Books - What are you reading?

Why would I be taking the piss? We is an excellent book. Everyone goes crazy for 1984 and Brave New World, where Zamyatin's book deserves the greater chunk of the press and the praise.

I agree, Orwell accused Huxley of ripping of Zamyatin and admitted that he was going to base his 1984 on We. I actually discovered it due to writing about Bentham's Panopticon.

@Idiot

I love both 1984 and Brave New World but have never heard of We. I'll definitely be adding to my list of 'books to read soon'

Slightly less good but equally important is Jack London's The Iron Heel. Another big influence on the famous dystopian books. Also We is now out of copyright so you can find it for free/cheap. My copy has a futurist cover and a bunch of essays at the end, I think it was only a couple of quid.

I generally buy all my books second hand online anyway, saves me lots of money.

cheers for the recommendations .

For me it was a quote from the Belgian radical Raoul Vanegeim: "Zamiatin's We. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Touraine's Cinquieme Coup de Trompette push back into the future a shudder of horror which one look at the present would produce". Unfortunately, Touraine's book doesn't seem to have been translated into English so I can't complete the set.

Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to AWu-Tang at #2481, but look what happens when you forget to press the reply thingy.

Get the Natasha Randall translation. It's supposed to be way better than the older translation.

I've started reading during my lunch breaks at work. I tend to have a novel on the go at home as well, so like something non-fiction for work, the last two being Riding Rockets, the autobiography of a Shuttle astronaught and Signal to Noise, a book about making predictions in stocks, weather, sports etc.

Trouble is, limited to maybe 45-50 mins at a time, I really need things I can pick up and get straight into and then put down again since I want to only read the book inside those lunch hours.

Any recommendations for something that would fit the bill?

Currently on Chapter 34 of The Count. Well good.

Trust me don't bother. I loved Dune, but the sequels are awful. Third book in the series is about the best, but still poor.

Slaughterhouse Five - after years of putting it off got round to reading it - meh.

Currently reading Perfidia, part one of a new LA Quartet by James Ellroy, starts the day before Pearl Harbour - 20% in and great so far.

This just arrived. Looking forward to starting this after Count

Having slowly, slowly inched my way through Mrs Dalloway (oooh matron!), I'm now smashing my way through Ryan Boudinot's Blueprints of the Afterlife. So far, so good. Mrs Dalloway was excellent, but one of the great things about high modernist literature is how eminently readable it makes everything else appear.

Looks like I've got plenty to keep me going until Christmas.

Picked up the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Karenina in Oxfam for a song this morning. Bonzer

Just starting The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, as I loved Oryx and Crake.

The final haul of books from my birthday:

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By the time Christmas is done and dusted I shouldn't have to buy another book until this time next year.

^ Same here. But then I inadvertently popped into another Oxfam whilst out for a walk with two of the kids this morning and this happened:

I've got two shelves of "yet to read" books. Two. Shelves. Christmases and birthdays really pile 'em up, especially when I can't read and cycle commute at the same time. There's a charity bookshop just down the road that I'm pretending to myself I haven't noticed yet because its existence makes further shelf expansion pretty much inevitable.

I have just returned from a week in away and got quite a bit of reading done. Covering a fair range, I would recommend all that I read:

Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe.
A Most Wanted Man - John Le Carre
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flannagan
The Children Act - Ian McEwan
Selected Short Stories - Rabindranath Tagore

Those arent short books either. Are you a fast reader or am I just slow?

I flew to and from India, had an overnight train journey, a day by the pool and a couple of car journeys as well as bedtime reading. Seeing as I tend not to sleep on planes, trains, or automobiles, I had plenty of time to get stuck in. All were read on Kindle except Tagore.

Achebe - not really that long, beautiful writing and a compelling narrative.
Le Carre - like watching an action film, one you are in, you want to keep going.
Flannagan - a great narrative, engaging, and at times caused me to well up at the brutality that was wrought in the name of building a railway.
McEwan - also not that long, but an interesting premise. I wasn't wholly satisfied with the conclusion, but I enjoyed reflecting on and discussing the medical / ethical consideration.
Tagore - I had read a few stores before and have a few left. Short stories can be beautifully observed vignettes, and many of these are. Seeing as I was in India, they had a certain realism.

You're just slow. Here's a non-exhaustive list of what I read yesterday.

Yeah, I say I shouldn't have to buy another book, but knowing myself I will invariably buy another 20 or so.

My personal yardstick of length of books is:

General modern paperback fiction, around 400 pages I can get through in 3 days max. These are like your Le Carre - they read like a movie and the pages sometimes seem to turn themselves. Thats 3 nights reading and the odd lunchtime or bog sitting.

I sometimes will stumble upon one of those books that you just can't put down, and even if they are 500 or so pages long, I can devour them in 24 hours, sometimes that's in just 3 sittings and it involves a shit-its-3-in-the-morning-i-really-must-put-this-down-and-get-some-sleep jobbie.

Then there are those meatier prose books, like some of the classics, which I almost always find harder to get through because they are meatier. Brothers Karamazov is under 800 pages yet took me a month to get through, whereas I'm over 600 pages into Count of Monte Cristo in just over a week.

I quite fancy that Flannagan.

I definitely intend to go back and read Infinite Jest again. Just need to find a spare couple of months in the midst of all the other books I need to read.

I finished it last night, the final quarter of the book became like the samizdat itself; a struggle to rid my thoughts of it, constantly trying to piece together the various sub-plots and recall obscure passages from the start of the novel that were suddenly rekindled by a fleeting reference later on - reading it became the only refuge!

As I should have anticipated, finishing IJ didn't stop this, and if anything made it worse. Hal's admission interview at the start (or chronological end) is absolutely packed with clues to what occurred post-YDAU and I definitely want to re-revisit it over the next few days.

Genuinely excited for a full reread once enough time has passed. Never has a book made such an impression.

Any recommendations for what next are welcome. Pynchon's GR is on the list, but I think I may need something less intensive first.