The 'Currently Reading' Thread.

[SaitoRyo]

I am currently reading the Raymond Carver collection Fires. I'd read his short story collections Would You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral yonks ago and remember really enjoying them. 

This is a collection of essays, poems and short stories and I like it, too. I suspect I'll blaze through it rather quickly. 

I am also working through the Roald Dahl boxset with the kids. We're currently on Matilda, which I didn't read when I was a kid. It's a joy to see them so engaged with books and I love reading to them.

[Lorne Malvo]

Picked up The Collected Stories Of Richard Yates at the weekend, so making my way through his collection 'Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness' for maybe the tenth time. Good grief, his work breaks my heart everytime but his prose is incredible.

I've never read his 'Liars In Love' collection or any of his other short stories, so I'm excited to crack on with those. Well, as excited as you can be for something that's going to make me incredibly sad.

[Loki]

On 2/27/2024 at 10:32 AM, BomberPat said:

lovely stuff!

I just finished Michael Moorcock's latest, The Woods of Arcady. It's the second part of what's at least a trilogy, in which Moorcock begins writing autobiographically, but then it all gets waylaid into a fantasy story. He ends up going on a Boy's Own adventure romp through the desert with the Three Musketeers, musing on his ideas of the Multiverse, while there's also a little sci-fi side-story that pops up unexpectedly into the narrative at times. There are some references to the previous book, but it doesn't seem to follow on directly (multiverse, innit), so I'm not sure whether the next book is intended to tie it all together or just more of the same.

It had its moments, but I don't think it really worked for me. The autobiography sections are interesting, because Moorcock is an interesting guy who has been around the sci-fi/fantasy world for decades, met everyone and done everything, and it's interesting when fantasy tropes and ideas start infringing on that story. But then for most of the second half of the book, at least, it just becomes a fairly pedestrian sword-and-sandals adventure with pretty odd pacing, and the fact that the central character is Michael Moorcock is barely relevant. It just feels like an idea that's never fully explored, but maybe that comes of being book two of three.

I've read a ton of Moorcock's earlier works and loved them, but I think his extraordinary imagination is what drives them, more than a great storytelling ability.  So when he's not completely on it, his stuff can drag.

Also, he may just have written TOO MANY books in his long career.  There's only so many ways to tell a fantasy story!  @BomberPat did you read Mother London?

[BomberPat]

26 minutes ago, Loki said:

I've read a ton of Moorcock's earlier works and loved them, but I think his extraordinary imagination is what drives them, more than a great storytelling ability.  So when he's not completely on it, his stuff can drag.

Also, he may just have written TOO MANY books in his long career.  There's only so many ways to tell a fantasy story!  @BomberPat did you read Mother London?

I did read Mother London, and remember really enjoying it, though I couldn't tell you a thing about it now.

Definitely agree that it's imagination and creativity more than storytelling that pushes it forward, which is understandable when he was churning out a 180 page book in two weeks to keep the bills paid, but it makes things a slog when it's a hefty book that still sometimes falls back on the shortcuts and tropes of that style. 

I attended a Q&A he did a few years ago, and he was talking about how a lot of the early books he'd write in under a month (the first three Corum books all came out in 1971, and all six of them between 1971 and 1974, and weren't even the only books he released those years). When it got to the questions, someone asked if, now he's able to spend as long as he likes on his books, he ever looks back at what he wrote earlier and thinks how much better they could have been with that much time available to him, and he said, "there's a couple I think could have done with another week". 

[Carbomb]

Despite being an avid fantasy and sci-fi reader, I've never got around to reading any Moorcock. Really should rectify that.

[Loki]

My favourite of all his novels in fact are the Nomad Of Time books - a trilogy about travelling to alternate versions of the first world war.  They're brilliant, and probably the most obvious of his books for a tv/film adaptation but they seem mainly forgotten about.  They might even be out of print!

[Carbomb]

36 minutes ago, Loki said:

My favourite of all his novels in fact are the Nomad Of Time books - a trilogy about travelling to alternate versions of the first world war.  They're brilliant, and probably the most obvious of his books for a tv/film adaptation but they seem mainly forgotten about.  They might even be out of print!

Thanks for that, will note that down - the main stuff I've heard of is his most famous, like Elric of Melniboné (oddly, I found out about that through Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier).

[BomberPat]

Alan Moore's a big fan of Moorcock, and Black Dossier is, even by his own standards, a self-indulgent chance to show off all of his influences, so that's not too surprising! I like a lot of the Elric stuff - very simple and straightforward fantasy, and there's a point in his most recent book where he bemoans that it gets a bit criticised now for just being a collection of "dark fantasy" tropes, by (not entirely incorrectly) saying that they weren't tropes yet when he was writing them. There's some decent graphic novel adaptations too - the story's simple enough and visual enough that it just works for that medium without really losing anything in translation.

I haven't read Nomad Of Time, but that sounds great. The problem with him having so much is that a lot of it sounds interesting, but the idea of jumping into it is a nightmare. I've mentioned before that my local second-hand bookshop ended up with hundreds if not over a thousand old pulp sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks that they don't know what to do with, so I've ended up buying one or two every time I'm in, and there's usually a Moorcock or a Philip Jose Farmer in there, and as they're both absurdly prolific authors who are adjacent to a lot of stuff I like (mostly Alan Moore again, in fairness) I feel like I should be reading more of it.

One of my best mates grew up in the '70s, and became a massive Michael Moorcock fan as a teenager, but then realised by the time he was in his mid-to-late 20s that he'd basically read nothing else. And he's still nowhere near having read all of it!

 

As for current reading, I'm just finishing up a collection of Jeffrey Bernard's "Low Life" columns from The Spectator, after having seen Robert Bathurst play him in "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell" recently. I first read an earlier edition when I was 18 or 19 or so, and a lot more easily taken in by the idea of being a career piss artist being somehow glamorous or noble. Re-reading it, it's still funny, though often pretty objectionable politically, but what stands out is how miserable it all seems. Still, it provided the catalyst to get me writing something that I've been bouncing around inside my head for a while, so that's something.