Last Book You Read....

[Johnny Fingers]

The Lion - Nelson Demille.

Follow up to 'The Lions game' (which was excellent) and have to say I found it somewhat disappointing.

6.5/10.

[Mak]

I'm currently on Boris Akunin's He Lover of Death - an Erast Fandorin mystery.

It's fast moving, not too intellectually challenging and - like all of the Fandorin books - good fun. The perfect book to relax from uni work with.

[Sunrise]

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. Not seen the film, but the book is another good work by the peculiar author. It's well written and Holly Golightly's character is iconic in how she represents finding oneself considering her background. It's really easy to get into and teach to young people - too easy really for education though as the whole plot is 'finding oneself'.

Read some of the man's stuff, including his landmark true crime thriller In Cold Blood, for my literature class at uni.

Edited March 15, 2011 by Sunrise

[mighty meadow]

Currently near the end of 'White Line Fever' the autobiographty of Lemmy. Not a massive fan of his music but the book is a pretty good read for the commute to work in the morning. Nothing too deep as you can probably imagine but plenty of sex, drugs and alcohol with a bit of violence thrown in for good measure. Got it for 75p in the local charity shop

The last book I read on way to work was pretty similar. Again not a massive fan but Led Zeppelin's unauthorised biography 'Hammer Of The Gods' was also a decent read. Again plenty of sex, drugs and alcohol with slightly more violence thrown in. Don't know too much about the individual members but if the book is accurate then Plant, Page and Bonham sound like a right bunch of p***ks i the early days. Again, 75p from the local charity shop.

Also finished 'The Killing Place' by Tess Gerritsen recently. First I had read any of her books and only bought it as part of the 2 for £7 deal in Asda when I was buying a book for the missus. Quite an enjoyable thriller even though it's not my normal type of reading material. Left a good enough impression for me to try some more of her stuff.

[T_S_A_R]

i finally finished gravity's rainbow by thomas pynchon.

it's a 900 page monster with incredibly dense and complex prose featuring aprox. 400 characters. it's a bit of a slog in some places but most of the time it's very, very funny and extremely readable. this is my second pynchon novel and like 'the crying of lot 49' it's brimming with references and allusions and it encourages a bit of research into the wide range of subjects addressed. at times it's overwhelming and i'm sure that a lot of it went completely over my head but it's a novel which you find yourself very easily immersed in and captivated by the scope and achievement of.

if there is a plot it's pretty hard to describe. it's set in europe in 1944 and 1945 as the war concludes, mainly in london and the south east during the v2 rockets attacks and in germany during the period when germany didn't legally exist anymore. it's pretty similar to 'moby dick' in that it does feel like several different books in different styles all merged into one although it's far more abstract than anything melville tried in his epic. instead of a white whale this novel is centred around a mythical v2 rocket called the schwarzgerat and the search for information on this rocket leads a very odd cast of characters in to some extremely strange situations. everyone in the novel is either a complete deviant or comprised in some way and there are lot of very peculiar goings on with every character seemingly being somehow plotted against in a game they have very little idea they are playing.

reading pynchon has an extra dimension that most novels don't have due to the fact he doesn't do any interviews and to the best of my knowledge has never spoken about his work. parts of the book make me think it must be partly inspired by lsd and he was in the right place at the right time to have been part of that in the 1960s but i guess there will never be any serious critical biography of him due to his desire for privacy. i do enjoy reading interviews and profiles of novelists but i think with pynchon due to the hyper paranoiac vibe that his writing creates and the general weirdness of it all his silence on it is fitting.

as much as i think it's a work of genius i'll be glad to be rereading some more straight forward old favourites next. i'm going to reread the 'master and margarita' to see how much rushdie ripped off from it in 'satanic verses' then batter into some hemingway and kerouac as i've abandoned them for far too long.

gravity's rainbow is also a musical and features a lot of songs throughout. this is my favourite, the origin of a characters genitals come into question and the chorus intone...

'Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own –

Just a big playful boy of a bone . . .

With a stout purple head

Sticking up from the bead,

Where the girlies all played Telephone

Te-le-phone

But They came through the hole in the night,

And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight---

Out of sight…

Now he sighs all alone,

With a heartbroken moan,

For the Pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn!

Edited March 24, 2011 by T_S_A_R

[Ludo*1]

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. 9.5/10

An absolutely amazing book about what happens when the devil, with chums in tow, pays a visit to the atheist city of 30s Moscow. I scarcely know how to start describing it. It was banned from publication when it was first written and only came to light in Khrushchev's thaw in the (70s?) i think. Some of the themes are obvious, like Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical account of the life of a writer at the time, and the general absurdity and collective self-delusion of the soviet union and its people at the time, but others are more complex and i doubt i will fully understand them soon, if ever. Amazing.

Sounds top notch, the only worry I have is, is it a difficult read?

[T_S_A_R]

Sounds top notch, the only worry I have is, is it a difficult read?

not at all.

most editions have quite detailed annotations which explain the russian references you probably wouldn't get otherwise which is handy but it's very funny and quite straightforward. as long as you know the tiniest amount about the politcal purges and culture of fear and informants in the 1930s in moscow you'll be fine.

Edited March 24, 2011 by T_S_A_R

[Ludo*1]

not at all.

most editions have quite detailed annotations which explain the russian references you probably wouldn't get otherwise which is handy but it's very funny and quite straightforward. as long as you know the tiniest amount about the politcal purges and culture of fear and informants in the 1930s in moscow you'll be fine.

Not particularly. As far as 'classic literature' goes, i actually found it easier than most. It helps that aside from being a serious piece of work it is also a pretty funny comedy as well. Some of the stuff the devil gets up to is pretty hilarious. Put it this way, if I managed to read, follow and enjoy it when I was trying to read it in a few hours at about 4am because i had a uni tutorial on it then someone reading it for pleasure at their leisure should have no problems. Also any book that includes a russian guy called Archie Archibaldovitch gets my seal of approval.

Although having said that, while the writing and the style is easy, the plot can get pretty surreal at times, so it might be difficult in the sense of working out what exactly is going on at certain points. Still strongly, strongly recommend it though.

Cheers. I'll have a look for it, definitely intrigued by it.

[wunfellaff]

Cheers. I'll have a look for it, definitely intrigued by it.

Also, was 'probably' what Jagger had read before writing 'sympathy for the devil'.

[madwullie]

Thomas Pynchon is fucking amazing - would heavily recommend checking out all his other stuff.

[T_S_A_R]

Thomas Pynchon is fucking amazing - would heavily recommend checking out all his other stuff.

i'm very keen to. as i've said i've read 'the crying of lot 49' and i'll probably read 'v' later this year.

but i'm glad to get a break from it now and return to the world of paragraphs, sentence structure and something resembling a linear narrative. 'gravity's rainbow' was a fair old commitment, i couldn't read it on the bus/train, i couldn't read it with a hangover or after a heavy weekend, i couldn't read it late at night and whenever i picked it up i inevitably ended up having to reread the last bits i had already read to get back into the flow and i was constantly flicking back the way to find characters that had reappeared after a couple of hundred pages.

i've read some reviews of 'against the day' and it seems quite similar in scope to 'gravitys rainbow' but bigger so i think i'll save that for next year unless i end up in hospital, plaster or the jail.

[madwullie]

i'm very keen to. as i've said i've read 'the crying of lot 49' and i'll probably read 'v' later this year.

but i'm glad to get a break from it now and return to the world of paragraphs, sentence structure and something resembling a linear narrative. 'gravity's rainbow' was a fair old commitment, i couldn't read it on the bus/train, i couldn't read it with a hangover or after a heavy weekend, i couldn't read it late at night and whenever i picked it up i inevitably ended up having to reread the last bits i had already read to get back into the flow and i was constantly flicking back the way to find characters that had reappeared after a couple of hundred pages.

i've read some reviews of 'against the day' and it seems quite similar in scope to 'gravitys rainbow' but bigger so i think i'll save that for next year unless i end up in hospital, plaster or the jail.

Totally agree. The first time I tried to read him I was when I was smoking a lot, and I'd have to go back and re-read entire sections because it was impossible to take any of it in.

[mighty meadow]

The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

7/10

[T_S_A_R]

recently i have read the master and margarita by mikhail bulgakov. i think it's probably the 4th or 5th time i've read it but it's also the first time in about 5 years andi found it as funny and as interesting as ever. there are three main narrative strands one following the fortunes of the title characters as they cut a deal with the devil, another relating the chaos caused by the devil and his lunatic band in stalinist moscow and a third which relates an alternative and more realistic version of the easter story centred mainly around pontius pilate. i could quite happily enthuse about every aspect of this book but i think my favourite thing is the narrative voice, he is completely charming and lyrical and you feel as if you're listening to someone tell you a fantastic story.

after that i picked up to have and have not by ernest hemingway. it's another book i read years ago but i didn't remember it as well as the bulgakov. it's classic hemingway, very easy to read with large helpings of racism and violence. it's set in the florida keys during the great depression and focuses on a local man who makes his living taking tourists out fishing but as the crash hits is forced into more and more shady dealings to make money. it reads as much as a social history as a novel as it documents the poverty and hunger of the local people contrasted to the conceited excesses of the rich tourists. although it's a very enjoyable book due to the heavy handed politicism it's not up there with my favourite hemingway works. it does make you want to get out doing some serious sport fishing though.

i went on a bit of an amazon splurge after that and bought 16 books which will keep me going til the autumn i'd imagine. currently reading warlock which is a cowboy/western novel, pretty good so far.

Edited April 13, 2011 by T_S_A_R

[drs]

''The Terror'' by Dan Simmons - reworking the 'lost' Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage with Eskimo mythology. Good read.

Would recommend most of Simmons work, though the American crime stuff was shite.

Read it, passed to Oxfam,

Awful, awful book.

Not even the hero having his tongue cut out could make this interesting in the slightest.

[footiechick]

The Ghost of White Hart Lane by Rob White

The carreer of John White of Alloa, Falkirk and Spurs written by his son. As a Falkirk fan I'd heard he was a great player so wanted to read it even though I'm not really into bios.

Tragically killed by lightning on a golf course when he was only 26.

Really really good read.

[yoda]

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

Quite a short book (I finished it within a day) which is basically a 'memoir' of the Vonnegut's life. Typical Vonnegut, plenty of humour and a helping of scathing satire, and he basically discusses his life and the world now. Decent enough if you like his stuff.

I have 'The Rum Diary' sitting on my desk and I'll probably start it in the next few days. Really looking forward to it

[spud131]

Trying to read 'All the Pretty Horses' by Cormac McCarthy but finding it incredibly hard going. Are all his books similar in style to this?

Edited May 3, 2011 by spud131

[Monster]

I'm currently reading One Day by David Nicholls.

I know it's a bit girly, but actually I can understand the hype about it. It really gets you involved in the characters lives and makes you want to keep reading it.

The logical question I keep coming back to though, is quite simply: Why don't they just get together? The pair of them are clearly not being honest with themselves.

Why am I analysing fictional characters?

[morrison]

I recently finished J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun.

for those that don't already know it, this is a semi-autobiographical account of Jim, a young boy growing up in Shanghai in the days and years following the Pearl Harbour attack. It's compelling reading and a moving story. I enjoyed reading Jim's views on what was going on around him - I'm sure it's not possible to like this character. All in all, an excellent book.

Also finished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas over the weekend; very funny stuff and utterly bizarre in places. A fine change of pace after my previous read.