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*What book are you reading? (part 2)

Just finished Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (didn't like it as much as Zoo City or Moxyland)

Now onto Open City by Teju Cole and Gender Outlaw: Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein.
 
idumea said:
Just finished Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (didn't like it as much as Zoo City or Moxyland)

Now onto Open City by Teju Cole and Gender Outlaw: Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein.
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Open City is one of the best books I have read in the past few years.
 
Here is a massive list of all the books I have bought in the past month or so:

The Private Sea LSD & The search for God by William Braden
The Complete Walker IV by Colin Fletcher
The Infinite (Problems of Philosophy) by AW Moore
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand & Eaven Boland
So You Want to be a Lobbyist?: Guide to the World of Political Lobbying by Corinne Souza
The Tower of Basel: The Inside Story of the Central Bankers' Secret Bank by Adam LeBor
When Was Wales?: A History of the Welsh (Penguin history) by Gwyn Williams
Collected Poems of RS Thomas
Spectacular Capitalism by Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Mountains and Rivers Without End by Gary Snyder
The Immense Journey (Vintage) by Loren Eiseley
Who Framed Colin Wallace? by Paul Foot
The Entity: Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage by Eric Frattini
"Gravity's Rainbow" Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel by Steven Weisenburger
New and Selected Poems: v. 1 by Mary Oliver
Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001 by WG Sebald
Meditation Now: Inner Peace Through Inner Wisdom by SN Goenka
The Diamond Sutra translated by Red Pine
The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples by David Gilmour
Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison
Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikku Bodhi
The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger
The Mystery of Existence by John Leslie
 
Oh and one or two more:

Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism by Stewart Home
The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series) by Franco Berardi
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff
Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock by Jessie Jarnow

I would quite like to read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis and I have a few other books lined up about HFT and dark pools and that kind of thing.
 
sojourner said:
What do you think, jeff_leigh ?

I had the misfortune to read that as my intro to Bukowski, and it scarred me for life. The misogyny dripping from each and every page made me want to smash his stupid fucking face in with a cricket bat.

So many of my poetry friends think the sun shines out of his arse but I just cannot get my head round my loathing of him.
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I read Wonen years ago and on the strength of your post I thought I'd read it again to see if time/age etc gave me a different perspective (I read Trocchi's Cains Book when I was about twenty and thought it and him were mint - re reading it in my thirties I couldn't get over what a wanker the Troc was. Still had some good ideas though). But anyway I didn't (and still don't) read Bukowski as a misogynist - He's a wanker fersure and Women is nowhere near his best effort - It does get a bit repetative but there's still some decent stuff in it IMO. Way I see it, those early 70's times with all that counter culture bullshit that Bukowski held in contempt but still sold his records on the back of, well, those times were deeply misogynistic. And Bukowski took advantage of all that crap. But IMO, in the book, he's harder on himself than any of the women he writes about. AFAIC Bukowski saw through the bullshit of everything and described (nearly) everything with the contempt it deserved. That's what I think anyway.
 
The Unquiet Heart by Gordon Ferris. Its the 2nd book in the Danny McRae series. Hes a Scottish ex-SOE operative working as a Private Detective in post-war London. Im liking it.
 
Chuck Klosterman - I wear the black hat.

He's the guy that writes The ethicist column for the New Yorker. It's a very funny collection of essays of the nature of villains. There's a great essay on Villains who are not villains that covers D.B Cooper, Mohammed Atta, Prince, Purple Rain, Morris Day (and the motherfucking Time) Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier.

Eye opener.
 
me nor- Vineland was good though

I'm on 'Wild Cards 2' a geroge rr martin edited, superhero themed collection. Good stuff.
 
tufty79 said:
just started 'gravity's rainbow' by thomas pynchon. already going a bit 'wut?'.
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The only thing I liked about Gravity's Rainbow was the bit about bananas... Some people have actually made a list of every single banana reference found in the book, can't remember the link but my favourite quote is this beautiful one which kind of rolls off the tongue:
"His giant bananas cluster, radiant yellow, humid green. His companions below dream drooling of a Banana Breakfast..."

I used to think Pynchon were one of those too clever chaps who wrote really brilliant books which always were intensely annoying to read, that was until I read Mason & Dixon... It's immense. One of the best american novels of the past twenty years. A masterpiece of a book. And I've always loved historical novels. This even have some creative anachronisms thrown in, so it's part fantasy aswell. And of course it's always fun when someone decides to write in 18th century vernacular and manages to keep it consistent and readable... lends an air of authenticity to the whole tall tale, you can really feel the flavour of the era even though you know it's fiction. Not a small feat. It took me ages to read the book, but when I finally closed it after finishing the last page I just wanted to read it over again...
Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by U.S. author Thomas Pynchon published in 1997. It concentrates on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.

The novel is a frame narrative told from the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke – a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy – who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house). Claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys, Cherrycoke tells a tale intermingling Mason and Dixon's biographies with history, fantasy, legend, speculation, and outright fabrication.

The novel's scope takes in aspects of established Colonial U.S. history including the call of the West, the often ignored histories of women, North Americans, and slaves, plus excursions into geomancy, Deism, a hollow Earth, and — perhaps — alien abduction. The novel also contains philosophical discussions and parables of automata/robots, the after-life, the eleven days lost to the Gregorian calendar, slavery, feng shui and others.
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Right now I'm reading a children's book from the 1970s or 80s about two irish kids kidnapped by vikings and forced to cope with life as servants in their new country (fiction, not fact but those kinds of things did happen during the viking era). The same author wrote a book called Raven Girl about a girl in a remote valley who lived alone as a feral child after all the other people of her community died of the plague, I'm reading that next.
 
Frances Lengel said:
I read Wonen years ago and on the strength of your post I thought I'd read it again to see if time/age etc gave me a different perspective (I read Trocchi's Cains Book when I was about twenty and thought it and him were mint - re reading it in my thirties I couldn't get over what a wanker the Troc was. Still had some good ideas though). But anyway I didn't (and still don't) read Bukowski as a misogynist - He's a wanker fersure and Women is nowhere near his best effort - It does get a bit repetative but there's still some decent stuff in it IMO. Way I see it, those early 70's times with all that counter culture bullshit that Bukowski held in contempt but still sold his records on the back of, well, those times were deeply misogynistic. And Bukowski took advantage of all that crap. But IMO, in the book, he's harder on himself than any of the women he writes about. AFAIC Bukowski saw through the bullshit of everything and described (nearly) everything with the contempt it deserved. That's what I think anyway.
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I still think he's a misogynistic twat. And over-rated.
 
maya said:
Coming up: The new KLF book by John Higgs ("KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned a million pounds") just arrived in the post today, have been added to the top of my reading pile... Looking forward to it.
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This is the best thing I've read in a while. Only took a day and a half, and while it tells the story of the KLF, it's largely centred around some quite mindblowing belief systems and theories, which it makes *just* accessible enough (for me anyway).
 
For those into UK crime, I just reread 'The Black Flowers' by Steve Mosby. V imaginative northern crime writer. A book within a book (possibly) within a book. Brilliant.

(apols if he's been mentioned before, haven't searched the thread)

Also the two Harry Bingham book are in the same vein. Gritty and characterful and very imaginative (IMHO).
 
sojourner said:
Anyway, I've started reading The God Delusion by Dickie Dawkins. Mainly so I can then read Terry Eagleton's rubbishing of him afterwards.
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Actually, I'm making a pretty good rub of exposing his weaknesses as it is. And does he HAVE to be so sneery? I can almost hear him stamping his feet petulantly at times!!
 
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