Books - What are you reading?

Just started reading this
Very good and only a chapter in

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...the Iliad....believe it or not! It's actually quite readable.....

Worth reading Ma'am Darling too.

I thought the Beatles book was undermined by an OK boomer view that the Beatles will always be culturally significant. My kids have no idea who the Beatles were!

Ready Player Two - Ernest Cline

Sequel to Ready Player One (which is pretty good, much better than the terminally average movie of the same name)
I'm about 1/3 into it and it has only just started to get good.

I've just finished English Pastoral by James Rebanks. Also read his previous book A Shepherds Life, which I enjoyed and covers similar themes and topics.
Personally, I think he's got a good balance between the stereotypical strongly opinionated farming type, the nostalgia associated with the 'hard working type' that his father and grandfather represent and their relationship with the landscape around them.
If you are interested in the dynamic between farming and the countryside (in particular the Lake District), I can recommend.

Been enjoying this:

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I’ve been re-(re-re-)reading Dune. It’s some years since I last read it and it’s been a treat to discover I’d forgotten quite a lot of it. There’s a few corny elements that didn’t really register last time, mainly around the Fremen’s dialogue, but otherwise I’m really enjoying it. Very much looking forward to the upcoming film, and also the recent board game that some friends got me for my birthday at Christmas. Not sure when I’ll get to play that though, what with this pandemic and all...

I might just read that, I've been a bit more curious about the royals since The Crown and I can imagine he doesn't take it too seriously.

I work in a sixth form and a lot of the students there are quite keen to prove they know who The Beatles are and like their music - so they're not totally dead.

That book cover has a self-published-on-Amazon vibe. I'm guessing the book isn't like that?

I'm currently reading The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge, as part of my ongoing quests to read more books by northerners and more books by women.

I'm enjoying it so far, but it's a strange one.

Just finished Deep by James Nestor. It's basically about freediving and ocean exploration. I've done my AIDA courses and found it absolutely fascinating.

I've now started American God's after enjoying Norse Mythology by the same chap. The hardest bit is trying to stop picturing Ricky Whittle after the TV series....

Endless Perfect Circles by Ian Walker. Hippy gets a few mentions.

It's not an all-time classic for no reason. :)

I don’t know man, books based on movies...

Neil Gaiman? American Gods is good, Neverwhere is even better...

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates was good.

I wish I was a handsome disaffected American who smoked fags and said "hell" a lot

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Neverwhere is even better...

Ah cool. I've got the 'Ocean at the end of the road' up next, will add neverwhere after.

Another excellent one of his! I'm a bit of a fanboi...

Bit late to the party, but just got Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Good read so far.

Just started this and it's great -

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It's not a question of whether you're drunk after going out for lunch, but how drunk you are.

Nearly finished "The Crusades through Arab Eyes", by Amin Maalouf. Would recommend to anybody who likes reading history books. His fiction has been getting some praise, so going to try that next.

General musings on my reading recently.

The books I quite liked were ‘Exit West’ by Moshin Hamid. I guess it wasn’t a flawless execution as such, but I found it really refreshing to read something that I found entirely new and unexpected.
There's a bit of magical realism, but the story doesn’t go into too much detail about it. He just pulls in some supernatural elements when he needs to speed up the story a bit. Works really well IMO.

‘Smile’ by Roddy Doyle had a fairly predictable narrative arc perpahs, but the story flows very well. Recommended.

I had a go at a few novels by Toni Morrison seeing as she won the Nobel prize. In a way she’s a great writer. At least to me, she is great at dialogue and building up quirky characters. But once I had read a couple I felt that she mostly develops her stories through dialogue. A bit like American movies where they bang a few very different characters together and just let endless scenes of bickering and arguments drive the story forward. Of the ones I read, I liked 'Sula' the most.

Not sure if I mentioned it before in this thread, but ‘My Dark Vanessa’ by Kate Elizabeth Russell was one of the best books I read in 2020.

Stefan Zweig’s ‘Beware of Pity’ was well written (I read the English translation) but not really worth the effort IMO.

Which Toni Morrison did you read? I tend to agree with your description, but I've only read two of her novels (Bluest Eye, God Help the Girl). Bluest Eye rocked me completely but God Help the Girl left me a little cold even though the prose was excellent.

Last book I finished was Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I read the english translation that Lem himself apparently didn't approve of but I can't read Polish so I had to make do. I loved it in spite of the utilitarian translation, one of my favorite sci fi novels now. It uses a sci fi setting to grapple with humanity's general desire to blindly push forward and establish new edens for ourselves, to terraform everything in the universe to conform to our desires. When we are confronted individually with our raw underlying desires (represented by freaky homunculi conjured up by a living psychic ocean), the ones that drive us that we don't want to understand, it's mortifying.
The book occupies the space between Star Trek and Alien, which is a clunky way to describe it but those are points of reference most of us can relate to.