Who's reading what?

[Nash]

I love these en-masse postings of yours, k-j.

I don't think I've read a single one of these. Possibly Our Mutual Friend (but then again, possibly not, I've read a few Dickens and they all tend to blend into one for me).

Jacob's Room is in the pile but keeps sinking to the bottom.

Not heard of Kressing before but it sounds right up my street, so thanks for that.

I've just started reading my first Ballard. Where has he been all my life? I haven't read anyone else that can build up such tension in the first 20 pages of a novel without it seeming forced. I imagine you're a fan of Ballard, k-j?

[ray miller]

I'm a big Dickens fan, Bleak House, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend are the bees knees for me. A few years back a mental health patient I got on well with, urged me to read his favourite book, Around The World In Eighty Days. I finally did, found it tedious in the extreme and told him so. Three days later he killed himself. Probably coincidence, still I wish I'd liked it more. Now a friend has presented me with her favourite book, Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson. You'll love it, she said. But I don't, it's dull and predictable, but I've got to soldier on to the bitter end in case she asks me questions about it.

[Ros]

I'm always stunned by k-j's prodigious reading. I'm supposed to be reading Bleak House but other things keep getting in the way. At present just finishing Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I read Bring Up The Bodies first, which I actually enjoyed more - Wolf Hall seems to drag a bit, and I keep losing track of who is who. Once you get past the oddness of her using 'he' to mean Cromwell all the time, they are very gripping.

Ros

[bodkin]

Just completed The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and it was OK, but maybe not great.

I mean I think it is clever and that sort of "structured weirdness" (the structure is vital, IMHO) is exactly my sort of thing and I really enjoyed the experience. I just don't think I come away with very much from it that I didn't have going in. I cannot imagine reading it again, although I will definitely read Hard-boiled Wonderland when I see a cheap copy.

I have read three Murakami now and they all have left me with a feeling of "lightness" or "triviality" which I think is in contrast tot he feeling I have mid-read... e.g. I think they are going to be about something pretty significant as I am going along, but at the end they turn out not to be...

Is this typical of the guy?

--

I do, however think Kate Atkinson compares very favourably with him. She does the weird, but more as a back-note than the main feature, and you definitely come away with the idea that you gained something in the process. I (didn't try much yet but) I think she's more re-readable too.

--

I did try to read A tale of two cities a while back. I got within spitting distance of the end and abandoned it. The problem was that I obviously knew where they were going all along. While I didn't know _how_ they were going to get there, it was interesting, but as soon as I could see the plot taking aim on the ending... boom, there was nothing interesting any more.

I have to say I am not impressed by Dickens. OK the characters are great and the language often very playful, but for me this is almost completely drowned out by his irresistible tendency to use 23,709 words where 11 would do.

--

Currently reading a book of Philip K Dick short stories. Obviously I have read them all before in various historical eras but for me they are very enjoyable.

I so love any author where their whole style drags you into a different way of thinking. Jack Vance, Walter Jon Williams, Iain M Banks, Tolkien, Chandler and Hammet are all examples to one or other extent.

Dick for example, has an underlying layer of paranoia in anything he writes (and I believe actually suffered from it at times in his life). There is always something that cannot be taken at face value: identity, humanity, loyalty, memory etc. Reality in the most extreme cases.

This may materialise in a competition poem before too long...

[k-j]

David - one of my motivations for reading Bleak House and OMF has been to enable me to watch the recentish Beeb adaptations (I try to avoid watching adaptations without having read the original). I thought Bleak House was pretty great, with Johnny Vegas as Krook and Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn!

The Master I've heard nothing but praise for, but I want to read more James first.

Yes, Lional B(e)ast. I love how Forster manipulates the reader's feelings towards him depending on whose head we're in. He's also an awkward character for the reader because his self-loathing, and his loathsomeness, is very likely our self-loathing, too - or maybe just mine, but he encapsulates the feeling of not being good enough no matter how hard one tries, of there being an unbridgeable gulf between reality and aspiration. Which makes you despise him all the more, as everyone else in the book comes to do. And yes, that's the one where we delve deep into Beethoven's fifth - which I think is overrated by the way, or at least bettered by 3, 6 and 9.

Nash - Jacob's Room would be for Woolf completists only in my view. Yes I think you'd definitely like The Cook! Very funny, if you like stories about Old Nick.

The only Ballard I've read is The Atrocity Exhibition, and I had such a violent reaction I never went back to him. I thought it was the awfullest 1960's navel-gazing, all that tired iconography of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, consumerism, pop-art nonsense, done in an embarrassingly self-conscious experimental style. I'm not a fan of stories about the 60's! Recently my wife acquired High Rise which I will get to sooner or later, it can't be any worse than TAE. Which Ballard are you reading? Empire of the Sun I think I'd like.

Ray - thanks, I'll make Dombey my next Dickens then. It's always awkward reading books on people's recommendation because they never live up to it and people always take your faint praise as a vicious personal attack. Having said that I'm currently reading my first Iain M. Banks on the recommendation of someone here and it's bloody brilliant.

Ros - how would you characterise those Mantel books? Is there much in them for someone who's not especially crazy about historical fiction? Are they fast-paced, unputdownable things (not necessarily a good thing!), or more meditative? I suppose, to put it bluntly, I'm a little wary of their popularity. Really I just need to read the damn things and find out.

Ian - yes, that's absolutely typical of Murakami and a pretty normal reaction. The guy just can't (or won't, but I think can't) write endings. I'll look into Kate Atkinson. A Tale of Two Cities isn't very good in my opinion. At least it's short by Dickens's standards. As you say, characters are OK but one-dimensional as in much of Dickens, plot is both contrived and predictable. You're dead right about Dick. I'm currently reading The Player of Games, 100 pages in it's fantastic! Can see myself ripping through these M. Banks novels now!

[Ros]

k-j - Hilary Mantel - no, not fast paced, def. on the meditative side of things. Fascinating, I think, because it feels as if you're living inside Cromwell's head. It's not a period I'm terribly familiar with - it helps to know which queen came where with HVIII, but you don't need much more. The historical detail feels authentic without being at all oppressive. And, quirkiness aside, some of her prose is lovely.

I'd second Kate Atkinson as a good read, particularly Human Croquet and her latest, Life After Life. She's good on female characters (who do tend to have a familiar tone once you've read a few).

I take it you've read Jasper Fforde? Have we covered him previously? I'm sure we must have.

Ros

[David]

I thought Bleak House was pretty great, with Johnny Vegas as Krook and Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn!

Yes, excellent. And Phil Davies as the old guy in the litter shrieking Shake me up, Judy!

And Lionel Bast, c'est moi aussi. Or nearly.

And yes, that's the one where we delve deep into Beethoven's fifth - which I think is overrated by the way, or at least bettered by 3, 6 and 9.

And 4 and 7 (and possibly 8). Although I love the transition from the third movement to the final one. It's very like what I imagine to be the sound of cosmic soup coming to the boil just before the Big Bang.

Re Ballard, I liked Cocaine Nights, which is the only one I've read.

And I've only read Wolf Hall, but I thought it was terrific, although I was assisted by having grown up with a mother and a sister who watched The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth avidly.

[Nash]

The only Ballard I've read is The Atrocity Exhibition, and I had such a violent reaction I never went back to him. I thought it was the awfullest 1960's navel-gazing, all that tired iconography of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, consumerism, pop-art nonsense, done in an embarrassingly self-conscious experimental style. I'm not a fan of stories about the 60's! Recently my wife acquired High Rise which I will get to sooner or later, it can't be any worse than TAE. Which Ballard are you reading? Empire of the Sun I think I'd like.

High Rise is the one I'm reading. I was thinking of trying The Atrocity Exhibition, I'll think twice about it now.

I try to avoid watching adaptations without having read the original

Me too, which is partly the reason I'm reading High Rise (Ben Wheatley's directing an adaptation at the moment).

[bodkin]

I'm currently reading The Player of Games, 100 pages in it's fantastic! Can see myself ripping through these M. Banks novels now!

Great! That one is possibly my favourite, although it is a difficult call because its very early and I think he also developed as he went on...

The only Ballard I've read is The Atrocity Exhibition, and I had such a violent reaction I never went back to him. I thought it was the awfullest 1960's navel-gazing, all that tired iconography of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, consumerism, pop-art nonsense, done in an embarrassingly self-conscious experimental style. I'm not a fan of stories about the 60's! Recently my wife acquired High Rise which I will get to sooner or later, it can't be any worse than TAE. Which Ballard are you reading? Empire of the Sun I think I'd like.

I always say I like Ballard, but I suspect I have read only a subset, possibly more his earlier stuff.

I recently read erm... The Day of Creation and while I still enjoyed it I wondered if it hadn't dated rather.

Possibly I rate his short stories more: The Terminal Beach and Vermilion Sands are the ones that echo in my memory... possibly The Drowned World is another I recall enjoying.

I think he as at his best when he is post-apocalyptic but in a more melancholy/contemplative mood. I feel he is an author where the characters cannot win, the possibility isn't considered, and the best they can hope for is to break even--but he's not usually vicious with it, more fatalistic.

Ian

[Nash]

I feel he is an author where the characters cannot win, the possibility isn't considered, and the best they can hope for is to break even--but he's not usually vicious with it, more fatalistic.

Certainly seems to be the case with High Rise. Just finished it and I'll be reading more of his on the strength of it.

I've also been reading a lot of short stories recently. Raymond Carver, Chekhov, MR James, Ray Bradbury, and many, many short story anthologies (in which I discovered Joyce Carol Oates, I'll be buying some of her collections). A lot of the early to mid-20th Century Weird Tales stuff too.

Kafka too, for the first time! I read Metamorphosis years ago but I'm new to the others. 'In the Penal Colony' is possibly the best thing I've ever read.

I'm about to start Will Self's short story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Not read him before.

And I'm halfway through In Search of Lost Time too. That Proust, he's quite good at the writing.

[Nicky B]

This is a fab thread. Thanks K-j,

I had only read Norwegian Wood so will be re-visiting Murakami. Also Kate Atkinson.

For short stories it has to be AL Kennedy, I've just started her latest collection "all the rage" - as always not much happens (in the action sense) but is deliciously written.

Meant to be reading Master and Margarita but struggling......

[Travis]

One thing that struck me was that most of the stories don't really read like the work of a short-story writer - more like sketches of novels that never took off…the stories are heavy on atmosphere and relatively light on plot.

Ah, yes! In hindsight, I think I did feel that while reading, but it never became an articulated thought. An interesting observation. Thanks.

I rather think we've evolved to construct all kinds of modes of existence and adapt accordingly - to handle life on whatever scale we build. But definitely the communal anonymity of urban life is a big theme in DD.

Oh, I agree with you. We’re highly adaptable. I was just trying to get into DeLillo’s head. His fascination with “the communal anonymity of urban life” (I like that, though I would say modern life) has to come from somewhere. He seems to me to be saying that modernity is somewhat less than pastoral, and that it’s weird. We’re falling upward. Something like that.

I'm currently four stories into Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace. So far I'd say it's about half a star ahead of DeLillo's collection. And I've got A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again coming in the mail, as a sort of companion piece I guess.

[k-j]

April - 11 books, all fiction.

The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman

Madcap tale of artistic failure and sexual frustration spanning early 20th-century Berlin, Paris and LA and c17 Paris and Venice. I thought the jokes about the protagonist's failure to get laid wore pretty thin, but overall I was impressed with this novel for how lightly it wore its grand ambition and intricate technique. Really liked the four epilogues, sort of like the last ripples of the story fading into the future.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf - Gaito Gazdanov

This is interesting. It starts out like a Conradian ghost story, the man the narrator thought he had killed as a child soldier in faraway Russia publishes a story based on the event which lures the narrator into tracking him down. Then it turns into a ghostly kind of love story as the narrator falls for the ex-paramour of his nemesis and thereby meets his doom. I can see why NYRB brought it back - more than just a curio and probably ahead of its time.

Pandora's Galley - MacDonald Harris

Continuing my chronological progress through the works of the great MacDonald Harris. This is probably the weakest of his I've read so far, but it's still an exquisitely-written historical novel. Venice is a perfect city for storytellers with its shapeshifting, its silence and its shadows, and Harris allows it centre-stage ahead of all the human characters. These are well done too, especially the mercenary yankee sea captain and his unforgettable Caribbean sidekick who command the titular vessel as Venice, with its tortuous internal politics, tries to work out how to handle Napoleon's advancing army. So I can't really fault this novel for what it is, but I did feel it lacked that connection to another world that Harris's stories so often have. It's a historical novel that doesn't really care about transcending its time and place.

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

About this time (as the Anglo-Saxon chronicles would say) I broke my collarbone and a rib thanks to an inattentive (and unlicensed) driver, so all of a sudden I was reading a heck of a lot. This I had got out of the library on a whim the day before the accident, so I was reading it in considerable pain, late at night, lying on the sofa where my groans wouldn't keep the rest of the household awake. It's a novel absolutely full of pain and tragedy of the bitterest kind, a relentless, unforgiving tale of moral weakness, intractable misfortune, and self-harm. I admire it for that, although part of me wonders if it would have been even more affecting had there been a prologue, or an opening 1/4, which dwelt on the honeymoon period, the calm before the storm of domestic strife. Anyone seen the movie?

The Horse Latitudes - Paul Muldoon

Some good stuff here, Muldoon is always good - to be honest I don't remember much of it - was half asleep and dosed up with painkillers.

Wisteria Cottage - Richard Coates

Disappointing. I was hoping for something really creepy but this is actually a fairly crude portrait of a psycho. I guess it might have been innovative for its time (1948), but I'm not familiar enough with the genre to know. The development of the central mental case is very methodical and the inevitability of the outcome somewhat negated the suspense for me.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov - Olga Grushin

This had been sitting in my tbr pile for a few years and it lived up to all the online praise. A beautifully written tale, by turns pellucid and halucinatory, of the social and mental unravelling of a Soviet party apparatchik as Gorbachev comes to power and the old order is shaken up. Grushin writes in English so inevitably there are Nabokov comparisons, and in terms of style I don't think they're unflattering to Grushin. But this is a very human novel, more so than (for me) Nabokov. There are no easy answers and no winners - everyone is forced into choices they would not have chosen had the system not been so fundamentally unjust - yet Grushin shows how the system is a human construction. Proustian, too, in its evocation of the experience of art and memory.

Blood Lake and Other Stories - Jim Krusoe

I really loved Krusoe's novel Iceland so I ordered this collection of short stories. A let-down I'm afraid. Iceland was zany but coherently so; this is just one zany escapade after another. There were one or two moments when Krusoe's wild ride through an America confected of ironic clichés slowed enough to cohere into something elusively sad, but mostly this was too hyperactively kaleidoscopic for me.

Concluding - Henry Green

Green was a fantastic writer! This is the story of a single day in a girl's school in what we gradually learn is a slightly off-kilter alternative England. Two girls go missing, one is found alive... But it's the technique which leaves you drooling. Green's narrative point of view is extraordinary, a sort of interior third person that immerses the reader in the characters more, perhaps than traditional modernist interior monologue or stream of consciousness, because it connects them to their environment, locates them accurately in space and in the story. It's also pretty funny in places and the characters interact and progress with a weird, fuzzy inexorableness. This was my second Green novel and I understand there are six or seven more, so that's marvelous.

The Zero Train - Yuri Buida

Modern Russian satire on Soviet life, quite good - plenty of vodka and meaninglessness and whores - built around the symbol of a mysterious daily train, cargo unknown (nuclear waste? bodies, alive or dead?) for which an entire line is constructed and staffed. Worth a look if you like your stories of Soviet life nasty, brutish and short.

A Mature Woman - Saiichi Maruya

I read Maruya's other works yonks ago but never got around to this one. It's not as good as his (brilliant) other two novels, Grass for my Pillow and Singular Rebellion. It takes quite a lot of patience, as he builds his narrative in what I'm tempted to say is a very Japanese way through, long, meticulously detailed set pieces. As an examination of the place of women, especially career women, in Japanese society it's very good, and Maruya's trademark subtle humour is certainly present. However it's rather long for what you get from it, although not a slow read.

[David]

Brilliant, k-j. I read very little modern fiction, on the basis of Sturgeon's Law, really, as well as my belief that there are still plenty of classics I need to read. (E.g., at present, Malone Dies, which seems to be proving my point.)

But we have a holiday coming up, and I need some reading for the boat, so I've printed out your latest post and I'm taking it down to Waterstones with my birthday book tokens.

[bodkin]

Just read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry -- sort of a ghost story with sort of a twist. Ends sort of flatly and although I enjoyed it along the way, it doesn't encourage me to seek her out.

Now reading Connie Willis's huge two parter: Blackout and All Clear -- she's revisiting territory she's explored before here with more historians from 21st century Oxford visiting variously dangerous parts of the past in the name of research. Previously she did this tragically Doomsday Book and humorously To say nothing of the dog (if you only read one humorous, romantic time travel adventure in your life, make it this one...) This time she's making an adventure of it and everybody is marooned in the London blitz. There's a lot of angst. 'Historians' in theory cannot change the past, because time travel has a built in mechanism that won't deliver them to anywhere where they could. However they worry incessantly about this, even whilst trying to remember exactly which road's get bombed on which evenings so they can be somewhere else when it happens. Enjoying it so far and there are plenty of hints that "something else is going on" but so far no idea what...

I've not read a lot of books set in the blitz, but what with these 1000+ pages of Connie's and Kate Atkins's (500-ish page) Life After Life (which you will probably either love or totally fail to recognise as a novel; I love it) I seem to be making up for that at the moment.

Ian

[k-j]

May - 12 books.

In the Land of Pain - Daudet

Picked this off the shelf hoping that Daudet's account of his syphilitic agonies would make my broken bones pale in comparison. It did. The book is just jottings, notes towards a book perhaps, spanning several years, but it's very effective at conveying the raw, brute nature of pain, the unliterariness of it, the impossibility of really communicating what pain feels like. The other thing I got from it, through the crippling slavery to the nervous system, the futile experimental treatments and absurdist weeks spent at spas with fellow sufferers more or less round the bend with pain, was the immense cheerfulness of Daudet, not a refusal to submit, for submission is inevitable, but his refusal to let his pain permanently alter his character. Thought the translation and notes by Julian Barnes were great also.

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story - Galen Wescott

Well-written novella about the visit of the Cullens, a moderately-monied Irish couple, to the home of an American woman in France with whom the narrator is staying. The woman's pet hawk, Lucy, would be terrifically easy to dismiss as an unsophisticated symbol of (frustrated) passion were it not for Wescott's strikingly animalistic portrayal. There's a tragi-comic parallel in the servants, who receive the Cullens' driver below stairs. The whole thing is immaculately written, maybe too immaculately, for there wasn't that gripping otherness that lifts books above an 8/10 for me; but still, a solid 8.

Troubles - J.G. Farrell

This has that gripping otherness. I read "The Siege of Krishnapur" when I was 17 at the behest of my English teacher who wanted me to contrast it with "Catch-22". Happy memories, but reading Farrell now 20 years later I realise his genius and reel. "Troubles" is the story of a troubled English WWI vet who travels (same root as "trouble") to Ireland to claim his betrothed. She departs the world and the book without much ado, leaving the hero to fall reluctantly in love with the eccentric remains of her family and the magnificent decaying seafront hotel in which they live out the last days of British Ireland. The book is frequently hilarious, full of eccentric long-stay guests, forelock-tugging halfwit servants, walking clichés on both sides of the Irish question, and deadpan authorial asides dropped surreptiously into the narrative. But what is really astounding is the unaffectedness with which Farrell laments at once the breakup of the empire, and the manifest evils of colonialism. I will be rereading Krishnapur, and then "The Singapore Grip" in short order.

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

One or two of these midwest tales were good in an evocative homespun midwest way, but really a pretty unambitious collection I thought. Anderson seems to be aiming for one moment of piercing transcendence in each piece, but mostly the moments are transcendent only for the characters, not for the reader to whom everything is still taking place in a tiny unimportant snowglobe. Overrated.

The Inferno - Henri Barbusse

Awful pretentious French novel about a chap who holes himself up in a hotel room and spies on the various denizens of the room next door through a peephole. By this means we witness three or four semi-interlinked meoldramas unfold, all equally tedious, while being treated to much philosophising by the author/narrator about what it means to be an author/watcher/narrator.

Collected Stories vol. 2- Maugham

Yes, I have a very soft spot indeed for Maugham. Not all of his tales are good, and very few are great, but he is such a congenial host, never looking down on you, always respecting his reader, that I can't help but read on. And I do love stories of the British Far East, India, Malaya, Singapore etc., gin slings and the whine of mosquitoes and trim Edwardian female thighs on creaking verandahs overlooking slow muddy rivers. Good stuff.

Poems - Edward Thomas

Worth reading, just about. Clearly a talented poet but only about 10 or 12 I really rated, but six or so of those were truly excellent. And one or two glimpses of the fiery, more free-form, less coy poet Thomas might have become.

Silas Marner - Eliot

A very simple tale, not what I was hoping for, but you can nevertheless see Eliot developing her powers here in the characterisation and the village tittle-tattle, the chatter in the pub and in the manor house. Silas is a tiresome bore and in fact none of the characters are very interesting, but it's a quick read and not too terrible in spite of itself. Up soon, Romola

The Adventures of Roderick Random - Smollett

Smollett's first novel, all that's good and bad about the classic picaresque style. The first half is a rollicking series of adventures, madcap turns of fortune on the fields of love and battle, and then suddenly it becomes a sort of satirical romance and spends a long time fannying around with only mildly amusing courtship rituals. So, glad I read it, but disappointed that all the oaths were discontinued half way through, and definitely not as good as Humphrey Clinker or Smollett's bravura translations of Don Quixote and Gil Blas.

The Debt to Pleasure - John Lanchester

Highly Nabokovian tale of a creepy English aesthete touring France while dictating his travelogue-cum-gastro-memoir. One of those books where you vacillate continually between YES and spare me, before finally closing it and finding yourself firmly on the side of YES. Very funny, very English (in a stateless, Nabokovian way) and very highly recommended to lovers of Nabokov, Brillat-Savarin, and Peter Mayle.

The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks

My first Banks SF novel and pretty damn good I must say. Everything I'd hoped for really - mind-crushing scale, godly ennui, a first-rate hero, a splendid central device (the game) which is tantalisingly just-described-enough, and the kind of things being imagined that you would hope would be imagined when the author has a whole galaxy to play with. Basically Banks makes full use of his enormous canvas, and he also creates characters and concepts which will last as many novels as you like. I loved it (even though to me it's completely implausible).

Dark Star Safari - Paul Theroux

Probably a bit too long and subject to all the usual faults of Theroux's travelogues, i.e. name-dropping and dropping in on literary pals, and sometimes unwarranted grumpiness. On the other hand, grumpy is better than the alternative, he still writes brilliantly, and his love and despair for Africa blaze through on every page. As in all his travel books, Theroux does a great job of placing the journey in his personal context without making it a book about himself, and his recorded dialogue is as convincing as ever. I think he's a very impressive writer when you look at his output. Must read more of his fiction.

[k-j]

June - only six books. Mainly because I went on holiday.

James Joyce - Richard Ellman

Finally got around to reading Ellman's Joyce, which I should have read at univeristy. In the end I was slightly surprised at the praise for and status of this book. It is certainly a great biography, but I'm not sure how great a literary biography it is. I found it much more about Joyce the man than his works. To me it seemed like Ellman didn't really love and/or understand the works, except curiously the Wake which he clearly adores. Perhaps it is simply that Joyce's life was pretty unremarkable - compared to his works, but even compared to many a European of his age - so a faithful (and mostly well-written) portrait like this just leaves you wanting to fuck off and read Ulysses again, which encapsulates its period and of course all periods. I really think Joyce was just a moderately clever man who happened to write one or two works of genius.

Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication - Various

Free ebook from NASA (I think). Collection of essays, some very boring, one or two interesting on the potential for communicating with hypothesised ET life, and also the likelihood of finding it, although nothing I hadn't read before re the latter. I really liked the thoughts on what language/communication might consist of for ETs.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction: XXXI, #3: Flann O'Brien: Centenary Essays - Various

About a dozen essays on Flann O'Brien, only two or three of them interesting. I really liked the one comparing Flann to Nabokov. There was a fairly undemanding structuralist one which I thought was OK, and one about Flann and Science Fiction which although good, promised more than it delivered. A few more had interesting insights but lots of bullshit, and some were just unreadable. For diehard Flann fans only, and a good reminder of why I didn't pursue academia.

Use of Weapons - Iain M. Banks

Another Banks SF ebook from the library. This one I thought was significantly worse than "The Player of Games". I hated the macho main character, thought the other characters were seriously underdeveloped, the structure was a stupid authorial piss-take which added nothing to the story, and the ending a piss-poor gotcha moment. It's always nice to be in the Culture universe but here Banks seemed to want to write a Rambo novel with traces of Rider Haggard. Ugh.

Remember Why You Fear Me - Robert Shearman

Some diverting fantasy/SF/horrific ideas let down by a colloquial Brit voice that comes across as slightly forced. The second story, about the Hell for dogs, is absolutely inspired, and one or two others like the Father Christmas one are quite moving and highly anthologisable things. Shearman is an ideas man, and when he manages to execute his ideas they flatten you. But too often his prose lets him down, especially his (first person) characterisation which is relentlessly simplistic.

The Mad Recce - Frank Knappett

My Dad visited and deposited this in my hand. I've no idea where he got it. It's a rip-roaring memoir of Frank's time in an armoured car regiment (i.e. the title) in North Africa and then Italy. He romps along in a classically frank and forthright English manner, memorably describing the unexpected decapitation of the captain of his vehicle one day in Egypt. Really a ripping read and not a bad primary source for anyone interested in the life of the troops in (those parts of) WWII, or just their memorable lingo and speech, cadence etc. Frank comes across as wry, optimistic, and it goes without saying resilient. Really this is what memoirs should be about - someone with a story to tell who can also tell a story. Bravo Frank.

[bodkin]

Use of Weapons - Iain M. Banks

Another Banks SF ebook from the library. This one I thought was significantly worse than "The Player of Games". I hated the macho main character, thought the other characters were seriously underdeveloped, the structure was a stupid authorial piss-take which added nothing to the story, and the ending a piss-poor gotcha moment. It's always nice to be in the Culture universe but here Banks seemed to want to write a Rambo novel with traces of Rider Haggard. Ugh.

Not my favourite this one... think I have only read it twice whereas some of his others have have on repeat play...

I think he may have let his nihilism get the better of him a little?

Not sure I recall the macho of the main character but it has been a long time... I think he brings this character back in a later book, but much older and possibly greatly changed.

Not 100% on the timing but I think I have read some more of his non-SF but my previous opinion still applies: the SF is way better.

Other than that not read much of weight recently. If I say "Victorian werewolves" and "Junior Met Detective unexpectedly becomes Wizard" you get the rough feel. Thinking it's been ten years and thus time to read the Lord of the Rings again, slightly prompted by watching the (9 hour) director's cut DVDs recently.

I did recently read The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R King -- this is the first of a series in which a young genius 20th century woman becomes apprenticed to an old genius Victorian detective, namely Sherlock Holmes. It was enjoyable and broadly plausible (within the constraints of its artificial world). There was the odd moment where I thought "No, wrong!" but not many, and there was a emotional build up to the gripping climax where the main character was put through the wringer in the cause of deceiving the villain. Only the villain was perhaps a little disappointing, somehow coming across as having logic reason for being so, but not really the emotional investment to explain their obsession. I will by another of these when/if I see it in a charity shop, however.

Ian

[David]

Poems - Edward Thomas

Worth reading, just about. Clearly a talented poet but only about 10 or 12 I really rated, but six or so of those were truly excellent. And one or two glimpses of the fiery, more free-form, less coy poet Thomas might have become.

An admirably unmawkish viewpoint. There may be something to it, but I'd never get rid of the book because of these 10 or 12 (or more). And I think Lob would be a desert island poem for me.

The Adventures of Roderick Random - Smollett

Smollett's first novel, all that's good and bad about the classic picaresque style. The first half is a rollicking series of adventures, madcap turns of fortune on the fields of love and battle, and then suddenly it becomes a sort of satirical romance and spends a long time fannying around with only mildly amusing courtship rituals. So, glad I read it, but disappointed that all the oaths were discontinued half way through, and definitely not as good as Humphrey Clinker or Smollett's bravura translations of Don Quixote and Gil Blas..

I read both RR and HC during my first post-school blast through Classic British Fiction, but I can't distinguish between them any more. I remember being elated by how unbuttoned 18th century fiction seemed to be.

The Debt to Pleasure - John Lanchester

Highly Nabokovian tale of a creepy English aesthete touring France while dictating his travelogue-cum-gastro-memoir. One of those books where you vacillate continually between YES and spare me, before finally closing it and finding yourself firmly on the side of YES. Very funny, very English (in a stateless, Nabokovian way) and very highly recommended to lovers of Nabokov, Brillat-Savarin, and Peter Mayle.

I have this, but haven't read it yet. (Have we discussed this before?) I did enjoy Capital, on pretty much the terms you describe.

[bodkin]

Forgot to mention, recently read a Douglas Coupland's JPod. This is my third Coupland and I think I have now down-rated my opinion of him.

The first I read was Microserfs and it was light and quite funny and I enjoyed it.

However the next I encountered was Girlfriend in a Coma and this is an entirely pointless book. It starts off well enough with the girl suddenly lapsing into a coma and the effects on her boyfriend and group of friends. However it then spirals off in an increasingly surreal direction which leads eventually to the deaths of everybody on the planet _except_ the girl (now re-awoken) and the aforementioned group of friends. Again this is wild, but could be going somewhere really significant -- only it doesn't. The story ends, the events are simply cancelled, rather than resolved, and the only outcome is a really (and I mean really) vague idea that people shouldn't waste their lives.

Which brings us to JPod. This is more like Microserfs in being quite amusing, only where the former is "light" this one is "light but sinister". There are murders, and drugs retailing, and video games development. It was enjoyable as I went along, but again to no great end. Whilst I accepted that in Microserfs I wonder if GiaC sensitized me to it, since it seems more of a flaw in this one. One nice feature is that a character Douglas Coupland appears in the story, and is a bit of a dick...

--

On a much more pleasurable note. Have just re-read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and am 3/4 of the way through the sequel Zero History. These are magnificent books. Very possibly his best (that I have read, which is 80-90%). I have in the past accused WG of writing the same story twice--e.g. that his style quite strongly involves certain characters and situations and the story tends to end in a certain way. This is still true, but these two books are fresh enough that it doesn't matter in the slightest (but you don't notice anyway until you're re-reading the Nth book, so this isn't a big problem to the non-obsessive).

The other brilliant thing about these two books is there are no SF elements at all, but I wouldn't hesitate to call them SF. They are literally set today (or a few years back by now) and in today's world with very normal things happening. The SF arises entirely from taking social, fashion, marketing, branding trends and extrapolating them into vision of today that isn't so much exaggerated as simply more deeply analysed.

As ever his imagery is great and both books feature many tiny turns of phrasing in both the narrator's and the various quirky characters' voices. I've read these twice before and still feel I'm appreciating more each time.

Both books feature interesting, female vulnerable/strong central characters. One a savant of product branding, who can look at a logo and simply know whether it "works" but might vomit if she meets the Michelin Man unexpectedly, the other a refugee from a 1980's rock career, reeling slightly from the financial crash and still not 100% sure who she now is. Both also feature "Huberus Bigend" an indefinable marketing guru/CEO who's there mostly for the other characters to feel uncomfortable about; who is motivated mostly by what's interesting; and who plans for his staff to betray him on a regular six year cycle, finding that the most "interesting" time of all.

Both books also worship a William Morris like ideal of craftsmanship, and in fact both take the form of quests for the creators of particular objects of adoration. In PR this is "The Footage", short segments of film from a (presumed) larger work, featuring unknown characters in an unidentifiable city, possessing the highest production values and then simply dropped on random internet sites for "Footageheads" the World over to hunt, view, dissect and discuss. In ZH this is "The Gabriel Hounds" a line of impossible to obtain denim-wear, again produced to the highest possible standard of design and production and sold, one-per-customer in rare and closely guarded "drops" the World over.

If you only ever read one book from a guy who invented a new SF genre, predicted the internet, coined "cyberspace" and then seemed to turn away from all of that to push a vision/warning of a near future where nothing is sufficiently real and hardly anything possesses true quality...

...well don't, read both of them.

Ian

[k-j]

However the next I encountered was Girlfriend in a Coma and this is an entirely pointless book. It starts off well enough with the girl suddenly lapsing into a coma and the effects on her boyfriend and group of friends. However it then spirals off in an increasingly surreal direction which leads eventually to the deaths of everybody on the planet _except_ the girl (now re-awoken) and the aforementioned group of friends. Again this is wild, but could be going somewhere really significant -- only it doesn't. The story ends, the events are simply cancelled, rather than resolved, and the only outcome is a really (and I mean really) vague idea that people shouldn't waste their lives.

Yes! Totally agree. GiaC was my first Coupland and it'll be my last.

It had been on my tbr list for ages and I was expecting a lot from it based on what I'd heard. Was also interested because the area Coupland grew up in, and where much of the novel is set, is the exact location my wife grew up in not so many years afterwards. The school they go to in the novel is my wife's high school - she smoked and drank as a teenager in exactly the same bushes Coupland's teens smoke and drink in. Her parents still live there and I lived very nearby for a few years so I know the area well.

But your summary matches my thoughts exactly. It's really a preposterous novel, very pretentious in places, cackhanded plotting, chickenhearted in its approach to its putative themes. Overall, pisspoor, embarrassing, and the worst book I read in 2012.

Must get around to reading William Gibson.

[bodkin]

Must get around to reading William Gibson.

I think he's one of those people where you don't realise quite how skilful he's been at first...

...however I was just checking out "Spook Country" which is one I've not got and I suddenly realised it sits between the two I talked about above. So everything I thought I knew may be wrong. Watch this space, but don't hold your breath.

Ian

[David]

Finally finished A Sentimental Education. You know you've been in the presence of a master, but you won't be rushing round there again any time soon. Not to that particular address, at least. Quite like the sound of Salammbô, though. "It is set in Carthage during the 3rd century BC." Mmm.

[k-j]

Finally finished A Sentimental Education. You know you've been in the presence of a master, but you won't be rushing round there again any time soon. Not to that particular address, at least. Quite like the sound of Salammbô, though. "It is set in Carthage during the 3rd century BC." Mmm.

I've got A Sentimental Education lined up on my e-reader for some time in the coming months.

Highly recommend Salammbô, I've not read anything quite like it. It has this deeply sensual quality to it, everything seems hyperreal, especially the gore of battle. And there's an absolutely fantastic Moloch who gobbles up fair maidens.

[David]

Highly recommend Salammbô, I've not read anything quite like it. It has this deeply sensual quality to it, everything seems hyperreal, especially the gore of battle. And there's an absolutely fantastic Moloch who gobbles up fair maidens.

Now, you've only whetted my appetite even more. (Starting to sound a bit like Michael Moorcock!)

Just have to get through Walt Whitman's America first. And I've been thinking - perhaps wrongly - that I should read some Marilynn Robinson.

By the way, if you're coming to London in February, you should definitely check out the London Review of Books Bookshop (and Cakeshop), if you haven't already.