What are you reading at the moment?

[Timmo]

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

 

I've been meaning to read one of his books for years, and I quite liked the premise of this one. It also held my attention for most of it. That's about as far as my praise goes though, I found it really basic in its insights and I found the conversations massively unrealistic, although I realise that could be at least partly down to cultural differences. Characters giving their life story to people they've just met is a regular occurrence. I also had major issues with some of the decisions made by the characters, although I won't spoil anything by being specific.

 

I have to say I found it funny how 95% of it is PG rated with polite conversations and gentle humour, and the other 5% is either really dark or very graphic sex.

[ZOK]

I find Murakami to be hugely overrated.

[Miner Willy]

I found a book during decluttering that I had no idea I owned. I don't normally read printed books as my eyes are crap these days, but it's only short, so I thought I'd just persevere.

 

So anyway, it's Fup by Jim Dodge, and I don't recall ever hearing of it or him, but it's brilliant. It's warm and funny and real; and just written with such confidence. A lovely surprise. 

[Silent Runner]

I've read a few Jim Dodge books and they're really good - Stone Junction is his best I think.

[Miner Willy]

1 hour ago, Silent Runner said:

I've read a few Jim Dodge books and they're really good - Stone Junction is his best I think.

Thanks. Added to the list. 

[Thwomp]

I've just started Dark Matter, and so far it's great - exactly my kind of book 

[Thwomp]

Well I've been really disappointed by Dark Matter. It started off really well with an intriguing mystery, but quickly hit a lull and never recovered from it. I read reviews saying that it had invented a new genre and was groundbreaking, but it just reminded me of a lot of sci-fi films, the main one being 

Spoiler

Predestination.

I didn't think it was anything revolutionary at all.

[Stopharage]

I think Blake Crouch is a terrible writer; he's the Dan Brown of populist sci-fi. He has some great ideas but his execution is poor and a lot of it ends up making no sense.

[Thwomp]

I've just finished The Butterfly Garden, another shit book. That's two in a row after Dark Matter 

[Vimster]

I'm reading A Cold Heart by Jonathan Kellerman, pretty standard murder mystery job, easy read but nothing outstanding. Just fancied something undemanding after slogging through Timescape. 

[emerald fox]

On 13/11/2020 at 16:44, ZOK said:

I find Murakami to be hugely overrated.

 

I read 18Q4 and enjoyed it, and have often thought about bits of it quite a long time afterwards which I guess is the mark of a good book. But I wasn’t left wanting to read more of his stuff and from what I’ve heard it’s pretty similar 

[Naysonymous]

Finished off Aubrey-Maturin, loved the series and while I do think the formula becomes a little stale towards the end it was a total pleasure from start to finish.  The first half dozen or so books were definitely funnier than the later ones but I did enjoy Maturin's development as a character as the books became more about him than Jack as time went by. 

 

After that I revisited The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet because it's set in the same time period as Jack Aubrey stuff and it was definitely worth a revisit after soaking up a bit more nautical knowledge from Patrick O'Brian. It's a fabulous book which I enjoyed just as much the second time round. 

 

Which brings me to Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, which came out last summer.  It had me absolutely hooked from the first paragraph as I felt it was going to be a love letter to Soho in the 1960s. Soho is an area I know fairly well but I'd have loved to have seen it during the height of the swinging sixties and the descriptions of the sights, the sounds and the smells of the place really hit the spot.   I'm not sure I love the book so far though, I'm still very much in the first act but I'm finding it hard to care about the titular band very much, some of the characters are clearly based on real people of the era, there's a German photographer who is a thinly veiled Astrid Kirchherr and I suspect there will be more as the book goes on.  The cameos by real famous folk (David Bowie, Brian Jones) seems a bit cheesy but fuck it, It's David Mitchell and it's Denmark Street in 1967 so I'm going to give it the benefit of any doubt. 

 

**edit**

 

About halfway through now.  It's a weird book, half of it reads like mediocre genre fiction and there was a whole section which felt self contained just so the group could have some adversity to overcome but there was so much of the book remaining you knew there was practically zero at stake. All of the real life people who have had speaking roles in the book are dead, I wonder if that's just to sidestep any potential legal issues. Jimmy Savile of all people is in the book for a little while(!) I got oddly annoyed about a geographical error on a train ride† and I'm not feeling the sections about the music, I guess it's hard to care about music that doesn't actually exist, but there's still something I really enjoy. There are heavy call backs to Thousand Autumns which I genuinely wasn't expecting and make me happy I revisited it just before picking this up and the Soho of the 1960s just remains a fascinating place. 

 

 

†over twenty years working on the railway will do that to a man I guess. 

[Vimster]

I've been reading Zucked: Waking Up To The Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee but am close to binning it. It's not saying anything I didn't already know about Facebook's shady way of doing things, about using various tricks to keep people's attention, its inability to do anything about hate speech, interference in election advertising etc. It spends a lot of time talking about his role in the early days of Facebook and him generally. Not sure where it's going but so far it hasn't been worth it.

[Chance Caramel]

I literally JUST finished 1974 - by David Peace.  The first of the Red Ridings quartet.

 

Has anybody else read it?  I feel like I just fell out of a massive whirling washing machine drum of complicated plots and a thousand villainous characters.  I’m not even sure who did what, and I can’t find any online plot explanations.  Help!

[milko]

I read those back to back a few years ago and remember it being pretty intense and dark. Really good too. But I'm probably not fresh enough to help much. There was a good TV adaptation in case you didn't know already, might be worth a go. 

[multi]

I also read those David Peace books at the time they came out, can remember really enjoying them and being really creeped out by them at times. But like @milko, it's a while ago now and I can't remember much detail, just that they were an excellent read. Keep on with them @Loz Boz

 

Today I read a review in the Observer of a book called "The Lamplighters" by Emma Stonex which sounded really intriguing, so I downloaded the start of it though Kindle. Burned through that at work today so will be ordering the full book in the morning. It's started brilliantly and I can't wait to find out more. 

 

It's a fictional tale about the mysterious and disturbing disappearance of 3 lighthouse keepers from a Lands End lighthouse in 1972, investigated by a fictional novelist in 1992, but is based on a real disappearance of 3 lighthouse keepers from a real life Scottish lighthouse in 1900.

 

the review that piqued my interest -

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/01/the-lamplighters-by-emma-stonex-review-haunting-folk-tale-rebooted?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

 

edit - I also read on here in one of the book threads some discussion about Stephen King and Peter Straub's The Talisman and how good it was. I read it as a youngster but can't remember much about it, so I was pleased to find on my visit to the Kindle store that it currently 9n sale for 99p. Bought it.

 

 

[Naysonymous]

Finished Utopia Avenue which has some nice passages, wraps up neatly and on the whole is "fine" but it's definitely a weak book by David Mitchell's high standards.  

 

Picked up Piranesi by Susanna Clarke after seeing quite a bit of buzz about it and I bloody loved it.  Glad I didn't know anything at all about it going in other than the very basic premise that it was somewhat gothic fantasy, I imagine it would be very easy to spoil if you read a synopsis, but I cannot recommend it enough if you're looking for a book you can fly through in a weekend.  

[ZOK]

Who was it who recommended The Island by Ana Maria Matute? It could have been from the Kindle thread...anyway I’ve nearly finished it and I wanted to thank whoever suggested it, because it’s quite brilliant.

[Monkeyboy]

 

I think this the final Nolan book. I really should have started at the beginning, I guess. But enjoying this one so far. The Hardcase Crime books have some amazing covers. Very Reprisalizer/Terry Finch (not a bad thing). So I actually don't mind paying a bit more for a paperback over a kindle edition.

[Silent Runner]

I found out recently that the film director S Craig Zahler also writes books. He's written in a few genres but the one that sounded interesting to me was Mean Business on North Ganson Street. A crime thriller about a cop who screws up at work and gets sent to a nightmare precinct somewhere in Missouri - this place is a living hell. On his second day two cops are ambushed and killed and things get more violent and grisly were quickly. 

 

This is a very good read but bleak as hell and outrageously violent. The film of his it reminds me off mostly is Dragged Across Concrete - it has the same nihilism and claustrophobia on every page. I'll definitely read more of his books but I might need a little break after this. 

[Naysonymous]

I've just finished The first fifteen lives of Harry August by Catherine Webb after seeing a few people be positive about it on here and I absolutely adored it.  It's like an extreme version of Groundhog Day I guess, but it's extremely polished, super tightly written and has some fabulous world building, fantastic characters and page turning tension. I didn't buy the McGuffin for a second but it really didn't take anything away from my enjoyment of wonderful story.  

[Silent Runner]

Over the weekend I read the new Christopher Brookmyre book The Cut. An elderly woman is released from prison after 25 years for killing her partner but she swears she's innocent. She teams up with a horror obsessed film-student who has his own dark past. Together they travel across Europe to try and solve the murder before some villains catch up with them.

 

This was pretty good but standard Brookmyre stuff. I find I really like the first 150 pages of his books then I quickly lose interest and by the end I just want the story wrapped up. The characters were well written and from the amount of horror film references I'd say CB is a proper horror buff. It's well paced and there are some laughs but there's a massive coincidence used as a plot point that was just ridiculous. 

[RubberJohnny]

Done a lot of reading during y'know - The Event:

 

The Mirror and the Light (Hillary Mantel) - The Wolf Hall trilogy has become a comfortable friend, and Hillary Mantel one of my favorite authors. They're hard to recommend, I'm fully aware they're dense and dry, but I think they're very rewarding nonetheless.

 

Monkey - Journey to the West (Wu Cheng-en) - The Penguin abridged version is very readable. I guess I didn't realise how faithful Dragonball was, because it's very silly and all the daft power levels are er, straight from the text.

 

Once Upon a River (Diane Setterfield) - A genteel enough read with some excellent engrossing prose. Not normally my kind of thing, feels a bit tailor-made to be adapted into a BBC drama.

 

Piranesi (Susanna Clark) - Not really a fan, it's just a big SCP Expedition Log.

 

Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Only eight year late to this one, Walter Isaacsons' biography is so good I picked up his other ones, despite having little interest in the figures they're about, he's great at giving not just an impression of the person, but the swathe of time they existed in.

 

The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - A similar book about Amazon, that's unfortunately dated by being from 2014, right at the inflection point of their exponential curve, and featuring outdated stuff like suggesting Amazon will manufacture all it's goods using 3D printers (remember them!?) as a result.

 

A Distant Mirror (Barbara Tuchman) - I'm sure this is very well-researched and thorough book on history, but reading about the Black Death in the middle of the pandemic was not exactly cosy, and in fact everything about the Middle Ages was just so unrelentingly grim that I was kind of glad to be done with it.

 

Abandoned - Sir Gawain and the Green Night - Sorry J.R.R. Tolkein, 'm sure you worked hard on this Old English translation, but this is fucking unreadable.

 

I've got Masters of Doom on the go next.

[Garwoofoo]

On 14/03/2021 at 22:25, Naysonymous said:

Finished Utopia Avenue which has some nice passages, wraps up neatly and on the whole is "fine" but it's definitely a weak book by David Mitchell's high standards.  

 

 

I really liked Utopia Avenue (Mitchell's without a doubt my favourite author) but it was the first one of his where I thought the way he interweaves his various novels became a bit detrimental - there are a couple of sections where you are almost required to have read The Bone Clocks and De Zoet in order to make sense of it all. It makes it a hard book to recommend.

 

I'm currently halfway through The Snakes by Sadie Jones and I can't put it down. I went into it not knowing anything about it at all and it's switched gears on me about three times in terms of what I thought it was going to be about - it just keeps ramping up and up. Can't wait to get stuck back into it tonight.

[Naysonymous]

Catching up on John Le Carre some more and I've gone for The Constant Gardner which I didn't know much about beyond the fact that it wasn't a cold war story and they made a movie out of it that I've never gotten round to watching.   I think I'm getting towards the final act now and I really like it, it's a neat little mystery surrounding big pharma and corporate murder.  Feels a bit odd reading it during the largest vaccination program in all of human history, especially considering some of the tin foil conspiracies out there might have been partly fuelled by stories like this one but it's all entirely plausible (the themes in this book that is, not the pandemic being a hoax so Bill Gates could inject us with microchips) and I might watch the movie when I've finished the book because I suspect it might be one of those ones which is a pretty faithful adaptation. 

[MarkN]

I'm reading No Name by Wilkie Collins. Absolutely loving it. I'd honestly never heard of it until I saw it on StandardEBooks whilst looking for things to read. I'd really enjoyed The Woman In White And the Moonstone, so this was a no-brainer. Approaching halfway through it, and enjoying it a lot. Main character Magdalen is ace.

[LaveDisco]

On 26/04/2021 at 18:50, RubberJohnny said:

 

Piranesi (Susanna Clark) - Not really a fan, it's just a big SCP Expedition Log.

 

 

This is absolutely valid criticism, but also exactly why I loved it.

[Thwomp]

Started reading Skagboys a couple of days ago. It's hilarious so far, but I'm only about a quarter of the way through. I can't quite connect the characters in the book to those in the film, I definitely prefer Begbie in the film - it makes more sense to me that he'd be a nutter and a bit of a weedy-looking bloke, rather than a meathead like in the book. Little blokes always want to fight. 

[Scribblor]

Just finished Piranesi, which I really enjoyed. Not a patch on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, mind you. Or, for my money, on The Ladies of Grace Adieu, but I definitely recommend it.

 

Next up will be Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets, which I bought after watching the utterly fascinating Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi.

[Thwomp]

On 28/07/2021 at 21:47, Thwomp said:

Started reading Skagboys a couple of days ago. It's hilarious so far, but I'm only about a quarter of the way through. I can't quite connect the characters in the book to those in the film, I definitely prefer Begbie in the film - it makes more sense to me that he'd be a nutter and a bit of a weedy-looking bloke, rather than a meathead like in the book. Little blokes always want to fight. 

 

I've changed my mind, I prefer Begbie in the book now. I like that the book is a bit more realistic and fleshed out e.g. Tommy isn't a goody two shoes like in the film Trainspotting - in Skagboys he takes drugs, fights, and burgles houses. He's just the least worst of the gang.