The 'Currently Reading' Thread.

[SaitoRyo]

Good on you, @Accident Prone!

I'm sure you'll be able to manage 10 next year. I'd also recommend checking out the general fiction or 'classics' sections of charity/second-hand bookshops, where you'll no doubt find some gems. Older editions also typically have better covers and more character to them than brand new ones, in my opinion. 

I'm quite a big reader, though I've tended to go through inconsistent spells in recent years due to only having free time in the late evening because of kids and whatnot and thus being knackered when it comes time to actually open a book. 

I've been a bit better this year, probably averaging two or three a month (depending on length). At the minute I'm about a third of the way through Cruising Paradise, a short story collection by Sam Shepard. 

I am really digging it, because the stories really are short and thus I can read a handful of them per night. I like Shepard's writing anyway and this is is somewhat similar to Motel Chronicles, which I red and enjoyed a few months back. 

[Accident Prone]

5 hours ago, SaitoRyo said:

Good on you, @Accident Prone!

I'm sure you'll be able to manage 10 next year. I'd also recommend checking out the general fiction or 'classics' sections of charity/second-hand bookshops, where you'll no doubt find some gems. Older editions also typically have better covers and more character to them than brand new ones, in my opinion. 

Cheers! Yeah I'll be checking out the vast charity shop stretch on my local high street, armed with my Good Reads list to see what I can pick out before hitting Wordery and the like.

I've got 100 books in my 'Want To Read' list, which is a mix of fiction and non-fiction, but I've narrowed the eight fiction (along with 1984 and Animal Farm) down to the following:

- The Brothers Karamazov
- Giovanni's Room
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- In a Lonely Place
- And Then There Were None
- Dune
- The Night of the Hunter

There's loads more on my list, but those are the ones I'll scanning charity shop book shelves for. I feel it'll be easier to pick titles out if I have that narrowed scope. Very true about charity shop books having more character too!

6 hours ago, SaitoRyo said:

I'm quite a big reader, though I've tended to go through inconsistent spells in recent years due to only having free time in the late evening because of kids and whatnot and thus being knackered when it comes time to actually open a book. 

I've been a bit better this year, probably averaging two or three a month (depending on length). At the minute I'm about a third of the way through Cruising Paradise, a short story collection by Sam Shepard. 

See I'd love to get to that point. That's my aim. I haven't set a target, but say, by the time I'm 40? So Four and a half years-ish? That's where I want to be. I also have a kid and whatnot, and when I get home it's dinner with the wife and kid and then putting the kid to bed and then the explosion of choice regarding TV or movies or video games or other projects, and I want the discipline to say to myself "No, read a fucking a book", despite how knackered and lazy I am.

[SuperBacon]

I have decided that even if its just one chapter or 20 minutes, I read last thing at night when I get in bed.

It helps as well that the last thing I see isn't a screen (not every night, I struggle to sleep and am often doomscrolling at 3am) but it's been a few weeks now and I've stuck to it nearly every night.

It doesn't always have to be a book either. I'm one of those people who will buy magazines and then not read them so I've got a massive pile next to the bed now.

No not bongo mags.

Haven't read the amount of books I'd like to this year but still more than last year. Still reading Young Mungo. Love it, but jesus the Scottish write some harrowing shit.

[SaitoRyo]

57 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

I have decided that even if its just one chapter or 20 minutes, I read last thing at night when I get in bed.

It helps as well that the last thing I see isn't a screen.

This is a thing for me, too. As I work on a laptop all day and will often watch a film or a football match if I get the chance, I want to give my eyes a break from screens every now and then (besides when I'm playing with my kids). I really like reading before bed and it's nice to put the bookmark on a page thinking 'I can't wait to open this up again tomorrow night'. 

[DavidB6937]

For me, as soon as I try to do one of those "I'll read x number of books" I lose all interest because it just feels forced. I know a lot of people like doing the challenges like that, but I really just like reading because I'm enjoying it not because I feel like I have to. I want to look forward to it. But I also get some people need that little bit of motivation to actually do it.

[hallicks]

@Accident Prone re: your list there. I read Dune (part 1? Book 1?) around 2 years ago. It’s exceptionally hard work, and whilst I enjoyed it in parts, I had absolutely no interest in reading any further. It was never one that I could really lose myself in because the prose is so arse backwards. Like he can’t just say, “and then Paul went for a shit,” it has to be, “looking vacantly at the side wall, decorated with art from the Bene Gesserit school on Planet Wankdorf, forwards movingly did Paul head in the direction of the Atreides bathroom, where a movement of the bowels was become upon him.” And it’s about 500 pages long and the text is dense as fuck, you can read for 5 minutes and your mind just wanders off because he’s still babbling on about some in-world historical bollocks that you could never possibly care about. The film was fairly alright, mind. 

[Keith Houchen]

Nearly finished The Plague by Albert Camus. Even though it predates Covid by 70 something years, it could be written about Covid. Funny and futile. 

[SuperBacon]

4 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Nearly finished The Plague by Albert Camus. Even though it predates Covid by 70 something years, it could be written about Covid. Funny and futile. 

I've not read much Camus, but loved The Outsider when I was younger. Short as well, always a bonus.

[Keith Houchen]

7 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

I've not read much Camus, but loved The Outsider when I was younger. Short as well, always a bonus.

I thought he was about 5’9”?

[SuperBacon]

2 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

I thought he was about 5’9”?

[Accident Prone]

On 12/13/2023 at 10:33 PM, hallicks said:

@Accident Prone re: your list there. I read Dune (part 1? Book 1?) around 2 years ago. It’s exceptionally hard work, and whilst I enjoyed it in parts, I had absolutely no interest in reading any further. It was never one that I could really lose myself in because the prose is so arse backwards. Like he can’t just say, “and then Paul went for a shit,” it has to be, “looking vacantly at the side wall, decorated with art from the Bene Gesserit school on Planet Wankdorf, forwards movingly did Paul head in the direction of the Atreides bathroom, where a movement of the bowels was become upon him.” And it’s about 500 pages long and the text is dense as fuck, you can read for 5 minutes and your mind just wanders off because he’s still babbling on about some in-world historical bollocks that you could never possibly care about. The film was fairly alright, mind. 

Ah right, sounds like one to put aside for after I finish Infinite Jest then, as that book is very much in that vain. Perfect bedtime fodder.

[BomberPat]

Recently finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Very different to what I normally read, but I really enjoyed it.

I heard a lot of people compare it (favourably) to Ready Player One, which feels kind of lazy, as they're very different books that just happen to be about computer games. That said, in terms of actually reflecting how computer games can be a through-thread of somebody's life, an escape, and a metaphor for key events, it does a far better job than Ready Player One because it never feels like someone just showing off how much they know about them. So in some ways it feels like Ready Player One if it wasn't written by a prick.

There's a couple of twists and turns that I thought were pretty forced, but mostly it's very good. The changing dynamics between the three central characters, and all of them at varying times having cause to look back on their younger selves and question how they behaved, or their part in what earlier had seemed like a black and white situation, are really believable, and changing perspectives between those characters never feels jarring. I definitely recommend it.

 

I've now started on Crossovers Expanded Volume 1 by Sean Lee Levin. It's something that's been on my shelves for years, an expansion of something now long out of print by Win Scott Eckert, inspired by Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Universe. It's basically charting an imagined universe of crossovers between literary characters, by accounting for when characters from different authors have credibly appeared in each other's stories, and making sense of the broader implications of that. It's niche, and not exactly something you can just sit and read through, but I love stuff like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, which start from a position of loads of different bits of fiction all being true, and then figuring out what that world would look like. 

[SuperBacon]

Finished Young Mungo.

It's a really tough read. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, is probably my favourite book of the last 10 or so years, but this came close. I am pretty sure I mentioned this last time but the way he writes about Glasgow is so evocative, and you picture everything so well.

I've been to Glasgow 3 or 4 times, but Douglas Stuart writes in a way that makes you feel like you live in the schemes (maybe growing up on an estate helped I don't know)

At one point he talks of the cities "need, its want" which is a great way of putting it.

Trigger warning: alcoholic parent, domestic violence, sexual abuse. Jolly!!!

That's two genuine classics in a row from him, and I think we're looking at one of the greats to be honest. 

Also, have finally got round to sorting a Goodreads, so if anyone wants to follow (for what purposes, who knows?) then I'm gbacon85 on there. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/171123515-gbacon85

 

[Just Some Guy]

It's Christmas time so how about a chilling ghost story?

I'm finally getting round to reading Thin Air by Michelle Paver and it's great.

A ghost story set during a climbing expedition in the Himalayas during the 1930s.

A say finally because I read one of Michelle Paver's previous books,  Dark Matter some time ago and thought it a modern classic of the genre (and set in Svalbard. A place that fascinates me).

[Fatty Facesitter]

British Rail - The Making and Breaking of our Trains by Christian Wolmar.

Fascinating insight into life before the Tories privatised BR (booo) and examining whether a lot of the criticisms levelled at BR (stale sandwiches, crap service etc) were actually valid among other things. You don't necessarily have to be a railway buff to enjoy it. Good read thus far.