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*What book are you reading? (part 2)

izz said:
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

again.


:D
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I'm reading this. I loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum and then read a couple of her Jackson Brodie novels which were okay, but didn't do enough for me to look out for any more of her work. My partner started reading Life After Life and gave up on it, then passed it on to me. The setting is an upper middle class family with servants, from 1910 onwards, not really my cup of tea. However the story is really a fantasy(ish), time travel(ish) story of 2nd chances. All beautifully described, period detail of the Blitz etc. Classy writing.
 
Robert L. Forward - Dragon's Egg, a science fiction novel first published in 1980 I believe and set in this century imagining how life might develop on a neutron star with gravity billions of times stronger than Earth's and an encounter with humans.

The science is interesting but the human characters are not the most convincing.
 
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
I'm a good third of the way through this and it's fantastic, a really rewarding read. Beard has spent a lot of time so far emphasising how little there is to go on evidence wise and how unreliable most of the sources are, but despite almost being none the wiser about anything that actually happened I feel like I've learned a lot from it all the same. Sometimes popular history writing can come across too much like storytelling which this avoids very well. It helps that she is clearly an excellent writer who writes very accessibly but doesn't patronise.
 
Just a few pages into 'Pegasus Descending' by James Lee Burke and it's grabbed me already. Been a while since I read one of his and I'm enjoying his fabulously descriptive attention to detail once again. I've never read a duff book by him.
 
Reading 'Lulu in Hollywood' - a selection of salty essays written by the one and only Louise Brooks. The book itself is a work of art, her words, majestic. What a writer! Opening essay is Kenneth Tynan's original portrait from 1979, 'Girl with a Black Helmet' from New Yorker magazine.
 
sojourner said:
Just started 'Cold' by Ranulph Fiennes. Another brilliant book. Some serious hair-raising stories in this one.
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Years ago, I read a whole tranche of sailing books by one Tristram Jones - culminating in Ice - a tale of being stranded under an antarctic ice shelf for 6 months and having to take out his own eye. Serious hard-core stuff (I was puttering about the Cam on a Mirror dinghy at the time).
Stuck without reading material, I have been reading The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet for what feels like years...and only up to page 67...is this worth taking an afternoon out to get a couple of hundred pages down?
 
Last couple of weeks I sailed through first two Phillip Pullman Dark Materials books, they were cracking reads.

Today I finished Dendera by Yuya Sato bit of a tricky read and its got flaws but wasn't bad. I felt like there was a lot there that might be to do with Japan and WW2, along with group think. Have to hang your suspension of disbelief that 70 year olds and older could survive as the ladies did as well.
 
campanula said:
Stuck without reading material, I have been reading The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet for what feels like years...and only up to page 67...is this worth taking an afternoon out to get a couple of hundred pages down?
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I read that last year, and although it was a bit of a slog being so dauntingly long, it was worth sticking with, great book, I liked the rich detail.

I'm at the same stage with A Brief History of Seven Killings, sixty pages in and it hasn't really hooked me yet. But I am a great giver up on books so will try a bit longer to see if gets as good as people say it is.
 
Nothing as demanding as previous posts, I'm on, 'The world according to Bob' James Bowen. The second in Bob the cats trials. Next will be another Carl Hiassen from the charity shop.
 
danny la rouge said:
Partnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth.
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Had to give up on this. It said in several places on the cover that it was "hilarious" and that the character Alex was a great comic character. I got to p127 without even a vague smile, never mind hilarity. But not only that: it was just repetitive, misogynist whining. I was waiting for it to go somewhere. I was waiting for the point. I have decided that if one is to come (which I doubt), I'm willing to forgo the chance of ever discovering it in return for not having to read any more of the same thing being said four times a page every page.
 
^ Well written, but odious. I think the point is the Great American Novel/coming of age angle, and presumably not many great authors had talked about being repressed and wanking in such eloquent terms before so it was shocking.

In my list of great authors who must have been/would be repulsive people to meet along with Hemingway, Rushdie, Brett Easton Ellis, Luke Reinhardt.
 
Beatlebone - Kevin Barry.

About John Lennon trying to visit his island off the west coast of island to do some primal screaming. Very well written, and wryly amusing, Lennon sounds like Lennon, but it's his driver, Cornelius, who is the real hero. Hopefully it'll find a way to conclude itself.
 
ringo said:
^ Well written, but odious. I think the point is the Great American Novel/coming of age angle, and presumably not many great authors had talked about being repressed and wanking in such eloquent terms before so it was shocking.
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Yeah, I get that it was of its time. And the wanking and all. I suppose I had hoped for some sort of development. And something to contrast the odiousness with.
 
its kind of a funny story by ned vizzini. An amusing and well written story about depression. vizzini threw himself off his parents roof and killed himself so its difficult not seeing precedents to that. very sad.
 
Rereading "A Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester, source of my user name. It's as good as I remember it, and thrown into a fresh light by having read Lolita in the intervening years.
 
campanula said:
Years ago, I read a whole tranche of sailing books by one Tristram Jones - culminating in Ice - a tale of being stranded under an antarctic ice shelf for 6 months and having to take out his own eye. Serious hard-core stuff (I was puttering about the Cam on a Mirror dinghy at the time).
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Ooo I might look out for that then campanula ! I have become obsessed with stories about polar travel - can't seem to get enough! It's the unbelievable hardships endured and the breathtakingly dangerous conditions - they're addictive to read about. Am currently reading Ranulph Fiennes's 'Captain Scott', in which he makes a brilliant case for debunking all the negative shittery surrounding Scott. One big point he raises is that of the four dozen or so biographies of Scott, not one of them has been written by a writer with actual polar/travel experience. They have no understanding of the stresses and strains (life threatening huge big fucking stresses and strains!) of polar life or travel.

Staggering though, the inexperience and complete lack of knowledge or preparation before his first expedition with the Discovery. They didn't even know how to erect tents, or how much food to pack! No dog training, nowt :eek::eek::eek: I'm fucking amazed they survived that first outing! :D
 
sojourner may I recommend Dan Simmons' The Terror? It's fiction but based on the true story of Captain John Franklin's expedition to find the North West Passage. It's so exciting!
 
chainsawjob said:
I'm at the same stage with A Brief History of Seven Killings, sixty pages in and it hasn't really hooked me yet. But I am a great giver up on books so will try a bit longer to see if gets as good as people say it is.
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Nah, it's just not holding my interest. Too grim, and I don't warm to any of the characters, and it's very 'male' (which is odd, I'd never really considered before that I do like fiction to have enough female characters in, but maybe I do... ok, there's one female narrator in Seven Killings).

Now I'm back to reading 'Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite' by Bruce Levine, which I started last year. It's about "the epidemic of political passivity in America", written by a psychologist, and looks at how defeatism, helplessness and fatalism can be overcome. I like his psychological take on things.
 
Slogging through Neuromancer - not really enjoying it much, find it all a bit hard work to be honest.

I understand he was visionary, but prose, Gibson, prose!
 
sojourner I read a wonderful book a few years ago, a memoir written by a man who left home at 16 to work for a trading company in Alaska in the early 1900s. Incredibly evocative. I will try and remember title/author for you :oops:

I'm currently coming to the end of Authority by Jeff VanderMeer. Had to stop for the night with only a few pages left because it is freaking me out so much :eek:
 
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