Books - What are you reading?

The pyramid by Henning Mankell

Just finished reading " Love in the time of Cholera" .." El amor en los tiempos del cólera"

anyone read this? or see the movie? .. I thought it was beautifully written...its a rather intoxicating story of a man who loved against all the odds.. ..."he loved her for over 50 yrs"... the story portrays his often sinister life of carnal affairs in a desperate attempt to heal his broken heart from her rejection... all the while continuing to fighting for her love... both morbid and powerful

I read this and really enjoyed it but i think i preferred One hundred years of solitude.
i saw the film of love in the time of Cholera and and found it a bit dissapointing

my mum bought me *A Partisans Daughter *earlier this year, worth reading?

Just read "Boyhood" by Coetzee. Starting to see why he got the Nobel as well as two Bookers.

Also been reading a lot of hard-boiled detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett is fucking amazing, both "the Maltese Falcon" and "the Glass Key" are classics, rather than just good genre writing. Raymond Chandler's not bad either.

I read this and really enjoyed it but i think i preferred One hundred years of solitude.

All magical realist literature is shit, except for that book, which is superb.

All magical realist literature is shit, except for that book, which is superb.

I'd have to disagree Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is an unbridled joy.

i have gone off murakami in a big way having just trudged (increasingly resentfully) though the wind up bird chronicle. i really enjoyed kafka and norwegian wood. found them quite powerfull and unexpectedly affecting actually. but i really disliked the wind up bird chronicle. i think i've just had enough of his wooly mysticism, aimless unsatisfying plots and stilted narrative and dialogue. that sort of passive/disconnected/alienated central character thing really started to grate on me after a while too. i just wanted to slap the main character for about the last 300 pages. i didn't give a fuck what happened to him i just want it to be over. and when it eventually was, there was no resolution, explanation or satisfation. loose threads everywhere, converging storylines left hanging and unexplained. not mystical or brave, just fucking pointless, shapeless, seemingly ill thought out and very very irritating. i hated it.

at the moment i'm reading the pickwick papers (my first dickens!) and am loving it. surprised to find it genuinely funny. not what i was expecting at all.

also still occasionally picking up neil young's biog and julian copes' japrocksampler.

I'd have to disagree Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is an unbridled joy.

Borderline magical realism - it's more like Animal Farm or Gulliver's Travels, ie straight social satire. And I missed something in the translation I read, because I didn't think it was that great.

Oh, and we're coming close to another of my pet hates, writers who write excessively about writing, other writers, publishers, or life as a professor of literature at small, liberal American arts colleges.

Murakami is the perfect hipster writer, in my humble etc etc – style over substance. I also can't get along with Marquez at all. I think his books are a bit schlocky.

The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece, though, I think.

At the moment I'm in the middle of few things – Mason & Dixon by Pynchon, which is unbelievable; I'm re-reading Crash by Ballard; and then some Richard Ford short stories. I'm about to start Moby Dick, too, which I've never read before.

Murakami is the perfect hipster writer, in my humble etc etc – style over substance. I also can't get along with Marquez at all. I think his books are a bit schlocky.

The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece, though, I think.

At the moment I'm in the middle of few things – Mason & Dixon by Pynchon, which is unbelievable; I'm re-reading Crash by Ballard; and then some Richard Ford short stories. I'm about to start Moby Dick, too, which I've never read before.

Have you tried any Don DeLillo, other than Underworld? I remember your comment from the advertising thread.

Oh, and we're coming close to another of my pet hates, writers who write excessively about writing, other writers, publishers, or life as a professor of literature at small, liberal American arts colleges.

Delillo, Roth etc? Roth i can not abide. I'm likely ignorant but i wouldn't throw Bulgakov into that category.

At the moment I'm in the middle of few things – Mason & Dixon by Pynchon...

Surely reading anything else at the same time as Pynchon is dangerous!

iat the moment i'm reading the pickwick papers (my first dickens!) and am loving it. surprised to find it genuinely funny. not what i was expecting at all.

Dickens remains a great novelist. The Pickwick Papers is very, very funny.

At the moment I'm in the middle of few things – Mason & Dixon by Pynchon, which is unbelievable; I'm re-reading Crash by Ballard; and then some Richard Ford short stories. I'm about to start Moby Dick, too, which I've never read before.
I could never get on with Pynchon. Too slow.

Moby Dick is a great read. Hope you enjoy it.

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.

Not in the same literary style as his earlier masterpiece "Theres theres a Wosket in my poscket" but I think the difference was representative of his own personal decline into dark introspection.

Have you tried any Don DeLillo, other than Underworld? I remember your comment from the advertising thread.

Yeah - I thought White Noise was brilliant.

Raskol, the Pynchon's for work, so I can mentally separate it a bit. Plus, M&D is no *Gravity's Rainbow…
*
Slow, andy? Pynchon? Which book?

Yup, I'm looking forward loads to Moby Dick. I'm taking it to Rome, along with some Henry James, who I love. Can't wait to just read books while sitting outside cafes drinking wine all day.

I read David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero and Cormac McCarthy's The Road while on holiday. The former was good, the latter brilliant. My advice is get in soon (if you don't mind grim stories) with the latter as it's being adapted into a film

Delillo, Roth etc? Roth i can not abide. I'm likely ignorant but i wouldn't throw Bulgakov into that category.

DeLillo was guilty of the college professor thing with White Noise, but otherwise he's kept his nose mostly clean. On Beauty by Zadie Smith comes to mind as a classic of the genre, but I'm picking at random - there are hundreds of forgettable novels about having an affair with your student and trying to get tenure while suffering from writer's block.

On the writing-about-the-process-of-writing front, I'd include Paul Auster, for New York Trilogy (perhaps the world's most boring book?), Mao II and even At Swim Two Birds, which was at least funny, ish. The problem is that writing, the activity, is very boring to describe, but also something that writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about.

DeLillo was guilty of the college professor thing with White Noise, but otherwise he's kept his nose mostly clean. On Beauty by Zadie Smith comes to mind as a classic of the genre, but I'm picking at random - there are hundreds of forgettable novels about having an affair with your student and trying to get tenure while suffering from writer's block.

On the writing-about-the-process-of-writing front, I'd include Paul Auster, for New York Trilogy (perhaps the world's most boring book?), Mao II and even At Swim Two Birds, which was at least funny, ish. The problem is that writing, the activity, is very boring to describe, but also something that writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Joyce, you say?

Tolerable.

The Road is ne plus ultra, in my 'umble opinon.

The Road is class in a glass. Also, Blood Meridian.

The Road is class in a glass. Also, Blood Meridian.

didn't enjoy blood meridian as much, The Border Trilogy however...

the way he evokes place is incredible.

DeLillo was guilty of the college professor thing with White Noise, but otherwise he's kept his nose mostly clean. On Beauty by Zadie Smith comes to mind as a classic of the genre, but I'm picking at random - there are hundreds of forgettable novels about having an affair with your student and trying to get tenure while suffering from writer's block.

On the writing-about-the-process-of-writing front, I'd include Paul Auster, for New York Trilogy (perhaps the world's most boring book?), Mao II and even At Swim Two Birds, which was at least funny, ish. The problem is that writing, the activity, is very boring to describe, but also something that writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Paul Auster's terrible. As is Zadie Smith. Auster in particular is one of those writers that I suspect people like for the wrong reasons. I am unlucky enough to have had to read almost his entire output at one point, for work. It gets much, much worse than NYT, believe me. I don't mind his non-fiction writing, though.

I suppose Roth would fall into your college-circle-jerk thing too; and Coetzee. It is pretty unforgivable.

I've tried Gravity's Rainbow and another Pynchon book that I foget the title of. I struggled to get into both of them as they took an age to get going so I gave up. This was a while back though, maybe they improve with age.

Paul Auster is okay, but his debt to Beckett is painfully obvious.

@plurabelle - have you read any Kelman?

The literary couple in Roth's Exit Ghost remind me of Auster and Hustvedt which might be funny if it didn't mean i was reading Roth.

The wrong reasons being the crime of giving far too much credence to the Guardian and others saturday supplements...

Paul Auster's terrible. As is Zadie Smith. Auster in particular is one of those writers that I suspect people like for the wrong reasons. I am unlucky enough to have had to read almost his entire output at one point, for work. It gets much, much worse than NYT, believe me. I don't mind his non-fiction writing, though.

I suppose Roth would fall into your college-circle-jerk thing too; and Coetzee. It is pretty unforgivable.

New York Trilogy was appalling, I only manage about 2 of the stories and binned it. I enjoyed The Music of Chance though, very good indeed, and there's a pretty good film adaptation, which for reasons unknown has a 'hollywood' ending.