What are you reading at the moment?

[Kingpin]

Max Brooks has written a short story called The Extinction Parade: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-14/max-brooks-original-zombie-story-from-world-war-z-author/

It's not bad, like I Am Legend but the humans are vampires and the vampires are zombies. It's set in Malaysia where I was all of two days ago so a lot of the locations are still fresh in my mind. Added bonus.

[McFly]

Reading On Beauty by Zadie Mith, its pretty good i want to keep reading it even though its not exciting, reminds me of Douglas Coupland a bit whom i love (Microserfs aside). Read both 3 Para and the follow up Ground truth i bought for £1 each from AzzDuh which were very interesting and well worth reading for military afficianados, the Halo encyclopedia is my main shitter reading material at the minute but its a bit big and clumsy for holding.

[neoELITE]

I've just ordered Cloughie's biography Walking On Water for £1.28 delivered on Amazon and a collection of horror short stories for £2.00 on Play.com

"Read by Dawn" is the new annual collection of modern horror writing, published under the Bloody Books imprint. Imprint curator Adele Hartley is the Director of the "Dead by Dawn", Scotland's International Horror Film Festival. "Dead by Dawn" is a member of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation and a major feature of the international horror film and festival network. To coincide with the festival turning 13 in April 2006, Adele will be publishing the first annual "Read by Dawn" collection which she has invited Ramsey Campbell to host, including an opening new story. Ramsey is recognised as Britain's most respected living horror writer, and his short stories and novels have been giving readers nightmares for many years. Film-goers haven't been spared, though, as his novels "The Nameless" and "Pact of the Fathers", both made spine-chilling movies. We hope the annual "Read by Dawn" collection will establish itself quickly as an international celebration of the best in contemporary horror.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

I'm just about to start The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 500 pages describing 3 days of absolute mental torture in a 20th century Russian gulag, written with the compassion, empathy and flair of a Russian master. This is going to own.

I've just finished the first book of 'Story of the Stone' by Cao Xueqin. Very good indeed. It flew by. The scenes describing the everyday morning activities of the protagonists remind me of the last chapters in War & Peace, despite taking place in very different cultures and written with very different aims. There is a certain coziness and pleasant routine to it all; large, happy families, a harmony and respect for each other vastly outdoing the gossip and resentment going on behind the scenes. I have the second book (out of 5) right here, but I have a feeling that I'm going to want to savour these books rather than burn through them like I have done with this volume.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

I read both White Jazz by James Ellroy and The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie this past week. Both excellent books, in very different ways. I've talked about The Heroes at some length in the fantasy thread, but White Jazz! Well.

It was a very good book, and a great conclusion to the LA Quartet and to Dudley Smith's story. Loved Big Pete's appearances, too. Like all of Ellroy's books that I've read, it was thoroughly excellent and blew me away in places, but it's not my favourite of his books (which would probably be either LA Confidential, American Tabloid, or Blood's A Rover).

[Kingpin]

I read both White Jazz by James Ellroy and The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie this past week. Both excellent books, in very different ways. I've talked about The Heroes at some length in the fantasy thread, but White Jazz! Well.

It was a very good book, and a great conclusion to the LA Quartet and to Dudley Smith's story. Loved Big Pete's appearances, too. Like all of Ellroy's books that I've read, it was thoroughly excellent and blew me away in places, but it's not my favourite of his books (which would probably be either LA Confidential, American Tabloid, or Blood's A Rover).

I finished LA Confidential last night, holy crap, the last quarter was almost apocalyptic. Unbelievable how he manages to weave it all together by the end. White Jazz is next up after Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box.

One question:

Why did they go to the train carrying the prisoners after speaking to Mickey Cohen? I couldn't quite find the logic behind that bit, except that somehow Dot Rothstein was involved (prison officer?) and then for some reason Deuce Perkins was there. Did Dudley's gang know there was a prison break happening and went there to snuff the guys who tried to kill Cohen? The reason being that they could establish a link between Dud's gang and the niteowl victims? It's not mentioned at all afterwards.

I don't know how the rest of it can make sense to me but I can't put my finger on this little bit. To be fair, I was reading at 4am so that probably didn't help.

I just wish I hadn't watched the film (even though it was years ago) as I had a vague idea of where it was going. Very different mind you, but still. Thinking about it now, they really miscast Dudley Smith.

[revlob]

I'm reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, as my girlfriend bought me a collection of his works for Christmas. It's actually really good, the discussion at the start about time as a dimension, and the Traveller's early musings about future societies are very clever, yet lucid.

[Chosty]

I'm just about to start The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 500 pages describing 3 days of absolute mental torture in a 20th century Russian gulag, written with the compassion, empathy and flair of a Russian master. This is going to own.

I like the sound of that - keep us posted.

[Valiant]

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman well listening to it as its an audiobook.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

I like the sound of that - keep us posted.

I'm only 1/5 but it is superb. The background menace is subtle, the characters are completely real, it's funny - somehow - and so, so hopeless. There's rage in there but so far it's stagnent. If it explodes it will be glorious and if it fails to spark into anything it will be entirely fitting with what I've read so far. Either way I'm a winner.

It's not stodgy at all, either. (but then Russian masterpieces are generally less so than people believe anyway.) I just read 70 pages hunched over on a noisy bus in rush hour.

[Flub]

I'm not reading it yet but I will be next week. The new Jasper Fforde Thursday Next book "One of our Thursdays is missing"

It is a time of unrest in the BookWorld. Only the diplomatic skills of ace literary detective Thursday Next can avert a devastating genre war. But a week before the peace talks, Thursday vanishes. Has she simply returned home to the RealWorld or is this something more sinister? All is not yet lost. Living at the quiet end of speculative fiction is the written Thursday Next, eager to prove herself worth of her illustrious namesake. The written Thursday is soon hot on the trail of her factual alter-ego, and quickly stumbles upon a plot so fiendish that it threatens the very BookWorld itself.

[Kingpin]

I liked Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. It has an interesting concept that is laid out straight in the first few pages. An ageing rock star buys a ghost on the internet and then bad things start to happen.

However, I didn't find it all that creepy and unsettling moments are few and far between (the content of a certain videotape being described is the darkest event of the novel, far more so than later twists and turns in my opinion). 

The few characters are likeable enough despite being somewhat unsympathetic when we first meet them; Jude and Georgia start out seemingly out of sorts with each other but grow closer as terrible, supernatural events happen to both of them.

The pace slackens before the halfway point and ultimately, it felt like the novel was missing a crucial third dimension. The villainous ghost had a lot of potential but became less and less of a malevolent spirit, more like an ever-present bogeyman. 

He could have laid on the chills a lot more than he actually did. Craddock could have been much more terrifying had he felt like less of a flesh-and-bones character. His supernatural chatter on the tv and radio felt a bit harmless in the end. 

Despite all this, there's lots to like. Good use of Jude's dogs Bon and Angus, I had really grown to like them as characters in their own right, and I loved all the nods to pre-2000 rock music, guitars and life on the road. 

His later novel Horns feels much more complete and well rounded, not to mention less conventional, so I would definitely recommend that before Heart Shaped Box. Still though, it's a fun romp for a first novel and has a number of interesting passages. 

[Eats hoops and leaves]

I like the sound of that - keep us posted.

Chosty it's imperative that you get hold of this book immediately. It's a fine thing to feel your life changing as you read something. The only problem with reading it is that you want to slap the trash people read on public transport out of their hands and scream at them that there are better things out there. It's horrific. I struggle to read it at times - and it's all the worse for knowing that this not very far from reality at all. An astonishing piece of writing and nothing short of a masterpiece. all of humanity smeared across 500 pages of genius.

[Chosty]

Excellent.

I've still got Cancer Ward untouched in my desk drawer so will add this to my Solzhenitsyn pile. I have to say, though, that as I get older I struggle more and more with tales of suffering that are closely based on real life.

I'm currently halfway through another book mentioned in this thread - The Underground Man by Mick Jackson, about an elderly aristocrat who builds a network of tunnels under his estate. So far, they haven't played a major part, and it's mainly been a lightly humorous and philosophical examination of his struggle with daily life, his ageing, aching body and - increasingly - memories from his childhood.

[Kingpin]

White Jazz by James Ellroy

I quite liked the stripped down style that a lot of people seem to have a problem with. After reading The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential in the past month, this was like reading James Ellroy in fast forward. The mixture of dialogue, inner monologue and newspaper reports worked quite well.

However, I think it's the weakest book in the LA Quartet. Not to say it's a bad novel but in terms of plot, it's not really as interesting or involving as the rest.

The Kafejian burglary case doesn't really get interesting until the linked-by-incest family are murdered. While Klein is uncovering the whole conspiracy (say 75% of the book), I'm just thinking "It's Dudley, get to Smith/Exeley showdown".

That said, satisfying conclusion to the whole thing, the last few pages left me wondering

if Dave does come back (in the 1980s?) and set things right as he's threatening to do.

I'm going have an Ellroy break for a few months before starting American Tabloid.

[moosegrinder]

Read through Well Of Lost Plots and Something Rotten and thoroughly enjoyed them both. Now waiting for the woman to finish First Among Sequels. Jasper Fforde is doing a discussion at the Waterstones in Sheffield but the tickets have sold out. Should have been quicker.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

White Jazz by James Ellroy

I quite liked the stripped down style that a lot of people seem to have a problem with. After reading The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential in the past month, this was like reading James Ellroy in fast forward. The mixture of dialogue, inner monologue and newspaper reports worked quite well.

However, I think it's the weakest book in the LA Quartet. Not to say it's a bad novel but in terms of plot, it's not really as interesting or involving as the rest.

The Kafejian burglary case doesn't really get interesting until the linked-by-incest family are murdered. While Klein is uncovering the whole conspiracy (say 75% of the book), I'm just thinking "It's Dudley, get to Smith/Exeley showdown".

That said, satisfying conclusion to the whole thing, the last few pages left me wondering

if Dave does come back (in the 1980s?) and set things right as he's threatening to do.

I'm going have an Ellroy break for a few months before starting American Tabloid.

I found the Kafesjian case pretty interesting anyway, but I do agree that it's not quite as good as LA Confidential or The Big Nowhere. In my opinion anyway - I think Silent Runner is a big proponent of White Jazz. I still really liked it.

It's not Ellroy at his most stripped-down, either - that would be The Cold Six Thousand, of the books I've read. Ellroy takes his telegrammatic prose to its limits in that book, which can make for some absolutely gut-punching scenes:

There's one specific account of a firefight in Vietnam which really floored me, told in staccato sentences of about no more than four words each.

[McFly]

Finished that Zadie Smith one, which was pretty dull really i thought. Started on Halo Evolutions, which is pretty decent for bedtime/bogtime reading.

[Flub]

I'll never understand book sale embargos for less popular authors. It makes no sense at all. I was out shopping today and decided to pop into Waterstones and see if the new Jasper Fforde book was on the shelves a couple of days early. I'm so keen to read this I'm willing to drop my "No paper book it's it's available in E" rule. Waterstones had copies but aren't allowed to sell it until Tuesday.

WTF? I can understand embargos for Pratchett or Rowling or some other big name author where the publisher thinks it's better to build hype and marketting in advance of a big launch but Fforde? Seriously? He doesn't even get advertised anywhere but SFX.

So I guess I'll have to wait for my Kindle edition on Tuesday morning. No matter though. At least I've saved a couple of quid.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

Excellent.

I've still got Cancer Ward untouched in my desk drawer so will add this to my Solzhenitsyn pile. I have to say, though, that as I get older I struggle more and more with tales of suffering that are closely based on real life.

I'm currently halfway through another book mentioned in this thread - The Underground Man by Mick Jackson, about an elderly aristocrat who builds a network of tunnels under his estate. So far, they haven't played a major part, and it's mainly been a lightly humorous and philosophical examination of his struggle with daily life, his ageing, aching body and - increasingly - memories from his childhood.

I'm not sure I could take Cancer Ward. I had a nightmare that I was in a Russian Gulag last night

Looking at this image before bed didn't help:

[Kingpin]

It's not Ellroy at his most stripped-down, either - that would be The Cold Six Thousand, of the books I've read. Ellroy takes his telegrammatic prose to its limits in that book, which can make for some absolutely gut-punching scenes:

There's one specific account of a firefight in Vietnam which really floored me, told in staccato sentences of about no more than four words each.

Excellent, I'll look forward to that.

I finished The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson in the meantime. It feels incredibly dated, all the characters are very prim and proper, though very few of them are fleshed out in any great detail. That said, I got chills on two separate occasions and it contained enough good ideas to see how it's considered such a horror classic.

I would liked to have seen Theodora and Eleanor's supposed "psychic" abilities teased out some more. I quite liked how Theodora often spoke of something that Eleanor was thinking but it never really went any further than this.

Eleanor going crazy/being possessed feels a bit played out now but I bet it was riveting at the time, and the ending must have been a shock.

[Silent Runner]

Last night I started Blacklands by Belinda Baur. It’s the story of a young boy who starts writing to a serial killer. He wants to convince him to reveal the location of his Uncles body who he thinks was killed and buried by the killer years earlier.

This is pretty great so far. It’s mostly written from the POV of the young lad and I think the author has done a decent job of getting into the mind of the 10 year old boy. I’m not entirely sure where the threat is going to come from as the killer is banged up but it must be building towards some kind of conflict or battle. The only problem is that the misery is being poured on really thick; the kids mother doesn’t like him, he’s getting bullied at school, his granny thinks he’s a weirdo and all he has in life is a correspondence with a child killer.

Recommended for crime fiction fans.

[Monkeyboy]

I'm about 100 pages into How To Read A Film by James Monaco. A pretty weighty tome, but very interesting.

I have had to look a couple of words up in the dictionary though.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

My review of the first circle. Some phrases are reused from earlier posts because I wrote this for my blog.

Difficult to know where to begin with this one. If you don’t know who Solzhenitsyn is then I’ll provide a quick explanation. A Russian who fought in WWII, returned, and was promptly put into political prison. For 11 years. This is the guy who brought the word ‘gulag’ into the English lexicon through sneaking his writing out to the West. Hard to imagine, but nobody really knew what was going on behind the Iron Curtain into this man popped up.

That out of the way, The First Circle (Into… in Russian) is a work of fiction set over 3 days in a prison. It’s not as physically torturous as the labour camps were because it’s populated by former engineers and scientists working on various projects at the behest of Stalin.

However, don’t think for a minute that the prisoners got away with anything. The mental torture inflicted on every prisoner is as hideous as it is subtle – uncertainty.

Men taken at night without any warning; letters to and from families intercepted and destroyed; lights switched on in the middle of the night; meals not turning up; books taken away – Solzhenitsyn shows us how the human spirit can be crushed by taking away the smallest thing we take for granted. He shows how the prisoners’ identities are slowly sapped away and how, despite the walls and the barbed-wire fences and the lack of communication, this leaks into the prisoners’ families.

Never mind Orwell and his boot on the neck – in this case fascism is a man forced to sleep with his arms hanging outside of his blanket – an action that goes against every instinct in one’s body.

But like those other great Russian masters, he never sinks into immature black and white bad vs good. Oppressor and victim merge, and this is perhaps stretched to its fullest realisation when he goes on to get into Stalin’s head. How Solzhenitsyn must have toiled over this part of the book!

I have always found myself attracted to artistic expression that concerns itself with isolation, misery, and loneliness. Not because I feel that this is what life is about, but because I think that it’s among these feelings that what we truly are is exposed and can therefore be examined. As a result I have often found myself blinking tears away as I have read/listened/gazed at whatever is in front of me – but always in the fuzzy melancholic knowledge that it’s all a simulation. This is different. I had to steel myself before reading it, I had to be careful that I didn’t read it on the commute to work (because doing so would have resulted in me walking in and putting my fist through my monitor), and I had to have at least an hour of uninterrupted quiet in front of me. For days afterwards I had to fight the temptation to slap whatever bullshit my fellow commuters were subjecting themselves to out of their hands and shoving a copy of this book at them instead.

I have never read anything so menacing, so malicious and – most importantly – so real. The First Circle sometimes makes Dostoyevsky and Kafka look like simpering children – and the former was no stranger to prison and death sentences himself. This is the most affecting book I’ve ever read. The most sad and damming examination of humanity I’ve come across. But at the same time it’s as celebratory towards the human spirit as the end of Crime and Punishment is. It just has something more to it that’s only possible due to its subject matter – it also celebrates the triumph of freedom and warns how we should never lose sight of what this means to us.

[oinkster]

Last night I started Blacklands by Belinda Baur. It’s the story of a young boy who starts writing to a serial killer. He wants to convince him to reveal the location of his Uncles body who he thinks was killed and buried by the killer years earlier.

This is pretty great so far. It’s mostly written from the POV of the young lad and I think the author has done a decent job of getting into the mind of the 10 year old boy. I’m not entirely sure where the threat is going to come from as the killer is banged up but it must be building towards some kind of conflict or battle. The only problem is that the misery is being poured on really thick; the kids mother doesn’t like him, he’s getting bullied at school, his granny thinks he’s a weirdo and all he has in life is a correspondence with a child killer.

Recommended for crime fiction fans.

Read it last year - really enjoyed it, and *cough* wiped a tear away at the end *cough*

[Yiggy]

So I am about 3/4 of the way through Lolita.

I loved the language at first but after the half way point I am finding it quite dull. The whole time on the road trip has been a little dull frankly and I am hoping there is some excitement towards the end. I still think the writing style is interesting enough.

Finding it a little uncomfortable to read in places as well. I think it's probably just the modern day attitude to what is essentially a story about a predatory pedophile. I'm probably not reading enough into it.

[Eats hoops and leaves]

It's supposed to be uncomfortable to read!

[Yiggy]

It's supposed to be uncomfortable to read!

Good point. It's less of a negative point really.

[routeburn]

Reading: Guards! Guards! (Pratchett) as part of the Gamerdork book club: http://gamerdork.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=2465

[Yiggy]

Reading: Guards! Guards! (Pratchett) as part of the Gamerdork book club: http://gamerdork.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=2465

One of the best early Discworlds IMO. Everyone used to love Mort but that was the one that really got me into them.

His writing has gotten a lot better over the years but those first 10 novels definitely had a lot of charm.