What books are we reading at the moment ?

[ian]

Speaking of which, just started reading Lolita... a book that so many people seem to really enjoy.

I'm not sure 'enjoy' is the right word. I found it unsettling. But captivating.

Dan Brown set out to write successful novels, and he created a formula.

I can't remember whether it was Dan Brown or John Grisham who said in an interview I once read that they took to writing novels as a business venture, in order to become rich. Might have been both. I don't hold it against them. You can't really argue with that kind of success.

Lolita is terrifyingly good and utterly disturbing, which is the point, especially when realise just how Nabokov has flipped your perspective somewhere really very disquieting.

The path to being a successful author these days is to churn out what are essentially movie treatments in the hope they'll get optioned (they mostly never get made, which I suppose, is fortunate). The most memorably bad one I read recently was something call Brilliance and was anything but, definitely one of the worst things I've read. It's so bad you have to finish it just because it's a marathon of bad (according to my google-fu, it's part one of a saga, presumably about as much fun as a march to Moscow that ends in mid-winter). According to Amazon, it's worthy of a billion great reviews. Honestly, it's awful on any measure. Mind you, I put The Martian in the same category, I don't get it, it's awful. It reads like it's written by a twelve-year-old.

I'm not actually bothered if people do enjoy this stuff, it's just the insistence that I must be interested. I get the HP lecture all the time (for the stupidest reason, I share a name with one of the lead characters, so yeah, just call me Reluctant Hermione). It's the same with football, as a regular traveller, it's was a safe bet that in any given taxi anywhere in the world, I'd get the Football Conversation. From Nairobi to Hanoi, they're waiting for me. I've tried bluffing it for diplomacy's sake, which is always a mistake since my knowledge of football ended with half-complete Panini album sometime around the kickoff of the 1980s. I never did get that bloody Sheffield Wednesday badge (this traumatic historical episode, alas, is never what they want to talk about). Even now, my father in any given conversation will bring up football and the fact he can't believe I've no interest in it. I honestly think those will be his last words to me.

[geraldc]

The bit that I found the most interesting bit about Lolita so far is that the book features a "fake" foreword from a psychiatrist who has edited the book. In it he explains that the author is a prisoner, and a bad bad person.
I rarely read forewords, and often skip them. If you skip the foreword to Lolita it presents the main protagonist in a completely different light, and helps to explain why some people see Lolita as a romance...

[ian]

Yes, that foreword is an essential part of the novel (it's not an actual foreword in the conventional sense).

[Mr Larrington]

Bah Humbert!

[citoyen]

If you skip the foreword to Lolita it presents the main protagonist in a completely different light, and helps to explain why some people see Lolita as a romance...

Tbh, it should be pretty clear that Humbert is a bad, bad person even without the foreword. He's presented as plausible and very human, but he's also a deeply unreliable narrator, and I'm not convinced it was Nabokov's intention for us to find him in any way sympathetic. Trying to make us 'understand' him, and therefore sympathise with him, is part of his tricksiness, not Nabokov's. If that makes sense at all, given that he's entirely fictional.

If you like Lolita, I would also recommend The Good Soldier.

[ian]

I always thought it was Nabokov's entire purpose to make the reader lose track of Humbert's unreliability and find themselves sympathising (or that is at least my interpretation). That's the clever flip – and more so, it's not a trick, at no point does Nabokov paint Humbert in anything other than the most despicable tones. You're not fooled by the author, you're fooled by yourself as the reader. It's a conspiracy of unreliability. The foreword emphases this – I think in more ordinary hands the foreword could have fallen flat as a get-out-clause – but in the novel it sets the scene for the later flip perfectly because you have been told, and you knew it from the very beginning. Yet you've been beguiled by the narrative into accepting some of the manifest unreliability of Humbert.

[woollypigs]

Another thing that gets me, is the ability of authors to check some simple things or their staff or publishers. This came up I'm the book I'm reading atm, right after I moaned about Dan Brown his lack of directions in Paris.

Even if I'm reading a fiction, a made up story, it is not SiFi, other world/outer space and full of magic (ok they do talk about witches), it is set in the Scottish Highland just after all hallow eve. At 5:30am at that time of year,  dawn e.g. sunrise is still fecking 2+ hours or more away !!! So don't tell me that you can start to make out the trees and path, in the thick woods you are walking trough, because of the early dawn !!!

[ian]

Mention of Dan Brown has made me want to dig out the legendary thread, but I can't find it. Chiz.

This one? https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=72990.0

I'd lost that. I just re-read and was moved to mirthy tears. I don't know what drugs I was on when I penned my panegyric for cupcakes, but they were evidently the good ones. I'm not really sure how we got from Dan Brown to cupcakes, but that's the majesty of the internet, derailing our thought processes since 1993. It also made me re-read some Chandler.

I am tempted to write a live-action review of Inferno. Bad prose and awkward storytelling as it happens.

[citoyen]

You're not fooled by the author, you're fooled by yourself as the reader.

Yes, that's a very good way of putting it.

[citoyen]

I don't know what drugs I was on when I penned my panegyric for cupcakes, but they were evidently the good ones.

Clearly!

[fd3]

Mention of Dan Brown has made me want to dig out the legendary thread, but I can't find it. Chiz.

This one? https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=72990.0

Kathy's reply is well worthy of POTD.  Spit-take?  I felt moved to brew a cup of tea, buy a laptop, just to express my mirth.

[citoyen]

So, I finished Bone Clocks. Yes, I’m a slow reader but it is 600 pages.

I have a terrible memory for books, which is great because it means re-reading is almost like reading for the first time, except for the odd minor details I do remember. The thing that struck me when I got to The Fun Bit in Bone Clocks is how very Dan Brown-esque all the stuff about the Blind Cathar is.

Just much better written.

Cracking straight on with Slade House now, which is a kind of epilogue to Bone Clocks. It’s also a brilliant and properly scary horror story. And lots and lots of fun.

[T42]

I just finished The Baroque Trilogy for the third time. Took a long time over The System of the World in particular, because having it on my tablet made it easy to nip out and look up bits of background - Hanoverian Succession, early 18th-century London maps, the various prisons, Trials of the Pyx and god knows what else.

Now looking for something else, but The Baroque Trilogy is a hard act to follow: after >2,500 pp I feel somewhat bereft. Maybe I'll re-read the Aaronovitch series...

[woollypigs]

I'm 19 hours and 16min into The Bone Clocks and got 5 hours 13min to go. That's about 7.5 dog walks. I hope I will get about 2.5 hours done tonight when I do the bottling of my homebrew. Thanks for the heads up, I'm enjoying this.

[ian]

So, I finished Bone Clocks. Yes, I’m a slow reader but it is 600 pages.

I have a terrible memory for books, which is great because it means re-reading is almost like reading for the first time, except for the odd minor details I do remember. The thing that struck me when I got to The Fun Bit in Bone Clocks is how very Dan Brown-esque all the stuff about the Blind Cathar is.

Just much better written.

Cracking straight on with Slade House now, which is a kind of epilogue to Bone Clocks. It’s also a brilliant and properly scary horror story. And lots and lots of fun.

I'd always assumed it was a bit of a knowing nod to the oeuvre of Mr Brown (which he just nicked from a million and one books traipsing through the various conspiracies, Dan Brown is not even an imaginative hack). Definitely makes a good job of it, I'd pay good money for David Mitchell (either of them, for that matter) to re-write The Da Vinci Code.

[citoyen]

I'd always assumed it was a bit of a knowing nod to the oeuvre of Mr Brown

In Slade House, he even has one of the characters say, after a lengthy passage of Basil Exposition: “This is all getting a bit Da Vinci Code.”

Knowing? It’s downright arch.

I love it.

[Canardly]

So, I finished Bone Clocks. Yes, I’m a slow reader but it is 600 pages.

I have a terrible memory for books, which is great because it means re-reading is almost like reading for the first time, except for the odd minor details I do remember. The thing that struck me when I got to The Fun Bit in Bone Clocks is how very Dan Brown-esque all the stuff about the Blind Cathar is.

Just much better written.

Cracking straight on with Slade House now, which is a kind of epilogue to Bone Clocks. It’s also a brilliant and properly scary horror story. And lots and lots of fun.

I'd always assumed it was a bit of a knowing nod to the oeuvre of Mr Brown (which he just nicked from a million and one books traipsing through the various conspiracies, Dan Brown is not even an imaginative hack). Definitely makes a good job of it, I'd pay good money for David Mitchell (either of them, for that matter) to re-write The Da Vinci Code.

Dan Brown managed to kill for me the intrigue and very real mystery of Saunier, Rennes Le Chateu, In Arcadia Ego etc. although this topic has become a bit of an industry nowadays.

[woollypigs]

Finished The Body Clocks.

Not really spoilers but it does give something about the book away, but then again if you read reviews on sites like Goodreads, they will give away more.

(click to show/hide)

Nice bleak ending eh? I could happy miss out the "war" in the Chapel bit. Loved the conversation with great aunt Eilish and I would be more than happy with that level of "witch/fantasy/sifi/old wives tales" 

Other than that I really enjoyed it, now to catch up on some podcasts and then I think I will start on Slade House.

[woollypigs]

Just started a new book and it is annoying me. (not Slate house as my local library got a waiting list for that)

Cause I don't know what's worse the author not getting the directions/locations right OR dreaming up a location that doesn't exist in a city you know very well.

[ElyDave]

Having just finished reading The Hobbit to my son, I've now started with Dune for him

For me, in the summer I rode through a local village which has turned it's bus stop into a book exchange, so I exchanged a few.  I'm currently reading one about the AQIM insurgency into Mali and Timbuktou which is based around the efforts to save the historic Islamic texts from destruction. It also gives a good potted history of the various attempts by Europeans to be the "first to reach Timbuktou". Quite good so far

[woollypigs]

Prey tell me the title of that book about the books of Timbuktou, pretty please

[citoyen]

When I was a kid, I thought Timbuctoo was one of those made-up names to designate a generic exotic and distant location. Didn't discover it was a real place before I reached adulthood.

[T42]

Dan Brown managed to kill for me the intrigue and very real mystery of Saunier, Rennes Le Chateau, In Arcadia Ego etc. although this topic has become a bit of an industry nowadays.

It was all a 1950s hoax in any case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No%C3%ABl_Corbu

Saunière got his money from simony.

[woollypigs]

When I was a kid, I thought Timbuctoo was one of those made-up names to designate a generic exotic and distant location. Didn't discover it was a real place before I reached adulthood.

Always been dreaming of either cycling or walking from Timbuktu to Kathmandu, just because why not.

[hatler]

When I was a kid, I thought Timbuctoo was one of those made-up names to designate a generic exotic and distant location. Didn't discover it was a real place before I reached adulthood.

Always been dreaming of either cycling or walking from Timbuktu to Kathmandu, just because why not.

Have you read In Xanadu ?  Highly recommended for you based on your last remark.