What are you reading now?

[Beef Oven!]

Cool!

I finished that book (Talking to my Daughter...) today. I am really spoilt for choice as to what to read next, I have so many unread books in my possession (and quite a few which I could read again!) Tonight I'll finish the last 30 or so pages of War and Peace. Then tomorrow I'll probably start Dante's Inferno, which I had promised myself I'd read.

I'm now cheating, I bought the narration download for 'Adults In The Room' and I listen in bed on my iPhone

[Conchis]

I missed Simon Gray's diaries when they first appeared but I am catching up now with 'The Smoking Diaries.' Moving and funny, laugh-out-loud funny, too.

I read the Complete Smoking Diaries in a great splurge last year. Marvellous stuff. I'd also recommend his other volumes of memoirs, Unnatural Pursuits, How's That For Telling 'Em Fat Lady?, Enter A Fox and Fat Chance. The latter is partiuclarly good if you happen to dislike Stephen Fry (as I do).

[un barbu]

I have ordered all of them from Abebooks and am particularly looking forward to 'Fat Chance.' Not a fan of Mr Fry.

[Pulcinella]

I'd love to hear your comments when (if?) you do. The level of description and comment on inner feelings are just breathtaking throughout. For humour, try Don Fabrizio's visit to a closed nunnery, or his shooting trip with Donnafugata's church organist. [Don Fabrizio is a Sicilian prince-ling and I suppose the whole book revolves around his feudal obligations..and a few privileges..in a changing society.] In case I've made it sound like a Don Camillo novelette...it isn't!

[The Leopard]
But you can see where Don Camillo comes from!
I think I liked Benedicò, the great dane, best.

Agreed: some very evocative writing there.
I scratched with the thought of bedbugs in their hotel, and sweltered with them on their coach journeys.
Pleased to have read it at last.

Currently plunging into Victoria & Abdul, which the library finally got hold of for me.

[teamsaint]

[The Leopard]
But you can see where Don Camillo comes from!
I think I liked Benedicò, the great dane, best.

Agreed: some very evocative writing there.
I scratched with the thought of bedbugs in their hotel, and sweltered with them on their coach journeys.
Pleased to have read it at last.

Currently plunging into Victoria & Abdul, which the library finally got hold of for me.

I happened to notice that Vic and Ab is still available in the Tesco £7 for two books deal, for those without easy access to such an obliging library.Also in " buy one get one half price" in certain WHS and Waterstones branches.

[Zucchini]

The Visconti film with Burt Lancaster is a feast of evocative images

[mozart79]

The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin

wonderful book and a must have for anyone in to Poetry.

[french frank]

The 1p House of the Dead has just arrived, but I'm sorely tempted to put it aside in favour of the lighter read, Howards End, while everyone's discussing it.

[Zucchini]

Blotto, Twinks & the Dead Dowager Duchess

[Richard Tarleton]

"The Darkening Age", by Catherine Nixey - the story of the Christian destruction of the Classical world in the 4th-6th centuries AD. In a chilling pre-echo it starts with the destruction of Palmyra's Greek monuments by Christian zealots around 385. She doesn't refer to recent events, but the parallel of marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness" coming out of the desert and destroying Greek stone columns, statues like that of Palmyra's Athena and temples, is all too obvious. Ch.3 looks at contemporary critiques of Christianity by writers such as Celsus whose writings have not survived - they were eradicated at the time - but whose ideas can be reconstructed through their rebuttals by Christian apologists. A scholarly account by a Cambridge-educated classicist who currently works at The Times. And she writes so well.

[gradus]

The Path to the Spiders' Nests, Calvino. Not greatly attracted by it and am interleaving it with Suffolk Scene by Julian Tennyson (great grand-son). An endearing book published in 1939 when the author was in his early twenties - he was killed as WW2 ended. It is not sentimental (imv) but draws heavily on his experiences being brought up in rural Suffolk and evokes a world that I find attractive. It is the only book I can think of with pages of carefully voiced Suffolk dialect. Perhaps one for specialists but a delight.

[Braunschlag]

Stasiland, Anna Funder. I read it before I visited Berlin and then read it again this week. It became very real the second time, an exceptional piece of work and writing.

[eighthobstruction]

....I was wondering if anybody had read this: An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It:
by Jessie Greengrass

or have they read any Laszlo Krasznahorkai [not a good name for a dyslexic brain]

[un barbu]

I have just finished Daniel Swift's 'The Bughouse: the poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound.' He looks at Pound's time in hospital after the war, using accounts left by visitors such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell and Charles Olson, as well as archive material from the hospital and the Department of Justice. Useful investigations of whether EP was, indeed, unfit to plead at the treason hearing and the nastiness of his politics (and their baneful afterlife in Italy in particular). I was impressed by it.

[Conchis]

Little Portia, by Simon Gray.

The theatre's gain was definitely the novel's loss.