Books - What are you reading?

@moocher and anyone else who's read Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss- are the other 2 in the series worth reading? I somewhat enjoyed Helliconia Spring but wasn't blown away by it.

I was told by someone on here that the other two were worth it, I have the 2nd but it is on the 'to read' shelf still.

Maybe I'll give it a punt next time I'm in the mood for something like that then!

I started reading James St James’ party monster last night. I’ve wanted to read it for years but other books seems to get in the way.

Then I started thinking about James Herriot and then downloaded the first book. Such a good writer, I felt like I was there in the cold barn.

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Has anyone read any Vladimir Nabokov? I've just finished reading a few of his short stories and thought they were great. I guess Lolita is probably the place to start?

I haven’t read it but I imagine there’ll be lots of other reading and listening to do to really get what he was trying to put across. Or maybe he was just a perv.

Nabokov is fucking great. Lolita is a great place to start, total gem of a novel. Despair or Laughter in the Dark are also good starters.

Penguin recommends Bill Brysons 'history of everything' for his age.

At his age I was reading books for adults from my parents' bookshelves and getting in to trouble when I took them to school. Publishers are terrible for making age-related recommendations; once a child gets beyond basic reading comprehension skills, what's good reading for them is much more dependent on their personality than their age. Hell, some kids are never old enough for the Moomin stories.

It's very hard to make recommendations without knowing the kid. My folks just used to take me to the library and let me find things for myself.

Cheers! Will have to pick those up.

Thanks everyone with your recommendations around indigenous folk and their stories, I have a good list now.

As for Terry Pratchett discworld novels, i absolutely fell in love with reading not quite teenage but early 20s when they were first published.

Lolita is a fantastic novel. To me, it's a story about the how subjectivity can be taken to extremes, but there are other ways to read as well.

I've also read 'Pale fire' and 'Despair' but didn't get that much out of them. That being said, people who know their stuff rate 'Pale fire' highly.

Pale Fire is a fucking challenging read - I wouldn't recommend it as a good starting point for Nabokov. I started reading it, then gave up. Maybe if you're also very into poetry then it might be a good one for you, but I am not a poetry person so I struggled.

Depends on the ten year old, some will, some won't. They'd probably miss quite a lot of the references regardless but it can still be entertaining.

Pratchett also did some children's books that I remember being pretty good. The Truckers trilogy, Johnny and the Bomb and Only You can save mankind, Dodger and a few others.

I can't remember what age I read the Redwall books but I remember them being excellent.

Pnin and Speak Memory. Pnin is a sly comedy. Speak memory a sly memoir.

Edit to add.. White Noise and Pnin are books twinned together in my mind because of the alternate views of out of the way US Colleges.

If you can find a copy of the Borribles books and the nephew has any kind of a dark sense of humour, he might love it. First book, a group of runaway children who have turned into Borribles (a goblin/pixie kind of thing) form a hit squad to go to Rumbledon and kill the Rumbles, a tribe of rat-like creatures with names like Vulgarian and Oroccoco.

I though they were great books. Hard to find copies, though, because satire for children (and genocidal warfare against Wombles) isn't much liked by newspapers and politicians and the original publishers were scared of getting in trouble.

You can get it on Kindle or the trilogy version with all books together is available as a paperback.

Seem to remember the third book got dropped by the original publisher due to the parody of the Met's SPG.

Robert Evans - After the revolution.
Looks as if it could be rather interesting and out as a podcast
https://atrbook.com/

His podcast, Behind The Bastards is great. Will give that a go!

I'm reading Middlemarch after hearing a few conversations about it at work (I love working somewhere where I can chat about the Euros and cycling but also about Middlemarch).

It's a huge achievement - George Eliot was superbly well read and the characters are so well observed. It's a giant book but it doesn't feel like a chore at all, I was quite disappointed to reach my tube stop this morning in the middle of a tempestuous political rally.

Heh. At school, my English Literature class was given Mill on the Floss as part of one year's reading schedule and rose up unanimously in revolt. We knew the teacher had a range of books to choose from and that book was so roundly hated by the entire class that she had to choose a different book just to progress.

It can be an effort to get teenagers to read literature from that era; the styles mostly seem very twee compared to 20th/21st century prose. I've read other Eliot books since, including Middlemarch, and from this perspective I'd say I find Mill on the Floss uniquely vomit inducing and the class might well have done better with a different choice from her works.

Middlemarch I can and do read today, despite the fact that some chapters start with six pages of flowery exposition before anything happens.

Just finished The Girl With All The Gifts. Been meaning to read it for ages and I really enjoyed it. Makes me want to go and watch the film. Anyone read the sequel? Or maybe it’s not technically a sequel - just set in the same universe.

I read Middlemarch a couple of years ago and loved it much more than I was expecting to, and probably more than anything I've read. For a book about some people in a provincial English town getting married, it is amazingly involving, I think because she explores the inner lives of the characters in so much detail and with such empathy.

Enjoying Piranesi : Susanna Clarke

It’s better paced than Jonathan Strange, but a proper mindfuck. Could be adapted into a very strange play

Really enjoyed J.Strange, will give that a look to add to the pile!

I've just started The Glass Bead Game by Hesse. Can't yet tell if I'm enjoying it or not!

Just finished 'The Kind Worth Killing' and 'Eight Perfect Murders' by Peter Swanson. Really enjoyed them both, total page turners. Would recommend if you like slightly over the top murder mysteries.