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*What book are you reading ?

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currently reading 3 books at once:

Music For Torching by AM Holmes
Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon (which i partly read - and loved - years ago)
How To Survive A Robot Uprising by Daniel Wilson, which is just silly

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Dubversion said:
currently reading 3 books at once:

Music For Torching by AM Holmes
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have you read 'This book will save your life'? the book group book of the month... I've read it and am wondering what other AM Holmes stuff is like....
 
Maybe it's the ex being away or the fact I'm trying to stay out of the pub, but I've read a scary amount this last week or two:

Howard Sounes - Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (Superb book - cheers bluestreak :cool: :) )

Andrew Simms - Tescopoly: How one shop came out on top and why it matters (Interesting, occasionally startling but didn't tell me much I didn't already know)

Max Adam - Nelson's Own Hero: The Life of Admiral Collingwood (Very readable, but I've read better...)

Richard Woodman - The Real Cruel Sea: The Merchant Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic (a bit narrative and unfocused so far, but interesting and often moving)

:cool:
 
foamy said:
have you read 'This book will save your life'? the book group book of the month... I've read it and am wondering what other AM Holmes stuff is like....
Click to expand...
It's nothing like the others but I'd recommend her others heartily
 
Orang Utan said:
Carrie or The Shining.
Pet Sematary is pretty good too.
Oh and The Dead Zone is fucking awesome!
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My picks for his best books are Firestarter, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Salem's Lot. There are two collections of his early short stories that are great as well - Skeleton Crew and Nightshift.
 
I didn't think much of Firestarter, but I loved the short stories - the most disturbing one is that bloke on the desert island with a load of surgical equipment and some smack. And no food. So he eats himself....
 
I LOVE Firestarter, it's probably my favourite book of his. It really shows that his writing is so much more than just bog-standard genre horror - the subject itself isn't that horrific, but the characters are so well drawn. Plus, what little girl doesn't dream of being able to incinerate her enemies with the fiery power of a thousand suns?
 
A TREATISE CONCERNING WEE: The uses thereof as a palliative, agent of cleansing both moral and physickal, as a tanning agent, an agent of spiritual and moral refinement, uses in medicinal decoctions and as a tonick for the relief for common ailments CONTAINING THEREIN a compleat description of the divers appearances, odours and tastes of lees, the humours of their production, Biblical concordances, a description of urea in history since the Classical Era, & c.

by Isaak Milesie, printed by Geo. R Urethra, publisher of urinary tracts at the sign of the Tun of Golden Water, Walton-on-Piddle. MDCCLVII
 
Picked up one of these Books Crossing books on the bus (where books are re-homed, with an indentifying sticker) - Run for Home by Sheila Quigley. Not my usual fare - crime novel - but original, very well written, northern (unusual) and highly recommended.
 
moonsi til said:
Anthropologist On Mars by Oliver Sacks.....ace bedtime reading, Im having very lucid dreams at the mo....
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I've just brought this - looking forward to it - i loved "The Man who mistook His Wife For a Hat"! Very interesting.

Just Finnished The Zahir by Paullo Colleho - also very good.
 
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Urgh. I knew there was a reason the postage was more than the cost of the book. Loads of them for a penny on amazon. I hate suicidal Danish Lit students. (the person who suggested the book)
 
Having finished Woodman, I've made a start on The Prize of all the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson's Voyage Round the World, by Glyn Williams. Given that I know Glyn and he's a nice bloke I've a slight vested interest in saying so, but the book really is superb. I read 100 pages last night without a pause. :cool:
 
MysteryGuest said:
A TREATISE CONCERNING WEE: The uses thereof as a palliative, agent of cleansing both moral and physickal, as a tanning agent, an agent of spiritual and moral refinement, uses in medicinal decoctions and as a tonick for the relief for common ailments CONTAINING THEREIN a compleat description of the divers appearances, odours and tastes of lees, the humours of their production, Biblical concordances, a description of urea in history since the Classical Era, & c.

by Isaak Milesie, printed by Geo. R Urethra, publisher of urinary tracts at the sign of the Tun of Golden Water, Walton-on-Piddle. MDCCLVII
Click to expand...
ISBN?
 
I'm not reading much at the moment, but I finished The Gambler by Dostoevsky last week, which was brilliant, really hard stuff, took a line to say what other writers toil for pages to say. I'd never read any of his stuff before. He was a punk. It'd make a great film, if you perhaps made the roulette into something else and updated the setting.

Now I'm reading The Right Nation. Why America is Different by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It's interesting and funny.
 
Dirty Martini, have you got any recommendations where to start re: "classic" [i.e., 19th century] Russian novels?* :)
I've read a fair bit of Dostojevskij, Tolstoy, Turgenyev, Checkov... But that's it, really- The sheer amount of the available literature is frightening, like an impenetrenable (but very interesting) mass... Have absolutely no idea where to start! :eek:

(*After about ten years of snobbish sneering at "old-fashioned" literary style and preferring to read modernist/avant-whathaveyou novelists, I've recently rediscovered the joy of "classic", epic, literature! And its a very welcome reunion, I must say...)
 
I'll bump that thought on 19th century Russian lit maya, I'd like to get a few more ideas, I like some 20th century Russian novels but feel that knowledge of more 19th would be helpful.

Currently having a bit of a Russian extravaganza with And Quiet flows the Don by Sholokhov, A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes and the harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest. Conquest is definitely an excellent historian but also seems to like wiriting more general books on political thought. I am nearing the end of his Reflections on a Ravaged Century which criticises the dogmatic solutions led ideologies of the 20th century. Interesting although at times it seems like a series of academic attacks on Hobswarm. Also finished Crick's biog of Orwell for second time and on reflection that was definitley more about the works (as opposed to the man) than I expected.
 
maya said:
Dirty Martini, have you got any recommendations where to start re: "classic" [i.e., 19th century] Russian novels?* :)
I've read a fair bit of Dostojevskij, Tolstoy, Turgenyev, Checkov... But that's it, really- The sheer amount of the available literature is frightening, like an impenetrenable (but very interesting) mass... Have absolutely no idea where to start! :eek:

(*After about ten years of snobbish sneering at "old-fashioned" literary style and preferring to read modernist/avant-whathaveyou novelists, I've recently rediscovered the joy of "classic", epic, literature! And its a very welcome reunion, I must say...)
Click to expand...

Heh, you've read more than me then. The Gambler's the only Russian thing I've read, unless Nabokov counts. I had a similar thing to you -- for years, if it wasn't American, it wasn't worth bothering about...
 
Papingo said:
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Urgh. I knew there was a reason the postage was more than the cost of the book. Loads of them for a penny on amazon. I hate suicidal Danish Lit students. (the person who suggested the book)
Click to expand...

I loathe that book too - she should have called it To The Dinner Party. Woolf is so overrated, she's been lionized because of her Bloomsbury connections (fuck knows why they were all awful) and dare I say it because she is a woman. And she didn't invent stream of consciousness either.

Her lit-crit though is first class.
 
I'm reading The Mansion by William Faulkner. I've never read anything by him before - it's a huge hole in my reading CV. The Mansion is one of his last books so perhaps it's not the best place to start. The first 50 pages have been magnificent though and you can see his influence on people like Cormac McCarthy.
 
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