What are you reading now?

[Anna]

I was just about to post the very same thing ferney - but then i wondered if I'd read it wrongly? I've just finished Curiosity Shop (believe it not, never read it before, it's always been one I've convinced myself that of course I read it years ago. And Quilp - gosh, he's the stuff of nightmares!)

I've also just got down from the shelf The Christmas Stories - Carol, The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth I never tire of Dickens and a while back, in a charity shop, I picked up some old bound volumes of unknown (to me) stories/journals such as The Uncommercial Traveller, Pictures from Italy, etc. I find his many 'grotesques' aren't that at all, they are just so true to life, you meet them all the time!

[vinteuil]

I find his many 'grotesques' are just so true to life!

... o indeed yes! When I was a callow undergraduate I repeated the usual clichés of his 'characters' being 'caricatures'; the older I get the more I realize he under-played rather than exaggerated. I mean, look at the denizens of this Forum!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... o indeed yes! When I was a callow undergraduate I repeated the usual clichés of his 'characters' being 'caricatures'; the older I get the more I realize he under-played rather than exaggerated. I mean, look at the denizens of this Forum!

Bah! Humbug!!

[JFLL]

I'm currently reading Nairn's London, a book of impressions about London and its buildings derived from Ian Nairn's travels through it in the 1960s. It reads like a piece of cultural history now, with so many of the places he describes having undergone complete transformation, but is still interesting for the picture it paints of that city and that time and also for Nairn's idiosyncratic approach, intensely interested in the unusual, the characterful, the personal, the communal life of buildings and places (including not a few pubs). Nairn was a sort of early forerunner of Jonathan Meades in his approach (and Meades is a great admirer of his work), though his prose style is more earthy and punchy than Meades', with unpredictable insights and arresting phrases. I recommend this, especially to those who knew and lived through the London of that period as I did not:

http://www.waterstones.com/waterston...ndon/10849505/

I've been enjoying this, too, aeolium, together with Nairn's Towns (an equally good collection of pieces on provincial towns, with postscripts on changes since 1967 by Owen Hatherley), and a fine book about him, Ian Nairn: words in place, by Gillian Darley and David McKie.

Certainly outspoken and earthy (All Saints' Margaret Street is described as an orgasm), so it's surprising that in his TV films (many now on YouTube) he often comes across as a rather hesitant and fragile figure, despite the famous rant at the Munich Oktoberfest and the heart-rending sermon from the pulpit of a semi-destroyed church in Bolton.

[vinteuil]

I'm currently reading Nairn's London, a book of impressions about London and its buildings -

http://www.waterstones.com/waterston...ndon/10849505/

Nairn's London one of my favourite books on the subject; and yes, he was a magnificent presenter.

I've been trying for some time to find his companion piece Nairn's Paris - but it seems unavailable - or available only at absurd prices

[Petrushka]

That has to be the wrong way round, Pet - quite apart from being a fantastic writer, Dickens' life had some extremely un-admirable aspects to it: the way he treated his wife (and women generally) and his attitude towards the Indian "mutineers", for example.

By coincidence, I've just finished A Christmas Carol - it's been about twenty years since I last read it, and there are so many details that I'd forgotten, including (unbelievably) this gem:

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches.

Sorry, for clarification I should have said 'admiring the life as told by Tomalin'. True enough about the way he treated his wife etc but Tomalin really does lay into some of the novels with hardly any of them escaping a critical mauling and confess I came away not greatly wanting to read them. Having said that, I am having my annual read of A Christmas Carol right now - just the right length to read in one day.

[clive heath]

Is this the place to remind one and all that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQBBBj_1wwI

takes you to " The Man who fought the Planners" ? .. and somewhere maybe there's that trip up the old A6. Merry Christmas.

[DracoM]

Margaret Attwood / Year of the Flood.
And just before that, ironically, John Christopher/ The Death of Grass.

[verismissimo]

Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead. Not the most recent on the subject, but he writes so well.

Coming up to the centenary.

[verismissimo]

Nairn's London one of my favourite books on the subject; and yes, he was a magnificent presenter.

I've been trying for some time to find his companion piece Nairn's Paris - but it seems unavailable - or available only at absurd prices

Never go to Paris without Nairn. Terribly thumbed by now.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Inspired by Petrushka's and gurnemanz's enthusiasm on the Radi4 Freezes its Schedules thread, I am reading War & Peace for the first time in Anthony Briggs' translation. And I am reading it for the first time - I've tried several times in the past in different translations and have never been able to get beyond the first few pages, so tedious did I find the characters and prose. But this is a real revelation - the prose communicates so much, the individuals mould into three dimensional individuals (rather than the cliched "types" I remember from the other versions).

This is going to be a real pleasure - my thanks to Pet & Gurne.

[antongould]

Inspired by Petrushka's and gurnemanz's enthusiasm on the Radi4 Freezes its Schedules thread, I am reading War & Peace for the first time in Anthony Briggs' translation. And I am reading it for the first time - I've tried several times in the past in different translations and have never been able to get beyond the first few pages, so tedious did I find the characters and prose. But this is a real revelation - the prose communicates so much, the individuals mould into three dimensional individuals (rather than the cliched "types" I remember from the other versions).


This is going to be a real pleasure - my thanks to Pet & Gurne.

Enjoy ferny let us know who wins...in extra time presumably

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Enjoy ferny let us know who wins

My money's on Marya Dmitriyevna!


(For anyone who hasn't read the novel, she's a formidable woman described as a "terrible dragon" by the younger characters.)

[Don Basilio]

I'm reading "George Eliot's" Daniell Deronda. Only just over a third through. Is it Trollope with intelligence or a rather more approachable Henry James? It is certainly different from The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch. The characters (even when they are a rector's daughter) all seem socially a cut above her usual cast. Also it is not set in the early C19 but contemporaneously.

It's really two stories. Daniel Deronda's story (which hardly figures in the first third) and Gwendolen Harleth's. Her story is far more interesting.

[Pianorak]

El ruido de las cosas al caer (The Sound of Things Falling) - by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Set in the Pablo Escobar period of the sixties, when Colombia was a main supplier of cocaine to the US.