What books are we reading at the moment ?

[pcolbeck]

Yep double rum rations all round before going into battle.

[Flying_Monkey]

I just picked up David Guterson's The Other, because I enjoyed Snow Falling on Cedars a few years ago. Also Michael Chaborn's Gentlemen of the Road - because The Yiddish Policemen's Union was so excellent...

[Mr Larrington]

"Slash" by, er, well, Slash.  Plus a ghost-writer bloke, obv.  Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, Axl Rose being a knob - all the usual stuff.  Still, at least he's a BRITON.

[her_welshness]

I just picked up David Guterson's The Other, because I enjoyed Snow Falling on Cedars a few years ago. Also Michael Chaborn's Gentlemen of the Road - because The Yiddish Policemen's Union was so excellent...

Snow falling on cedars is a fabulous book 

[Jezza]

I just picked up David Guterson's The Other, because I enjoyed Snow Falling on Cedars a few years ago. Also Michael Chaborn's Gentlemen of the Road - because The Yiddish Policemen's Union was so excellent...

Snow falling on cedars is a fabulous book 

I'm actually reading it at the moment. Really enjoying it so far.

[LEE]

I read a few Jeremy Clarkson book son holiday ("The World According to.." and such like).

I thought they were bloody funny.

So sue me.

[David Martin]

I just picked up David Guterson's The Other, because I enjoyed Snow Falling on Cedars a few years ago. Also Michael Chaborn's Gentlemen of the Road - because The Yiddish Policemen's Union was so excellent...

Snow falling on cedars is a fabulous book 

I'm actually reading it at the moment. Really enjoying it so far.

Got given it by a friend. Really enjoyed it, especially as the various threads of the story unravelled.

..d

[Flying_Monkey]

*Spoilers below*


Well, unfortunately I was not so impressed with The Other. Guterson is a good writer, that's for sure, and his everyman narrator rings very true. But the story, and even some particular scenes are so close to Into the Wild, the true story of Chris McCandless, as written by Jon Krakauer and later made into a film by Sean Penn - particularly a scene where character tries and largely fails to butcher and preserve a whole moose - that it would be charitable to call it a partial tribute or a reworking especially as he Guterson doesn't mention either book or film and frankly I don't believe he had not either read the book or seen the film...

[Flying_Monkey]

Gentlemen of the Road (AKA 'Jews With Swords' as the working title had it!) on the other hand, is superb. Great old-fashioned swashbucking stuff with exotic locales, swordfights, daring escapes and suchlike, but also beautifully written and with some loving attention to detail that puts it way beyond parody or knowing postmodern tribute. I am not surprised Chabon dedicated it to Michael Moorcock because there's more than a touch of The Eternal Champion about it, although he does keep it strictly Tenth Century.

Now re-reading David Peace's brilliant Tokyo Year Zero. It's wonderfully sensory fiction, replete with the itchiness of lice, the stink of human sweat and shit, and above all the bitter taste of defeat and degredation. The sequel, Occupied City, is just out and I will get it as soon as I can...

[mike]

A confereracy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

very, very funny.  Quite a sad story behind the book too - his mother found a carbon copy of the book in her sons belongings 10 years after he committed suicide and had it published then.  Now there's a statue of the main character (Ignatious Reilly - "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.") in his home town.

[Sergeant Pluck]

A confereracy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

Complicated (I thought so anyway  ) but very very funny  I love the names... like Myrna Minkoff.

[Mr Larrington]

Blood Line ~ Mark Billingham.  Back to proper Inspector Thorne et al, and a good thing too.

[Tom B]

'The Sunday Philosophy Club' by Alexander McCall Smith  - the first of his I've read. It's lightweight but goes off on diverting tangents. The protagonist is an attractive 30-something in Edinburgh and it's fun to imagine  what she might look like  

[Mr Larrington]

Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played With Fire".

Yup, me too.

The other niggling thing is that the film version of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" has been released just about everywhere except the UK and Captain Cook's Mistake.  TWFKAML is righteously cross about this...

Isn't that because it's a swedish film, and the lucky old ENGLISH-speaking world is going to get a Hollywood remake so we don't have to stress our poor little branes reading all those tricky subtitles?

 

Good news:  TWFKAML e-mailed a Strop-O-Gram to Yellow Bird Films and has been assured by the Big Boss his own good self that "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" will get at least a limited release in BRITAIN later this year.

[mark]

"South" by Sir Ernest Shackleton. I read "Endurance" a while back, and now I want to see how Shackleton tells his own story. So far, Alfred Lansing is by far the better story teller, but that's partly because Shackleton gave him such good material to work with.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

'The Sunday Philosophy Club' by Alexander McCall Smith  - the first of his I've read. It's lightweight but goes off on diverting tangents. The protagonist is an attractive 30-something in Edinburgh and it's fun to imagine  what she might look like  

Have you tried his Scotland Street books? Similar style, different characters.

[Tom B]

Have you tried his Scotland Street books?

Ready near the top of the pile, thanks 

[Flying_Monkey]

Now on to Don DeLillo's Falling Man which I found in a bargain bin here... I am having a burst at the moment!

[Mr Larrington]

The Family ~ Ed Sanders.

Edit: I know members of the Manson Family used a lot of false names, Ed, but did you really need to list anything up to half a dozen aka's whenever someone is named?  It's annoying, is what it is.

[TheLurker]

I have just finished, "The Cyclist's Finger Post" by W.F. Ball. Price 1/- (1899)

A serendipitous discovery in a second-hand bookshop on Saturday.  Describes a number of routes from Birmingham to various places (Holyhead, three routes to London &tc.).  Some of the routes he describes might be difficult to follow these days although one of my older maps shows that they would still have been perfectly possible up to the late 1930s and in all probability up until the late 1950s as well;  before we started building all the motorways.

It's by turns amusing and saddening reading.   You read of, "thousands of cyclists" heading out of Brum to (for example) Meriden and you wonder what that must have been like and compare it to today when a couple of dozen would be a mass turn out.

If time allows I'll try and scan some of the adverts and post them on flickr or similar. They're wonderful; including the one that proves that people have been arguing about crank lengths for at least 110 years.

[alan]

Re-reading Simon Doughty's book on long distance cycling.One or two long forgotten lessons relearned.

Anyone know how he is doing of late?

[her_welshness]

Am currently reading 'The Pilot's Wife' by Anita Shreve, not getting into it at all. 

[Greenbank]

Re-reading Simon Doughty's book on long distance cycling.One or two long forgotten lessons relearned.

Anyone know how he is doing of late?

You're far more likely to get a response (and others interested will also be able to see it) if you post this in the Audax forum.

[Tourist Tony]

Alternating between Mark Beaumont's book and Richard Matheson's collected shorts, translated into French. Need the practice.

[Frenchie]

I read the running book by Haruki Murakami on the plane. A great, easy read; one I recommend to a lot of us here who enjoy riding/running regularly and for hours on ends, as Murakami attempts to describe why he enjoys it so much. Great authors write simply and clearly.

Now finishing The Cyclist's Manifesto which I picked up in Northern America before my return. Interesting but I can't say I agree with all of it; but an interesting read nonetheless.