What books are we reading at the moment ?

[Vince]

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride. It hasn't stopped raining yet.

Finished it. It stopped raining briefly before it started to snow.

Now moved onto book 2 - Dying Light. Set in the summer, it is only raining occasionally.

I am amused by some of the books set in the summer occasionally using words like sticky and sweltering. Did Mr Macbride get a bung from the tourist office?

I finished the third book - Broken Skin (Damp and drizzly) and think I'm McBrided out.

Moved on to The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross. I very much enjoyed it especially the way you can take bunkum and surround it with sufficient tech speak to make it seem reasonable.

[pcolbeck]

Europe in Autumn - David Hutchinson

A noir spy thriller set in the near future. Beautifully described locations. It's SF I guess but not of the spaceships and aliens kind, think more like China Miéville's The City and The  City.

Finished that and immediately dived into:

Europe at Midnight

A sequel with some of the same characters and also some really weird topography.

Both excellent.

[andrewc]

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride. It hasn't stopped raining yet.

Finished it. It stopped raining briefly before it started to snow.

Now moved onto book 2 - Dying Light. Set in the summer, it is only raining occasionally.

I am amused by some of the books set in the summer occasionally using words like sticky and sweltering. Did Mr Macbride get a bung from the tourist office?

I finished the third book - Broken Skin (Damp and drizzly) and think I'm McBrided out.

Moved on to The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross. I very much enjoyed it especially the way you can take bunkum and surround it with sufficient tech speak to make it seem reasonable.

If you enjoyed that you can try his short story A Colder War for free.  Similar theme, but not in the Laundry sequence.

[citoyen]

I, on the other hand, have just started reading Raymond Chandler viz. "The Big Sheep Sleep".

#gibsonesque.  Not.

That's on my to-read pile along with The Little Sister, the two Marlowe novels I haven't read.

I started reading Neuromancer yesterday and it was immediately obvious from the opening line* that he owed a massive stylistic debt to Chandler, to the point where I had to look it up to check I wasn't having a brainstorm. And apparently, it seems that everybody already knew. Except me.

*"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

[andrewc]

Now on to the third Ben Aaronovitch "Whispers Underground"

I enjoyed those, and was disappointed when the release of the latest one was postponed.  After a recommendation I tried "London Falling" & "Severed Streets" by Paul Cornell,  similar theme of police procedural mixed up with occult stuff, but far nastier & bleaker.

[ian]

*"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

See, that's a fantastic line. I'd go big out an old copy but I suspect it's mouldering in the garage and for some reason (looks like the publisher is re-releasing them) it's not available on Kindle until sometime in 2016. Shame I would have ordered it from my sickbed.

Not having had enough punishment with the worthy but painful A Brief History of Seven Killings, I have been reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (for some unspecified reason, Amazon gave me a free book and I thought this might make me cleverer and earn me yet more of the good and clever YACF respec'). I've thrown in the towel. You may go back to regarding me with disdain, the group's itinerant village idiot. Hide behind the sofa and pretend that like you're not there when I post. I don't mind. It's reminded me why I dislike literary fiction. If you've not had the misfortune to read it, it's basically five grievously entitled people whining and being annoying for 600-odd pages. Lots of reviews seem to think this is a stunning portrayal of a family breakdown and one that they so recognise. I'd hate to meet their families. If I did I think I'd tell them SHUT UP too. I wouldn't mind so much if it was a struggle against adversity, but all the adversity is of their own making. They're choking on their own indulgence. I don't want to hear them coughing up their rich, sludgy lives over one another.

I'll admit he's a clever writer. Some of it sparkles. But one simile follows another. And another. And another. So where Gibson paints a picture in a single, brief line that sets the tone for an entire three book series, you need to dig through four pages of Franzen's blizzard of description to get within viewing distance of whatever the hell he was trying to say, which turns out not to be much at all. And then he'll go off on tangent that appears to have little to do about anything, seemingly to prove that he's done lots of research.

I got to 67%. Basically there could have been an acerbic 200 page book somewhere in there but it's smothered under 400 pages of insufferably smug cleverness. And a couple of the grimmest most cringeworthy sex scenes ever.

[Kim]

*"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

See, that's a fantastic line.

That the younger generations probably think refers to a deep primary blue...

[ian]

*"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

See, that's a fantastic line.

That the younger generations probably think refers to a deep primary blue...

Sadly, the unremittingly unmemorable awfulness of the Poltergeist remake means I can't remember how the girl-in-the-static scene was portrayed for audiences more attuned to digital reception.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

About to start the new one from Sophie Hannah in the Culver Valley series, The Narrow Bed.

[Mr Larrington]

Now on Farewell, My Lovely and if Len Deighton didn't read Chandler before writing any of his first-person spy novels then I'm giving up my fledgling career as a literary critic and going on the bins.

[ian]

After tossing the towel on the splatter of pretentious wank that was The Corrections, I ended up reading Room, which I didn't realise was a movie (I'm right up there with Wow, mainlining the cultural zeitgeist). Actually, I did know there was movie called Room, I just didn't connect the two because rooms, like invisible elephants, are everywhere. Anyway, I've not seen the movie. I'm not sure why I bought the book since I don't like five-year-olds and the plot sounded a bit like something from the WH Smiths misery porn shelf. I read the first half in one sitting (one dubious benefit of sniffling my way toward armageddon is that it's an opportunity to get through a few books) and I suspect it won't survive the evening.

[Mr Larrington]

Room, eh?  Was there an (invisible) elephant in it?

[mattc]

I, on the other hand, have just started reading Raymond Chandler viz. "The Big Sheep Sleep".

#gibsonesque.  Not.

That's on my to-read pile along with The Little Sister, the two Marlowe novels I haven't read.

I started reading Neuromancer yesterday and it was immediately obvious from the opening line* that he owed a massive stylistic debt to Chandler, to the point where I had to look it up to check I wasn't having a brainstorm. And apparently, it seems that everybody already knew. Except me.

*"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

I love Chandler AND Gibson; for different reasons.
Yes, Gibson borrows some of the style; but he adds so much more (and he doesnt keep describing female body parts and their influence on the protagonist ).  In fact if all he did was use Chandler's words to describe stories set in his own vision of the near-future, his books would be great . But that's *not* all he does.

His style gets a lot less Chandlery in later books (which may be a shame ... )

Crucially; there are worse criticisms you could make of a writer. Its like saying an author is inspired too much by DIckens. Or Will S.

(I really should read some Len Deighton one day ... )

[ian]

Room, eh?  Was there an (invisible) elephant in it?

Reality, I've come to learn, is littered with invisible elephants.

[rafletcher]

Yet another police procedural (they're not generally too challenging, which suits me just fine), this one the fourth (I think) of the Cape Town set Benny Griessel ones from Deon Meyer.

[ElyDave]

Re-reading the Matarese Circle, my bedtime read, a few pages every night to help still the brain.

[rafletcher]

Re-reading the Matarese Circle, my bedtime read, a few pages every night to help still the brain.

I loved the early Ludlum's.

[Mr Larrington]

Ludlum is still remarkably prolific, considering how dead he is.

[T42]

Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest. Sequel to The Three Body Problem.

Feels diffuse at first, then the story emerges. Good.

Ludlum?  First one was good, second one was OK, third one was terminated with extreme prejudice.  From a distance now they all look the same.

I did learn something handy, though: the saying rest is also a weapon.  Or as TG put it, it's the recovery that makes you ride better.  Trotting that out is a great way of reining in jerks who are all agog to cut short your snooze time.

[Riggers]

Robert Harris's Imperium. About Cicero – as told from his personal assistant Tiro. Political machinations in Rome and, initially, I was hesitating to start this but, having stuck with it, is proving jolly interesting and entertaining. Pompey's in there and Julius Caesar.

[Mr Larrington]

Hurrah: "The Damage Done", being the sixth novel of James Oswald's Inspector McLean series, has just touched down on my Kindle

Bah: I'm only 15% through "The Lady In The CAEK Lake" and I can't just abandon poor Marlowe like that

[rafletcher]

Robert Crais latest Cole & Pike offering  "The Promise".  Next up Time Weaver's 4th David Raker offering. The protaganist seems indestructable!

[mrcharly-YHT]

Number whatever in the series of books I really should have read years ago but have only just got round to, only to discover that they really are that good: Neuromancer by William Gibson

I've spent the last 4 days in the company of my daughter at Goldsmiths, in the studios and environs.
Then started re-reading Gibson's Spook Country and discovered a whole new depth of meaning in the novel, textures and riches I didn't notice before. Genius of a writer.

[Redjeep!]

"Fooled By Randomness" by Nassim Nicolas Taleb.

Still trying to get into it and can't decide if it's "one of the smartest books of all time" , as it proclaims on the front cover, or just a pile of recycled, rehashed old sh!te.

[citoyen]

Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels.

I had a hankering to read some Isherwood recently though I can't remember why. I'm glad I did, though. It's wonderful stuff. Funny and charming.