What are you reading now?

[teamsaint]

Important to remember that the industry really is a vast sausage machine.
Boxes have to be ticked, agents are exceptionally powerful, and a few big publishers completely dominate what we tend to get to see in the shops,read reviews of, see on shortlists.

Currently, a short history of Robert the Bruce, “ King and Outlaw”,by Scottish academic Chris Brown.

Which, oddly given the basic material, seems to be less depressing that much of todays fiction would appear to be !!

[Pianorak]

Yanis Varoufakis: Adults In The Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment.

What happens when you take on the establishment? In this blistering, personal account, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis blows the lid on Europe's hidden agenda and exposes what actually goes on in its corridors of power. . . As is now clear, the same policies that required the tragic and brutal suppression of Greece’s democratic uprising have led directly to authoritarianism, populist revolt and instability throughout the Western world.

Adults In The Room is an urgent wake-up call to renew European democracy before it is too late.

Probably a good thing we didn't join the Euro - but should the UK/Cameron have tried harder to help "renew European democracy" rather than call for a Referendum?

[Beef Oven!]

Yanis Varoufakis: Adults In The Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment.

What happens when you take on the establishment? In this blistering, personal account, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis blows the lid on Europe's hidden agenda and exposes what actually goes on in its corridors of power. . . As is now clear, the same policies that required the tragic and brutal suppression of Greece’s democratic uprising have led directly to authoritarianism, populist revolt and instability throughout the Western world.

Adults In The Room is an urgent wake-up call to renew European democracy before it is too late.

Probably a good thing we didn't join the Euro - but should the UK/Cameron have tried harder to help "renew European democracy" rather than call for a Referendum?

An understanding of the analysis in Yanis' book and his treatment by the EU establishment, makes it clear that the UK/Cameron couldn't have done much to "renew Europen democracy" even if they wanted to "try harder."

[Tevot]

An understanding of the analysis in Yanis' book and his treatment by the EU establishment, makes it clear that the UK/Cameron couldn't have done much to "renew Europen democracy" even if they wanted to "try harder."

Hello there,

A couple of the books on my to read list are both on the Brexit theme I suppose 1) Unleashing Demons by Craig Oliver and 2)The Strange Death of Europe - by Douglas Murray.

Hopefully I will have time to read them before the year is out - other commitments and laziness permitting !!

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[french frank]

And I'm fed up with the "small but perfectly formed" tendency amongst some of our contemporary "literary" novelists.

That would make me more likely to read one . I don't make much time for reading modern fiction these days - I'm more likely to go back to a "small but perfectly formed" short story which I particularly enjoyed in a collection. I gave up Booker the year Herta Müller won … oh, all right, that was the Nobel Prize, same difference. I bought two of her novels at the time and wasn't tempted to go further than the first few pages.

Currently reading:the October issue of Prospect magazine. All very sensible and Guardian

[Beef Oven!]

Hello there,

A couple of the books on my to read list are both on the Brexit theme I suppose 1) Unleashing Demons by Craig Oliver and 2)The Strange Death of Europe - by Douglas Murray.

Hopefully I will have time to read them before the year is out - other commitments and laziness permitting !!

Best Wishes,

Tevot

I’ve read both of those. I found the Craig Oliver Book a very interesting real-time romp through the whole shooting match. The Murray book is my book of the century! It’s not about Brexit or the EU, though.

[vinteuil]

The Strange Death of Europe - by Douglas Murray.

... an interesting if over-detailed wiki page on Douglas Murray -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Murray_(author)

.

[Beef Oven!]

... an interesting if over-detailed wiki page on Douglas Murray -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Murray_(author)

.

I don’t agree! I think it’s a rather boring wiki page. He’s much more interesting than that!

But I think you’ll find that it’s the book that most people are interested in, not the man.

[vinteuil]

... I think you’ll find that it’s the book that most people are interested in, not the man.

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Death_of_Europe

.

[Conchis]

Karl Ole Knausgard - The End

This is (guess what?) the final volume in the My Struggle series and I am finding it as baffling to assess as the other volumes. It's very readable and the author has some arresting insights into the business of daily life but one can't help thinking literally anyone with an average command of their own language (and the available time) could have turned out this massive series of books. To call him the 'Norwegian Proust' as some critics (who almost certainly have never actually read Proust) have is deeply insulting to the French original. Proust's novel (and it IS a novel) is about the only book you'll ever read that will change your life (and for the better). Knausgaard has basically constructed a shopping list of his thoughts and feelings - there is a lack of art to his work's construction and you can't stifle the feeling that he's basically just shoving down the first thing that comes into his head. And it's NOT a novel, as Knausgard has not even bothered to disguise the personalities he is writing about - the upshot of his fun and games being his uncle threatening to sue him for defaming the family name and his second wife leaving him because he's so horribly self-absorbed (though the latter detail isn't covered in the book).

My Struggle is basically a guilty pleasure - a junk read for the beach, which your John Grisham-reading neighbour in the next lounger might mistake as 'highbrow'. Artistically, it's a pile of fetid crap.

[Beef Oven!]

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strange_Death_of_Europe

.

Interested in the book, not the polarised ideas of Gwerdian and Telegraph Hacks

You addicted to banal wiki entries?

[Tevot]

Laura Spinney : Pale Rider - The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed The World

I got half way through this during the summer ( before taking a detour down the Road to Unfreedom ) but thanks to a long weekend - no teaching this Monday - hope to finish the book soon.

A good read although being a rather dim chap beholden to the arts I found the scientific background and epidemiology to be something of a chore.

She writes well and takes in a broad canvas including the USA, Russia and China yet vividly and poignantly brings home the personal human tragedy of a pandemic that historians and specialists believe might have killed up to 100 million people. Nobody is quite sure.

Victims of the flu included the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, dramatist Edmond Rostand and the artist Egon Schiele plus his wife and unborn child.

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[Conchis]

Re: Douglas Murray

Some years ago, I read his biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. It is extremely poor. That Murray thought Douglas of sufficient interest to waste time researching and writing a full scale biography of him casts doubt on his judgement, imo, but if he'd done a good job on it, I would have said no more. 'The style is the man', as Richard Nixon once said, and Murray's 'style' is very much a reflection of his strutting, constipated 'gay on the Scene' personality. It is natural that such an ugly personality should find attraction in bilious non-entities like Douglas and bilious non-concepts like Brexit.

[waldo]

Powell was an appalling bore and a tedious snob. His published work reflects that.

The books might appear to be superficially entertaining but they are thin stuff. The idea that Powell was some kind of 'English Proust' is so absurd it would be laughable, if so many fat-bottomed idiots didn't buy into it.

Karl Ole Knausgard - The End

To call him the 'Norwegian Proust' as some critics (who almost certainly have never actually read Proust) have is deeply insulting to the French original.........

Looks like you have the basis for a new kind of literary criticism.

[french frank]

'The style is the man', as Richard Nixon once said,

No idea whether Richard Nixon said it, but he was anticipated by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in 1753 ('Le style c'est l'homme même', Discours sur le style), and perhaps in thought by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy in 1651 ('Stylus virum arguit).