Peter Russo, Dr Mohammed Haneef’s lawyer, justified releasing the full transcript of the police interview with his client by saying that paying attention only to the selective bits Kevin Andrews had quoted were like having read only half a book.
That gave me an idea. By popular Nabakov’s request, I bring you yet another LP book thread.
What book are you reading right now? How does it measure up to its initial promise half way through? Fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter. But I’m interested in how people’s judgements, assessments, engagements, feelings about a book change as they read on…
Cool post idea.
I’m reading my colleague Ray Evans’ new CUP History of Queensland.
Review here:
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22176099-5003424,00.html
I’m just up to the bit where he’s going to talk about the Bjelke-Petersen era. It’s been an interesting read for me because one thing I’m doing with a course I’m teaching this semester – Government and Economy – is trying to integrate theoretical perspectives on political sociology, political theory and political economy with the history of Brisbane. Ray’s going to be taking us on a Brisbane history field trip in a couple of weeks. There are some very startling continuities – and a big sense of the specificity and the difference of what transpired and the patterns of social development and political conflict in this place as opposed to other bits of Australia. So I’m enjoying the writing, the research, and the way I can sort of integrate history with my sense of place. My feeling at the moment is one of anticipation as I get to some history I can actually remember in part.
Non-fiction: Jared Diamond’s Collapse, mid way though it, the stuff about Vikings in Greenland. What impresses me, as ever with Diamond, is the ease with which he can make soil erosion and water-tables, fishery management and mineral composition into fascinating and easily understandable to the lay reader. That said, this is the fourth ecological collapse in a group of about eight and it is getting a bit depressing as basic patterns emerge. I will finish it but I have slowed the pace appreciably
Fiction: Gardens of the Moon Steven Erikson. This got recommended to me as being in the same ‘gritty epic’ style of Fantasy as George Martin’s kickass Song of Ice and Fire series. Midway through it and I’m somewhat impressed yet pretty aware of the book’s failings. Narrative sequence is still jerky, several characters are annoyingly underdone (others are brilliant) and the massive backstory and Erikson’s reticence to give the reader any more than a morsel at a time alternates between courageous and stimulating and utterly frustrating, expecially when the pace stalls. Were it not for the vivid and lyrical descriptions of the utterly fantastic universe and intriguinging characters I could easily see myself chucking this across the floor, but I will definately finish and may read more of the series.
I have read Collapse, I recall it gets better again halfway through when he starts studying successes, because the societies in question are interesting. There’s a great bit in New Guinea about his mate having to go home to eat his uncle. The problem I have with books like this is that if you are an outsider to the particular academic field being studied, I think it is very easy to be impressed by an argument which within its field is considered to be quite poorly put, so one’s ability to judge the worth of the book is compromised.
I am halfway through a book called “Tokyo Real”, which is a Japanese moral panic tabloid-style story about schoolgirls who become ecstasy addicts (!?). It is a tiny book with very big type and spaces between every sentence, written in Japanese, and the first Japanese “novel” I have ever tried. It’s slow going because my Japanese is so poor that to read sentences longer than “the cat sat on the mat” takes a long time. Good grammar practice though. And funny in its own way – it’s a testament to the safety of Japanese society that their biggest concern is schoolgirls taking ecstacy.
I’m about 60 pages into a completely enchanting book (yeah yeah, weird thing to say about a crime novel, but it is, truly) by a crime writer I’d not heard of before: Louise Penny‘s The Cruellest Month. Here’s a sample:
‘What’re you doing?’ Olivier asked Gabri. It was the middle of the night and they were standing in their living room at the B&B. Olivier had reached over and felt Gabri’s side of the bed cold. Now Olivier pulled the belt of his silk dressing gown tighter and through bleary eyes watched his partner.
Gabri, in rumpled pajama bottoms and slippers, was holding a croissant in his hand and seemed to be taking it for a walk round their living room.
‘I’m getting rid of any evil spirits that might have followed me home from the séance.’
‘With baked goods?’
‘Well, we didn’t have any hot cross buns, so this was the next best thing. Isn’t the crescent the symbol of Islam?’
…. And another:
‘I went to Cambridge. Christ’s College. Studied history.’
‘And honed your English.’
‘Learned my English.’
Now it was Clara’s turn to be surprsied.
‘You didn’t speak English before arriving in Cambridge?’
‘Well, I could say two things.’
‘And those were …?’
‘Fire on the Klingons, and My God, Admiral, it’s horrible.’
I’m reading A Separate Peace, which I’m finding much more interesting than last time I attempted it. For my more trashy bedtime reading, I’m rereading a lot of Dorothy L. Sayers detective stories. I just finished Gaudy Night (it’s my favourite of the LPW series). Something I finished a while ago and have been meaning to return to the library is The Justice Game, which was just as interesting as I remembered it being when I first read it several years ago.
Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
Brilliant character study of the man who invented much of the machinery of the US security state.
Grose’s achievement is to demonstrate how inauthentic became Dulles’ presentation of himself to the world. And how Dulles lost himself in the wilderness of mirrors of his own construction. Initially a very attractive personality, he emptied himself of his own heritage and integrity.
The US is a culturally poorer, less free, less honest place because of Allen Dulles.
Margaret Yorke ‘No Medals for the Major’. A crime novel written in 1974 with beautifully realised characters and relying heavily on human nature to fine tune the suspense to breaking point. Suspense is building and you know it’s all about to horribly wrong before coming back to something resembling rightness, but not a Hollywood ending.
Fiction: Felix Holt the Radical by George Eliot. I’m about halfway through. As usual with Eliot it’s beautifully phrased, insightful, illuminating, often very moving, but a bit over-earnest and sententious. Even her comic relief, while witty, has something Teutonic about it.
More so than with other Eliots you see how conservative (with a small c) she was – she doesn’t approve of those wanting change at all (ironic in view of her life history). And I’m also reminded of Nietzsche’s comment that she had abandoned the Christian God but was still shackled by the Christian worldview.
Non-fiction: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Stephen Landes. Disappointing in the light of the reviews. It’s very Chicagoesque in its economics, which would be OK if it was accompanied by more original insights (something Chicago boys have traditionally been good at) and if Landes did not tend to be a bit too selective as to the historical evidence. And unfortunately Landes is not a gifted prose stylist – it’s proving a bit of a struggle to finish.
I’m reading Ian Irvine’s [i]The View from the Mirror[/i] series. He’s a fantasy writer from down near Dorrigo in NSW. I read the series when I was about 15… I feel like revisiting it again. I have such a poor memory that it’s almost like reading it for the first time anyway. Enjoying it thoroughly. No matter how much I grow up… I’ll never grow out these kinds of books.
Cliff – Jaysus but you had me worried for a sec! A quick google search has revealed you’re talking about a different Ian Irvine to the tool I’m often forced to work with. ‘Nuff said, methinks.
I’ve just started readin an ex-student’s feature film script – based on a true story (apparently) – about Victorian gangsters. Violent, foul-mouthed and pretty slick sounding at this point. But do we need another one of these?
Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams by C.L Moore.
Almost exactly half-way through.
It’s interesting, I’d come across her through old issues of Weird Tales, her style certainly preserves a fifties pulpishness, but it’s a cut above the usual standard – she seems happy to abandon the linguistic genre tropes when necessary and it makes her prose considerably more atmospheric.
Leinad – I haven’t read Erikson (god only knows when Martin is gonna finish that series. Sob! I would never have started back in 99 had I known…) but if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to shit me to tears in fantasy novels, it’s when half the bloody book (or more) is a goddamned journey to somewhere. I hate it, I hate it so much (which is why, cf Cliff, I’m not very impressed with Irvine at all).
Mervyn Peake wrote two fantasy books essentially set inside a single castle, and they are, imho, the most brilliant examples of the genre I’ve ever read. Your (shudder) Jordans, Goodkinds, Brooks, etc. woudl do well to take a lesson from them.
The Janissary Tree: It’s good. The period it’s set in – Istanbul in 1836 – is one of change so I was always going to enjoy it. I had been half-expecting a kind of Noir-Holmes fusion though; it’s really just a Turkish Holmes.
Speaking of half-read books…. I’m still halfway through
The Brothers Karamazov. I bought it when I was 17, read half of it when I was 21 but put it aside when the pressure my honours dissertation work started to get daunting. I still haven’t got back to it yet. Kevin Andrews probably read halfway through and ordered the deportation of Dmitri on character grounds…… don’t tell me who did it, because I’m planning on getting back to reading it someday! Mind you, despite my pretensions to intellectual cred I’m not one to read much highbrow literature. My bibliography is mostly along the lines of Raymond E. Feist, Tolkien, David Eddings, Philip K Dick and Douglas Adams. The English Co-ordinator at my High School was always disgusted at what I was reading, and was constantly trying to force Tim Winton on me lest I rot my brain. My english teacher tried to get me to read Plato’s Symposium but all I can remember from it is a bunch of Greeks getting drunk and discussing homosexual pederasty. I’m sure there was more to it than that though…
American Primitive John Fahey’s How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life.
Been wanting this for some time. Strange and wonderful writing. Not your usual book about music.
Well, most of the first book “A Shadow on the Glass” consists of Karan and Llian constantly fleeing across mountains and rivers and wherever… so you’d hate it, I must admit. I like the whole idea of there being a mystery involved that is slowly revealed. I thank my poor memory because I forget the answer….
I also like moral ambiguity. I don’t like a simple good vs. bad story (which is one of the problems with Tolkien)… and Irvine is good at revealing that “goodie vs. baddie” dichotomy is generally speaking, a partial and subjective construction… the myth of a character’s evil breaking down once the reader gains proximity to that character in the story. There’s something to like and hate in all of the powerful characters… unlike Tolkien’s more theological construction.
Im reading “Sorry” by Gail Jones.
I fear that the book is not living up to the early promise of the wonderful opening pages. The Shakespeare woven throughout the book doesnt work in my view, it seems clumsy and laden. Not a realist text but rather functions with a kind of hyperbolic excess, as Jones has put it. Some people have said this and I agree its possible that it references Toni Morrison’s Beloved, memory, re-membering and the repressions of the past. Yet its opening words seem to call out to the whispers of “Benang”. Perdita (lost) is the name of the central character and its a great question Jones poses …”Is it too late to say sorry, did the moment pass, did white Australia lose the only moment it had?” Just a heartbreaking question, too poignant, to wonder if maybe we missed the moment….
I am reading “Silencing Dissent“, by Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison. It compiles chapters written by experts in their fields to show how the Howard government has systematically repressed and controlled public information in a whole range of related areas:
- universities
- research
- NGOs
- the media
- the public service
- statutory authorities
- the military and intelligence services
- the Senate
Oddly enough, I find the book strangely reassuring because it explains of of my greatest grievances about the state of Australia, namely that the public are asleep to all that is being done in their name.
Of course, we all know about many, if not most of these things, but reading them all carefully compiled between the pages of this book makes me realise just how thoroughly, how damned professionally, the job of dumbing-down Australia has been accomplished.
I am jumping from chapter to chapter, now focussed on the media.
‘True Confessions’, by John Gregory Dunne. Well, after Joan Didion’s ‘Year of Magical Thinking’, I keenly felt the need to read something by her husband. It’s snappy, and I’ll bet it caused quite a stir among the Catholic clergy when it came out.
Reading The City of Falling Angels – John Berendt’s account of the fire that destroyed the Opera House in Venice in 1996. It makes a nice change from Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist which I read last weekend. Flanagan was sordid, depressing and, I had the feeling all the way through, trying too hard. Berendt is like a New Yorker article – classy setting, assured, interesting.
Fiction: currently reading the ‘His Dark Materials‘ Trilogy. The anti-theism is getting stronger with each book. I would have loved these books as a young adult.
Non-fiction: finally reading The Weathermakers. Haven’t really read much of it yet.
Halfway through Pynchon’s latest – the funny thing about it is that it’s quite enjoyable while you’re reading it. That said, the lack (or conscious aversion from) normal narrative development (it’s more a gigantic mesh of interwoven stories, all of which are entrancing and engaging, but don’t have a teleological endpoint) has the effect that, as much as I enjoy it while I’m reading it, I’m just not motivated to pick it up in preference to other things.
Such as the last few volumes of ‘Cerebus’ (the longest running independent comic series, and one of the longest works of fiction in literatur, collected in 16 ‘phonebook’ volumes). Cerebus is really a case study of how the end of a work can marr your enjoyment of the whole. Basically, Cerebus went from being a satirical pastiche of ‘Conan the Barbarian’, then onwards into a vehicle for political and religious satire, then a collection of reflections on great literary figures (Oscar Wilde, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemignway), but ended with the insane conspiratorial religious ramblings of its self-obsessed author. What a journey though – I’m trying to finish the last few volumes despite how much I’ve come to hate what the comic eventually became.
I whipped through ‘Motley Crue: The Dirt’ in a couple of night, and can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it – absolutely hilarious.
I got half way through Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’, then read Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Written on the Body’ for a class. The Winterson book was beautiful. I was already a fan of her first three novels, but this one may be better. I’ve talked to people who felt the gender ambiguity of the narrator was a total failure, but I think it was successful.
Now I’m back to Chandler. It’s interesting to read something that has been endlessly referenced, paid homage to, satirised etc in the intervening years. I admire the economy of the writing, and that it is so well-paced. Some of the lines are classic, although I do wonder whether Chandlers original audience were laughing as often as I seem to be, or at the same parts.
books 2% read
Hi Gandhi,
I had a quick look at “Silencing Dissent” a few months ago, and found its main argument quite unconvincing.
First, the experts are ‘self-apponied’, or perhaps self-selecting in that they seem to have come together in the fervent belief that dissent is being silenced.
Second, I find their cases weak: at least in a quick skim. I think they describe several developments
i) more right-wing think tanks
ii) more right-wing columnists
iii) government ignores policy recommendations from “progressive” sources
iv) “progressive” writers/speakers/.ploemicists find themselves heckled or argued against
To me,
i) is just an observation: if true, it may widen discussion in Australia, it may mean a broader range of topics is up for grabs; it may mean non-right-wingers have to HONE their arguments or JUSTIFY their assumptions or COLLECT FURTHER DATA. I don’t see why any of these should be resented. In a liberal society, discussion and debate can lead to better policy suggestions on all sides, don’t you think?
ii) get over it! A free press baron may employ whomever he sees fit.
iii) the government, any government, is entitled to take advice from wherever it likes; and then is required to justify its decisions publicly. I’m getting sick and tired of certain pompous writers labelling themselves (and their friends) “public intellectuals” implicit is the feeling that their views should be worshipped. I don’t believe that high public merit is aquired simply by large public output.
iv) get over it! If the community wants anything, it wants free discussion from a wide range of viewpoints so issues and opinions can be weighed
I’m inclined to think the present government hasn’t particularly muddied the waters of public debate. It hasn’t “closed down dissent”, really.
Do you recall PM Bob Hawke’s rhetorical response to occasional critics? quoth he “The reality is….” (so the dissenter was by Bob’s definition ‘unrealistic’)
Paul Keating will engage arguments, but overdoes the abuse.
Mark Latham glowered (and emailed) with menace and invective.
Clyde Cameron was “a great hater”.
Dear Jim Cairns was confused.
Gough was by any measure humble and shy.
It’s not as if the ‘Labor side’ has always been Periclean in adhering to calm, open, rational, clear, non-abusive debate. Far from it.
cheerio
Adam,
Oh I _love_ Chandler. Beautiful, beautiful prose that I think became overshadowed by the genre he wrote in and his endlessly quoted one-liners, which don’t actually crop up that often. So snappy and terse, I would give something to be able to write with such economy. I can always picture him writing, look at his sentences and thinking “what else can I cut?”
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
America Alone by Mark Steyn.
Highly recommend it!
I’m in the process of researching for a book on the First and Second Fleeters who were involved in the American Revolution. 97 of them if you count James Cook’s very tangential involvement, and take a wide perspective and include Europe and India. Without the latter I’d have to leave Philip out.
Just bought, today, Edward Countryman’s The American Revolution. Not into it far enough to make a judgement about it, but the blurb says it uses the ‘new’ [1985] social history to interrpret a supremely political event. Its going to mhave to be something to equal Gary B. Nash’s recently published The Uknown American Revolution. That puts paid to any idea that the American Revolution was remotely conservative in its early stages. And its a thumping good read so I recommend it highly.
Halfway through Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763 which is much easier going than some of the journals for the later years. Not quite on a par with his Life of Johnson. Oh for the life of the idle 18c, aristocracy. But on reflection all our lives are probably as irrelevant as Boswell’s in the wider scheme of things.
The murderer in Brothers Karamazov is …
This is a wonder4ful thread and there’s nothing better than a good discussion about books or movies. It even beats politics.
I loved ‘written on the body’ and couldn’t understand why the ambiguous gender of the hero (?) was even relevant, let alone controversial. Like Ged’s race in A Wizard of Earthsea, I didn’t even notice. I have to say though I think Winterson’s later works have descended rapidly into “look how much I know!” twaddle.
I completely agree about fantasy novels with a never-ending journey. However, one which involves a long journey that is well worth a read is “The Scar” by China Mieville. That man’s efforts to revitalise fantasy are sadly wasted by the fact that 99% of fantasy authors are robots.
Agreed, patrickg. Great quote.
SG,
I prfer Perdido St and Iron Council (now _that’s_ a journey!). I don’t think 99% are actually crap, it’s just that 99% of what bookstores stock is rubbish, and most fantasy readers are so desperate for the stuff they’ll take any old rubbish.
I used to read the crap every now and then in the same way that you’ll watch a bad movie, but stopped when I got busy. Now, I haven’t read a bad fantasy in a couple of years at least, and they make up about 1 in four of the books I read.
The good stuff is there, but you need Lifeline bookstores, ancient, mouldering secondhand bookstores, and obscure corners of ebay to find them. I think you would be surprised how much good stuff there is, I constantly am.
patrickg, I agree about Perdido St. Station, wonderful wonderful book, but I didn’t actually enjoy Iron Council so much. Just the whole train thing didn’t work for me. Maybe you’re right about the 99% (not a figure I’d stake my house on, I’ll grant you), and certainly about fantasy readers being so desperate for a decent book that they’ll take the risk.
Thinking about Perdido St. Station now, and the bug-woman and her lover, brings back many fond memories. That book was so good!
I’ve also noticed in modern fantasy a real tendency for the conservatives, the survivalists, and the religiously slightly kooky to get involved. That horrible “Wizards First Rule” is like a libertarian polemic (and damn weird too), that Jordan chap is an ex-marine, and now we have Eragon written by some home-schooled dweeb from Montana. I think Fantasy needs more Mieville’s and Banks’s to reclaim it.
Perdido Street Station, oh God yes! what a complete brainfuck.
Never mind that: currently buried in The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar. Very diverting. And a nice break from an almost completed wallowing in Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels. No pretentions of literature there, but damn fun.
You should all go on FaceBook and share your Bookshelves!
Guise, I am 4 episodes away from finishing the entire Sharpe collection of movies. Never has Sean Bean been so fine! Also, I am close to completing the Flashman set, which is a damn fine collection of Victorian era devilry if ever there was any. I aim sometime in the future to move on to Sharpe. But maybe the movies will have spoilt it for me.
By God Jon, that might be the thing that actually gets me to use my all but dormant Facebook account. The procastination opportunities are mind-boggling….
SG:
Fuck, I wouldn’t touch those books with a goddamned barge pole. A tree died, for that. Shudder.
Have you read Gormenghast SG, cause if you like Mieville, you’re gonna _love_ it.
Barbara Kingsolver “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”. It has had quite a bit of hype considering it’s really a book about gardening and eating – her family’s quest to be ‘locavores’ for a year. It certainly gets you thinking about ‘food miles’ (how far the food on your plate has come and the ecological implication of that) and caused a heated argument in this household about eating out of season strawberries from Queensland (while blindly attempting to sidestep the coffee from Columbia issue).
I am a Kingsolver fan long before she was named the 74th most dangerous person in America (due to a heartening essay voicing reason after Sep 11). It is not the same journey as her fiction and in some ways not a patch on her essays, but I am hanging in there.
SG, The criticism I heard was that it was too much of a self-conscious strategy and it detracted from the experience of reading the novel. I was involved in teaching the text as exemplary of a lover’s discourse that exceeds gender categories, so that element was foregrounded somewhat in the discussion.
When reading it, what sex did you assume the narrator was? For me, the provisional assumption was that it was a woman, although there is nothing definitive in the text one way or the other.
I’m interested in following it up with more Winterson, but I’m wary. You’re not the first person to suggest to me that the later books aren’t as good.
Sharpe movies … urrrr, don’t know. Sean Bean, yes, maybe, but do I need to start diverting funds into another series of DVDS … urrrr.
patrickg, I have the sad habit of following friends’ recommendations when I am after a book – especially when I’m staying in their home and have a return journey ahead of me. So I at least didn’t *pay* for the political exposure those fine novels had to offer…
I’m not averse to reading conservative screeds if they’re good – RM Meluch is in my opinion a fine author (I loved Jerusalem Fire), but obviously in the “unmarked helicopters are coming to take our white babies” line of politics. Most conservative fantasy authors are just really bad though.
As for gormenghast, yeah I have read them all and I really did love them. I also thought they were really refreshing in the fantasy genre, and I am disappointed they are not given more importance by sci-fi/fantasy “critics”.
Adam, I assumed female, but mainly because the author was female I think – there were elements of the characters recklessness and fecklessness, particularly in some scenes, that made me think more of a male protagonist, like in, say a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. But the author’s gender swayed me too much I think. Maybe next time you teach it you should try to keep the author a secret…
Guise: they’re really good! And Sean Bean is great. Really, really good! (And I downloaded them with bitTorrent).
I felt the same while reading, and not just because Winterson is female, but also because it was easier to reconcile that narratorial voice with a woman. I thought most of the students would have felt the same, but more than a third (as an estimate) had assumed that it was a man while reading. I think it worked well to illustrate some of the themes of the course, but there’s so much going on there that we almost inevitably lapsed into discussing other aspects of the novel.
SG, it’s not the politics, it’s the prose. Gah.
re: Winterson, I dunno, I just find her really cold, or something. So removed from her character, always watching them, observing. I can’t really describe it. That distance kind of, hmmm, I don’t know, it’s a little disturbing in a way, i think.
In April a close friend of mine died, leaving me his book collection of around five thousand books (give or take a few thousand). Some of my friends and acquaintances have ask me for a catalogue, but that’s out of the question. There is so much work I have to do at the moment it’s not funny. The friend who died would have called himself an occultist, and about half the books would fall into the category of the esoteric and eastern religion, including many books on Freemasonry, the Tarot, alchemy and astrology.
I have held two garage sales so far to clear out some space, and while many of the books are clearly rubbish or are on topics that I have little interest in, there are many dozens of books which I would call gems. In particular, there are many books on Christian origins, such as Guignebert’s Jesus, Crossan’s The Historical Jesus, Thiering’s Jesus of the Apocalypse, and Fideler’s Jesus Christ Sun of God, all good ammunition in my secularist jihad.
There are also many books on mythology, including the complete works of Jung and the complete Golden Bough by Frazer. One of the book I am halfway through at the moment is J. M. Robertson’s Pagan Christs. The copy I have is from 1967, but Robertson’s original essay was published in 1903, and was the follow up to his Christianity and Mythology, which unfortunately is not in the collection.
Robertson’s work is remarkable because he is one of the early authors to have alleged that the reputed founder of Christianity never existed. The Jesus myth theory goes back to the eighteenth century when Volney argued that Jesus was a solar myth derived from Krishna. Robertson’s most distinctive thesis is that the Gospel story of the Last Supper, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection was a mystery play which came to be accepted as an account of real happenings.
Even though I am inundated with books, I am tempted to buy The War on Children’s Minds, after I caught a glimpse of Stephen Law on TV this morning. He is calling for a liberal approach to values education and pointing out the dangers of authoritarianism implicit in religious education.
patrickg, did you try reading Written on the body? It was my introduction to Winterson and I have a suspicion that the first Winterson one reads has an effect on one’s patience to try more. It didn’t feel cold to me at all, but I can see how one would say that about other novels of hers.
The fifth of Eoin COLFER’s ‘Artemis Fowl’ series, “The Lost Colony”. Where the Sainted Pratchett took sword & sorcery, Colfer takes Harry Potter.
Ostensibly for kiddies and they’ll appreciate them but, like the Simpsons, heaps for ‘adults’.
A plea to Ursula Le Guin – nothing for years… More Ekumen please, pretty please
Katz – re DULLES, don’t forget his equally evil brother George Foster
There’s also a Cardinal Dulles would you believe!
I haven’t read Gormenghast for an age – reading about reading it makes me think I should re-read it!
PatrickG – Mervyn Peake wrote a trilogy; Gormenghast, Titus Groan & Tutus Alone which has titus in the modern world, cars etc.
He also wrote fragments of a fourth but was claimed by motor neurone disease before stitching it together. His widow published them with her recollections of his outline but I haven’t seen it since the 60s and can’t recall the name.
He was a stunning artist, official war artist for the British Army after the liberation of Germany, makes Goya look like Beatrix Potter or Arthur Rackham.
After finishing latest Harry Potter book, I’ve gone back to the start of the series and am currently up to number 3 (Prisoner of Azkaban).
But I’m sad.
I’m about halfway through Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, which is a thick book of essays and diary entries (he’d be a great blogger), some of which have previously been published in the London Review of Books. My partner gave it to me for my birthday and then read it before me and kept chuckling and quoting bits to me. It’s as good as she led me to think it was. It’s like having an at times intense and other times lazy conversation – or like reading a first rate blog. Unfortunately I have to read another couple of novels now – for a class and my book group – so I’ll have to put it on hold for a couple of weeks.
Amphibious, perhaps Patrickg was referring to the Gormenghast trilogy. Which, spelling errors aside, went in a different order to yours.
And what’s more, the third was so stretched as to make the possibility of a fourth very scary indeed. Thank heaven for motor neurone disease.
Farking amazing for the first 2 though.
From the list Library these weeks. The bloody Cloud book is $4.20 overdue:
The book of clouds – John A. Day,
Tour de France, tour de force : a visual history of the world’s greatest bicycle race -by James Startt ; introduction by Greg Lemond ; preface by Samuel Abt
Atlas of the southern night sky Steve Massey, Steve Quirk.
Shadow account – Stephen Frey
A very public solution [text] : transport in the dispersed city Paul Mees
Grave music [text] Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Walking in Scotland – Lonely Planet
Macular degeneration [text] : the complete guide to saving and maximizing your sight – Lylas G. Mogk and Marja Mogk.
The Picador book of crime writing [text]- The Picador book of crime writing [text] / edited by Michael Dibdin
An author and his image : the collected short pieces – J. P. Donleavy
07/07/2007 : New scientist. [magazine]
NOV 2006 : Harvard business review
JAN 2006 : Hi-fi news [magazine]
FEB 2006 : Hi-fi news [magazine]
50th Anniversary Issue : Hi-fi news [magazine]
FEB 2007 : Hi-fi news [magazine]
Slow motion : changing masculinities, changing men – Lynne Segal.
Making trouble : life and politics – Lynne Segal.
Contemporary perspectives on masculinity : men, women, and politics in modern society – Kenneth Clatterbaugh
Why feminism? [text] : gender, psychology, politics -Lynne Segal.
Straight sex [text] : the politics of pleasure – Lynne Segal.
Last night a friend gave me: Almost there: the onward journey of a Dublin woman / Nuala O’Faolain.
I don’t know why but I’d never read Nuala before. I got halfway through it last night and now I’ve just gone online and reserved all her books at the library. I can’t recall how long it is since I’ve been so taken by a charming open but reserved style of writing about the personal.
Just finished the latest John le Carre: The Misson Song. I’ve enjoyed others more, but they all give a unique view of worlds never seen – in this case the Congo.
Can I HIGHLY recommend you also create an online library to share using the free LibraryThing – just point and click to add your books then share it with others. Here’s mine – wonderful how it stirs up memories of books read long ago.
Frankenstein. Never read it at school, and am enjoying it now.
I’m a bit more than half way through Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation: a True Story of Death, Grief and the Law. Of course this was inspired by Darlene’s recent post.
I’d formed an interim opinion of the book, not so much from the ensuing thread as from Phillip Adam’s interview with Singh and the Cinque parents, a post that Ken Parish did in early 2005 at Troppo and the discussion thread and perhaps most of all by a very perceptive lecture Inga Clendinnen did to a bunch of lawyers where she used Garner’s book as an example.
So from Clendinnen’s notion of contrasting and competing stories I was sure that Garner’s story couldn’t be the one true story, but I wanted to find out whether I agreed with Clendinnen’s story about Garner’s book.
The first thing I found out was that Garner says it’s about the story of how she got to know Joe Cinque, so the story is very much about Garner.
I cheated and read the last few bits first. There I found her report of what the judge told her about why he made his decisions. Also I wanted to know where Garner was leading the reader. Frankly I didn’t want to be fully at the mercy of Garner’s prose.
A good move, I think. All I’ll say now is that there is a lot of very raw material there about this bizarre case and how the justice system works.
FXH, Lynne Segal is a goddess.
Chesil Beach. And I am up to their bits.
How does my “Batman” comic fit?
And only red wine about is flagon of Renmano fortified; a cheeky little number from a massive Riverland steel vat, topped up with metho. No goblet or fluted glass necessary; just stuff cork down neck and chugg; enjoy (errrggg!!) with dry rollies or stubbs .
Seriously?
Concentration is dead. Tried a thing called “The Support Economy”, about late capitalism and then a Val McDermid airport thriller.
NBG. These are cheapies from a bookshop
Library for a Faye Kellerman? But it (still) wants unjust fine for videos out late years ago, so am left with TV adaptation of “Bleak House” which looked so promising after first episode, stumbled across other day. But can’t find second episode; mass of badly labelled videos scattered throughout house.
Amphibious, I was actually talking about the trilogy. That said, I think Gormenghast is the strongest of the books. I’ve read every other Peake I could get my hands on, but nothing has matched those dizzying heights for me.
Are you sure about the motor neurone call? My impression was that his health in general was bad, coupled with at least two nervous breakdowns, and that he eventually had Parkinsons, and that his cause of death is never stated (this kind of ellipsis leads to me think maybe it was suicide, certainly not implausible given his unstable mental health and degenerative illness).
SG, I have haven’t read Written On the Body, I’ll have to give it a shot.
The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice by Irmtraud Morgner about a 12th century woman troubador who, sick of the menz, elects to go to sleep for 800 years or so and wakes up in 1968. A tragedy of disappointed expectations. A biog of Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir to flesh out some of the history for the above. Lost interest about 3/4 of the way through because Weir is a decent historian and relies on 12th century sources which are scant, as are the details of Eleanor’s life after getting hitched to Henry II.
Recently finished Don DeLillo’s new novel Falling Man. Some truly great writing, but a bit patchy. There are some chapters written from the perspective of a 9-11 hijacker, which are truly mesmerising. He writes with a rhythym that just draws you into the mind of the terrorists. But there is also some typically DeLillo dialogue – unrealistic, and overly intellectual for two people who are supposed to be having a chat.
I’m currently reading the most recent edition of Granta, a literary magazine/journal. It’s about 300 pages of short stories – excellent stuff.
Bought Carpentaria yesterday (won the Miles Franklin recently). I’m going to start it on the weekend.
Just over halfway through Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies – America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Rise of the FBI 1933-34.
A cracking read, and a wonderful snapshot of a point in time where there was this great convergence of gangsters – Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, the Barkers, etc – and how their various actions, crimes and doings helped shape the early days of the FBI.
Some of the stories are hilarious – the various ineptitudes of the FBI in its early years – the fact agents struggled to know how to fire guns, had no idea about surveillence, stake-outs, etc.
At the same time it paints the gangsters in various lights – the seemingly dapper Dillinger, the psychotic Nelson, for example.
But while it is a rollicking and violent ride through history, its interesting to read how much death and destruction these people caused – gunning down police and innocent civillians, people with families and children, in cold blood.
Often they were feted by the public, grippied by Depression and looking for a Robin Hood figure and suspicious of authority. Dillinger in particular was attuned to his public image, and tried to play up that image while he and his gang members conducted increasingly brazen and violent bank robberies.
In all, a really interesting slice of history.
And Adam Gall – count me in as a massive Chandler fan as well. If you can, get his hardcover collection of short stories – the economy and style of his writing just improves even in these shorter yarns.
The Diana Chronicles by Tina Browne. A fabulously written and researched dissection of the Diana Spencer, HRH Princess of Wales phenomenon which provided a great counterpoint to the wickedly observed film “The Queen” which I only just caught up with this week.
Browne was a player herself in this riveting drama, as a journalist for Vanity Fair, later editor of the New Yorker. She had met Diana and many of the key players and subsequently interviewed for this newly published book just about everyone important to do so: from the Royal Family to the British aristocracy, the courtiers, politicians, media moguls, journos, stalkers, Diana’s family, friends, lovers, servants and representative adoring members of the British public who greeted news of her death with a sorrow and a mass paroxysm of collective weeping that astonished that nation and still begs for explanation.
A sympathetic, feminine, insightful but also unsentimental and perhaps in the end more than a little judgemental view of Diana, the human being, and a book that brings together and adds to the vast political, sociological and psychoanalytic studies of this subject.
Currently reading:
Crete: The Battle and the Resistance which is up the Beeve’s usual high standards and is full of marvellous characters like Oxford Dons who’d leave their glass eyes behind on their office desk when going up into the mountains to join the partisans.
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber about one crazy Berlin babe and with some spicy lithographs and photograuves too!
Age of Delirium about a time and place that made Gormenghast Castle look like a Silicon Valley start-up.
Amphibious:
There was actually an Ekumen novel a couple of years back called The Telling – not her best work, but good. And there is a terrific new trilogy for young adults which is supposed ot be being finished this year – the first two were called Gifts and Voices and are definitely worth a look. And there have been two new Earthsea books in the last few years as well – Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. For a woman in her 80s she’s still cranking them out.
And given the number of people here who seem to lean towards fantasy and scifi, I wonder if any of you might be interested in the amazing Richard Powers’ most recent book, The Echo Maker – it won the National Book Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer and is quite, quite remarkable, tying questions about personal identity and the natre of our relationship with the biological world into an oddly moving little thriller about brain injury and paranoia. Margaret Atwood describes him as the Melville of the 20C, and she’s not far wrong when it comes to the denseness and richness and ambition of the books. The new William Gibson, Spook Country is fun as well, and Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is great – a fantastically incorrect comic novel which begins with 9/11.
PatrickG – health in general was bad, .. at least two nervous breakdowns, and .. had Parkinsons, and that his cause of death is never stated (this kind of ellipsis leads to me think maybe it was suicide, certainly not implausible given his unstable mental health and degenerative illness).
Yes, you’re correct – brain glitch of my own.
I’ve read his biography – what other books did he write?
Finished that book on the American Revolution. A good introduction to the period.
Also bought the same day Stephen Talty’s “Empire of Blue Water: Henry Morgan and the Pirates who ruled the Carribean Waves”. It starts off okay with an interesting portrait of a rather sinister character named Thomas Gage, an ex-Catholic ex Dominican who turns Angtlican persecutor of English Catholics and is involved in Cromwell’s first foray into the West Indies. But after that it just goes from bad to worse.
The book is filled with historicasorical anachronisms. Comparing the British/Spanish conflict to the 20C postwar Cold War with Neil Armstrong landing on the moon for the US and the Soviets having a colony on the dark side of the moon (I kid you not); comparing 17C pirate ships to V8s;and alleging the Lewis and Clark early 19C expedition had 17C French-made muskets. (From memory, they had Brown Besses)And what connection early 19C American explorers had with 17C British pirates in the Caribbean, I don’t know. At this point I gave up in disgust.I very rarely sell any of my 17C/18C books, but this one is going straight to the second-hand bookshop.
Lately it’s rare for me to be finishing a book from cover to cover, but as is my wont, I’ve been dipping into a bunch of things, new and old (I’ll only talk about the old and familiar; as for the new, it’s too soon to have an opinion).
–The poems of James Dickey, which everyone should read if they can. Dickey was uneven as a poet, but even his bad stuff is somehow rewarding because of its idiosyncrasy. Poems by Dickey (the author of the novel “Deliverance”) that everyone should try out include “The Heaven of Animals,” “The Performance,” (!!), “The Shark’s Parlor,” “Buckdancer’s Choice” whose final stanzas are a miracle, “For the Last Wolverine,” the magnificent “The Bee” (“Coach Norton, I am your boy”), the equally sublime “The Rain Guitar,” and “The Strength of Fields” (“My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.”)
– A perennial for simple nourishment, “The Collected Stories of Frank O’Connor”. One of the true giants of the English language in the 20th century, and the most unobtrusive and unsung of the genuine titans (yes, that’s right, I said titans). O’Connor has, like Kafka, the rare and peculiar gift of a certain type of writer, in that every single one of his sentences is already perfect, by virtue of the fact that it was he who wrote it. Few writers in English possess this quality; not even Shakespeare has it. The prose style is quite a marvel to encounter, in that it takes a lot of effort to discover that there really IS a style. An O’Connor story is like looking at one of the Dutch Old Masters: the technique is so transparent and past-mastered, that for a long time you don’t even realize that you’ve been observing a work of human craft, not a natural object. Like Mistah Mike Stipe used to say, “A must!”
– Also I’ve been dipping (for the first time in a while, really) into my mini-library of standard classics about the natural history of wolves: Murie, Mech, Lopez, et al. Wolves are really quite remarkable creatures. For folks who like to read about nature but don’t give a rat’s about wolves, I’d also highly recommend Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” about, well, the arctic; and if you’re still curious after that, check out the saintly William T. Vollman’s strange and compelling novel of the arctic, “The Rifles.”
–Oh, and of course, anybody who hasn’t read The Collected Poems of both Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler (and James Merrill, too, if you’re really working overtime) is just a bloody savage, really.
http://www.andrewsmustresign.com/
(andrewsmustresign dot com)
Amphibious,
My Pye, and Letters From A Lost Uncle, leap to mind, and there was a heap of stuff published posthumously, but I dont’ know what it would be like, quality-wise. Nothing I’ve read subsequently was as good as gormenghast.
Sfter my disheartening experience with the pirate book, I resorted to my book shelf for one of the books there still unread.
Christopher Hobhouse’s “Fox”, a biography of Charles Fox, first published in 1934.
First a word about the author. Hobhouse was killed in an air-raid, on London, I think, in 1940.At the time he was in the Royal Marines. But in the interwar years he was in Moseley’s British Fascist Party. For the most part, so far at any rate, he keeps his anti-Semitism out of his biography of Fox. (Three rather disturbing instances in the 152 pages I’ve read so far.)
That caveat aside, the work is a minor masterpiece of English literature. As a stylist he is impeccable. Politically, he is a Tory, so his tenor is anti-Whig, but not to the point that it interferes with his historical judgements too much, or his quite fair assessment of Fox who is one of the more interesting figures of 18C British politics, up there with Chatham,Wilkes, Wilberforce and George III. Nowhere near as boring as Pitt the Younger.
Am getting a copy of Jeremy Black’s biography of George III soon. Glanced at it in the local library and went straight to the bookshop and ordered it. Will do a post about it when I get it.
I’m reading yet another American skool story, a genre to which I’m addicted. This time it’s Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld.
I loved Donna Tartt’s Secret History (Outsider arrives at exclusive private school and is drawn into an elite circle of students presided over by eccentric teacher; Murder and mystery involved), and more recently, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (Outsider arrives at not quite so exclusive school and is drawn into an elite circle of students presided over by eccentric teacher; Murder and mystery involved). So, as Curtis’s protagonist, Lee, approached the gates of her exclusive private school™ in the first chapter, I was fully expecting the elite circle of students presided over by the eccentric teacher and the murder mystery. Funnily enough, this has not happened. I guess you can steal a plot and characters once, but after that people will start to notice.
There is an elite band of students, as in every school, but our outsider remains an outsider and the elite students do not seem to be harbouring any secrets darker than what substances they might have imbibed in Boston on the weekend. Some of the teachers are mildly eccentric but they do not start Jean Brodie-style cabals. No-one is bumped off.
Instead, Prep is a nearly plotless but quite absorbing portrait of life at a rich person’s school through the lens of a scholarship student with social anxiety. That sounds dull, but the fascination is in the detail. I’m up to the last couple of chapters, so if anyone does get murdered or anything like that, I’ll get back to you.
Ambiguous,
Um, I think you suggested you only read 2% of the book? Maybe you should have taken a closer look! Or maybe just stop reading the Murdoch press???
I can understand that all governments have an interest in stifling dissent to some extent, since it lets them pursue their agendas (good or bad). The problem is that under Howard, myriad avenues of dissent have been stifled so ruthlessly that it seriously undermines democracy. I don;t think this was Howard’s original intent, but I don;t think he cares any more either.
Andrew Wilkie’s chapter on the Intelligence and Military was good, but familiar terrain for anyone who has been paying attention. I wish more such brave whistle-blowers had stepped forward over the years, and I cannot help wondering if they will all crawl out of the woodwork after the next election?
Just finished Vernon God Little – my little sister (Hi Libby!) left it for me to read. I quite liked most of it, although the ending was a crock. I often find that with books I get engaged with (but not necessarily like all that much) I’m still a little pissed off and empty after finishing them. It’s like leaving a little universe you can never quite get involved with again no matter how many times you try to re-read the book.
Amphibious, perhaps Patrickg was referring to the Gormenghast trilogy. Which, spelling errors aside, went in a different order to yours.
And what’s more, the third was so stretched as to make the possibility of a fourth very scary indeed. Thank heaven for motor neurone disease.
Farking amazing for the first 2 though.
This is not fair. Peake died of something which led to dementia and loss of brain function. I don’t think it was MN syndrome or Parkinson’s, something more akin to Kreutzfeldt-Jakob I believe.
“Titus Alone” was kind of completed-but-not- a full length but rough draft – when Peake became too ill to write any more. The book is actually a collaboration between people, I’m not sure who, who pieced it together and edited it posthumously. So to criticise it on the score of not being up to the level of Gormenghast or Titus Groan is really not comparing oranges with apples.
What I really love about “Titus Alone”, besides the car which is like another character, is
***SPOILER***
After inhabiting a world that feels somewhat nineteenth century, when Titus gets out into the outside world it is obviously the 50s-60s or so. I loved the dysjunctive jolt of realising the time frame was so different to what I’d assumed.
I just went over to Wikipedia and it appears Mervyn Peake did die of Parkinson’s. My bad! I got the impression it was CJD because of Maeve Peake’s heartbreaking description of him in her biography “A World Away”. But I think when Parkinson’s gets very severe (and remember treatment was much cruder in those days, and the Peakes didn’t live in places where state of the art treatment was available) it could prevent him from communicating. As in “Awakenings”.
The Wikipedia article threw up another interesting fact – one of the members of the band I most loved in my teenagerhood, Can, wrote a Gormenghast opera. Opera always kind of squicks me but I found that intriguing.
Some of the lines are classic, although I do wonder whether Chandlers original audience were laughing as often as I seem to be, or at the same parts.
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Look pal you’ve got swell legs and I’m really glad to make their acquaintance but I’ll have you know that I’m clean, shaved and sober and I don’t care who knows it. What’s so funny about the Big Sleep?
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Started re-reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which is important after re-reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics which I think may be important.
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And American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips which is just scary.