*What book are you reading? (part 2)

[belboid]

Just about to start Raymond Chandler's The High Window.

Quite excited about this one, part of my plan to read all the Chandlers over the year. The Big Sleep is a work of genius, but I already knew it backwards. I couldnt remember Farewell My Lovely quite as well, but did do so pretty much as I read each section. High Window, I know not at all, it's gonna be well good.

 

[pogo 10]

Crimson china, about the morecambe bay cockling tragedy.

 

[Orang Utan]

Crimson china, about the morecambe bay cockling tragedy.

Please credit the author! It's the least you can do. They would have worked for months or even more on the thing.

 

[pogo 10]

Please credit the author! It's the least you can do. They would have worked for months or even more on the thing.

Betsy tobin[book was in my bedroom and was too lazy to get it].

 

[ManchesterBeth]

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar - the Time Regulation Institute
S Reid - Assimilate: A Critical history of industrial music.
Martin Stokes: The Republic of Love. Cultural intimacy in Turkish popular music.

Plan to read.
Mikko Lahtinen - Niccolo Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism.

 

[sojourner]

A few stories into my all-time beloved Ray Bradbury's 'I Sing The Body Electric!', which has to be one of the world's greatest titles, and is taken from a Walt Whitman poem

It's like being sensually stroked all over by beautiful ideas and words. God I love him.

 

[Dexter Deadwood]

H Is For Hawk - Helen Macdonald.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18803640-h-is-for-hawk

 

[mentalchik]

Proxima - Stephen Baxter

then

Best new Sci-fi 27

then

The Peripheral - William Gibson

 

[weltweit]

I just read A Good Hanging, Ian Rankin which is my first Rankin read. I have read quite a few Mark Billingham thrillers in which his detective DI Thorne takes the length of a book to solve a crime so I was at first a little disturbed to see that Rankin's Rebus seems to solve a crime about every twenty pages or so!

 

[Buddy Bradley]

H Is For Hawk - Helen Macdonald.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18803640-h-is-for-hawk

Heard so many good things about that, definitely on my wishlist.

I'm currently reading Faraway, by Lucy Irvine, who you might remember from Castaway and the Oliver Reed film adaptation. It's actually really really good - she's a great observer, and it's a fascinating mixture of biography of the quintessential English couple setting up in a tropical paradise, combined with Irvine's slow uncovering of the real story behind their impact on the island they chose to call home.

 

[maya]

Don Quijote... I love it! The daddy of all picaresque novels (or all novels in general, I presume-). Much easier to read than I feared, too. Wish I knew spanish so I could read the original... although the translation is mint. Such a great book.

 

[ViolentPanda]

"London's Labyrinth" by Fiona Rule - a kind of pot-boiler of the best couple of dozen books about (mostly) post-Industrial Revolution London. Not bad,but she's no Ackroyd.
Sara Scott's "The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse", which I'm re-reading after a poster made a claim about its' content that I didn't recall being any part of what the author wrote.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Working my way through the Winter King trilogy by Bernard Cornwell and on book 2 now, its pretty grim and gritty and I have doubts that the Druidic religion was as brutal and fond of human sacrifice as the book makes out but its pretty entertaining.

Also Merlin is a complete fucking dickhead, entertaining though.

 

[treefrog]

Working my way through the Winter King trilogy by Bernard Cornwell and on book 2 now, its pretty grim and gritty and I have doubts that the Druidic religion was as brutal and fond of human sacrifice as the book makes out but its pretty entertaining.

Also Merlin is a complete fucking dickhead, entertaining though.

I think I read that years ago- cracking fun! Might see if the library has it in as some light relief once I finish The Man in the High Castle.....

 

[sojourner]

A mate's lent me 'How To Be A Woman' by Caitlin Moran, and as it's from a friend of a friend, and I have to give it back fairly quick, I'm having to read that before going back to Ray.

Actual laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and clever use of language in others. Yeh, I like it so far

 

[Orang Utan]

A mate's lent me 'How To Be A Woman' by Caitlin Moran, and as it's from a friend of a friend, and I have to give it back fairly quick, I'm having to read that before going back to Ray.

Actual laugh-out-loud funny in parts, and clever use of language in others. Yeh, I like it so far

It always saddens me to see positive reviews of this, considering how dreadful she is at the internets.

 

[sojourner]

It always saddens me to see positive reviews of this, considering how dreadful she is at the internets.

Is she? Well, there are hints at crapness in the book tbh, but there are also some hysterical sections.

Give us an example then.

And - why does it SADDEN you that people may have gleaned some joy from her writing?! That's a very odd position to take.

 

[marty21]

It always saddens me to see positive reviews of this, considering how dreadful she is at the internets.

I don't mind her on the internets tbh

 

[Orang Utan]

Is she? Well, there are hints at crapness in the book tbh, but there are also some hysterical sections.

Give us an example then.

And - why does it SADDEN you that people may have gleaned some joy from her writing?! That's a very odd position to take.

It saddens me that she might be a good writer, whilst she behaves so appallingly on Twitter

 

[sojourner]

It saddens me that she might be a good writer, whilst she behaves so appallingly on Twitter

I don't see why the two should go hand in hand.

What constitutes 'appallingly' then?

 

[campanula]

Just finished Proxima (Stephen Baxter) but am dithering about the next book in the series? - Ultima - mainly because it seems to be in a quasi-Romanesque meta-history thingy which I am not finding appealing. To be honest, Baxter is not really my cup of tea but shortages of reading matter and a handy book token...
H is for Hawk - sort of bumbling through this but not riveted.
Signature of All Things has just arrived and I am appalled to recall the awful Eat Pray Navel Gaze (was fooled by the botany aspect). The non-read pile is growing - dunno whether I am losing patience but these days, if I have not been gripped by at least page 30, then its off to the charity shop (or handy park bench).

 

[Orang Utan]

I don't see why the two should go hand in hand

They don't. Writers are often arseholes.

 

[sojourner]

They don't. Writers are often arseholes.

PEOPLE are often arseholes in general. Nowt spesh about writers in particular.

I still don't really understand why it would 'sadden' you.

And - for the third time - what constitutes 'appallingly'?

 

[Orang Utan]

Saddened/annoyed/just let out a big sigh at shitty humanity.

She's just part of that smug twitterati who all stick up for each other. Had to stop following most of them cos it was just one big backslapathon.

 

[sojourner]

Saddened/annoyed/just let out a big sigh at shitty humanity.

She's just part of that smug twitterati who all stick up for each other. Had to stop following most of them cos it was just one big backslapathon.

Oh right, got you, I think.

I don't use Twitter so no idea what that means. Have stopped using Facebook pretty much, apart from reading/poetry stuff. Pile of fucking wank.

 

[Orang Utan]

Yeah, probs for the best.

I do think that being a writer can magnify one's arseholiness though. Not that writers are always arseholes.

 

[inva]

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
I've seen the excellent Nicholas Ray film of this before, so I was curious to find out what the novel it was based on is like. I'm just over a third of the way through it and so far it seems to be generally darker in tone and more direct in its portrayal of Dix Steele (the main character and the one played by Humphrey Bogart in the film) as a vile, predatory misogynist. It's been very good so far, anyway, although it did take me a little bit to really start enjoying it because Steele is so repulsive and the early part of the book is very focused on him and his thoughts before other characters begin to enter the plot much.

 

[Dillinger4]

Oh right, got you, I think.

I don't use Twitter so no idea what that means. Have stopped using Facebook pretty much, apart from reading/poetry stuff. Pile of fucking wank.

 

[sojourner]

Yeah, probs for the best.

I do think that being a writer can magnify one's arseholiness though. Not that writers are always arseholes.

Maybe they just express it better

 

[mentalchik]

Just finished Proxima (Stephen Baxter) but am dithering about the next book in the series? - Ultima - mainly because it seems to be in a quasi-Romanesque meta-history thingy which I am not finding appealing. To be honest, Baxter is not really my cup of tea but shortages of reading matter and a handy book token...

am just finishing it too.......................to be honest am struggling not to find it a bit dull now at the end..........