What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (9 Viewers)

[Scientician 0.8]

Currently reading Old Bones & Shallow Graves: The Untold Story of The Irish-American Gangster by T.J. English. It's quite interesting in parts.

 

[Wobbler]

I've just started the Blandings omnibus by PG Wodehouse.

 

[Squiggle]

has a bit of controversy about it; new editions have dropped the story William And The Nasties [on the order of Crompton's descendants].
Written in 1935, the story relates how William distrusts a Jewish shopkeeper and forms a mob to drive him out of town. Anti-semitism was not frowned upon much back then.

Nasties phonetically sounds quite like nazis.

I loved the 1970s television series.

Yes, the tv series was great. My brother and I used to try reinacting things like liquourice water

I've just started the Blandings omnibus by PG Wodehouse.

That's a good omnibus. The poor old Empress.

 

[MDR]

Just finished Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy and read A Christmas Carol at the weekend (deadly - I must read it every year).

Just started The Count of Monte Cristo. It's a pretty fast moving story, but at 1,200 pages it needs to be.

 

[MDR]

Jaysus, this thread went two months without a post!

I've been reading a lot lately, probably because my body is trying to hibernate in my imagination for the winter. I finished the Counte of Monte Cristo over Christmas. An amazing book - all plot, plot, plot, with little bits of character development as we go along. Don't be put off by its length - highly recommended.

Since christmas I have read The Mayor of casterbridge by thomas hardy (deadly as ever); the world according to Garp (yawn); and a biography of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin (ok, but nothing new in it). I have just started the Woodlanders (Hardy again). After that I plan to check out some DH Lawrence and maybe some more swashbuckling Dumas.

What's anyone else reading these days? Any 21st century recommendations to tempt me away from 19th century classics?

 

[billygannon]

Just finished reading Peter Carey's debut - The Fat Man in History. It's a bunch of short stories all set in some quite strange, vaguely dystopian places in a futuristic Australia. A suburban Mad Max, if you will.

They're not bad, except a lot of them end in a fairly open-ended way.
I've also got Simon Armitage's Collected Poems in my bag. He's better than most.

 

[classic seanc]

Just finished this this morning:

It's thoroughly entertaining with some unintentionally funny opinions about drug abuse and stuff, written as it was in the 1920's. It doesn't even hint at the idea that New York was the melting pot from which America was born like the film does. It's more like what Paul Williams might have written had he been around at the time.
But the characters, the stories and the phraseology are all deadly.

 

[nEiLo]

The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick - it's good fun

 

[Squiggle]

Keeping it purely to literature I am currently reading "The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker" by Tobias Smollett.

Before that it was "The Heart of Darkenss" (Joseph Conrad), next is "A Passage to India" (E.M. Forster), Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan) and "A Journal of the Plague Year" (Daniel Defoe).

All good, whch is just as well, as my reading for the forseeable future will be dictated by a course "required reading" list.

 

[Mitchum]

Just finished Patrick Suskind's 'Perfume' last week. Big meh. All florid prose and no bite.
Been flicking through Maeve Brennan's collection of short stories 'The Rose Garden'. Textbook New Yorker fiction. All about the empty lives of WASPS in post-WW2 NYC-well-written but nowt new or interesting.
Gonna start Thomas Pynchon's new one tonight. Mixed reviews so we'll see etc.

 

[krystal]

a book on the history of fashion and costume

 

[sweetoblivion]

Simon Reynolds' Rip it up and Start again.

It's about the Post-Punk era. It's cool.

 

[BC]

dennis cooper: "period".
dont quite know what to make of this, must read it again. it seems the various characters in the novel are different aspects of just two (or maybe even one) central characters.

 

[magicbastarder]

finished the road this morning.
superb stuff.

 

[MDR]

All good, whch is just as well, as my reading for the forseeable future will be dictated by a course "required reading" list.

Which course are you doing?

 

[Squiggle]

Which course are you doing?

BA in Humanities in DCU thorough Oscail, National Distance Education Centre.

Doing 3 modules this year. My other reading has consisted of Plato "The Republic", commentaries on same, Aquinas "Selected Writings", Aristotle "Selected Writings" and commentaries on same.

 

[MDR]

BA in Humanities in DCU thorough Oscail, National Distance Education Centre.

Doing 3 modules this year. My other reading has consisted of Plato "The Republic", commentaries on same, Aquinas "Selected Writings", Aristotle "Selected Writings" and commentaries on same.

They are all books that the writers I like have read, but I have always been put off by the prospect of antiquated language or brainy philosophy. Sounds like an interesting course though - g'luck with it.

 

[Squiggle]

They are all books that the writers I like have read, but I have always been put off by the prospect of antiquated language or brainy philosophy. Sounds like an interesting course though - g'luck with it.

Well, some of the philosophy is head melting - particularly when time is in short supply. But the literature (I'm doing 17th & 18th Century and 20th Century) is very good.

Spelling can be more of a problem than the words used but saying them out loud usually solves that... if not, there are usually notes in the back

 

[billygannon]

dennis cooper: "period".
dont quite know what to make of this, must read it again. it seems the various characters in the novel are different aspects of just two (or maybe even one) central characters.

In many ways, like Thumped?

 

[Mormon Nailer]

Finished The Innocent by Ian McEwan and started deception by Philip Roth.

Enjoyed everything about the Innocent except for the letter at the end. That was a bit made for TV movie.

To early to say on Deception.

I bought a huge stack of stuff the other day, including Gravity's Rainbow. I have decided to give Thaomas Pynchon one last chance. Cant normally get my head around the fucker at all. Although I should have guessed cause the first thing I ever read by him were the liner notes to Lotions's - Nobody's Cool, and they make no sense.