What are you reading now?

[johncorrigan]

I read Neil Gayman's 'American Gods' recently. Really enjoyed it - loads of great ideas, many of which I thought worked very well, though there were a few bits that I thought might work better in a comic book format. Apparently it's a TV programme these days with Lovejoy playing the rather excellent character, Wednesday.

[un barbu]

Richard Holloway's memoir 'Leaving Alexandria' is my current re-reading. Honest, well-written, and at times very amusing.

[Pulcinella]

Re-reading The handmaid's tale before launching into the sequel, one of the Booker shortlist job lot that arrived last week.

[DracoM]

Halfway through 'Alias Grace'. Deeply satisfying and worrying. Beautifully written too - as usual with MA.

[Conchis]

Just finished reading The instrument, the debut novel by the largley forgotten Peter Everett (most famous for Negatives - later filmed with Glenda Jackson, Peter McEnery and Diane Cilento).

Just started on Brian Moore’s debut novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.

[vinteuil]

'Falk' by Joseph Conrad.

... thanks for this, which has nudged me to read it. Fascinating - the opening so like that of Heart of Darkness - but then the scenes in the south east Asian port Kiplingesque in their comedy - the gossipy Schomberg in his ghastly hostelry, the Hermann family, Falk's wrenching the boat away in his tug - before we come to the horror, the horror, of Falk's back story. It's a Conrad that I feel should be better known.

If you want to know how modern critics approach Falk, try this for size :

"Conrad’s Falk portrays the act of cannibalism of a white man to propose that even resorting to cannibalism can find its moral justification within the society that abhors such actions. This effect is achieved by means of simultaneous narrative distance and involvement created through both deictic shifts in various narrative spaces (embedded within the main narrative space and constituting the textual world, subworlds and possible worlds with multiple spatio-temporal shifts) and delayed decoding which results in imperfect knowledge worlds delivered by the personal, justifying viewpoint of the intradiegetic narrator. As such, both deixis and delayed decoding, we argue, are ultimately related to the manipulation of narrative distance; they produce a kind of uncanny effect of simultaneous immediacy and distance which is fittingly in line with epistemological doubt as an aspect of modernist sensibility."





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[Stanfordian]

Roy Keane - 'The Second Half' with Roddy Doyle

[Richard Barrett]

I went through an Atwood phase a few years ago in which (as is typical of me) I read all of her books, the ones I hadn't already read, one after the other. Having read The Handmaid's Tale long before that, it didn't form part of the binge. I think I'll read it again before moving on to the sequel. I did like Oryx and Crake and its sequels very much, and The Blind Assassin and Cat's Eye, in particular, but everything she's written is more than worth reading.

Who among us likes reading SF? I do, it's a teenage enthusiasm I never grew out of. I spend some time reading every day, and I seem to have fallen into a rhythm of alternating between more "serious" books and SF novels, although I do like the latter to be thought-provoking rather than (just) entertaining. It strikes me that, apart from Atwood, much of the best work in this area is being done by female authors. Maybe something to do with not getting carried away with the futuristic hardware etc. I'm just in the middle of the third and so far last in Emma Newman's Planetfall series.

[Joseph K]

This thread appears to have replaced the 'what are you reading'.

[Joseph K]

Almost finished Kafka 'Metamorphoses and Other Stories', a Penguin collection of his short stories. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Richard Barrett]

oops, I didn't realise this was a new one...

[vinteuil]

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... praps the Hosts might merge these threads?

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[Richard Tarleton]

Done! New thread merged with existing one, I trust this is the right way round.

[Rjw]

The British are Coming the war for America 1775-1777.

By Rick Atkinson.

A very interesting and detailed account of the first two years of the American War of Independence. There are two more volumes planned.

Don't tell me who wins!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Don't tell me who wins!

Spoiler: There's a Sequel

https://www.britannica.com/event/War-of-1812