General Reading / Book Thread for 2019

Reading ‘The Dispossessed’ now. leGuin is properly one of the best sci-fi writers ever, all her worlds are so fully realised. Especially enjoy her description of sexualities and love in these books.

5 Likes

Circe.

It’s good, huh? Think it dipped a fair bit when Odyseuss came into it, recalling his stories in a rambling sort of list just turned me off but otherwise I loved it, plus I found visualising it all came quite easily, which normally I really struggle with.

Just making a start on the new Joseph Knox now, which I’ve been really looking forward to.

I finished Howard’s End.

The writing itself was really nice but by the end I hated all of the characters and the narrator’s politics so much I wouldn’t even say I enjoyed it.

I don’t have a great return on the Literary Canon.

1 Like

tried reading 2666 but i gave up. really hate fiction where the main characters are academics or authors or something.

Been reading A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway as I’m off to Paris later in the year. About four chapters in but it feels like on hundred. Why does he feel the need to describe every boring facet of his life in such detail? There was a discussion about fires and the buying of firewood in chapter one and it only got more tedious from there.

Maybe if you’re interested in that period of literary history this is all very interesting. Not for me though.

6 Likes

Have you read his novels? I loved Old Man and the Sea, but found the exact same problems as you mentioned when I tried The Sun Also Rises - a whole lot of detail that detracted more than it added.

1 Like

Have you read A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers? It’s much lighter stuff in terms of the writing style, but I absolutely love the world it built and the way she approaches sexualities and just how open and warm her descriptions are. So I’d suggest that, given the particular aspects you mentioned about LeGuin’s writing.

5 Likes

I’ve heard his novels are really good. I nearly read For Whom The Bell Tolls when I went on holiday to Spain the other year. I have noticed that his novels can be quite expensive to buy for some reason though. I got AMF for a pound off Amazon though so I’ll probably just donate it to Oxfam

Definitely read Old Man if nothing else, it’s very short and packs in a lot of imagery in that time, without being dense.

1 Like

Finished reading ‘On Liberty’, have to admit it kind of caught me by surprise by the end since I don’t think Mill was the free market advocate all the modern “classic liberals” seem to think he was and on that specific note I actually found myself agreeing with a lot of what he was saying.

Amazingly AEI probably one of the worlds premier think free-trade think tanks picked up on this (although they didn’t think it was a good thing natch)

Currently reading ‘Dreams of Leaving and Remaining’ which I’m really enjoying, kind of thought it was going to be a book about Brexit but if anything it says more about how economic and social inequality map onto (or rather don’t map onto) the current political landscape.

I can’t remember who I heard say this but they said that ‘On Liberty’ would be better titled ‘On Responsibility’ for this very reason (i.e. that it isn’t a treatise advocating unregulated freedom in a libertarian sense - J.S. Mill was a utilitarian after all).

1 Like

This pretty much, I mean I still think he more or less failed to predict that it wasn’t necessarily government oversight people would be most concerned about in the 21st century but the influence of private capital but his idea of liberty and the benefits of it seem to centre human flourishing beyond accumulation and trade which at most he seems to see as necessary evils.

He’s also,perhaps surprisingly, very feminist particularly for the time period. Doesn’t excuse him being a bit of a racist but it’s interesting many of his ideas have clearly been used to justify things they were never intended to.

Seems to me that both of those paragraphs (minus the racism part) could have been written about Adam Smith too!

1 Like

Reading Kitchen Confidential for the first time. It’s such fun. I miss that man :frowning:

Also got Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales on the go for night time spoops. Seem to be more misses than hits in this collection?

Ah don’t tell me that, that’s one of the books I’ve brought on holiday with me!

I think what’s more likely is that she is a very subtle writer and I am a very stupid reader

Still on Vineland, which I’m really enjoying still. Don’t think I’d realised at first just how much of this novel is flashback. It’s a bit of a precursor to the framing device of Mason & Dixon in a way, which is maybe why I found it a bit more disorienting at first.

I’m also reading Stuart David’s Belle & Sebastian book on the train. The story of their origins is crazy and totally alien from today’s perspective.

Just finished Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant as I’m having a mermaid phase. For someone quite terrified of the sea it just didn’t really scare me like the reviews suggested, could definitely picture it as a film though, and the mermaids were suitably creepy. Felt like it dragged out a fair bit then the end came too soon. Not sure if that’s because she might have a sequel lined up but it definitely could do with a bit more detail about the captive mermaid and coming back to shore. Felt like she’s maybe a writer of a different genre trying her hand at something scary but she couldn’t articulate that fear.

Still, I enjoyed it well enough based on the concept alone.

‘There is no roseability …’ Sorry could not help it! :smiley:

1 Like