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

[Repelies]

the writing is shocking flowery so far (20 pages in).

Slightly off topic but did anyone see that crap interview last week on the LL?

 

[rettucs]

Slightly off topic but did anyone see that crap interview last week on the LL?

I love Bruce but I can't watch or listen to anything that has tubridy in it.

I have no doubt it was dreadful.

 

[Repelies]

I love Bruce but I can't watch or listen to anything that has tubridy in it.

I have no doubt it was dreadful.

Apparently Tubs said it got off to an awkward start when he bumped into Sprinsteen in the hotel elevator beforehand hahahaha. The skinny prick got all tongue tied and offered him a gift of two vintage bottles of Irish Whiskey. Bruce suggested getting two glasses but the stupid cunt turned him down ahahahahahahah. Imagine turning down an offer of a drink with a legend like that. What sort of a fucking idiot is he!?? LOL

It was the weirdest fucking interview ever - it was like a funeral. Tubs got all choked up again and could barely get the first question out because of nerves - he was probably regretting not having that whiskey hahahaha. Tubs tried to be cool by wearing jeans and a pair of boots lol and then kept asking the boss more boring questions. It was terrible but watch it when you have had a few jars to numb the cringe LOL.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

I like Tubbs. His interview with Jeremy Paxman was a bit awkward

 

[Repelies]

I like Tubbs. His interview with Jeremy Paxman was a bit awkward

Well somebody has got to pay his 200k a week..nice work if you can get it ..though it does help if you have close connections to FF.

 

[hugh]

Grand Hotel Abyss: Stuart Jeffries

Biography and description of main ideas of the Frankfurt school thinkers. Handy if you don't want to have to actually go and read Adorno, Benjamin et al.

 

[Lili Marlene]

Grand Hotel Abyss: Stuart Jeffries

Biography and description of main ideas of the Frankfurt school thinkers. Handy if you don't want to have to actually go and read Adorno, Benjamin et al.

oh yeah i've been meaning to read that.

Clearly one should actually put the effort in but it looks like a good read anyway.

 

[Jim Daniels]

Recently finished The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. It tells the story of a young girl and her grandmother spending a summer together on an island. Simple, amusing, insightful and charming!



Tove created The Moomins if anyone remembers them. There's a great BBC4 doc about her life on You Tube

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[Jim Daniels]

Midway through my first Virginia Woolf. It's extraordinary!

 

[Lili Marlene]

Angela Carter- Nights at the Circus

Really, really difficult; hugely intellectual, masterclass level writing - jumping from character to character and first to third person narrative constantly and effortlessly- but a little too arch and unfriendly for me.

Starts in London and ends in Siberia having pretty much metaphorically, and occasionally literally, burnt down the entire of civilization along the way. Considering its mostly about a foul mouthed cockney woman with wings who works in a circus it should have rollicked along, and I get the impression that it certainly thinks that's what its doing, but I found it very slow paced in parts.

Still though, incredibly memorable and there is so much in there. It made me feel very small on many levels.

 

[Jim Daniels]

Angela Carter- Nights at the Circus

Really, really difficult; hugely intellectual, masterclass level writing - jumping from character to character and first to third person narrative constantly and effortlessly- but a little too arch and unfriendly for me.

Starts in London and ends in Siberia having pretty much metaphorically, and occasionally literally, burnt down the entire of civilization along the way. Considering its mostly about a foul mouthed cockney woman with wings who works in a circus it should have rollicked along, and I get the impression that it certainly thinks that's what its doing, but I found it very slow paced in parts.

Still though, incredibly memorable and there is so much in there. It made me feel very small on many levels.

Sounds great! I've only read The Bloody Chamber and Wise Children, both of which I really liked, even though I recall being frequently perplexed by them too. She certainly has a way with language.

I often wonder if her books (and those of other writers from her period and earlier) were considered difficult back when they were first published, or have readers just become more accustomed to more straight-forward writing.

 

[Lili Marlene]

Sounds great! I've only read The Bloody Chamber and Wise Children, both of which I really liked, even though I recall being frequently perplexed by them too. She certainly has a way with language.

I often wonder if her books (and those of other writers from her period and earlier) were considered difficult back when they were first published, or have readers just become more accustomed to more straight-forward writing.

It was a very different experience to the Bloody Chamber, much denser writing, I haven't read Wise Children though. I know that was her last book so it's probably as hard.

There was plenty of big-selling straight forward writing back then and i'm fairly sure there's lots of difficult stuff being made now, didn't Solar Bones just win a prize? I think you need to go back 50+ years before you start seeing real literary titans in the actual best-selling lists.

 

[Jim Daniels]

It was a very different experience to the Bloody Chamber, much denser writing, I haven't read Wise Children though. I know that was her last book so it's probably as hard.

There was plenty of big-selling straight forward writing back then and i'm fairly sure there's lots of difficult stuff being made now, didn't Solar Bones just win a prize? I think you need to go back 50+ years before you start seeing real literary titans in the actual best-selling lists.

Ah yeah, fair enough. I just always have this perception that "the Classics" are considered difficult reading for the most part.

Must get Solar Bones. A one-line book.

 

[hugh]

Speaking of difficult, has anyone copped a look at Alan Moore's new novel Jerusalem yet? Was looking at it in a bookshop last week. It's insanely long ... 1000+ pages of pretty densely packed text. And it looks really meandering and convoluted too. I've only a passing interest in Moore so not enough to commit to something like this but, like, Jesus .. some editing maybe?

What's the story with Solar Bones? One-line? Really?

 

[Cornu Ammonis]

Speaking of difficult, has anyone copped a look at Alan Moore's new novel Jerusalem yet? Was looking at it in a bookshop last week. It's insanely long ... 1000+ pages of pretty densely packed text. And it looks really meandering and convoluted too. I've only a passing interest in Moore so not enough to commit to something like this but, like, Jesus .. some editing maybe?

I got it ages ago and so far I've gotten through the prologue and about ten pages into the first chapter. It's good but it's not exactly a page turner.

 

[Jim Daniels]

What's the story with Solar Bones? One-line? Really?

Yeah! It won the Goldsmith Prize recently - a cool £10,000.
Mike McCormack wins Goldsmiths Prize for Solar Bones


Rick O’Shea on Solar Bones: ‘one of most fluid, approachable books I’ve read’

Rick O’Shea on Solar Bones: ‘one of most fluid, approachable books I’ve read’

‘I got many, many responses saying that because it has no natural pauses, stops or chapters and it’s so compelling you just had to read it in a single sitting’

It’s the intimidation factor.

Say to most ordinary people on the street (the well-trodden path everyone always goes for a wander on when they need opinions about everything from political scandals to Brad and Angelina to global warming) that a book has no full stops in it, no quotation marks for the dialogue and that it’s framed on the page, well, unusually, and chances are the shutters will probably come down. Even if it’s only 223 pages long.

I have to admit that, although I consume books a fair bit more than most people I know, I felt the same way too when I was confronted with Solar Bones for the first time. The conspicuous absence of full stops immediately puts you in mind of Finnegans Wake, a book as unread as it is revered in the canon of Irish writing. It’s one that I’ve tried to tackle at least once a decade since I was in college, always ending in me quietly putting it back on the “long-term to be read” shelf after an attempted wrestle followed by me throwing it frustratedly at the couch in whatever house I happen to be living in at the time.

But, before you think I’m making comparisons with Solar Bones, at least in terms of how easy or hard it is to tackle, let me stop you there. Mike McCormack’s new book is one of the most fluid, readable and approachable I’ve read this year.

Amongst other book-related activities I’m involved in these days, I run an online book club on Facebook. A little kitten that started off life as a place to chat with people I knew back and forth about what I was reading, it has since grown into a hulking monster of a thing now numbering a few thousand people and my favourite place of calm and warm friendship on the wide, wild web.

It’s a perfect place to find those typical people “on the street” whilst they discuss everything they’re reading. As I write this, chats are ongoing inside the virtual walls about everything from the Polish title of The Girl With All The Gifts (It’s Pandora, thanks for asking) to how brilliant John Connolly’s Charlie Parker Series is all the way to why one member had a headache and needed a nap after reading William S Burroughs for the first time.

Many of them are an adventurous lot too, though, and when I choose books of the month I try to pick things that I think are brilliant, worthwhile and, every now and then, possibly outside their comfort zones.

It was only there, when I made Solar Bones one of those books of the month a while back, that I realised that the punctuation is for many (and a bit counter-intuitively) one of the attractions of it as a read. I got many, many responses throughout the month saying that, because it has no natural pauses, stops or chapters, and it’s so compelling, you just had to read it in a single sitting.

One member said that she found the best way to read it was to whisper it aloud to herself and another described Mike as “a master sentence writer, which is probably why this book is written in one sentence”. I can’t disagree.

Then there’s, as it came to be referred to in our discussions, “The Thing”. The ending of the book. There are a hardy breed of us who try, wherever possible, not to read the blurb on the back of books when we’re weighing up whether or not to dig in. Instead, I’m of the “read the first page and that should give you an idea of whether it’s for you or not” lot. So I came to the beautiful, poignant, long-signposted end of Solar Bones slightly blind to it (I’m a little slow at the best of times) and I’m glad I did. I’m aware the author intends readers to know where the journey ended to avoid any suggestion of shock or twist for shock’s sake. For me it just made what happens all the more moving. It’s one of only two occasions I’ve welled up at the end of a book this year (the other was Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be The Place in case that’s going to keep you up at night).

Thus, for me at least, Solar Bones is that rare creature in the centre of a beautifully awkward Venn diagram of contemporary Irish writing. It falls at the same time into the tiny sliver of space occupied by a small, utterly traditional interior story of ordinary life, a radical form, a book that perhaps might have been expected not to find a mass audience but has, one published by a small press and a book that is gaining international acclaim (not least from the recent controversy about its exclusion from consideration for the Man Booker Prize, and its thoroughly deserved inclusion in the shortlist for the year’s Goldsmiths Prize, which rewards innovative fiction.)

We live in a world of stories of modest narrators, frequently from rural Ireland with achingly real lives and it would be all too easy for Solar Bones to have disappeared into the cracks of that particular well-trodden road. Instead Mike McCormack takes his own sharp turn left onto a new, uncharted track and I, for one, am hugely glad he did.

At a public interview I was conducting with him recently, Donal Ryan called me, to my immediate mortification, a “book warrior”. Someone who goes out into the world and fights hard to get people to notice and engage with genuinely great books.


After I stopped blushing, hard, I ended up thinking that it’s not such a bad title to have. Solar Bones is a genuine thing of beauty and one of those books worth fighting for. You should give it a chance.

Rick O'Shea presents The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1. Throughout October, The Irish Times will publish essays by Mike McCormack, his publishers at Tramp Press, fellow writers Sara Baume, Colin Barrett, Mia Gallagher and John Kelly, and academic Sharae Deckard. The series will culminate with a live interview with Martin Doyle, assistant literary editor of The Irish Times, in the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin, on Thuraday, October 20th, at 7.30pm, which will be published as a podcast on October 31st. Solar Bones is published by Tramp Press, and is available online and in all good bookshops for €15.

 

[hugh]

Cool. I've picked it up once or twice in a shop recently partly because my (and probably your) buddy Fiachra designed the cover. Must give it a go so.

 

[Lili Marlene]

We live in a world of stories of modest narrators, frequently from rural Ireland with achingly real lives and it would be all too easy for Solar Bones to have disappeared into the cracks of that particular well-trodden road. Instead Mike McCormack takes his own sharp turn left onto a new, uncharted track and I, for one, am hugely glad he did

that eejit Julian Gough described the genre as "funerals in the rain" which I thought was acually pretty funny and rings true. IIRC one of the stories in Young Skins is literally that.

 

[Jim Daniels]

Cool. I've picked it up once or twice in a shop recently partly because my (and probably your) buddy Fiachra designed the cover. Must give it a go so.

I don't know Fiachra personally, but his design work is pretty cool alright.

 

[Jim Daniels]

that eejit Julian Gough described the genre as "funerals in the rain" which I thought was acually pretty funny and rings true. IIRC one of the stories in Young Skins is literally that.

That is quite amusing! Forgot about Young Skins. I remember it getting good reviews, but forgot to buy it.

Julian seems alright, no?