The Books Thread (2009) edition

[legios]

Thought I would make a start on a thread about the books we are reading this year. I've recently finished a couple of good ones myself.

This afternoon I finished Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, which is one of those books I would consider a classic of the Gumshoe tradition. It is rather a shame that it is categorised (ghetto-ised one might almost say) as a "crime novel". Yes there are a number of crimes committed in the course of the story, and they to some extent are central to the plot, but the book is really about something more general than that. More than murder and its surrounds Chandler is considering wealth, and its corrosive effects both on those who lack it and on those that do. It paints a fascinating picture of early fifties L.A and the strata of wealth that sits on top of it. Through which Philip Marlowe, Chandler's protagionist and somewhat alter-ego, moves as a man apart - defined by a personal code that transcends money whether he likes the circumstances that puts him in or not. Far less frenetic than many of his later imitators, Chandler creates a very palpable sense of place and time. He also has a nearly unique, with the crime genre, prose style - a gift for a certain kind of tone and rhytmn of language which is absorbing in its own right. As far as I'm concerned there are good reasons that Chandler is considered to be the grand master of the genre. Absorbing stuff, and well worth a read.

The second book is one I actually finished just before Christmas, and so sneaking it in here is kind of cheating, but I didn't manage to post about it before Christmas:-

The Corner, a year in the life of an inner city neighbourhood is written by David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun journalist behind Homicide: A year on the killing streets and Edward Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective who has since worked with Simon on The Wire. According to one version I heard the book got its start when Simon's editor suggested he do series on a year in the life of a street corner - forgetting that in Baltimore "corner" is a slang term for an open air drug market... Whether that story of the books origin is true or not, the result is a book with a kind of matter-of-fact sensitivity and acuteness of observation. The book follows a year in the real lives of the residents of a drug corner on Fayette Street in West Baltimore. Hanging the book around the experiences of a broken family who are all involved in the street drugs scene in one way or another - as users, dealers or both, the book charts their attempts to get in, get out and just get by in a neighbourhood where the only viable economic activity left is the drugs industry. It is hard-hitting stuff - made more so by the same matter-of-fact prose style that Simon used in Homicide. I defy anyone to read it and not be moved by some of the books contents. It paints a graphic picture of an environment where the American Dream is quite frankly toxic, and where every teenager knows that statistically if they make it to twenty-one alive they will reach it in a prison cell. And anyone who thinks the world can be divided as simply as "junkies" and "normal people" is in for a bit of an education too. It is emotionally powerful stuff, the more so because you know that these events actually happened, I was genuinely affected by what I read. Suffice it to say that I had to put the book down and walk away from it several times when I was working my way through it. Powerful and moving stuff, very far from light reading but certainly eye-opening stuff. (Mine was an import copy, it is not due to get its long-overdue publication in this country until April or thereabouts).

So, that's what I've been reading. What about your good selves?

Karl

[The Doctor]

Um, I read a Terrance Dicks Doctor Who book in the library called World Game. Shenanigans with Wellington and Nelson. It was ripping old fashioned fun.

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Currently reading the Collins Gem pocket books on Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Also very slowly re-reading (in a different translation) the delight that is Don Quixote.

I'm sure I'll get round to The Long Goodbye eventually, having enjoyed The Big Sleep and Chandler's short stories.

Martin

[The Doctor]

Only in America by Matt Frei. Written by (until recently) the BBC's Washington correspondent, this is a rather scattershot book about modern America. It's fairly brisk but annoyingly never really settles into a theme, trying to be a guide to recent politics, a commentary on general American specific issues and what it's like to live in Washington and feeling between stools. Maddeningly, every time it shows signs of getting into something meaty it whisks on to the next topic. It feels more like a series of magazine or newspaper articles than a coherant book. It is, however, a bright and breezy read and if you want a primer on America circa early 2009 it does the job, but readers looking for something more in-depth should look elsewhere.

-Ralph

[Gav]

I'm reading House of Leaves AGAIN! It's a book i keep coming back to, and keep finding new things in it. Incredible.

[legios]

Well, I think I have found my reading matter for next month. There seems to be a bit of a movement to get some of the work of C J Cherryh, one of my favourite SF authors, back in print in this country. Probably off the back of Regenesis, her most recent novel getting a hardcover release over here. Not only do I see that Amazon have the former in stock for a decent price, but there is a one-volume edition of Merchanters Luck and 40,000 in Gehenna, two of her books I haven't been able to track down, on release as well. I think come payday I may be making a couple of acquisitions there.

In the meantime I have taken Tripoint and Cyteen down from the shelf to immerse myself in.

Karl

[The Doctor]

Frost/Nixon by David Frost with Bob Zelnick. This is David Frost's account of his infamous interviews with Richard Nixon in 1977. Unfortunately, the writing style is extremely dry and surprisingly repetitive for someone of his journalistic stature (Nixon's views on Vietnam are fully recounted in detail three times, for example) rendering what should have been a fascinating subject matter rather boring. It does at least offer a more balanced view of Nixon as a President and man than is usually the case, however, and it's clear Frost both liked and admired him in a slightly blinkered way. Frost, alas, seems unaware of his own ego when conducting the interviews. The transcripts are interesting, however.

-Ralph

[The Doctor]

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale. This is an account of a real-life investigation into a murder at an English country house in June 1860, which was notorious at the time. The book goes to great length to place the affair in historical context, taking in society attitudes of the time, explaining the then relatively new idea of a detective and looking at how the case was written about in factual and fictional literature of the time. Fascinating stuff, well told. Worth a look.

-Ralph

[Mark_Stevenson]

I'm currently reading jPod by Douglas Coupland. Wickedly good fun.

Mx

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I bought the hardback version of Azincourt once it was reduced to half-price, and read it through in a few days. I have passed on most of my Bernard Cornwell books, but like Sharpe's Trafalgar and Sharpe's Waterloo, Azincourt is a to-keep.

A superb way to learn history.

Martin

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Now just finishing off the Analects of Confucius.

In some of his sayings, the meaning is clear and I find myself nodding in agreement:

"The Master said, 'It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.'"

Others, however, leave me scratching my head:

"The Master said, 'When housing his great tortoise, Tsang Wen-chung had the capitals of the pillars carved in the shape of hills and the rafterposts painted in a duckweed design. What is one to think of his intelligence?'"

Hmmm.

Martin

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Check out this series for stonking value for money:

Nice cloth-cover hardback editions, over 1000 pages each. I got the Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Sherlock Holmes ones when I saw them in the shops - paid £9.99 each, but they're even cheaper on Amazon.

They look mighty fine on the bookshelf, I can tell you.

Just read 'The Hunting of the Snark' for the first time in the LC book. Most amusing.

Martin

[The Doctor]

Recent books here have been an Elric Omnibus by Michael Moorcock. Not bad tosh, but am spacing out the seperate books contained within rather than reading it all in one go. I think it would bea bit samey otherwise.

Currently reading Generation Kill by Evan Wright. This is the book that the remarkable mini-series was based on. It's written by a journalist embedded with a unit of US recon marines for the first two months of the most recent Iraq war. A vivid, clear writing style which really brings home the reality of the situation on the ground. I don't usually find military/war accounts to be very accessable but I can follow it fine. Really brings to home how ****ed up war is. The mini-series is almost word-for-word straight from the book, I now see. Both are highly recommended. The book is currently near the bottom end of ASDA's cheapo paperback chart at £3.86

-Ralph

[legios]

Wish I'd had a look in Asda for it in that case, didn't figure it would have shown up there. I picked it up at the weekend in the Waterstones three-for-two sale. (So technically I suppose it didn't cost me anything and was therefore cheaper, but t'is the principle of the thing). I will be interested to read it (seeing as the world and his wife appears to have beaten me to renting the mini-series), but it will have to wait its turn as I am partway through Regenesis at the moment and that book is a bit jealous of my time.

Karl

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I've just finished reading Don Quixote for the second time. It is definitely one of the top five candidates I would put on a list of books everyone should read - not before they die, but ideally before they get too far into life, so as not to be fooled by the supposed originality of everything that came after.

By sheer coincidence someone was praising it in a Radio 4 light entertainment programme the other day, and they summarised better than I could why it is so brilliant.

For one thing, it is arguably the first proper novel ever written, published in 1605, over a century before Robinson Crusoe, which is said to be the first English novel. And at the same time it sends up the medium of the novel. How cool is that? To invent the novel and spoof it, before anyone has had a chance to write any fully serious novels?

It is in two parts. The first part introduces Don Quixote, a man unhinged by all the ballads of Medieval chivalry that he has read, who decides to revive the profession of knight-errant, and with his comic sidekick squire, Sancho Panza, sets out to do noble deeds, mistaking windmills for giants, flocks of sheep for armies, inns for castles, and so on. The second part, published some years later, continues their adventures. But between the two parts, someone else wrote an unauthorised sequel to the first part (the first ever fan fiction?). In the second part by Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho learn that their exploits were published in Book 1, and have become famous as a result. They also learn that some slanderer has published a false sequel which misrepresents them, and they seek to make it known that only the author of Book 1 is their genuine biographer. The author of their authorised histories is not, however, Cervantes (the actual author) but a Moor who, Cervantes claims, wrote the original accounts of the adventures which he is merely translating for the benefit of the public.

That's just a sample though of the imaginative twisting and turning of this wonderful satire, and of course fails to do justice to two of the most human and likeable tragi-comic characters in world literature.

Can't praise it highly enough.

I've also finished reading my first book of selected writings on Socrates. They are a real mixture of what I consider to be flawed logic that a modern child could see through and wisdom higher than any I encounter in everyday life. Ancient philosophy is not something to be read as a manual, but I don't think you can get a much better stimulus for your own thought processes. Re-reading Plato's Republic now. Then on to Aristotle.

Martin

[Deleted]

Mar 31, 2009 18:30:25 GMT Grand Moff Muffin said:

Check out this series for stonking value for money:

Nice cloth-cover hardback editions, over 1000 pages each. I got the Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Sherlock Holmes ones when I saw them in the shops - paid £9.99 each, but they're even cheaper on Amazon.

They look mighty fine on the bookshelf, I can tell you.

Martin

Are they massive-sized books because if they are I've seen them in The Works and was thinking of getting the Sherlock Holmes one at one point. Only two things put me off getting it though. First, I've already got a backlog of novels I want to finish reading and secondly, due to their size I've got absolutely nowhere to put them!

[Grand Moff Muffin]

No, the ones from The Works that you're thinking of are 24 cm wide and 31 cm high. These ones are less than 16 cm wide and 24 cm high. I bought the Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes ones from The Works, and they are lovely, with all their nice colour plates, etc., but they are too big and heavy to read comfortably. These are much more manageable ones, and can be held open in one hand, whereas the big versions require two hands and a table.

Martin

[Deleted]

I may consider getting these smaller ones then. I prefer classic fiction to modern fiction and although Shakespeare doesn't really float my boat I would probably be interested in Sherlock Holmes.

[Cullen]

I'm reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation books at the minute. The original trilogy was great and chock full of great sci-fi ideas. I've start reading the second trilogy written 30 years after the first and so far it doesn't really stack up. The page count is up but the ideas are not. Always a problem with an ongoing series, especially one the author returned to after such a long time seemingly due to fan and publisher pressure than really wanting to.

[blueshift]

May 28, 2009 23:00:48 GMT Cullen said:

I'm reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation books at the minute. The original trilogy was great and chock full of great sci-fi ideas. I've start reading the second trilogy written 30 years after the first and so far it doesn't really stack up. The page count is up but the ideas are not. Always a problem with an ongoing series, especially one the author returned to after such a long time seemingly due to fan and publisher pressure than really wanting to.

Oh ho ho ho ho

Just you wait till you read his prequels and he tells about how Hari Seldon has hot sweaty sex with his ninja robot girlfriend

[The Doctor]

Currently reading a Doc Savage volume on loan from Nick. It is fine pulp nonsense. Makes for a refreshing read, actually.

-Ralph

[legios]

I've gone a little bit off my normal reservation with my current reading - taking one of my occasional foray into Fantasy. At home I am currently working my way through Michael Moorcock's "The Eternal Champion". A little rough around the edges, and shows its roots as some of his earliest work in places, but it does have a fair amount of freewheeling imagination to it and some very striking images. (The idea of a frozen, ice-covered Earth onto which the moon has fallen like an enormous mountain is one that very much stick in my mind.

From epic fantasy I have been drifting to something a little bit more modern and "urban". My "train reading" ("Eternal Champion is not mine to cart about and is also the size of a brick and a half) has been Sergie Lukyanenko's "The Final Watch" - the last book in the cycle that he began with "The Night Watch". Once again their is a very definite flavour to these books that is very different to Western Urban Fantasy. Even the parts of the book that are set in Edinburgh are seen through a distinct lens which gives an interesting perspective on the city. It is interesting to see it a little bit through tourist eyes. Anton remains a suitably flawed and likeable protagionist and the book presents one of the better reimaginings of the legend of Merlin that I have seen (answering the "Was he a good man or a bad man?" question that comes up when you compare different versions of the legend with a resounding "depends").

A little bit of an expedition outside my usual genre but a bit of variety is good for me I feel.

Karl

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Well, I finished 'The Brother Karamazov'.

God, I love the great 19th Century Russian prose writers.

Tolstoy is my favourite - I've read 'War and Peace' and his short stories, and am going to read 'Anna Karenina' next - because he shows the full breadth of human life. Every character he brings on, however small his or her role, whether peasant or privileged, young or old, male or female, he turns into a distinct individual human being with their own unique characteristics, who you can picture and imagine meeting in real life - just in a few short sentences. You can understand every character's point of view, see through each's eyes in turn, and believe in their lives as your own. Their fortunes do not appear to be driven by the needs of the author to send a particular message, but rather by the whims of fortune in real life - neither idealised nor overly pessimistic, but a mixture of the rough with the smooth. Whatever their situation and yours might be, you can always find something in common with them because they are all your fellow human beings and have their thoughts which they share with you. And on top of that, 'War and Peace' defines the word epic, as it follows its various characters through the Napoleonic Wars and beyond, and also follows the movements of nations and takes whole chapters out to discuss the factors driving human history, and assess how much power to direct world events really lies with so-called 'leaders' like Napoleon and how much they are merely markers or indicators at the head of unstoppable tides of collective human will. 'War and Peace' is perhaps the greatest novel ever written.

But Dostoevsky, who wrote 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' contributes in a different sort of way. His central characters are more fatally, emotionally intense, as opposed to Tolstoy's apparent mission to cover the full spectrum of mankind. And both Dostoevsky's great novels contain murders.

'Crime and Punishment' is told through the eyes of the murderer, his thoughts and emotions before and subsequent to the crime, as he is hounded by a Columbo-like police inspector. The murder is of an innocent victim, premeditated, and in no way morally justifiable. But if you think of murderers as another species to yourself, who you have nothing in common with, read this book and get back to me.

'The Brothers Karamazov', however, is a league above 'Crime and Punishment' in sophistication. It is longer, and doesn't focus on a single character but a medium-sized cast of unique characters. The murder and question of who the murderer is are but one component of a novel that explores (in depth) religion, atheism, lust, greed, love, human contradictions, patience, pride, anger, hypocrisy, mob mentality, envy, jealousy, sympathy, forgiveness, fatalism and idealism. It takes a whole group of chapters to give an account of a conversation in which an atheist eloquently and devastatingly expounds his viewpoint - which taken in isolation would convince you the author must be an atheist, as it beats any such arguments I've heard from real people on the subject. It then devotes another whole group of chapters to the life of a gentle monk and his final address to his friends, which has the entirely opposite effect, and convinces you that the writer must be the greatest speaker in the world on behalf of faith, again more eloquent than anything I hear in real-life religious debates or read in newspapers or on the Internet. The novel shows entirely true-to-life hypocrisy and sincerity by both believers and non-believers, and portrays emotionally unstable characters of all kinds who simply cannot be dismissed as irrational by an honest human reader. The court case in the final act is actually less satisfying than the deep conversations had in earlier parts of the book, and yet here too, the closing speeches of the prosecuting and defending counsels are both brilliant. Never on TV do you get such deep and convincing arguments on both sides. The author's own views come out at the very end, as a miscarriage of justice and the death of a child fail to quench the hope for a better future by the younger generation (much as the murderer's inevitable capture and conviction in 'Crime and Punishment' are a relief to him and produce the first sense of hope and redemption).

And no, I haven't spoilt the books by telling you how they end. Telling you the ending only spoils lesser stories, whose merits are entirely in guessing whodunnit or who lives and who dies. These are books about characters and their thoughts. Read them and wonder what you were doing with your life up until now.

Martin

[Deleted]

Just finished reading the James Bond novel Thunderball and found it be one of the better Bond novels. Not the best but one of the better ones. I am now onto the novelisation of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and, just like the movie it isn't coming out as too exciting. The author appears to have an interest in using the word 'dove' quite often. No, not the feathered bird 'dove' but another way of saying the word 'dived' which to me sounds like an English word created by somebody from a non-English speaking country.

[legios]

Nov 2, 2009 18:25:40 GMT @zudobug said:

J The author appears to have an interest in using the word 'dove' quite often. No, not the feathered bird 'dove' but another way of saying the word 'dived' which to me sounds like an English word created by somebody from a non-English speaking country.

Some people would suggest that to be exactly the case. It is a US English useage - "dove" is more common past tense of the verb "dive" over there, the "dived" useage being more associated with British English.

Having read a lot of US authors in my formative years it is fair to say that "dove" actually looks less odd than "dived" to me by now.

Karl

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Personally, I'm more bothered by the use of 'span' as the past tense of 'spin'. Yuck.

Martin

[Deleted]

I prefer my books to be written in proper English rather than US English. I can cope with words like 'neighbour' but without the 'u' and similar words like 'recognise' being spelt with a 'z' rather than an 's' but words like 'dove' just don't do anything for me.

[The Doctor]

I do get quite annoyed when UK printings don't bother to 'correct' the American printings. Seeing words like 'colour' as 'color' in a UK edition drives me up the bloody wall.

-Ralph

[jameso]

I just finished Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was a bit of a struggle, but did make me laugh a few times.

irreference.com/pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies/

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Read the final 150 pages of 'Anna Karenina' by Leo Tolstoy on my day off yesterday (including over a nice pub lunch at my local). My high regard for the great Russian prose writers of the 19th Century remains unchanged from my post of August 22. I don't know of any writer who can get a reader to understand and sympathise with so many different characters in a novel at once, all with different outlooks on life, views on each other, and entirely believable currents of inner emotional and intellectual thought. The character I most find myself wanting to dislike is the title character, who is entirely absorbed in her own emotional needs in reltion to her husband and lover, to the extent that she puts her children's needs second, and yet her downward spiral into despair is too convincing, and I can't quite dismiss her problems as self-inflicted, since she is at the mercy of her own psychological make-up - as are we all, but perhaps women more so, with all the changes they go through around childbirth.

At the same time, unlike writers that I dislike who focus too exclusively on one outlook on life (such as Chekhov) and who fail to describe the full spectrum of human existence, Tolstoy interweaves the tragic story of his 'heroine' with the changes going on in other characters' lives, from the emotional highs of true love to the terrors of childbirth, from a range of attitudes to both fatherhood and motherhood to the superficiality of high society, the life of peasants, simple wisdom, struggles with belief and disbelief in religion, the meaning of life, financial worries - as with 'War and Peace', you get the feeling that Tolstoy has lived a dozen lives where we only have experience of one. And when I shut the book I go away with a greater understanding of people whose outlooks on life previously seemed inexplicable to me.

After reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I find myself more conscious of the complete lives being lived by all the people I bump into as I go about my own life - how they are all just as real as my own. If everyone read this stuff, I think there would be far more patience and understanding between human beings, because it breaks down the barriers we put up that allow us to be hostile/dismissive/contemptuous to one another. Every time I think someone is a pillock, I just have to remember that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have taken me inside the lives of such people and shown me things from their point of view, and I understood them - and I revise my hasty judgement, recognising my own limited knowledge of their lives, without which I should not jump to conclusions about them any more than I would wish them to do about me.

(And these authors have also shown me characters that have much in common with me, and shown me that they are far from unflawed.)

Check out the big four works. They are more than worth a few weeks of your life:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_and_Punishment
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov_(novel)

Martin