*What book are you reading ?

[Dillinger4]

This week I finished:

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Wonderful book, I have read Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh too. Both books are filled with such a dark and dry sense of humour, and a subtle feeling of a vague impending doom. I cant wait to read more of him (if anybody has any recommendations of other novels, or other similar authors...)

I have also finished:

Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon

I had seen the film before I had read the book, but again a very funny book (in a much different way than Evelyn Waugh)

Books on the go at the moment:

Thinking in action: On Belief - Slavoj Žižek

Not really tried to hard with this one yet, Its a bit heavy and I am supposed to be revising (and this is completely unrelated).

and I have a load of others half on the go....

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

Junkie - William Burroughs

Never read any of his before.. it's okay but he does seem a bit cold and distant so far

of course it does, its written in the head space of someone on junk.

have a sustained go at Naked Lunch next and see where you get, is my absolute advice....

 

[Boogie Boy]

Going to start 'The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner' by James Hogg.

BB

 

[J77]

Recently read:

The Society of Others -- William Nicholson.

It was good for the most part, the ending was a bit lame.

Arthur and George -- Julian Barnes.

Nice book for lazy reading in the sun

 

[Pieface]

Started Deliverance - have no idea what it's going to be like as I haven't seen the film yet - it's downloaded for viewing afterwards though. He's setting them all up for a big fall at the moment and the protagonist is not at all sure what they are doing going up into the mountains to rediscover their masculinity. I think I'm going to like it - there's a survival fantasist character as well - a kind of suburban Ray Mears type but with an edge of frontier machismo - he's so going to come a-cropper

Ended up buying this purely because of a still posted on here from the film the other day of the inbred banjo boy. I wikkied him and the film and found there was a book - the actor was neither inbred nor mentally retarded - and seems to have had 2 parts in his life, one as that kid and one about 20 years later reprising the role in Tim Burton's Big Fish as a town banjo player.

So there you go

 

[Pieface]

oooh - a quotation:

I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men.

They have bows and arrows with them too.

 

[sojourner]

Started Deliverance - have no idea what it's going to be like as I haven't seen the film yet

Can't believe you've never seen the film!


It's very good. Haven't read the book mind

 

[sojourner]

Finally started Jeanette Winterson's The Lighthousekeeper, after also reading The Passion both very whimsical and she really does the story-within-a-story well.

Yay, a fellow JW fan

 

[Pieface]

Can't believe you've never seen the film!

no one can believe it - although an iconic scene which I kind of know about has played out very differently to how it sounds in the film. They may be quite different...

 

[Dubversion]

no one can believe it - although an iconic scene which I kind of know about has played out very differently to how it sounds in the film. They may be quite different...

to be honest, building an impression of Deliverance from listening to "Beers Steers & Queers" by Revolting Cocks might not be reliable

 

[Pieface]

God I hate that fucking song.

 

[foamy]

just started 'Black Swan Green' by David Mitchell. Its seems ok so far, not really sure why i bought it - i didnt enjoy Cloud Atlas that much but this one seems less long

ETA - itsobviously 'less long' as it has less pages, but hopefully it wont be so drawn out

 

[maya]

Junkie - William Burroughs

Never read any of his before.. it's okay but he does seem a bit cold and distant so far

I think he kind of distanced himself from that book in later years, not because of the content (which is largely autobiographical), but because he didn't really know how to write a novel at that time, so he didn't consider it very good-
(Although, the same could perhaps be said of Naked Lunch, which is perhaps the worst of his books IMO!)

By his own definition he belonged to the picaresque tradition, that kind of satiric and bizarre tales which has links to oral traditions in medieval times but which in literature started with works such as Satyricon... Wild exaggerations, sex and shit and sperm and death, the grotesque and the uncanny...

If you're interested in his a bit more advanced "cut-up" novels, you could try The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, or Nova Express...

But I'm especially fond of his three latest books which are written in a more conventional narrative, abandoning the experimentalism... They're a bit more mellow (or as mellow as Burroughs can be- which means still not exactly bedtime stories), and IMO works better as enjoyable novels in their own right (whereas the preceding works have many good bits, interspersed among lots of not so good bits, while juxtaposed so confusingly the damn thing feels like a maze of ciphers or a practical joke where the prank is on you)

Not everyone warms to his work at all- Myself I don't think his language is that good, he's more of an ideas man... But a lot of authors are, that doesn't necessarily diminish his value...

 

[N_igma]

Tony Hawks-One Hit Wonderland.

 

[chooch]

Alasdair Gray- Lanark

 

[sojourner]

Michele Roberts - A Piece of the Night

Fucking wonderful wonderful writing...a welcome change after the last 'easy read' which is so beloved of my fellow bookclub members

 

[Nikkormat]

She, by Henry Rider Haggard. Great book, gripping.

 

[J77]

I just read The boy in the striped pyjamas by John Boyne.

A book which should be on every school's reading list!

 

[Pieface]

Alasdair Gray- Lanark

Fucking amazing novel! I waffled about it somewhere on here...

I just saw the mural he's done in a converted church in Glasgow's west end - it's beautiful - place called Oran Mor.

 

[chooch]

Fucking amazing novel! I waffled about it somewhere on here...
I just saw the mural he's done in a converted church in Glasgow's west end - it's beautiful - place called Oran Mor.

I´m enjoying it so far. Quite dark, very strange.

 

[Pieface]

SO strange!!

 

[SubZeroCat]

The Innocent by Ian McEwan

 

[DotCommunist]

Just started Gravitiy's Rainbow. Looks promising so far, the same surreal tone and unique writing style as in Vineland.

It's on a one week loan from the library. The chunkiest, most challenging book of all I took out this week is on a one week loan. Bah

 

[Dubversion]

Dr John - Under A Hoodoo Moon (by Rebennack with Jack Rummel)

no idea how ghostwritten this is, but it's excellent - really captures the flavour of New Orleans and is written in the speech patterns and language the Dr uses. Wonderful stuff (apparently he was so fucked at the time that he doesn't remember writing it, but that might be hype.. )

 

[foo]

just finished, The Paper Eater - Liz Jensen.

odd but good.

 

[zora]

Apples by Richard Milward. Which is really very VERY good.

 

[May Kasahara]

Finished 'A Good Man In Africa' at the weekend, which was enjoyably daft. Am now reading Alice Sebold's 'The Lovely Bones', which is this month's book club choice; I am getting on with it better than I thought I would (a lot of the incidence is very well observed) but at the same time it is really starting to piss me off.

 

[Dirty Martini]

I've just whipped through 'Those Feet. An Intimate History of English Football' by David Winner, which was really disappointing. I was expecting a lot more. Nothing particularly original in it, a lot of it being cobbled together from other writers' stuff on declinism, post-imperial unease, bla bla. Quite a few factual errors too.

 

[Dirty Martini]

'Visits From The Drowned Girl' by Steven Sherrill. I liked 'The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break', so I'm hoping I'll like this.

 

[May Kasahara]

'The Lovely Bones' is pretty awful, tbh. Thankfully it is also a quick read, so should be over soon.