*What book are you reading ?

[Dirty Martini]

A Perfect Hoax by Italo Svevo.

 

[sojourner]

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh

Are you an Irvine Welsh fan? (I am)

How are you finding it?

 

[sojourner]

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

The main thing that's striking me so far is my contempt for David Lurie - in some ways it reminds me of certain content from The Dice Man

I'm hoping it gets better

 

[ViolentPanda]

Currently reading Kathryn Dodd's "A Sylvia Pankhurst reader", David Toop's "Ocean of Sound" and Stephen Dorril's "Blackshirt".

 

[foamy]

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

i loved this - especially loved reading it on the way to work (school!)

i'm reading 'The Birds' by Tareji Vasees (sp?) translated from Norwegian.

 

[maya]

i'm reading 'The Birds' by Tareji Vasees (sp?)

Tarjei Vesaas... Try reading "The Ice Palace"- his best book, IMO.

 

[foamy]

Tarjei Vesaas... Try reading "The Ice Palace"- his best book, IMO.

ha! my guess was quite good then only started it today but read 100 pages and enjoying it muchly.
will check out the ice palace, thanks

 

[May Kasahara]

Since I'm having such trouble getting into novels at the moment, I've decided to return to an area that never fails to hold my interest - crime.

Am reading Fearless Jones by Walter Mosely. It's alright so far, but I wouldn't agree with the Guardian's assertion that he's the best crime writer working today (mind you, individual reviewers have probably said that about any number of writers). Certainly he's got nothing on Joe R Lansdale in the entertainment stakes.

 

[Pieface]

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

Took me an age to get into it but finally hooked me last night - it's got that S American fiction thing going on of massive cast of characters and loads of eccentricities - she's writing from a feminist, lefty slant as well.

 

[ringo]

Are you an Irvine Welsh fan? (I am)

How are you finding it?

Yes, I've read all his books. The last couple (Filth & Porno) I found so over the top disgusting that I was starting to go off him, but this one is a bit more easily digested.
Awful pun that.
Some of the characters are continuations of his previous main men, there's a lot of sick boy (sadistic smug bastard) and spud (weak victim) in the main two characters, but enough inventiveness in their relationship to hold it together. Only half way, but so far so good.

 

[Cheesypoof]

Started

'Let it blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs' this morning, the bio of America's greatest gonzo journalist and most legendary rock critic. So far, its brilliant. he died of an overdose at 33 in 1982 and was respected as much by the rockstars as the fans.

his writing will always be remembered, he wrote for Creem, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone in the 70s and his reviews, sometimes done on stage with the performers, were legendary stream of consciousness, speed and benzy fuelled gutter masterpieces.

 

[sojourner]

Yes, I've read all his books. The last couple (Filth & Porno) I found so over the top disgusting that I was starting to go off him, but this one is a bit more easily digested.
Awful pun that.
Some of the characters are continuations of his previous main men, there's a lot of sick boy (sadistic smug bastard) and spud (weak victim) in the main two characters, but enough inventiveness in their relationship to hold it together. Only half way, but so far so good.

I really liked Filth - he does grotesque so well.

I would have hoped though that by now, he would have started changing his stock characters. I used to love that characters in his books would all be interrelated somehow, but find myself wanting more now

Hmmm...I want to read it, but it won't be on the priority list I think

 

[tastebud]

Started

'Let it blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs' this morning, the bio of America's greatest gonzo journalist and most legendary rock critic. So far, its brilliant. he died of an overdose at 33 in 1982 and was respected as much by the rockstars as the fans.

his writing will always be remembered, he wrote for Creem, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone in the 70s and his reviews, sometimes done on stage with the performers, were legendary stream of consciousness, speed and benzy fuelled gutter masterpieces.

That's funny, cos I have Mainlines, Blood Feasts & Bad Taste, in my desk drawer* as we speak.
(*I just put it there this morning, to read at a later date).

 

[ringo]

"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic" is a good collection of Lester Bangs writing, great for dipping into.

 

[ViolentPanda]

"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic" is a good collection of Lester Bangs writing, great for dipping into.

Especially when he gets into his "hectoring the grand-chilluns about how music back in the day was so much better than the shit on the radio nowadays" mode.

 

[foo]

just finished Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Inshiguro. i enjoyed it, although i've read quite a few books with this theme by now. a bit, The Handsmade's Tale....with boys.

does anyone know if this book is in translation, or did he write it in english?

 

[bluestreak]

Q by Luther Blissett. One of the greatest novels ever written and if you haven't read it you need to.

 

[tastebud]

Q by Luther Blissett. One of the greatest novels ever written and if you haven't read it you need to.

like you already told us, last week, on this very thread.

 

[Dubversion]

"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic" is a good collection of Lester Bangs writing, great for dipping into.

his piece on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is about the most powerful and moving piece of music criticism i've ever read.

What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

and then Bangs closes the piece by comparing a Morrison lyric to this

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

Federico Garcia Lorca

which has me in bits every time i read it

 

[Boogie Boy]

Phew! Bacon was fun!

So now it is going to be 'Poetics' (Aristotle) and 'Culture And Anarchy' (Matthew Arnold).

BB

 

[ViolentPanda]

just finished Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Inshiguro. i enjoyed it, although i've read quite a few books with this theme by now. a bit, The Handsmade's Tale....with boys.

does anyone know if this book is in translation, or did he write it in english?

He writes in English, came over here when he was a toddler. Writes beautifully though, doesn't he?

 

[ViolentPanda]

his piece on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is about the most powerful and moving piece of music criticism i've ever read.




and then Bangs closes the piece by comparing a Morrison lyric to this



which has me in bits every time i read it

Ah well, one poorly thought-out review out of his whole output ain't bad, I suppose.

 

[Dubversion]

i'm going right off you

 

[Fledgling]

Jut finished The Warden by Trollope which was average and have started Three men on the bummel which should be excellent.

 

[quimcunx]

Q&A by someone. It's about an Indian boy who wins 'who wants to be a billionaire' despite being an uneducated poor waiter. Each question relates to a a part of his story. 'snot bad.

 

[Appassionata]

Stuart Spencer - "The Playwright's Guidebook"... because... er... I think I can be one, but I need guidance.

 

[chooch]

Patrick Hamilton Craven House

 

[sojourner]

Have stalled on Disgrace

Am instead re-reading Written on the Body, cos it's my recommendation for book club, and even though I've read it about 4 times now, I need to refresh my ailing memory

What a fucking brilliant book

 

[Dirty Martini]

Finished A Perfect Hoax. I like Svevo a lot, he had human beings nailed.

Now it's Eight German Novellas, alternating with some John Updike memoirs, though he can be a very annoying writer.

 

[wishface]

Trying to read Three Stigmatas of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick. I say trying, my eyesight is not what it was and i am consequenly not the reader i was, to my shame. I do like my genre fiction.