What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (7 Viewers)

I've never found him hardcore atheist or anti-religion if you actually dig into his work beyond the headlines, and there's a whole pile of sympathetic religious characters in the new one. I do agree it doesn't grab you immediately like the others did though; it's a very slow, meandering read for quite a while, but that can be nice too. I'm kind of waiting to see how the whole trilogy works as a whole before passing any kind of judgement on it. There were certainly some bits in it that I was a bit iffy about

mostly, for a book that is obsessed with the practical side of things; making rafts, taking care of young babies etc., to suddenly jump into a chapter or two of a weird fairy-tale fantasy felt very jarring.



let us know how that goes will you? People are always bigging him up but the only book by him I have read was a YA one called Un Lun Dun and it was embarrassingly bad.

Agree with respect to your spoiler. It felt like one of those filler episodes on a TV show. Maybe its a deliberate trope though? On the religion thing - sure there are sympathetic religious characters such as the nuns but I don't think that changes the overall thrust of where he is coming from. Sometimes I feel like I'm being lectured at by Richard Dawkins. I really liked the whole idea about consciousness being distributed around all material things and the connection with particles/Dust though (not a spoiler I hope). More of that please! I do remember not being particularly taken with the first book in the original trilogy but it then it really catching fire with Book 2 so maybe we'll have the same situation here.

China Mievelle (sp?) - enjoying it so far. My feeling about his novels is that they are based on amazing ideas but generally don't really go anywhere and end up something of a disappointment. So, we'll see .....
 
Just started The Wonder by Emma Donoghue.
Reading it on the bus home last night, I was left feeling totally low brow when this guy sat beside me and whipped out The Complete Works of Arthur Rimbaud.
Prick.

I just finished The Wonder which I enjoyed. Same goes for Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling - the joke about clothes from COS was 9/10.

Now for some Rimbaud. Ahem. Actually it's time for some Bill Bryson about 20 years after I last read anything of his.
 
Read Blindboy's book, pretty great. Some stories are better than others and because it ignores the rules of polite storytelling for madbuzz writing it doesn't always work. It's still a good laugh when it doesn't though. Well worth a read anyway, lots of great slaggings of everyone in Ireland. Better than whatever the latest John Boyne is gonna be anyway.
 
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Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
An interesting story but way too drawn out and related by an absurdly hysterical drama queen of a narrator who is supposedly a fine, bright young star of the military. A bit of a drag, this one.

I gather from goodreads that Beware of Pity is uncharacteristically bad for Zweig. It's his only novel, his short works are probably worth checking out

I just finished "Angst" by Zweig and really enjoyed it. It's about the psychological state of a married woman afraid that her affair will be revealed. It's a very short novel. I had the same experience as you - I tried one of the longer works and quickly lost interest. But this was short and snappy.

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig
I read this in the pub this evening on my way home - a short, snappy little novel about about a married woman trying to have an affair without her jealous 12 year old son - who hasn't a clue what's going on - finding out and telling the husband. Excellent.

L'Abbé C by Georges Bataille
This is a load of garbage, and a load of nonsense too. It promised so much!
"L'Abbé C" is a shocking, unnerving narrative about the intense and terrifying relationship between twin brothers. Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed 'l'Abbe'. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium, and death ensue. Charged with sensuality and a heightened, dreamlike atmosphere, this novel portrays the darkest and most profound aspects of human experience

Whores For Gloria by William T. Vollman
Encounters with drug-addled, disease-riddled prostitutes in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. There's something a bit weird and creepy about Vollmann. Like, I assume these are all accounts of his own encounters wrapped in a thin and transparent shell of fiction. Yet I like him all the same and despite the depressing and squalid subject matter this book is still kinda warm and endearing. That would be the humanity, I suppose. Very good, and satisfyingly short.

Memoirs From Monrovia (And Other Delights) by Ace Farren Ford
This is a book that you sorta look at more than read. It's a short scrap book type of thing filled with work-related notes from colleagues and work-related scraps from when he worked in a sex shop in the early 80s. Not very interesting, IMO. I'm a fan of the Los Angeles Free Music Society so I bought it.

Omensetter's Luck by William H. Gass
Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts.
This was excellent, a great read. It was a bit tiresome in parts - for sure I was dazzled by the wild prose and the mind of the crazed preacher but c'mon get on with it. I was a bit skeptical about this lad (having read very little of his work) but I might read something else by him some time.
 
I was sick the past few weeks, so while I was languishing in my sick bed I read Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, which I loved (but I love all his books anyway); Midwinter Break by Bernard McClaverty which was brilliant and The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett which was great fun.
I'm currently re-reading If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor. In my "to read" pile I have Last Exit to Brooklyn and Steppenwolf.
 
Fire and Fury. I'm glad that it's over. Lots of names of media tycoons and other randomers I haven't head of. It was interesting remembering some of the craziness that has been and is already kind of forgotten in a short space of time. The Mooch, that woman being killed in Charlottesville.

At least it is done now and I can get back to a regular reading pattern.
 
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Riddled with inaccuracies and a complete lack of knowledge about anything that happens after about 1995; the first 10 years of his career get 200 odd pages and the last 30 years about 50 pages. Bizarrely, despite all that, it's fairly well written and it'd be passable if the author had decided on a thesis about Prince's music beyond "he's just died and I was commissioned to write a book".
 
Just finished The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton. A debut novelist from Cork. Cool, enjoyable yarn with a rich and interesting use of myth and language. Bizarre to read a dystopian novel set in Ireland but it works.
 
Just finished The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton. A debut novelist from Cork. Cool, enjoyable yarn with a rich and interesting use of myth and language. Bizarre to read a dystopian novel set in Ireland but it works.
Oh yeah i've been looking at that one, would you recommend?
 
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flew through the first half of this. was enjoying it. but once i put it down I found it to be a bit of a chore to get back into. Was only okay for me. pretty unique style of telling the story. Just not for me overall. should have been a quick read and would be for most but I hit a wall with it

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started this last night and absolutely loved the first 40 odd pages. Looking forward to picking it up again later. wanted a bit of a reprieve after Bardo, think I chose well
 

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