what are you reading now?

Therese Raquin rocks. Zola is enjoyably grim: La Bete Humaine, Germinal (which makes me think of the video of Desenchantee by French synthpop chanteuse Mylene Farmer), L'Assommoir - all nice and depressing.


Studied Donne for Finals. The Earl of Rochester was my ace in the hole lit crit wise - my essays on him kicked ass.

Mebbe the easiest way to start a discussion would be to post a poem or two and invite analysis...

"Perhaps the best way to get a discussion of some worth would be to have a book of the month thread where the previous months book themes could be discussed in detail between a dozen or so dissensus members????"

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I think that that's a really good idea. If someone could organise it we could do it. Only problem is that a group of my friends are going to read the Booker shortlist by the announcement date and I've been asked to participate so if I take that up I'm going to be very busy with reading.
Never read Donne I'm afraid.
Read Germinal was I was very little, found it very depressing.

Im reading Houellebecq's "Lanzarote"

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What's that one? I've never heard of it.

Lanzarote, its a very short 1st person deal about a guy who goes to lanzarote, its ok, not a patch on Atomised... but its a nice book with landscape photos halfway through, its ubershort. I think its just over 100 pages, same themes of empty searching and hollow beliefs being sold - yknow?

Soooo I almost started a new thread about which book people would like to read, but then I realised that that would be a bit unfair, I dont know how many options a voting thread can offer but theres nothign to stop me just going
Light a Penny Candle (1982)
The Lilac Bus (1984)
Echoes (1985)
Firefly Summer (1987)
Silver Wedding (1988)
Circle of Friends (1990)
The Copper Beech (1992)
The Glass Lake (1994)
Evening Class (1996)
Tara Road (1998)
Scarlet Feather (2000)
Quentins (2002)
Nights of Rain and Stars (2004)
Whitethorn Woods (2006)

!!!!!!

so now im kinda torn between asking people in this thread what they would like to read ( after all everything already mentioned here is useless as people have read it! ) or start a new thread for the purpose of the vote options thread!

I really wouldnt mind reading "Spook Country"
What about a Dostoevsky book???
Thomas Pynchon
Issac Asimov?
PK Dick???
Ive never read any Palanhuik (sp??)
Another Donne??
Hubert Selby Jr???
Maurice Dantec???
Burroughs???
Bataille?

What would you guys like to read, I really like to be introduced to someone ive never heard of.

"Lanzarote, its a very short 1st person deal about a guy who goes to lanzarote, its ok, not a patch on Atomised..."

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Cheers.

Yeah, why not start a new thread. Say that whoever is interested has, I don't know, a week to sign up and suggest a book. At the end of the week everyone who is interested votes and then we read and discuss them in order of popularity, one a week or something.
Will that work?

I like the enthusiasm for Zola here. I remember reading Terese Raquin and being gripped - a really pacy thriller about adultery and murder. In fact, i don't think i've read a bad Zola - agree with all those mentioned and would add La Bete Humane, Nana and Au Bonheur Des Dames.

I think because Zola was so engaged with trying to pin down what it was to be alive in France at the end of the century he still has a strong immediacy which engages contemporary readers. Anyone read his thinly veiled biog of Cezanne?

In fact I am a great fan of the nineteenth century French novel - Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal are the big guns and i would recommend pretty much anything they have written (and whilst he is a twentieth century writer i would add Proust to this list of unimpeachable French novellist).

Only the Russian and British novel at the time can compete with such high quality and such variety of style and invention

was someone here talking about "the demon" by hubert selby Jr?

i just finished it... pretty great... really dark... selby has that old brooklyn vibe that Henry Miller had that i think is dead now... corner bars and dinner at grandma's on sunday, and the the oddball pervert charectors who somehow fit in w/ that milleu (even when they don't...)

i think i'm gonna try and read thru everything selby did... i am almost finished doing so w/ mordecai richler (haven't read his juvenalia) and it was pretty rewarding...

hey petergunn that may well have been me. I did read the demon this year. Amazing book. On par with Last Exit to brooklyn, howevre I think the room is his best!!! CHeck it out, its ggreat!

P.S. - EVERYBODY - Please keep posting in this thread dispite the action in the book club thread, its allways good to hear about books!!!

reading the jungle by upton sinclair at the moment, not sure if its been discussed on here already but im totally hooked. so gripping, so grim, so hopeless - only half way through at the moment and life has never looked bleaker!!! i thought the prose style was going to piss me off initially, but actually the first chapter or so is quite deceiving since he cuts down heavily on the over the top descriptive stuff to settle for a more matter of fact style - i guess that totally mirrors the losing of faith and enthusiasm as you get sucked into a system you're unable to escape - like the chapter describing the slaughterhouse - its so long and enthusiastic and everything is noted, and you can just imagine people arriving at chicago from the country and being like "wow" - so eager to learn and to start

Just finished something called The Book of Fuck by Ben Myers, but I can't really recommend it to be honest. It felt very second-hand, just like a tamer version of Bill Drummond's books without the wit or a weak pastiche of Hunter S Thomson. Everything about it seemed very half-hearted, by the last few chapters I even had the feeling that the author had got a bit bored of it, or recognised how lame it was and was just filling in pages until he had something long enough to call a book. As well as that it was really badly edited and it had loads of spelling mistakes and bits where words were missed out or sentences didn't make sense - rock n roll writing, yeah!

Imperial Life in The Emerald City - about the reconstruction/destruction of Iraq post invasion. Won the samual Johnson non-fiction prize. Very readable and at the same time a devastating critique of US screw up post Saddam.

Rough Rides - Kimmage's excellent account of being a pro cyclist and corruption in the peleton. (i've usually got a cycling book on the go and don't know how i overlooked this one. I've said it before but i think cycling writing may well be the most consistently excellent sport's writing - cricket can sometime be good, football occasionally, boxing too but not so many good books and very few whch are ghosted crap tabloid biogs)

Nearly finished David Goodis's 'Nightfall', which I've really enjoyed.

Also reading 'The Writer's Chapbook', a superb compilation of excerpts from interviews with writers by The Paris Review. Steinbeck talking about how he read manuscripts to his dogs! And many more insights into the minds of writers. I'm guessing it's better than the recently published Paris Review compilations because it contain all the 'best' bits.

just read matt thornes 8 minutes idle which i really liked. the cover makes it look like dick lit but its basically about office drudgery, which isnt new anymore, but he somehow fleshes out each seemingly insignificant tiny detail perfectly. also read chinua achebes man of the people, which the slightly too quick/neat ending aside, was a really sharp, funny, satire of 60s politics in west africa. currently reading kafkas metamorphosis. well that and pankaj mishras temptations of the west, which is about modernisation in modern day india.

I'm on jury duty this week so I've had plenty of time to read (I'll just toss a coin at the end of the trial I guess) - finished off House of Leaves, The Third Policeman (did enjoy this, surprising ending as well) and The Psychic Soviet (made me laugh a lot - I think it was supposed to) and now I'm reading The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Read Ryu Murakamis "piercing", not going to read any more by him, read "in the miso soup" , his books just wash over me in a very unaffecting way, kinda gave him a second chance on the strength of Miikes "Audition" film.

To continue the War theme ( although purely by chance! ) im reading the everyman library edition of Roald Dahls collected adult storys - very grim, macabre, mythical, vivid and touching - really liking them, read about 4 or so that are heavily influenced ( if not autobiographical ) by his time spent in the RAF- great stuff, maybe over looked seeing as so many people are fans of his childrens books, which are fantastic, but his other storys are really amazing and certainly touch me just as much as some of the 'best' authors..

currently reading violette leduc's la bâtarde, dino buzzati's desert of the tartars and théodore monod's méharées, which is a bit too descriptive and annoying in a french way (poetic while pointing out it does not want to be poetic, that sort of thing). but it's about travels in the sahara so i can't put it down, and i'm on the last pages. i think i'll leave violette's book for a while as her neurosis is starting to get on my nerves.

Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem - Peter Ackroyd.

'GRUESOME! GRIPPING! GREAT!'...as The Daily Mail never said.

Started it last night and was hooked to the extent of reading way past my sleepy time.

King Of The World by David Remnick - a really great biography of Muhammad Ali that captures him as a person, a political figure and analyses his life in the context of his own time. I really recommend it.

Just started Naked Lunch - OK, so I guess the average Dissensian probably learned to read with this book, but anyway - and it's quite funky, in the sense of the word funk's original meaning of fear/gunk, I suppose...I'm only a few pages in and already some guy's started killing people by absorbing and digesting them like a human Shoggoth. Wicked!

Mr. Tea said:

Just started Naked Lunch - OK, so I guess the average Dissensian probably learned to read with this book

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Are they all that hip???!!! There's great Burroughs material on YouTube, by the way.

slim jenkins said:

Are they all that hip???!!! There's great Burroughs material on YouTube, by the way.

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Not necessarily - some of them probably worship Mike Oldfield.

I saw the film of NL years ago, thought it was about time I had a go at the book.