what are you reading now?
Dave Peace is great actually but very, very dark. The 19++ books read like William Burroughs goes to Leeds, and has sordid sex. I like China Mieville a lot, but he mostly writes genre fiction. Embassytown was definitely an attempt at a serious work - Rich might have some comments on how successful or otherwise this was.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Amazing, but the Adam Nevill version I posted earlier is maybe better.
They discussed this story on the H. P. Lovecraft podcast - maybe you're already a fan? - along with a bunch of other 'weird fiction' writers (Poe, Machen, M. R. James, you get the idea) after they ran out of HPL. Some decent stuff on there if you haven't checked it out. The address is hppodcraft.com.
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IdleRich
IdleRich
I've only read the first of the Ridings "Trilogy" but I would't say it's anything like Burroughs. It's a nasty, grimy little story written in a simplistic style - kind of noirish with a tabloidy feel. I liked it but that's not at all the comparison I would draw.
Embassy Town - yeah it's ok but it feels a bit like a musing on a theory of language dressed up as a novel. Something good going on there though. I remembered scenes from it a lot afterwards, maybe I was too harsh at the time.
Embassy Town - yeah it's ok but it feels a bit like a musing on a theory of language dressed up as a novel. Something good going on there though. I remembered scenes from it a lot afterwards, maybe I was too harsh at the time.
matt b
Indexing all opinion
The tone changes quite a lot after the first one- he really hits his stride.
The way in which fact is woven into the last 3 Ridings books in particular is incredible- like a dark occult secret history of W. Yorkshire.
Drive through Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax etc etc on a dreary winter's evening you can get flashbacks, where Peace is describing reality.
Peace is awesome.
I've been reading the Grijpstra and de Gier novels (Dutch detectives with a predilection for outbursts of improvised outsider Jazz). Better than the Martin Beck series.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
On a horror tip, I really want to read this next:
Ignore the cheesy cover design, it's a supernatural horror-thriller based on a true story (how many of those do you come across?) about a maverick psychiatrist in the middle of the last century who pioneered this therapy that involved keeping patients, mostly women, asleep for weeks or months at a time. And then destroyed all his clinical notes before he died. Sounds freaky as fuck, anyway. Found it via a link on the Strange Attractor website, which must count for something as far as weird-cred goes.
Ignore the cheesy cover design, it's a supernatural horror-thriller based on a true story (how many of those do you come across?) about a maverick psychiatrist in the middle of the last century who pioneered this therapy that involved keeping patients, mostly women, asleep for weeks or months at a time. And then destroyed all his clinical notes before he died. Sounds freaky as fuck, anyway. Found it via a link on the Strange Attractor website, which must count for something as far as weird-cred goes.
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Finally finished 'Great Expectations' - plenty to enjoy and admire, almost too much in fact. Perhaps why it became a slog for me ultimately. Dickens is a fascinating author - so good at subtle, observational descriptions, capable of fine irony, but also brilliant at grotesques, and over-the-top physical comedy, and on-the-big-pointy-nose satire. Of course the plot is completely unbelievable, full of ludicrous coincidences and so on - but then, so much of it seems fairy-tale-like in any case, that these coincidences don't seem to matter all that much. The big flaw with the book as far as I'm concerned is that the love story between Pip and Estella is essentially uninteresting - because Estella is uninteresting, and you can't really tell why Pip should be so obsessed with her, aside from her being beautiful. Which can be enough, I suppose. The plot, in fact, doesn't really hang together, save for those consequential bonds, and so its really the sheer comic vitality of the characters and setting that make it work - Pumblechook, Wemmick, Jaggers, are all hugely enjoyable and memorable characters.
I'm now reading this http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/26/what-it-means-human-review which seems quite academic in style, and deconstructionist to boot, but also potentially very interesting.
I'm now reading this http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/26/what-it-means-human-review which seems quite academic in style, and deconstructionist to boot, but also potentially very interesting.
STN
sou'wester
I'm reading Greybeard by Brian Aldiss. Enjoying it so far. Some of the dialogue is pretty ropey but I expected that really.
Other stuff I've enjoyed recently: Electric Eden by Rob Young and Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel.
Next I think I want to read On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin. Anyone read it?
Other stuff I've enjoyed recently: Electric Eden by Rob Young and Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel.
Next I think I want to read On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin. Anyone read it?
connect_icut
Well-known member
We read On the Black Hill in school, I think just because I grew up in Hereford and it's set around there. It was one of those things that seems incredibly creepy when you're a kid but I'm not sure it would have remotely the same affect on me now. It would probably just make me homesick.
woops
is not like other people
i think you guys read too much science fiction
SF is not my favourite genre stuff. I prefer the thriller genre. My two best are Marc Boem's Eye of the Beholder and Bukowski's Pulp.
The Eye is as cypheric as to render eponymity redundant. The familiar office, the desk, the solitude : the pre-digital tropes of desperation are as grubby as the future is pristine.
Pulp was Bukowski's last novel and it does bear the hallmark of late style. Goodbye-to-all-that humour, tilting at literary windmills, a fluency not to be found in his earlier chronicles.
SF is not my favourite genre stuff. I prefer the thriller genre. My two best are Marc Boem's Eye of the Beholder and Bukowski's Pulp.
The Eye is as cypheric as to render eponymity redundant. The familiar office, the desk, the solitude : the pre-digital tropes of desperation are as grubby as the future is pristine.
Pulp was Bukowski's last novel and it does bear the hallmark of late style. Goodbye-to-all-that humour, tilting at literary windmills, a fluency not to be found in his earlier chronicles.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Touch of Self-parody there, Ed?
IdleRich
IdleRich
Persevered to the tedious end of The Tailor of Panama - it's hard to believe that it's by the same guy that wrote Tinker Tailor etc It's basically some kind of clumsy meditation on the nature of truth and how it relates to the media and so on and so forth. Kind of like if a four year old had written Foucault's Pendulum. Some of it is just so silly that you want to throw the book away in frustration but it even fails to be funny so you can't read it as a comedy. Once you've seen what the book is about it slowly grinds forward with no revelations of interest or anything at all to enliven it.
I wish I was better at giving up books but the second I finished that one I ploughed into something called Fuel Injected Dreams by James Robert Baker. In comparison it feels like a masterpiece although really it's not that. I am enjoying it anyway, it's about an eighties radio dj based in LA who loves oldies - we're talking Ronettes rather than Pat Boone here. He gets a phone call from a reclusive production genius who hasn't made a record since the sixties and who keeps his wife - the former singer of one of his bands - virtually a prisoner in his kitsch mansion. In other words, he's Phil Spector (though not by name and in fact Spector is mentioned as a separate character in the book presumably to prevent any legal problems) and the book imagines what would happen if he turned up again, as mad as a bucket of frogs and about to unleash a killer new tune that he'd been working on for fifteen years.
Since the book was written we actually know what happened the next time PS would surface but I guess that doesn't matter. The book is fast-paced and has loads of references to a lot of music I love, drugs and lines such as "I laughed like a dad who'd just backed over his deformed little girl with a brand-new car" which sort of make you feel it's trying a bit too hard but which make an enjoyable change from the Tailor of Panama.
I wish I was better at giving up books but the second I finished that one I ploughed into something called Fuel Injected Dreams by James Robert Baker. In comparison it feels like a masterpiece although really it's not that. I am enjoying it anyway, it's about an eighties radio dj based in LA who loves oldies - we're talking Ronettes rather than Pat Boone here. He gets a phone call from a reclusive production genius who hasn't made a record since the sixties and who keeps his wife - the former singer of one of his bands - virtually a prisoner in his kitsch mansion. In other words, he's Phil Spector (though not by name and in fact Spector is mentioned as a separate character in the book presumably to prevent any legal problems) and the book imagines what would happen if he turned up again, as mad as a bucket of frogs and about to unleash a killer new tune that he'd been working on for fifteen years.
Since the book was written we actually know what happened the next time PS would surface but I guess that doesn't matter. The book is fast-paced and has loads of references to a lot of music I love, drugs and lines such as "I laughed like a dad who'd just backed over his deformed little girl with a brand-new car" which sort of make you feel it's trying a bit too hard but which make an enjoyable change from the Tailor of Panama.
empty mirror
remember the jackalope
I'm almost done with The Beautiful Music All Around Us by Stephen Wade. It comes with a CD, of course. The author tracks down the families and friends of the musicians recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in the 1930's and 1940's and traces their influences and impact on music of the present day. I recommend this.
The last work of fiction I read was Abe's The Woman in the Dunes. I wonder if Vollman is a fan - it has fits where the narrative splinters out into other territory. Claustrophobic and supremely weird.
Just before that I read All The Pretty Horses. Good, of course.
My wife bought me Hook's Joy Division book. Flipped through that. Looks amazing.
The last work of fiction I read was Abe's The Woman in the Dunes. I wonder if Vollman is a fan - it has fits where the narrative splinters out into other territory. Claustrophobic and supremely weird.
Just before that I read All The Pretty Horses. Good, of course.
My wife bought me Hook's Joy Division book. Flipped through that. Looks amazing.
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blacktulip
Pregnant with mandrakes
That sounds great - thanks for mentioning it!
Have been having a D.H. Lawrence Christmas. Frankly, my mind is blown.
blacktulip
Pregnant with mandrakes
Love Abba, by the way. Marvel at Abba.
IdleRich
IdleRich
I'm reading the Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco - more European conspiracy theories, this time dictated by a master forger who has lost his memory and is regurgitating them in the hope that they will hope remind him who he is - aided by a similarly lost and forgetful priest who adds to his notes when he is asleep. It turns out that the forger has been inventing conspiracies right, left and centre to further his own career but it seems like they have an annoying habit of becoming true or almost true.
You could make a case for saying that Eco has trod all this ground before in Foucault's Pendulum and you'd probably be right but it's a long time since I've read that and I'm enjoying this one.
You could make a case for saying that Eco has trod all this ground before in Foucault's Pendulum and you'd probably be right but it's a long time since I've read that and I'm enjoying this one.