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What are you reading at the moment? Recommendations welcome
- Thread starter Julie
- Start date
- Featured
Julie
Basic
- Thread starter
- #62
No Christmas complete without Dandy and Beano Annuals - it was that delicious ‘paper’ smell of new books. Still sniff books now! Every week I had the comics - probably 3 or 4p at the time! 2000Ad when older - some amazing artwork - Slaine and Rogue Trooper were faves. Had a Magpie annual once, and Tom & Jerry.You missed so much Hannah. Annuals and comics in general were inspirational and such good fun. And of course now with rise of Graphic Novels people like Mr Gaiman have made a bit of a splash.
Well done for reading Bunty on the sly though
Currently reading Fight Club. Interesting voice. Love the style. But I'm speedreading / s k i p p i n g l o a d s. (That was my attempt in showing not telling about my skip reading.)
I didn't like it; not for me, although the voice was good.
Katie-Ellen
Full Member
Bedtime reading last night Wilding by Isabella Tree.
Just fascinating. A potted education.
A nation that does not take care of its soil, cannot thrive.
The price of war. The long term cost of digging for victory.
Just fascinating. A potted education.
A nation that does not take care of its soil, cannot thrive.
The price of war. The long term cost of digging for victory.
I’m switching between my big Jim Butcher and The Near Witch by VE Schwab. Both have something about them that grabs me. But I need to finish them. I really like the sound of the books recommended by Emma and Sara on Pop Ups!
Chris Yugay
Basic
Just finished Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. 3 out of 10. Started Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Still early days but the quality of writing and imagination are undeniable.
Chris Yugay
Basic
Love Monte Cristo! Somehow, the lack of "economy" has never put me off. Even as a child I would binge all through summer on Dumas, Verne, HG Wells and Dickens. When did we become so obsessed with functionality? I miss books which paint a massive picture one delicious brush stroke at a time rather than show me a snapshot. From the economical writing perspective, the Old Man and the Sea is a story of an old coot who goes fishing, comes home empty-handed. ;o)
I agree, Chris. Modern society demands instant gratification in storytelling, and many much-heralded classics from days gone by would never get out of the slush pile these days.
Contemporary writing often must be exceptional to be allowed space to grow, otherwise it seems doomed to never to reach a wider readership because it can be seen as not getting to the "good bits" quickly enough.
In a way I understand why this is the new norm but it's pretty sad too.
Chris Yugay
Basic
Is it the society which sets these new norms though? Or is it the publishers and the lit agents? They claim to know what people want. The statistics show, however, that people read less and less. Is it because other people, just like myself, have no taste for books chosen for them on the basis of the new norms?
I think its an arts-wide malaise.
Today's book world takes many of its leads and cues from other other storytelling mediums - cinema and TV. These inevitably, because of production costs, can scarcely justify shooting even two seconds of on-screen time that doesn't advance the plot or else have some cataclysmic disaster scene, extraordinary car chase, explosion, intergalactic battle or whatever.
In the current pop world no one seems to be interested in paying their dues as acts were once required to do. It appears sufficient to be a moderately capable karaoke performer, then you can be brought under the wing of some Svengali who will give you your two minutes in the sun before dumping you in favour of the next one in line.
We now have a crazy situation where there are "stars" who have nothing tangible to offer but their (alleged) stardom - stardom that has been bestowed upon them for nothing other than being famous (bereft of any discernible talent) or having a name that begins with K.
Today's book world takes many of its leads and cues from other other storytelling mediums - cinema and TV. These inevitably, because of production costs, can scarcely justify shooting even two seconds of on-screen time that doesn't advance the plot or else have some cataclysmic disaster scene, extraordinary car chase, explosion, intergalactic battle or whatever.
In the current pop world no one seems to be interested in paying their dues as acts were once required to do. It appears sufficient to be a moderately capable karaoke performer, then you can be brought under the wing of some Svengali who will give you your two minutes in the sun before dumping you in favour of the next one in line.
We now have a crazy situation where there are "stars" who have nothing tangible to offer but their (alleged) stardom - stardom that has been bestowed upon them for nothing other than being famous (bereft of any discernible talent) or having a name that begins with K.
Paul Whybrow
Full Member
Robert M Derry
Basic
Yes, although I do believe that writing and tastes evolve over time and I like to be able to read older texts in a certain style and newer texts in a modern vein.
I would also say that the older texts which have endured are the exceptional ones. I'm sure we'd be less forgiving of the ordinary bloated texts of the day, now forgotten.
Given that it's a translation, I'm sure the poetry would have shone through in original French and wouldn't have dragged as much. I actually finished it last night. The story is brilliant and it's so satisfying to hear the count pronounce "I am Edmond Dantes!" to his betrayers.
I'm moving onto the last of Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series tonight. It's technically YA, but I'd definitely recommend the series to anyone who likes Fantasy.
SteveWhy
Basic
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
I set this book down not ten minutes ago, and my mind is swirling with all kinds of thoughts, impressions, ideas. It's a very suggestive book, full of references and echoes, not only to literature but history, religion, film and music. The difficulty is figuring out where to begin.
Let's start with the structure. What you have is six stories which are presented one after another in the first half of the book. A, B, C, D, E, F. Each story is a found document of some kind in the next. The narrator of A is writing in his diary, which is reading by the narrator of B who is writing letters that are shown to be read by the protagonist of C...and so on. Each story breaks off incomplete, mid-story, except for story F, which alone is uninterrupted, and alone is not nested inside another story. F is, in effect, the outermost level of this matryoshka doll. In the second half this structure is inverted, with each story continuing where they left off in the opposite order of the first half, or E, D, C, B, A. In essence, the reader begins inside the inner most matryoshka doll (A), ascends to the outermost one E, before re-entering and diving back into the core.
The matryoshka doll metaphor, BTW, is not my invention but the book's. Cloud Atlas is a highly self-conscious work of metafiction that spends quite a bit of energy talking about itself, describing itself. At one point a character in C ("Half Lives") muses to himself on the nature of time.
"One model of time:" he says, "an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside of a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual passt but which we perceive as the virtual past." These philosophical musings are dropped into the middle of what is basically an airport novel, where they stick out like a sore thumb.
This matryoshka doll is a present containing not only shells of the past but of the future. Cloud Atlas is a kind of hybrid historical-science fiction novel whose story extends into the past as well as the distant future. Also importantly, these shells are virtual; they are malleable and constructed, i.e. fictions. They are, furthermore, fictions that serve the needs of the present. "The present," Mitchell writes, "presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will." And if the virtual past is constructed from "reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction, in short belief", they help to shape the "virtual future" which is constructed by wishes, prophecies, daydreams". (How far are we meant to push this matryoshka doll metaphor? My instinct says, not that far.)
These simulacra are not merely illusions though. Mitchell makes it quite clear that they help to create our actual future, "as in a self-fulfilling prophecy". The narrator of A, speaking at the end of the novel, picks up this theme. "Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind....If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such as humanity is sure brought into being....If we believe that humanity may transcend too and claw, we we believe divers races and creeds can share this world...if we believe leaders must be just...such a world will come to pass."
In story B, the protagonist is composing a piece of music, the Cloud Atlas sextet, which perfectly describes the structure of the novel, ABCDEFEDCBA.
Now, I suppose, we can come at last to the content. The six stories of Cloud Atlas range in style and genre as well as historical period. The density and ingenuity of those linkages are part of the pleasure of the book. For one, in each of the stories a character has a sort of comet shaped birthmark. In C, the protagonist reads the letters of B and realizes that she somehow shares the same memories. Another in B, declares with curious certainty as he's about to commit suicide, "Rome will fall again. Cortes'll lay Tenochitlan to waste again, and later sleep under Corsican stars again...Nietzche's gramophone."Meanwhile, the denizens of F, a postapocalyptic civilization livinig on the margins of an ecologicially devastated world, believe in the reincarnation of souls. This suggests the six stories of Cloud Atlas representing the path of a single soul traveling through different bodies and different historical periods.
All of these forms experience slavery, predation, rape, colonialism and social injustice, as well as a cacophony of voices holding forth on such themes. The world, all of the worlds, of Cloud Atlas are a veil of tears. History is a slaughterbench of suffering.
There are, it seems to me, three main voices in Cloud Atlas. The first might be called the Nietzschean one, the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals, celebrating the brutal vitality of the aristocratic class. "What sparks wars?" says one character from B (the most Nietzschean of the stories), "The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the feature of violence...is the instrument of this dreadful will...The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions." Incidentally, one of the musical pieces being composed in B is titled "Eternal Recurrence". Here we have a vision of savage vitality, a world overflowing with savage, predatory vitality, ultimately overflowing and consuming itself in a meaningless spectacle.
The other I will call the Stoic: "A life spent shaping a world I want [my child] to inherit, not one I fear [he] shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living....I shall pledge myself the abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave..." Let's describe Stoicism this way: it is a slave ideology. The slave knows that he is unfree, but he thinks to himself, "In my mind I am free."
The Stoic counterposes the freedom of the will to the unfreedom of the world, is unfree because he lives in an unfree world, but he is free in his mind. Unable to transcend the opposition between his will and the world, the Stoic's characteristic response to the world is abstract moral precept, his characteristic attitude resignation.
None of this grand design would work very well as a piece of fiction, I might add, if the writing wasn't so good on a sentence by sentence and page by page level. Few works of experimental fiction are so good a getting you to turn the page. Everywhere there are delightful witticisms, great imagery, nuggets of astonishing lyricism, feats of literary horseplay and pastiche, astute observations on art and culture. And somehow it all moves to gracefully and swiftly, sucking you along all the way to the end.
So why is it that I'm really less taken with this book that this mountain of entirely sincere praise I've heaped on it would suggest? I suppose part of my reservations are a consequence of the structure itself. Each of the stories are merely an episode in the grand arc of a soul's transmigration through eternity. What that arc is is hard to say. Is it an ascent towards Enlightenment? Perhaps. But is certain is that this framing device has distancing effect on each of the individual stories.
Perhaps this is why each of hte stories, taken by themselves, can arouse interest but never urgency. My attitude towards the narrative's goings-on was amused and detached, but I was never quite suffering and feeling with them. Like a God looking down among mortals, I always remained hovering over scene, outside the tableau, never quite immersed.
Something else. Why six stories? I know for a fact this was scaled down from 9. I'm not sure it was scaled back enough. Why not five or four? It seems to me that 3 is the minimum number of parts you need to make this kind of structure work. More adds complication but not necessarily depth.
Nor or all the stories of the same quality. IMHO B, E, and F are the best. B is not badly done at all, if a bit on the nose thematically (we even get something like a moral at the end). C recreates an airport thriller quite competently, but I've read enough airport novels and one more adds nothing to my life. I found myself growing tired of the D's lack of narrative momentum, wherein the comically curmudgeonly protagonist wanders around various train stations and hotels and while constantly griping about his health.
The design of the book perhaps precludes any sort of consistency of tone. The clash of multifarious tones and voices is perhaps part of the design of the book and help to give it a kind of amplitude of human experience.
I set this book down not ten minutes ago, and my mind is swirling with all kinds of thoughts, impressions, ideas. It's a very suggestive book, full of references and echoes, not only to literature but history, religion, film and music. The difficulty is figuring out where to begin.
Let's start with the structure. What you have is six stories which are presented one after another in the first half of the book. A, B, C, D, E, F. Each story is a found document of some kind in the next. The narrator of A is writing in his diary, which is reading by the narrator of B who is writing letters that are shown to be read by the protagonist of C...and so on. Each story breaks off incomplete, mid-story, except for story F, which alone is uninterrupted, and alone is not nested inside another story. F is, in effect, the outermost level of this matryoshka doll. In the second half this structure is inverted, with each story continuing where they left off in the opposite order of the first half, or E, D, C, B, A. In essence, the reader begins inside the inner most matryoshka doll (A), ascends to the outermost one E, before re-entering and diving back into the core.
The matryoshka doll metaphor, BTW, is not my invention but the book's. Cloud Atlas is a highly self-conscious work of metafiction that spends quite a bit of energy talking about itself, describing itself. At one point a character in C ("Half Lives") muses to himself on the nature of time.
"One model of time:" he says, "an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside of a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual passt but which we perceive as the virtual past." These philosophical musings are dropped into the middle of what is basically an airport novel, where they stick out like a sore thumb.
This matryoshka doll is a present containing not only shells of the past but of the future. Cloud Atlas is a kind of hybrid historical-science fiction novel whose story extends into the past as well as the distant future. Also importantly, these shells are virtual; they are malleable and constructed, i.e. fictions. They are, furthermore, fictions that serve the needs of the present. "The present," Mitchell writes, "presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will." And if the virtual past is constructed from "reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction, in short belief", they help to shape the "virtual future" which is constructed by wishes, prophecies, daydreams". (How far are we meant to push this matryoshka doll metaphor? My instinct says, not that far.)
These simulacra are not merely illusions though. Mitchell makes it quite clear that they help to create our actual future, "as in a self-fulfilling prophecy". The narrator of A, speaking at the end of the novel, picks up this theme. "Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind....If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such as humanity is sure brought into being....If we believe that humanity may transcend too and claw, we we believe divers races and creeds can share this world...if we believe leaders must be just...such a world will come to pass."
In story B, the protagonist is composing a piece of music, the Cloud Atlas sextet, which perfectly describes the structure of the novel, ABCDEFEDCBA.
Now, I suppose, we can come at last to the content. The six stories of Cloud Atlas range in style and genre as well as historical period. The density and ingenuity of those linkages are part of the pleasure of the book. For one, in each of the stories a character has a sort of comet shaped birthmark. In C, the protagonist reads the letters of B and realizes that she somehow shares the same memories. Another in B, declares with curious certainty as he's about to commit suicide, "Rome will fall again. Cortes'll lay Tenochitlan to waste again, and later sleep under Corsican stars again...Nietzche's gramophone."Meanwhile, the denizens of F, a postapocalyptic civilization livinig on the margins of an ecologicially devastated world, believe in the reincarnation of souls. This suggests the six stories of Cloud Atlas representing the path of a single soul traveling through different bodies and different historical periods.
All of these forms experience slavery, predation, rape, colonialism and social injustice, as well as a cacophony of voices holding forth on such themes. The world, all of the worlds, of Cloud Atlas are a veil of tears. History is a slaughterbench of suffering.
There are, it seems to me, three main voices in Cloud Atlas. The first might be called the Nietzschean one, the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals, celebrating the brutal vitality of the aristocratic class. "What sparks wars?" says one character from B (the most Nietzschean of the stories), "The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the feature of violence...is the instrument of this dreadful will...The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions." Incidentally, one of the musical pieces being composed in B is titled "Eternal Recurrence". Here we have a vision of savage vitality, a world overflowing with savage, predatory vitality, ultimately overflowing and consuming itself in a meaningless spectacle.
The other I will call the Stoic: "A life spent shaping a world I want [my child] to inherit, not one I fear [he] shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living....I shall pledge myself the abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave..." Let's describe Stoicism this way: it is a slave ideology. The slave knows that he is unfree, but he thinks to himself, "In my mind I am free."
The Stoic counterposes the freedom of the will to the unfreedom of the world, is unfree because he lives in an unfree world, but he is free in his mind. Unable to transcend the opposition between his will and the world, the Stoic's characteristic response to the world is abstract moral precept, his characteristic attitude resignation.
None of this grand design would work very well as a piece of fiction, I might add, if the writing wasn't so good on a sentence by sentence and page by page level. Few works of experimental fiction are so good a getting you to turn the page. Everywhere there are delightful witticisms, great imagery, nuggets of astonishing lyricism, feats of literary horseplay and pastiche, astute observations on art and culture. And somehow it all moves to gracefully and swiftly, sucking you along all the way to the end.
So why is it that I'm really less taken with this book that this mountain of entirely sincere praise I've heaped on it would suggest? I suppose part of my reservations are a consequence of the structure itself. Each of the stories are merely an episode in the grand arc of a soul's transmigration through eternity. What that arc is is hard to say. Is it an ascent towards Enlightenment? Perhaps. But is certain is that this framing device has distancing effect on each of the individual stories.
Perhaps this is why each of hte stories, taken by themselves, can arouse interest but never urgency. My attitude towards the narrative's goings-on was amused and detached, but I was never quite suffering and feeling with them. Like a God looking down among mortals, I always remained hovering over scene, outside the tableau, never quite immersed.
Something else. Why six stories? I know for a fact this was scaled down from 9. I'm not sure it was scaled back enough. Why not five or four? It seems to me that 3 is the minimum number of parts you need to make this kind of structure work. More adds complication but not necessarily depth.
Nor or all the stories of the same quality. IMHO B, E, and F are the best. B is not badly done at all, if a bit on the nose thematically (we even get something like a moral at the end). C recreates an airport thriller quite competently, but I've read enough airport novels and one more adds nothing to my life. I found myself growing tired of the D's lack of narrative momentum, wherein the comically curmudgeonly protagonist wanders around various train stations and hotels and while constantly griping about his health.
The design of the book perhaps precludes any sort of consistency of tone. The clash of multifarious tones and voices is perhaps part of the design of the book and help to give it a kind of amplitude of human experience.
Robert M Derry
Basic
I really enjoyed Cloud Atlas. I think that it really shows how the past, present & future are interconnected. I like the Russian doll analogy, although I think the story invoked a sense in me of dropping a pebble in the ocean and watching the ripples spread out.
I also read a variety of fiction so I thought that it was quite interesting that each short story was from a different genre, even though, as you say, some are weaker than others.
Plus, not many short story collections get published nowadays. He probably got away with it on the basis that they're interconnected so there's one overarching narrative it theme.
Thirteen's a great book. Just read it a few weeks back and then Fifty-Fifty which is another belter. Love his style and how he handles multiple POVs.
Just finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab. Magnificent! There's a strong rhythm and poetry to the prose. A bit heavy-handed on the words "Perhaps" but feels deliberate and I could read past it.
I've finished Rupert Everett's memoir Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins (an enjoyable peep behind the curtains of a lot of lifestyles most of us will never experience...names droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven...and there's a dog) and I'm now half way through Maggie O'Farrell's Waterstones Book Of The Year, Hamnet. Beautifully written, her style is like a cross between Helen Dunmore and Ali Smith. I was a bit reluctant to start it because the death of a child is subject matter that usually puts me off, but so many people have raved about it and I know I love her writing. Anyway, it's excellent so far.
Hannah F
Full Member
I love Maggie O'Farrell's writing style. I'm eagerly waiting for it to come out in paperback.
David Y
Basic
I read a whole book in one sitting yesterday. Enid Blyton's The Secret Seven ! I only read the Famous Five before. Chapter one of this first book in the series was titled 'Plans for an S.S. meeting'. A rather controversial choice, I thought, given it was written in 1949. I'll be reading a Malory Towers volume next (loved the BBC iPlayer dramatisation), then the opening Harry Potter's again. This is research for my own middle-grade fiction novel, who's first draft is nearing completion. Also half-way through The Defence by Steve Cavanagh. Not as good as his others, but only one typo so far.
Victoria Bastedo
Basic
I love Enid Blyton! When I was young, I got one of those thin little paper backs, with an atmospheric watercolor cover, you know the type? Dark blue, with crashing waves and rising cliff in the night. It was called, 'Mystery Island'. It became one of 'my' books. I kept it for the way it made me feel, I could smell that salt wind coming in the open bedroom window of the tower, I could feel the clamminess of the ancient secret passageway which went under the sea to the island from a forgotten cave. The way the young people, about my age at the first reading, found themselves alone in their mystery, although loving adults were nearby, made the night belong to me. I wanted to read it again, when I was in my late-forties-early-fifties, but alas, I'd lost my ragged copy long since. Enter the wonder of the internet. A title like 'Mystery Island' yielded not very successful results. Finally, after much thought, (trying to get my older brain to search the memory banks, hah!) I remembered the author's first name might've been.... Enid?
My friend, who was really good at investigating, discovered that someone named Enid Blyton, had written a book called. 'Island of Adventure'. Success! I got a copy of it off of ebay. It was good to have it on my shelf again. I guess some American publisher of the seventies thought it needed a more jazzy, though still oblique, title when they put out their version.
David Y
Basic
Haha, glad to have stirred a memory. One thing I remember as a child was how she was criticised because *all* her dialogue tags were 'said'. Never anything interesting like 'whispered' or 'shouted' or 'exclaimed'. Yet, here we are decades later and we're all told to only use 'said'. Haha. Trivial fact she grew up in my current neighbourhood, sharing that honour with a certain Julie Andrews.
Hannah F
Full Member
I loved Enid Blyton's "The Faraway Tree" series.
Good one!!I adored The Famous Five and read every single one. Wasn't so grabbed by The Secret Seven, but loved the St Claire's series and also read a fair few of the Mallory Towers set. I never read The Faraway Tree or The Wishing Chair trilogies, but my daughter hugely enjoyed both.
Incidentally, @David Y are you reading Enid Blyton and Harry Potter with a view to getting an MG book of your own published? It's a good idea to read the classics, but I would counsel you to also read a bunch of successful MG fiction published within the last couple of years to get a handle on what publishers and agents are interested in nowadays and the preferred styles of writing for 21st century children. (Speaking as someone who's been through the same process...) Good luck!
Victoria Bastedo
Basic
As I said somewhere in the forum, I've recently realized that MG fantasy fiction is a better fit for me than YA. YA is gritty, dark, blech, so often, lol. I recently read and loved, 'Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms', and am now reading, 'The Lost Property Office' by James R. Hannibal. I'm about a third of the way through it. The first few chapters were really good. Clever, focused into the kid's feelings, vivid. At about a third of the way through it's slowing down a bit in interest for me, but still. Great title, good concept, fun.
I adored The Famous Five and read every single one. Wasn't so grabbed by The Secret Seven, but loved the St Claire's series and also read a fair few of the Mallory Towers set. I never read The Faraway Tree or The Wishing Chair trilogies, but my daughter hugely enjoyed both.
Incidentally, @David Y are you reading Enid Blyton and Harry Potter with a view to getting an MG book of your own published? It's a good idea to read the classics, but I would counsel you to also read a bunch of successful MG fiction published within the last couple of years to get a handle on what publishers and agents are interested in nowadays and the preferred styles of writing for 21st century children. (Speaking as someone who's been through the same process...) Good luck!
Chris Yugay
Basic
Thanks for the recommendation, Victoria. Will put The Lost Property Office on my to-read list. When you are done with it, check out The Secret Library (also MG fantasy). There is a free audio edition of it on youtube
Victoria Bastedo
Basic
Hi Chris! My, that prologue to the Secret Library is certainly chilling! Had me gripped. It was a bit of a challenge to go from that, to kid at school, lol. Is this book available in a kindle format? I'd like to read more, but do best on the screen. Thank you!
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