The 'Currently Reading' Thread.

[SuperBacon]

3 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

My girlfriend got me a kindle and within a week I’ve read two Orwell novels

Makes you think...

Never got on with a Kindle or whatever, but great that it's encouraged you to read more

 

[Sphinx]

I did find that it was really handy to notate certain parts and highlight certain words to get the definition. The downside for me was that every page looked and felt the same and the dodgy copies of books I got didn't give an accurate representation of how far I was into a book (my fault obvs). I've felt more inclined to buy physical copies, which I have done for a few years now. Great for travelling though especially, eReaders.

[HarmonicGenerator]

Amazon also have daily 99p deals for Kindle, so if you want to read more but struggle with physical books / can’t necessarily afford full price / don’t have easy access to a library, that’s a good way to pick some new stuff up for only a little money.

[Jazzy G]

You get some books for free with your prime membership but I think they're on a one at a time basis. 

I finished reading Dirt Baby by our very own @Astro Hollywood. It was an easy read, lots of twists, all stories of varying lengths from a paragraph to a few pages. 

[Keith Houchen]

On 10/20/2023 at 6:24 PM, Keith Houchen said:

after I read Blood Meridian

Bloody hell. It was fucking relentless with its violence, nihilism, and horror. I “Loved” it, I suppose, but fucking hell he was a cheery bastard old Cormac, wasn’t he. 

[BomberPat]

My foray into reading fiction was perhaps predictably short-lived - I wanted to get into a pattern of alternating fiction and non-fiction, and work through the to-read pile that way, but between a couple of other books I picked up along the way, and then the next three or four on my list being a research rabbit hole, it'll be a while before I get to fiction again.

That said, here's what I've read since last time:

The Night Of The Hunter by Davis Grubb - the movie is so good, and one of my all-time favourites, that the fact I never hear anything about the book made me assume that it wouldn't be great, and that the film dragged something exceptional out of mundane source material. Luckily I was wrong, and I loved the book too. It goes into more detail than the book on the background to the story, with more scenes of the Preacher in prison and building on his relationship with the kids' father, as well as establishing the story as set during the Great Depression to a far greater extent than the film. Otherwise, the movie is a surprisingly faithful adaptation. The only downside, and something that puts me off a lot of American fiction of its era, is that some of the dialogue is written in a really annoyingly folksy style.

Witchcraft and Black Magic by Peter Haining - picked this up from my local second-hand bookshop, who got it among a treasure trove of old pulp sci-fi and fantasy books. It's a bit of a novelty; early '70s, hugely inspired by Margaret Murray's work on "Witch Cults", which it just assumes to be 100% accurate, and not largely bollocks. A fun bit of '70s soft occultism, with some fantastic artwork, but not a very good book.

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth - a spin-off of a podcast I've never listened to. When I was getting seriously into taking writing classes, and reading books on writing, a few courses recommended just getting some books on etymology, because discovering old meanings of words or the history of where different expressions come from is a really good way of feeling out a story, and finding twists and turns in your narrative. Picked this up during a flurry of buying books of that type. It's very readable, and surprisingly funny, but a bit of a "toilet book", the kind of thing you'd pick up and read a bit of here and there, rather than committing time to reading from cover to cover.

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin - my second Levin book, after Boys From Brazil. Probably my favourite of the three I read. Deeply late '60s in tone, but an easy read that, if I hadn't already seen the film, might have at least kept me guessing. 

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin - finishing the three, another that was probably hurt by me being too familiar with the concept, that would have been a great mystery read if I didn't already know all that. The way it kind of drops hints and red herrings to what's really going on all the way through is masterfully done, for the kind of pulp page-turner it is. There's an interesting introduction that talks about how the original is about predicting a male backlash against women's rights movements, while the later remake movie repositions the villains to be other women, and how well commercial interests managed to wrap commercial and consumerist goals in the language of women's lib, that may be a more interesting story than the book itself at this stage.

One Armed Jack by Sarah Bax Horton - picked up on a whim in Sainsburys, it's a Jack The Ripper thing, focused on identifying the Ripper as a specific Whitechapel resident who's largely been overlooked. It's somewhat convincing, but you never know what evidence to the contrary is left out of these things, and when it goes into their suspect's familiarity with key locations based on places his family and associates lived or worked, it all feels convincing, but I suspect that with enough information you could trace the same connections for almost anyone in Whitechapel at the time. The book also relies a lot on taking at face value police suspicions at the time that the Ripper was Jewish, and later writings by key figures who claimed that they knew who the murderer was but that they couldn't prosecute because other Jews wouldn't identify him - my own take on all that is that the "we knew who he was" stuff was damage control to try and protect the police's credibility after the fact, and that placing suspicion on the Jewish community as a whole was just good old-fashioned antisemitism, and that possibility doesn't even get a look-in here.

A Selective History Of Bad Video Games by Michael Greenhut - just not a very good book. The criteria for "bad" games seems completely arbitrary, and fairly narrow focused in terms of consoles (IIRC, for the 8-bit and 16-bit generations there's nothing outside of NES and SNES releases), and half the write-ups are arguing that they're actually not that bad, despite the fact that there's only one author, so if he doesn't think they're bad, why has he included them? The book isn't funny enough to be an enjoyable read about bad games, and the author's game design/programming background could have given more context on why things went wrong, but more often than not he just uses it for a quick sentence or two on how things could have been improved, when exploring those ideas more might have made for an interesting book. As a result, there's not much point to it.

Agent Zig-Zag by Ben Macintyre - a rare audiobook for me, taking advantage of some Audible credits. It's the story of Eddie Chapman, a career criminal who was imprisoned in Jersey at the outbreak of World War 2, and ended up working for the German secret service, before becoming a double agent for the British. The sort of book you get your Dad for Christmas. The early chapters are great fun, because it's just a constant revolving door of weird characters and unlikely stories, but it starts to drag by the middle, when it's pretty much exhausted every version of "who is Chapman more loyal to?" and "can he be trusted?". At one point, it unquestioningly repeats stories of the magician Jasper Maskelyne's wartime activities in fooling the Nazis with elaborate illusions and whatnot, and those stories have been pretty comprehensively debunked these days, so it did make me wonder about the credibility of the rest of the story.

 

Now, finally, I'm reading Every Man For Himself And God Against All by Werner Herzog, his autobiography. It's absolutely mental, in exactly the ways I'd hoped - insane stories, mad digressions, focusing on irrelevant stories for pages at a time, while giving a story like "the time a witch tried to kidnap me as a child" barely a sentence before moving on. Pleasingly bonkers.

[Chest Rockwell]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

Now, finally, I'm reading Every Man For Himself And God Against All by Werner Herzog, his autobiography. It's absolutely mental, in exactly the ways I'd hoped - insane stories, mad digressions, focusing on irrelevant stories for pages at a time, while giving a story like "the time a witch tried to kidnap me as a child" barely a sentence before moving on. Pleasingly bonkers.

This sounds great. If it has an audible read by him then it's just gone straight to the top of my list. 

[BomberPat]

33 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

This sounds great. If it has an audible read by him then it's just gone straight to the top of my list. 

I'm told that he did read the audiobook, so I will probably end up getting that too!

[CharlesTuckerTheThird]

I'm currently working my way through Yotsuba&, a ridiculously wholesome manga series. It's so wholesome that messing with the protagonist is one of the few things that can get you banned from 4Chan.

[BomberPat]

Herzog's book was fantastic - definitely going to revisit it as an audiobook for full effect. Assuming that even half of it is true (and given what we know to be true, it probably mostly is), some of the stories of the things he's done and seen are absolutely harrowing, and then it's all nicely off-set by him being pleasingly clueless about pretty much all pop culture, like not knowing the Simpsons was a cartoon when he was first asked to be on it.

Since then, I was writing something about Eric Pleasants for my blog - he was a boxer, wrestler and circus strongman from Norfolk who ended up in a prison in Jersey during the Nazi occupation, was shipped out to a German prison, then joined the British Free Corps, basically a volunteer British branch of the SS. After the war, he ended up in a Russian prison for six or seven years, then was released and returned to the UK after Stalin died. Unlike other members of the Free Corps, he was never tried for treason or any other crimes; it seems like the government of the time either didn't want to draw attention to it, or felt that his time in the Gulag was punishment enough. There's newsreel footage of his return that's very much "our brave boys brought home!" in tone, with no mention of what he actually got up to during the war, or how he ended up in a Russian prison in the first place.

He wrote/had ghost-written two autobiographies, so I read both of them in research. The first, I Killed To Live, was actually weirdly ghost-written by Eddie Chapman, the aforementioned spy from Agent Zig-Zag, in 1956; it has a lot of Chapman's style to it, and inserts Chapman himself into the narrative at points that were almost certainly untrue. It was serialised in the News Of The World, and it has that combination of tabloid shock fodder, '50s machismo bullshit that's all about winning fights and having sex with beautiful women at every opportunity, and Boy's Own Adventure tales of derring-do, that makes for quite a shit book, even given the interesting content. Naturally I have a personal interest in the sections of the story that took place in Jersey, and I'm pretty confident that the version of events in this book are almost all bullshit, and more extrapolated from Chapman's experiences than from Pleasants'. Similarly, the reason I was writing about it on my blog was because there's a wrestling connection, and while this book goes into more detail on Pleasants' wrestling background than his later book does, I'm not convinced any of it's true - Chapman places Pleasants' debut in a gym in Dean Street, Soho, that I haven't been able to find any evidence of it ever existing, which isn't helped by the fact that he calls the gym "Astras Kostas", and it took me far too long, and a couple of happy accidents, to realise that he'd fucked that one up royally, that there was a wrestler Costas Astreos, and through unfamiliarity either Pleasants, Chapman or the editor butchered the name and gave it to the place rather than the person. A couple of other wrestler names get absolutely mangled too.

The second book, largely in Pleasants' own writing, was Hitler's Bastard: Through Hell and Back in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, written much later and to a more capable co-writer, then edited by a couple of historians and released after Pleasants' death. There's obviously a lot of similarities with the previous book, but also a lot of contradictions, that I'd mostly put down to Chapman's bullshitting in the original, but also to Pleasants himself being an unreliable narrator - there's so many fight scenes, prison escapes and acts of heroism, that it feels like he's trying to convince himself as much as the readership that he was a good guy, and not just a petty criminal and a fascist. The original book claims that he got stuck in Jersey because he slept with a local girl and overslept, missing the last boat before the occupation, whereas this time around he'd gone there as a conscientious objector - the first is a much more Eddie Chapman story, but also suggests that Pleasants felt that an English audience in the 1950s would look down on him more for being an objector than a collaborator. It's a bit rich reading him constantly slag off the people of Jersey for collaborating and aiding the enemy during the occupation (as, admittedly, many of them did), knowing that he went on to join the SS. The theme throughout the book is that he was just a simple anti-war pacifist, who didn't want to be drafted into a war to kill people he had no problem with, because killing is always wrong and war is a racket. That sounds somewhat plausible, even if the way he went about it was questionable and self-serving at best, but it's hard to shake the feeling that his criticisms always fall on one side - whenever he feels the need to talk about the horrors of war, it's the bombing of Dresden, it's the Russians sacking Berlin at the end of the war, it's always the Allies who get the brunt of it, he never really directs that criticism at the Nazis, while the only bit of war-time "heroism" and bravery he admits to admiring was Mussolin getting busted out of prison. Neither book mentions that Pleasants had been a member of the British Union of Fascists before the war.

 

Interesting, if often very frustrating stuff. I can't say I'd recommend either book, as unique as his story is, because there are better war-time memoirs, written by people less unpleasant to be reading the thoughts of. He's someone I think would be better served by a decent historian writing about his life, rather than taking his own version of events at face value.

Finishing off this particular rabbit hole, I'm currently making quick work through The Traitors by Josh Ireland, which is about Pleasants, Harold Cole, John Amery and William Joyce, all British men who collaborated with the Nazis during WW2, and about Mosely and British fascism both before and during WW2. It's a surprisingly funny and easy read, allowing each of those men's words the space to frame how they viewed the world, but also clearly treating them with the contempt they deserve.

 

I will probably, hopefully, go on from there to actually get back on reading some fiction as I keep promising myself. I am on holiday next week, so will take a couple of books there - probably a Le Carré, and maybe Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which I have only heard good things about.

[Loki]

On 10/30/2023 at 11:37 AM, BomberPat said:

 

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth - a spin-off of a podcast I've never listened to. When I was getting seriously into taking writing classes, and reading books on writing, a few courses recommended just getting some books on etymology, because discovering old meanings of words or the history of where different expressions come from is a really good way of feeling out a story, and finding twists and turns in your narrative. Picked this up during a flurry of buying books of that type. It's very readable, and surprisingly funny, but a bit of a "toilet book", the kind of thing you'd pick up and read a bit of here and there, rather than committing time to reading from cover to cover.

 

I was at school and uni with Mark, both doing English.  He's got a wonderfully idiosyncratic style (the Horologicon is weird but brilliant), but if you like etymology his writing is fascinating.

[Just Some Guy]

+1 for appreciating Mark Forsyth.

His short history of drunkenness is a fun read.

Just getting to the end of the new Robert Galbraith (judge me, I can take it).

Next up is David Mitchell's Unruly.

Then I have a Francis Pryor book on pre-history.

Looks like I'll be getting my Dad Agent Zig Zag for Christmas. Thanks @BomberPat

[hallicks]

The Atlas Six - Olivie Blake. I found this an odd mix of compelling and annoying. I suppose you'd classify it as fantasy, though it's strength is the relationships between the characters rather than any kind of original take on magic. Was relieved that my wife skipped the parts I found incredibly boring, which is something I can never do, except I did make an exception for one or two chapters in this book. A little bit tropey in places. One of the characters whole schtick is that they don't care about anything that happens, which makes you question as the reader why you should care about reading about them.

The Satsuma Complex - Bob Mortimer. The second half was an enjoyable yarn, but I find most of his surrealism either outright annoying or overly twee. I think I laughed out loud once. There's some good characterisation in parts.

Rule of wolves - Leigh Bardugo. The 7th and final Grishaverse book I think? A good ending to a thoroughly enjoyable series. The best one is Six of Crows. It's YA fantasy through and through but there's a lot of craft in it and the world building is excellent.

The Magicians trilogy - Lev Grossman. Second read through of these three books. Grossman's prose is tremendous. The 2nd book is perhaps a tad self-indulgent on 2nd reading, but I put that down to knowing where it's going. A rare trilogy where each story feels contained and complete, but everything contributes to the overarching story and it never feels like threads have just been left dangling "because trilogy."

[FLips]

Been listening to The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring and watched the films to understand it better. Big mistake because some guy called Tom Bombadil has turned up in the book and it's wild. He's such a bizarre and unfathomable character that he was left out the film completely because he single handedly ruins the plot.

[Accident Prone]

  

On 1/17/2023 at 9:39 PM, Accident Prone said:

I've never been a fiction person when it comes to books. I prefer my first-hand autobiographies, essay collections, books that are simply an encyclopaedia of interesting thoughts and ideas, and books that are basically glorified top ten lists.

I turn 35 in April, and I've felt incredibly uncultured/dumb as a bag of hammers for a while now. Almost depressingly so (maybe one for the mental health thread, who knows?). Anyway, I've decided to make reading a priority this year when it comes to my downtime, and I used a £40 Christmas gift card and a £5 off coupon to grab some of the standards and classics, at least the ones that sound interesting. It's time to educate my dumb ass,

Bearing in mind that I've read next to fuck all for 35 years, here's the parcel of softbacks that should be arriving tomorrow:

- Infinite Jest

- Fahrenheit 451

- To Kill A Mocking Bird

- Of Mice And Men

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

- Catcher In The Rye

 

I am incredibly excited to dig in, but please tell me how terrible these choices are, haha!

 Well I fucking did it.

I  smashed the last few pages of Fahrenheit this morning. I'm in no position to critique or analyse any of these tomes as I am a newcomer and simple pleb when it comes reading, but I would rank the books as follows:

5. Fahrenheit 451

4. The Catcher In The Rye

3. Of Mice And Men

2. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

1. To Kill A Mocking Bird

I enjoyed Fahrenheit more when the shit hit the fan, but the journey there was a bit tiresome. Maybe on reinspection and reread, now I know the means to the end, I will enjoy it more.

I'm still slowly plowing my way through Infinite Jest as my bedtime book. I'm about 250 pages in, which is about 20% of the book. I've just finished the long chapter where we follow the radio host through a house party, which was riveting, but my favourite chapters are the one's following the trials and tribulations of the tennis academy. My other favourite chapters include the description of the rehab grounds, the druggie anxiously awaiting his fix, and the burglar who breaks into to an important political figure's house (I'm being as vague as possible so as to not go into spoiler territory). I can't say I'm a big fan of the extreme dialect chapters though. Those are a slog to get through.

I'll be aiming for 10 books next year. I've already been gifted copies of Animal Farm and 1984, so I'll need to select 8 more to fill the year out, which is what I'll do with any xmas vouchers. Here's to more education and making up for lost time!

Edited December 13, 2023 by Accident Prone