Books that you've read lately

I haven’t. might try at some point. that recently published book was taken from there wasn’t it? looks like it might be expanded in it’s standalone version

i don’t really know what it is but if it’s christopher tolkien reworking stuff i’ve already read then i don’t think i’ll be arsed with it at all

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I finished Persuasion last night. I really like P&P but this was so stiff and formal that I’ve struggled with it for about two months.

Continuing on about Brief Interviews, I read ‘Octet’ last night. Wow.

I’m someone with similar reservations^ as DFW about the whole “meta” thing, and I really liked this story. I wish I could remember the exact sentence (I think it was part of a footnote) that made me laugh out loud. I like how this collection seems preoccupied with the weird truths and insecurities and whatnot people have difficulty communicating, and the many ways in which this can lead to myriad varieties of fuck-up.


^ i.e. I can be as frustrated and bored as I can be totally inspired and fascinated with this kind of post-modern play, depending on how it’s done, etc.

Just finished up Butterfly in the Typewriter, which is an incredibly staid and flimsy biography of John Kennedy Toole. Don’t know why I thought it would be informative when his Mum destroyed everything valuable to understanding him.

Starting Blindness by Saramago. Liking how eccentric the (lack of) punctuation is but long paragraphs are the enemy of the sleep-deorived!

4321 isn’t as bad as I initially thought but it is very dense, no dialogue at all. It’s quite morale-sapping to turn the page of a great big massive heavy book and just see solid prose (maybe a paragraph break or two if you’re lucky). I’ll stick with it for now though because I like a few of the characters.

I finished Life after Life by Kate Atkinson the other day. Loved it. Is A God in Ruins worth a read? I’m imagining it will be but thought I’d ask.

Just read The Loney, liked it overall but it seemed to leave a few threads open… Very creepy last couple of chapters but I got a bit bored of the God stuff.

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What with Autumn approaching, I started reading The Haunting of Hill House. This has turned out to be a solid decision as I’m really digging the tone of it at present (I always like when a “haunted house” successfully pulls off feeling kind of both homely and threatening / unsettling; House of Leaves has a bit - if I remember right - where he essentially explains why this is good via the Freudian uncanny)

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Just grabbed The Haunting of Hill House from Amazon as it sounds goodo, cheers! Just finished ‘The Loney’ which I chatted about in the horror thread, and have now started To Kill A Mockingbird as have never read it

I’d been raiding through my sibling’s books looking for We Have Always Lived In The Castle (I don’t really know anything about it, but it has such a cool name, right?). I thought we had both, but it transpires that (as far as I know, anyway), we just have two copies of Haunting. I’ll note now that there’s a (somewhat thematically appropriate?) struggle in my mind while reading it, in that I’m having to resist reading all of Luke Sanderson’s dialog in my famous Owen Wilson impression.

May investigate The Loney further; had meant to appeal for more eerie, creepy recommendations for this bleak-looking October, and I think I remember having been intrigued about that book when I stumbled across a review for it on The Grauniad.

Edit: speaking of, pls throw Halloween-ish recs my way if you have any solid 'uns

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anyone into Fred Vargas
heard bell hooks talking about her. just read The Three Evangelists, it was alright

Just realised my recent reading has been a close approximation of the ingredients of House of Leaves. Finished Haunting of Hill House – with all that great haunted house “homeliness crossed with something eerie and corrupted” tone, and really well-communicated anxious dread - and now I’m reading Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges: I’m currently liking the invention and imagination in the few short stories I’ve read, which appeals to my love of (for want of a better word) “imagined texts” and whatnot.

I may well check out We Have Always Lived In The Castle at some point, or any other Jackson, if anyone’s got solid recs.

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Breakfast of Champions is the only Vonnegut I’ve enjoyed start to end. Absolutely love the reduction of mental illness to bad chemicals in your brain.

Lincoln in the Bardo wins the Booker Prize. Looking forward to reading that one. Anyone read it?

Not yet but Tenth of December is one of the best things I’ve ever read. Can’t wait to read this. I read the first few pages in a bookshop whilst waiting at Waterloo for someone and it was great. Get in, George.

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Another no, but it’s probably the one from the shortlist I am most interested in reading.

I’ll get round to it this time next year.

Yeah. I liked it, but not sure I was blown away. It’s funny and it’s sad, and there’s a great range of voices, but somehow it didn’t quite add up for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s at least an eight out of ten, but I was hoping for a ten. Victim of expectations innit.

Good to know. But, yes, managing of expectations is vital. Anticipointment is a ballbag.

The repetition of shifty dark-skinned characters in Ballard’s novels is pretty awful tbh

Partway through Alberto Toscano’s “Fanaticism”, which tries to redeem apocalyptic/millenarian thinking from the ill-repute it has fallen into since, well, almost forever. It does a mostly good job too and includes a good take-down of Norman Cohn, who again, is one of those mid-20th Century English social-critics/philosophers/historians whose interminable dullness and third-way thinking seems, still, impossible to scrub off.

On a related note, I just finished Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending”. I am utterly baffled by Kermode’s reputation in England - on his death he was lauded as one of our best critics, but I couldn’t find much evidence for it under the protracted, simplistic (but somewhat intuitive) metaphors and the general idea that anyone who believes in anything is a bit touched.

I miss reading fiction tbh