[Rocksteady]

A few good reads recently:

This Side of Paradise, F.Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel. Strange tragic story (in the classic sense, where the seeds of the protagonist's 'downfall' are inherent in his character) following the life and loves of a rather unlikeable WASPish American man through school, university and subsequently (skipping over his experiences in WW1). Some very pithy prose, and some very modern themes, trying to get to grips with the fairness of the world, the distribution of wealth, the perpetuation of the status quo etc. I got the sense there was a lot of clever observation stuff going on that was lost in translation if you weren't around in the 1920s. Also it was terribly pretentious. There were several scenes randomly written in the style of a play. On the whole I quite liked it, but wouldn't massively recommend it. If you're only going to read one of his books, read The Great Gatsby.

Read Jack Vance's The Dying Earth on an old-skool fantasy/sci-fi tip. Liked it. Very old-skool, very episodic, quite 'trash' fiction but enjoyable and extremely creative. Not a novel so much as a loose collection of stories.

Big recommendation for anyone who likes intelligent fantasy/sci-fi is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I can't believe this passed me by when I read loads of this sort of thing at Uni. Very well-written, very clever philosophically and in structure, extremely weird and engaging. Some Lovecraftian horror elements in there. Clearly a big influence on Steven Erikson. Definitely a series I could read again numerous times. Right up there with the best fantasy literature I have read. 

[Fiend]

BOTNS sounds interesting, will check!

[filz]

Big recommendation for anyone who likes intelligent fantasy/sci-fi is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

+1 for The  Book of the New Sun. I read the books 20 or so years ago and they are still among my favourites sci-fi books.

[DaveC]

I've been picking up the pace a bit in recent weeks, finished a couple of contrasting titles:
1. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder.
Really a follow up to Snyder's superb "Bloodlands" of a few years ago, this is in some ways a disappointment. While it offers an excellent and well-written history of the Holocaust, it doesn't really have anything new to say until Snyder starts trying to use the Holocaust to predict future events at which point a pinch of salt should be taken. Worth reading for the basic history which is superbly researched and up-to-date.
2. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
Simply superb, makes most crime fiction look pretty ordinary, and it's all true! If any book successfully communicates Hannah Arendt's idea about "the banality of evil," this one does. If you like true crime, this book should be the first thing you read since it is regarded as the prototype of that genre.

[remus]

Just finished Honnolds book, Alone on the Wall. Pretty mediocre to be honest, Honnold strikes me as a pretty interesting character but we only catch glimpses of it in between some journalist waffling on about how world class he is.

Somehow its almost worse for having brief moments of quality as it inevitably cuts back to some other rather mundane aspect of his already well publicised ascents. Overall I think it suffers from being dumbed down and for Honnold being a pretty young guy.

Give him another 20 years of climbing and the freedom to right his own book and I'm sure we'll see something much more worthwhile.

[jwi]

I, for one, is not going to read the autobiography of someone born in the 80s. Autobiographies should be short books written by people who's already forgotten most of the important stuff that ever happened to them

[a dense loner]

Exactly. I also have no intention of reading autobiographies written by people I know

[dave]

Did you not read Jerry's autobiography Dense?

[Fultonius]

Anyone read any of the Boardman Tasker shortlist this year? I might try and pick up the Barry Blanchard one.

[a dense loner]

Yes his is the only one I've read, I don't know him.

[lagerstarfish]

for some reason I am now thinking of the poem "Theatre" by Rik Mayall

[cheque]

I'm reading Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn (it's about Fred and Rose West) in every spare minute I get.

It's utterly gripping but not in the way you'd expect of a book about serial killers- it's completely matter-of-fact and, despite reading like a novel, seems almost completely constructed from interview transcripts with no tone of authorial judgement and the absolute minimum gory details.

It's at once a surreally strange story but completely normal as well- what strikes you is how their atrocities came from their own weird childhoods of abuse (and probably Fred's head injuries in his adolescence) rather than just being "inhuman monsters" or something. They totally come across as the sort of odd but forgettable people you'd cross paths with at some point and think nothing of it. I'm currently getting to sleep by telling myself that child safeguarding and police intelligence sharing is much better these days. 

[Fiend]

Big recommendation for anyone who likes intelligent fantasy/sci-fi is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I can't believe this passed me by when I read loads of this sort of thing at Uni. Very well-written, very clever philosophically and in structure, extremely weird and engaging.

I just finished the first book and unfortunately I have to say it's the worst of the nearly 100 fantasy/sci-fi books I've downloaded since I got an e-reader, the only one I've deleted and regret buying in the first place. Stilted and turgid writing (recently I found The Southern Reach Trilogy and Firefall occasionally challenging to read, but this was just frustratingly murky), characters and events that seem to appear out of nowhere for no reason, unbearably dull side anecdotes from random characters, and a plot that hardly went anywhere. I had a vague interest in how the protagonist developed as a newly qualified torturer, and that just about got me to the end, and no further.

But thanks anyway!

[Rocksteady]

Sorry!

I guess I've been reading a lot of Proust this year so maybe I've developed a high tolerance for digressions! FWIW I thought the second and third books were better than the first, but are written in that quite verbose literary style.

Fiend, give me your top 5 fantasy sci-fi series and I'll see if I can come up with a recommendation that you actually like!

[butters]

Have you read The Quantum Thief yet Fiend? Just about finished the first book after picking it up on a whim (largely because it sounded interesting and it wasn't noir) but I have to say that I found it much better than expected. It's up there in the top five books read this year for me which considering the fact that I have been reading classic noir predominantly in 2015 is saying something.

[DaveC]

A couple of excellent little numbers I've finished off in recent weeks:

On Foot: A History of Walking by Joseph Amato. Looks at the role of walking in Western culture in particular. Only two hundred years ago it was the most common form of transport for all bar the richest over any distance, long or short, now it is a pastime of choice for the middle and upper classes in a world dominated by motorized, wheeled transport. Nicely written, very interesting and bound to tell you some things you didn't know.

The Maze Maker by Michael Ayrton. A fictionalized autobiography of the mythical Greek figure Daedalus, father of Icarus, creator of the wings that took the latter to his death, and also creator of the Labyrinth that held the Minotaur on Crete. Written nearly fifty years ago, the author was better known as a sculptor with some quite famous works now housed in places like the Tate. An excellent read, written in the first person and addressed to a 20th century audience that the protagonist wants to make sure understands the truth about his long and eventful life.

[Fiend]

Butters, I have indeed, and the rest of the trilogy. He treads an infinitesimally slender line between smartly creative linguistic futurism and infuriatingly jargonistic techno-babble, but does so with enough pace and entertainment, to pull it off, just.

Rocksteady, no offense intended to you nor your tastes, I just didn't like it. I do concur that reading classic literature might be good preparation for his prose.

Narrowing my preferences down to 5 is a bit limiting, but I've been a big fan of Alistair Reynolds, China Meiville (at his best i.e. Perdido, The Scar, The City And The City), Christopher Priest, Charles R Wilson, and Iain /M Banks. Pure-fantasy-wise I still haven't found an author who consistently does it for me, but at times Ian Irvine, Celia Friedman and Brandon Sanderson have been good. However these days I've tended to like the works of as yet less prolific authors, such as James Smythe and Jeff Vandermeer (both pleasingly spooky in their subject matter).

[slackline]

He treads an infinitesimally slender line between smartly creative linguistic futurism and infuriatingly jargonistic techno-babble, but does so with enough pace and entertainment, to pull it off, just.

So do you.

[Fiend]

Well done, you spotted it 

[slackline]

Well done, you spotted it 

I've been reading your posts for years.....

[Falling Down]

DaveC that Michael Ayrton book sounds great.  I have a painting by a Russian artist Denis Forkas Kostromotin on my wall in the lounge of Theseus, Daedalus and the white Bull called "The Infamy of Crete" so I'll definitely be reading that.

Just finished Michael Moorcock's The Whispering Swarm a few days ago, the first of three volumes in his "autobiography" which blends an intimate telling of his life story with a fictitious/imaginal part of London called Alsacia, the site of a Carnelite friary abolished under Henry VIII peopled with various fictional and historical figures that he stumbles upon as a young Fleet Street hack and pulp novelist.  It's really quite brilliant and I think he's trying (and succeeding) to illustrate his life as a writer and the flights of imagination that inspired him as opposed to a dry sequence of events.  Quite long and sags ever so slightly in the middle but I can't wait for the next volume.  I'd read his Elric, Cornelius, Pyatt and London books first before reading this though.

[Johnny Brown]

Just finished The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. This is one of those books that I've been aware of for years but never got round to. Somehow I'd also avoided reading anything about it, so it was nice to go in to a  classic completely fresh.

It's basically a detailed travel diary of a two-month trek into a remote part of the Himalaya. Lots of natural history detail, and an insight into Buddhism which becomes more developed as it goes along. Not much happens, no plot, no resolution, but a beautiful book I will definitely read again.

[DaveC]

I've been chugging through books at a rate of knots this last few weeks, here's a couple of the latest, both excellent:

Despatches from Dystopia by Kate Brown. One of the outstanding social historians around, Kate Brown has written a little masterpiece on some of the places she has visited in the course of her research, mainly in Kazakhstan and the Ukraine but also in other parts of the former Soviet Union and in the United States. Makes some intriguing comparisons between the forced migrations in the Soviet Union and the westward migration in the United States of the 19th century. Quite disturbing in places. 8/10.

Latest Readings, Clive James. I have mixed feelings about my fellow countryman's writing at times but this little book is a gem in which he visits or revisits books he has been reading since his diagnosis with Leukemia five years ago. Makes me feel I must revisit some of James' own previous work that I have missed. 9/10

[andy popp]

After a slow start to the year I've been reading more in recent weeks (despite working like a bastard at the minute). Here are a few recent highlights - I'll have forgotten some as I'm away and can't scan the bookshelf.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Dancing in the Dark, volume 4 of his novel-cum-autobiography. One of the strongest I felt; the same intense focus on the ordinary, same playing with flashback and time, but also more lyrical. Also ends on a glorious bawdy high as our hapless teenage hero finally gets his end away at a festival.

Alison Light, Common People. Very good piece of accessible social history about, well, common people and the author's own family in particular.

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Not as good as the magnificent The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but the title story in this collection is worth the price alone.

Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Completely bonkers account of completely bonkers love affair. I was glad to have read it but am not sure I'm actually recommending it. What a great title though!

Virginia Woolf, Orlando. Having never really enjoyed fantasy and deciding I hate magical realism after a terrible experience with Gabriel Garcia Marquez last year I'm not sure why I picked this - man lives several hundred years becoming a woman in the process and undergoes a myriad of impossible experiences. But I loved it: profound, tender, witty, often very beautiful.

Edith Wharton, House of Mirth. I've been meaning to read Wharton for years and this was my first - hugely impressed. The blackest of satires, great psychological insight. If you read Fitzgerald to learn about the Jazz Age, read Wharton for the Gilded Age.

Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour. Simply a masterpiece. Thinly fictionalised account of Waugh's own experience of WWII. One of the funniest books I have ever read but also deeply melancholy and humane. I read the revised, single volume version first published in 1964 (not the earlier three volume version). Apparently the later one was how Waugh wanted it read. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Now speeding my way through Patti Smith M Train. Very different to Just Kids, her account of her youthful love affair with Robert Mapplethorpe. In M Train Smith seems sad and lonely, adrift. But the writing is very good and perhaps its going to go somewhere I can't yet predict.

[DaveC]

Just finished River Grenier's Palace of Books, a look at the how, why and whatever of writing by a veteran French editor and writer. A fabulous little book. Andy, I think you might really appreciate this one if you haven't come across it.