which was pretty good). I'll go into detail when I'm more awake/sober, but essentially I think Saturday is McEwan's (perhaps unconcious) expression of his terror of getting older.

 

Haha our opinions of him are opposite... loved Atonement, read a few pages of Chesil and decided put it down again, I think it was the prose style that put me off (I'll come back to it at some point).

 

Anyway, got around to finishing Saturday today. Wasn't so thrilled with the ending, all the Baxter things I probably could have done without, which is odd considering it's the main plot of the book. I just thought the observations of the everyday were very well done. The anxieties of ageing are pretty evident, and almost definitely conscious, but I didn't think they felt laboured.

[ipaul]

Stuff

 

Ended up completely forgetting about that Orwell book - however I am reading through it now and shall share my thoughts soon

[ipaul]

I finished reading Coming Up For Air last night.

 

I really enjoyed it. There isn't exactly much in the way of plot, it's more just a kind of wonderfully executed commentary on a central theme: the passage of time, the nature of change and how the protagonist deals with it. In turn, this theme makes the book rather timeless and it becomes interesting almost by default considering it was written and set in 1938.

 

It's a claustrophobic, frustrating and generally morose kind of book. It's sadness isn't evoked through any particular events however, it just kind of seeps out through the atmosphere that's created, the helplessness of the main character and the general longing for an England that once was (or perhaps wasn't).

 

I would thoroughly recommend it at any rate.

[Wesley]

I'm also about to start reading this:

 

However this may well take me to a while as I have lots of uni essays due in quite soon, as well as working twenty hours a week. Plus I'm getting Halo Anniversary and a 3DS before the month is out....

 

Just finishing this, it's great.

 

EDIT: I should really keep reading the thread before pressing the quote button.

[Dan_Dare]

late to da choppah, but I really liked Saturday. I agree though that the Baxster stuff grew a bit contrived. The first scene is really well done but later it kind of felt like it was a contrivance to give the book more of an almost thriller-y structure which I felt wasn't needed. I was quite happy without it reading the family and character stuff.

[gaggle64]

Had to dig this read up to say I've finally reached the end of American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates, and it's a work of impeccable observation and biting social satire. I read slow but this took even longer thanks to how brilliantly discomforting way the scenes play out as the central character slides deeper and deeper into a passively destructive malaise. I didn't realise exactly what the book was telling me until the final two paragraphs and I'm quite prepared to believe this is deliberate. It's the first JCO novel I've read and on the basis of this her reputation as a modern genius is both well deserved and not celebrated enough.