General Reading / Book Thread for 2019

Sounds like the kind of thing I do enjoy, yes! Do you have any particular recommendations for me, please? :blush:

I finished Vineland today, which has a fittingly odd and somewhat lowkey ending to what is an odd and somewhat lowkey novel. Really liked this second read-through though, made a lot more sense of it this time round (I seem to remember struggling to get my head around quite what a Thanatoid is first time round).

Dunno what to read next.

Was planning to re-read Human Acts by Han Kang, but I also got a few books left to get started on:

  • We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (I only know that it’s seen as the precursor to 1984 / Brave New World by many)
  • The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis, which I didn’t know existed. Didn’t realise the film was an adaptation (might try and watch the film first, actually?)
  • A PKD collection that’s tied in with the Electric Dreams series (I might read these alongside watching the adaptations)

Read An American Marriage last week - throughly recommend.

Also fao @anon44830896 @anon45164313 and @Gnometorious if you like readable thrillers have you read Jane Harpers ones? Set in the outback, currently i am reading The Lost Man. Easy to read but also very well written.

I also read The Rumour and The Sister recently, would not recommend on a literary level as were throughly ridiculous but good easy holiday nonsense - 99p on kindle too.

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I’ll add the lost man to my kindle list! It sounds good.

I’m about 20% of the way into Daisy Jones & The Six and I am fully loving it!

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Finished Human Acts this morning. Unflinching in the descriptions of violence, yet it always manages to feed into the general mood of sadness instead of ever feeling gratuitous. I got a lot of this the first time I read it, I think, but there was definitely more clarity of the anger running through it at how innocent lives can be carelessly ruined by those in power.

Don’t know what to move to next (it’ll be coming up to Halloween reading, soon!)

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Just finished When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, after trying The Shining but just getting a bit depressed with it and fancying something light. It didn’t disappoint! Found myself laughing out loud loads.

We by Zamyatin is really good

I’d go as far to say that Orwell ripped him off quite a lot with 1984. It’s essentially the same story with a bit of tweaking, same plot structure and character types. It’s kind of amazing how it’s been marginalised really when you consider the reach of 1984. I will qualify this by saying that obviously 1984 is a great book and is important for the UK. I think I enjoyed Zamyatin’s prose even more though; it’s a lost more playful and inventive, I think.

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Recently read:

French Lietutenant’s Woman (John Fowles). Really liked this, excellent prose and love the little post modern flourishes, elevates it to another level.

Brecht: A choice of evil- I didn’t know much about Brecht before and this gives a very lucid and readable account of his life and politics.

Conversations with Friends (Sally Rooney). She’s good with dialogue and has a sense of people’s psychology, but the book as a whole is not exactly groundbreaking and I think it’s quite telling that this is seen as some kind of modern masterpiece.

The Weird and the eerie (Mark Fisher). Surprisingly straightforward and readable, he moves through mainstream culture to more obscure work to talk about the stranger things in life.

Art Sex Music (Cosey Fanni Tutti) I read this just before the Sally Rooney and it just made the difference between the two eras ever more distinct. The abundance of freedom and creativity running through this book is joyous. She isn’t as good a prose writer as say, Patti Smith, but the enthusiasm makes up for it. Loved it.

Poetry by Paul Celan and Holderlin…I am too stupid for poetry.

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Found The ‘Autobiography of Agent Dale Cooper’ in BHF shop… Not as seedy as the Diary of Laura Palmer but still, he comes across as a bit jarring, they give a bit of backstory to Windam Earle which I can’t recall if much was given in the series. Overall, easy to read but not amazing. Frost sibling wrote it.

Daisy Jones & The Six is absolutely amazing. Loved every second of it.

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Adding to my kindle!!

You’ve probably already read it, but John Fowles’ The Collector is absolutely brilliant and very, very deserving of a read

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Yes, that was my first of his I’d read…excellent book

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We is quite funny. Really liked the reveal of the railway timetable being the height of English literature.

Although it was obvs written in a totally different context, I can’t help but draw parallels with today’s aggressive bottom line centric culture and to an extent with the kind of talking down of humanities in comparison to STEM’s mahoosive singular importance or whatever it is i’m trying to say

Finished Normal People a few weeks ago. By the end I was really enjoying it, some lovely details I thought she caught the way the characters spoke and little features of their lives really well.

BUT, I just really struggle to get over the central conceit of the book. For all its realism, I just find it impossible to believe that the two main characters would ever get together given their backgrounds. For such a realistic book, it just felt like a pure fantasy, something from a Harlequin romance. I’m sure people will come and tell me I’m wrong now, but the whole thing struck a duff note to me, though as I say, I thought overall it was very good and I liked it a lot.

Decided to try and power through The Goldfinch before the film comes out in a month’s time. Nearly 900 pages ffs

(Seems well written and engaging so far)

It’s going to be weird if Margaret Atwood gets shortlisted for the Booker Prize tomorrow when the book’s still not bloody out yet

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I bought this on a whim in Waterstone’s the other week.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gallows-Pole-Benjamin-Myers/dp/1526611155/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AC1F2P7BX33B&keywords=the+gallows+pole&qid=1567433298&s=gateway&sprefix=the+gallows%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1

It’s really good so far. It’s about coin clippers in West Yorkshire in the 1700s.

I also took the plunge with Murakami recently. Kafka on the Shore. It was OK, I guess.

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Happens fairly often. Kind of a bind for the publisher because it means they can’t capitalise on the sales boost that comes with it, but I presume they’re limited by an international release date.

Finally got around to reading October Miéville’s retelling of the Russian Revolution quite enjoying the bit where the Bolshevik central committee troll Lenin by either not printing his letters or printing letters that say the opposite to what he’s saying.

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