The 'Currently Reading' Thread.

[Clumsy Dad]

Apart from my shithouse books, I was given A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole a while back as a gift from my mother in law, I really should start reading it, any good?

 

I read that recently and thoroughly enjoyed it; I think Ignatius J. Reilly is one of the greatest characters in literature, he

[Carbomb]

Loving your sig quote, smp - "My Wall" is an amazing track.

 

 

Currently reading "Fool's Fate", the third in the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb, and also, on SickWoy's recommendation, "Only Revolutions" by Mark Z. Danielewski. The former is standard fantasy fare which I enjoy reading on the bus, the latter, well - I'm enjoying it immensely, but I have to say it leaves me in a bit of a funny state of mind afterwards. It's taking me a while, though.

[Steveo2007]

[SiMania]

 

The Visitor is the 4th in the series of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, I've got another 4 here to read when this is finished.

They're good thrillers with some unexpected turns and Jack Reacher is almost like a guilty pleasure, I've heard the ending to this one is a bit crap though.

[LaGoosh]

After finishing The Dark Tower series I have decided to gradually go through Stephen King's back catalogue and am currently on:

 

 

Good stuff so far. A mix of the horror of a worldwide disease outbreak and the gradual buildup of the magical Satan-esque character Randall Flagg (who played a big part in The Dark Tower).

[ezaki]

I've just finished Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon and am about two thirds of the way through the follow up The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighbourhood by David Simon and Edward Burns. For anyone who enjoyed The Wire these books are essential reading.

 

Next up will probably be D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Anthony Beevor as I loved his previous books especially Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 and The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

 

I'm also re-reading the Battle Royale manga series whilst I'm sitting on the can in the morning. Other recommended toilet reads are Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned by Alan Alda and Just One More Thing by Peter Falk.

[John Eric]

These words as I type them.

[Twatters]

 

I've read all of Bill Bryson's books. I never get bored even after re-reading them loads of times.

[EdgarTheSlouch]

Just ordered from Amazon the Bruiser Brody biog and also Dark Corners (from the author of Ghostwtach)

[Steveo2007]

Just starting.

 

 

I liked the documentary series so thought I would give the book a go.

 

[The Cum Doctor]

 

The Visitor is the 4th in the series of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, I've got another 4 here to read when this is finished.

They're good thrillers with some unexpected turns and Jack Reacher is almost like a guilty pleasure, I've heard the ending to this one is a bit crap though.

 

Not sure if I'd say it's crap. It's certainly a bit on the "eh ? really ?" side, but not crap.

 

Incidentally, the new Jack Reacher book is an absolute scorcher. I don't think I've read a bad one yet.

[thislittlemasochist]

I've just started reading "Consider Phlebas" by Iain M Banks. I've read 2 of his other sci fi books (Inversions and Against a Dark Background) which I really enjoyed so decided to read his sci fi back catalogue from the beginning.

I'm only a few chapters in as i tend to get really sleepy when i read but I'm liking it so far.

[Carbomb]

I've just started reading "Consider Phlebas" by Iain M Banks. I've read 2 of his other sci fi books (Inversions and Against a Dark Background) which I really enjoyed so decided to read his sci fi back catalogue from the beginning.

I'm only a few chapters in as i tend to get really sleepy when i read but I'm liking it so far.

 

Banks belongs in the upper echelon of the sci-fi pantheon, IMO, along with Asimov and Gibson. "The Player Of Games" is one of my favourite books of all time - I keep re-reading it, and still enjoy it immensely.

[David]

The latest book to sit proudly upon my British made coffee table is "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West" by Christopher Caldwell.

 

A rather splendid read, which, even though I am but a quarter of the way through, will surely rank as one of my favourites.

 

Below is a review from the Guardian;

 

Mass immigration into Europe in the past 50 years has profoundly changed the continent and is likely to change it even more over the next half century. Yet it is a subject so immersed in fear and wishful thinking that it often seems we still don't have a proper language in which to discuss it.

 

It is partly for this reason that Christopher Caldwell's new book, with the melodramatic title Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, will seem rather shocking to some readers of this newspaper. For he asks some unusually direct questions: can you have the same Europe with different people? Why did mass immigration happen when so few people actually wanted it? Immigrants want a better life but how many of them want a European life? Why is minority ethnic pride a virtue and European nationalism a sickness? Is political correctness just fear masquerading as tolerance?

 

As you can tell from those questions, the book is a sustained attack on the well-meaning liberalism that is still the dominant note in official immigration debates. Yet although Caldwell, a conservative American, believes that European immigration has not been a success, at least for the host societies, he is not anti-immigrant and says that he is a great supporter of the American melting pot. The book, or most of it, is written with the bemused but decent "native" European in mind.

 

Even if you disagree with his premises, Caldwell is worth persevering with because he is a bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties. And that is partly because, as an American, he knows that mass immigration is not only compatible with a strong, confident, patriotic society, but may even require it. He can see Europe from the outside and has a genuinely pan-European view of the immigration issue, something rarely encountered in domestic commentary.

 

Caldwell cuts to shreds the conventional wisdom of the "immigrationist" ideology - the view that mass immigration is inevitable and in any case a necessary injection of youth into our ageing continent. He shows, contrary to the immigrationists, that the flows of recent decades are unprecedented. He also demolishes the economic and welfare- state arguments for mass immigration and points out that in most countries there was no desperate need for extra workers in the 1950s - in Britain's case, Ireland still provided a reserve army of labour. One of the most startling figures in the book is that the number of foreign residents in Germany rose from 3 million to 7.5 million between 1971 and 2000 but the number of employed foreigners stayed the same at 2 million.

 

Caldwell is at his best describing the confused cultural and intellectual condition of much of Europe at the time the first waves of immigrants were arriving. It was hard, he points out, to follow Europe's rules and embrace its values when Europeans themselves were rewriting those rules and reassessing those values. After the brutal experiences of the first part of the 20th century - two world wars, the Holocaust and de-colonisation - European elites had embraced a liberal universalism that declared the moral equality of all people and implicitly questioned the legitimacy of most racial and gender hierarchies.Liberal universalism could, in theory, have been compatible with confident nation states and national identities, but in practice it seldom was. The idea of national traditions and solidarities came to be scorned by liberals in many European countries.

 

Caldwell reverses the conventional argument, which says that if immigration has been a relative failure it is because the host society has been too hostile and unaccommodating. On the contrary, he argues, it is because most of the host societies were too weak and insecure to make newcomers an offer that was sufficiently confident to secure their loyalty and integration. Most European countries, constrained by liberal universalism and the immigrationism ideology, were simply too laissez-faire towards migrants. For the first time in modern history, European societies were set up to allow a big group of citizens to lead their lives as if in a foreign culture.

 

Caldwell somewhat overstates the case - surely the failures of European immigration can be attributed to both the hostility of the masses and the insecurity of the elites. But then he is not seeking to be balanced and reasonable. This is a declamatory, polemical work and no more so than in its treatment of Islam. In fact, the book is really two essays - one an insightful probing of Europe's confusion about postwar immigration; the other a rather cartoonish polemic about the potential Islamic takeover of Europe.

 

There obviously have been, and are, particular problems associated with the arrival into an increasingly secular and liberal Europe of large numbers of Muslims with a strong, often illiberal religious world-view. But Caldwell here abandons his clear-eyed reporting in favour of recycling a mild version of the neoconservative "Eurabia" thesis, which sees a decadent, irreligious Europe overrun by militant Islam.

 

He provocatively points out that there were fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in today's Europe. He also invites us to imagine that at the height of the cold war, Europe had received a mass inflow of immigrants from communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported. Again, it is fine to square up to the issue of Muslim commitment to national citizenship (one-third of British Muslims say they place their commitment to fellow Muslims before Britain) but to equate the war on terror with the cold war is outlandish.

 

In other areas, too, Caldwell has a tendency to heckle from the sidelines, rather than grapple with dilemmas. Yes, Europe did overestimate the need for migrants and underestimated the cultural and religious upheaval they would bring, especially those from outside Europe. But does Caldwell want to reverse the postwar liberal universalism and its associated playing down of national identity, which was partly inspired by the US itself? How do we in today's Europe nurture a sense of national belonging - and a sense of a collective "we" strong enough to sustain generous welfare states - that is compatible not only with mass immigration but also with the postmodern individualism that has been an even more striking feature of recent decades? Liberal nationalisms should not be built against the feelings of the majority, as elite-driven multiculturalism sometimes seems to be, but that in itself does not get us very far.

 

Moreover, Caldwell is far too sanguine about the US experience with race and immigration and does not seem aware that the idea of the "melting pot" has been under sustained attack in the US for decades. He is also too pessimistic about the UK and ignores, for example, the great success of Indians and Africans in climbing the professional ladder. And he is too ready to take official Jewish accounts of the return of anti-semitism at face value.

 

And yet, compared with most literature on migration, so often dull and clich

[WU LYF 4 LYF]

Two books, one for my history course (though it is also interesting) and one I was given.

 

I'm usually useless at concentrating on reading and thus it takes me ages to finish any book, but with the novel Norwegian Wood I did it in a week. It's also the first book that's ever made me cry. Couldn't reccomend it any higher, beautiful love story that is easy for me to relate to. For a translation, the prose is incredible, it's the characters though who really make it, the pacing is spot on.

 

 

The next book is a fairly interesting history so far, I'm about five chapters in. The first two chapters are especially useful, giving a great overview of the economy and populace and national identities felt in the period. Who knew that there were one million sheep in England by 1150? Anyway, most history books really suck, and that's from a student studying it, so this is refreshingly decent, while still detailed and relevant which should stop the cunt lecturor's complaining about 'unreliable populist history'.