what was the last book you read?

I'm good at starting books but bad at finishing them (a consequence of not reading novels too much I think - with non-fiction you feel less guilt about stopping if you don't agree with the argument or think you know it already. Hence I never finished the Cavanagh Creation book because excellent though it is I lived through it and am not interested in Oasis.).

So the most recent book I actually completed was Paul Morley's Nothing, which I would give a solid 19 out of 20 to - a remarkable book, as I think I've said elsewhere. It takes a while to get used to the style but it's very much worth it.

A Disaffection, by James Kelman. 15/20.

Nova by Samuel Delaney, interesting science fiction novel, deceptively straight forward but packed full with symbolism (of which I missed a lot I'm afraid).

I just finished reading "Mysteries" buy Knut Hamsun, it's a good book but I wish I hadn't bothered finding out about Knut himself...It's always best not to know too much about people who write/paint/sing things that you like, coz invariably you'll be disappointed.

She came to stay by simone de beauvoir - swathes of pleasantly superficial existentialism from satre's main squeeze. lots of smoking & dancing. more honest than The age of reason, anyway.

Forgot the rating...16/20!

"Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels, which I'd give 19/20 at the moment; I think I probably need to read it again, though.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon.

Only halfway through at the moment, probably give it about 13 at the moment. needed a slimline book after ploughing through david foster wallace's infinite jest...

rock springs by richard ford - 14/20

Read Tama Janowitz's 'The Male Cross Dressers Support Group' and reread Flann O Brien's 'The Third Policeman'. I can't remember in what order.

Liber Kaos by Peter Carroll. I'd give it a 10 for an interesting beginning, but an unfounded basis for "scientific" magic. For all the thought that goes into the ideas of Chaos Magic, it's funny how easily they dismiss certain concepts they feel have overstayed their welcome. Just because you wish things were different, doesn't make it so.

"London Fields"-Martin Amis....PIECE OF SHIT. I'd heard such great things about this book and I couldnt believe how silly it was. 8/20. Before that I read "As I lay dying" by William Faulkner which is excellent.

I'm rereading J.G Ballard's The Drowned World. I stole it from the school library years ago. It's not as good this time around. before that I read Day of the Triffids. I think there's a pattern emerging. DOTT was great. It made me cry. lix.

The Last Samurai, Helen Dewitt. It's abstract and erudite but really funny and touching. Excellent. 17/20.

Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming. I refuse to give number ratings because I think it's a crap idea, but I will say it was a book that I found impossible to get through. It wasn't difficultly written, it wasn't at ALL long, maybe 250 pages at most? It was just...uninteresting. Not to mention terribly unfunny.

I'm now re-reading American Psycho to see if I changed my mind about it. I hate feeling like it's a chore to go through two chapters though, though I'm finding it less of a nuisance now than I did then.

"Fillerbunny in: 'I Fill Up' 15 Pages! Guest starring: Monkey Who Gets Shot In Face!"

It's a small comic book; roughly 5x9 with a rabbit that experiences tragedy and violence. It's brilliant.

20/20 (just for fun)

I suck at finishing books these days, probably because something more interesting always comes along which I just have to start into. Last thing I finished was Foster Wallace's Girl With Curious Hair.

just finished don delillo's mao_ii. i'd give it an 18/20. more immemorable characters from delillo salvaged as always by a great premise, intriguing dialogue, and a prose style that is as fine as any you're likely to find. interesting parallels can be drawn to white_noise with the recurring themes of paranoia, belief, and television.

Fred: the man who reads the entire back catalog of one author before moving on to a new one. This is like the 4th Delillo book since Christmas! At least it's not David Foster Wallace anymore ;)

Currently reading Joachim Fest's _Plotting Hitler's Death_ -- a good reminder of how people can react when push comes to shove in the worst possible way. 16

okay, first off, the italics stop here. hopefully.

anyhoo, yes, otis, i agree with you. beyond enjoying a good old- fashioned story, i like to examine an author's style, to analyze his technique, and when i find a style i particularly love, i latch onto the author.

delillo isn't so far removed from wallace, no. the latter has admitted that the former is a great influence and that he, i.e. wallace, has tremendous respect for him. to me, though, it seems that delillo, a novelist, is more interested in plots and themes, whereas wallace, a *writer,* enjoys creating characters.

meanwhile, i hear rumors that wallace's next novel will be about porn. based on the _premiere_ article, i can only hope it's true.

'The Rings of Saturn' (W.G. Sebald). 19/20

YO JOSH, WTF? Eye-talics man.

Anyhow, while perhaps if you find it difficult to get into author's styles, it's easier to read more than one book of theirs at once, but for me personally - as someone who analyses style rather greatly (i.e. I'm rereading American Psycho because I'm trying to get PAST the style) - I can get immediatley into it and just tear it apart from the get go. Then I find if I read more than like two books in a row by the same author, I get exceedingly bored with their style and find it hard to chug through the third (or fourth or what have you) book. Don't you get *bored* with reading the exact same style over and over? I think I'd rather read one author, then another immediately, for comparison's sake almost more than anything else.

I always found reading too much of the same author would make it more difficult to read completely dissimilar authors.

Huh. Could've sworn I closed that tag. Oh well.

I have to say that _Premiere_ article was freaking funny (and depressing). I especially liked the outraged letters of contempt the following issue from those in the industry who felt they'd been slighted. No, really?

Ally, I wouldn't say it constitutes reading the exact same style over and over, because any decent writer's style is always evolving, unless there's some literary equivalent to Max Martin I'm unaware of. But I don't mean to defend this point too strenuously, because while I might find it easier to read consecutive books by one author in theory, in practice, my attentions wander. I've been reading one DFW book or another for the past few months, yes, but I tend to just read bits here and there, at lunch or what have you, because he's easy reading for me (and was from the get-go, incidentally). At the same time I've read or been reading Gide, Wojnarowicz, Barthes, blah x3. Some artists have oeuvres increasingly more fascinating or rewarding the more you immerse yourself in them, others benefit more from whatever knowledge of their peers you bring to them, is what I've found, and I can only hope that what I bring to the work is adequate or put it aside for another time if I think it's not. As to reading too much of the same author making it hard to read completely dissimilar writers, I could see how a fanatic singlemindedness could certainly lead to such a problem, but for me it just serves as an effective contrast - to give as examples my two favorite authors, Genet seems all the more special after all this pomo nonsense. But DFW seems really fucking funny and breezy after wading through much Genet.

Clans Of The Alphane Moon - Philip K. Dick. An enjoyable read, even if he didn't carry the premise as far as I would've liked. But I'm a big Dick fan, so I'll give it 15/20. Love the sicko ending.

London Fields (look ma! italics off!) is a truly great book. If you're interested, I could explain exactly how rich and complex the thematic structure is -- it was quite a revelation for me when I figured it all out.

The last novel I read was The Royal Family by Vollmann (I'm such a fan I even bought shitty Gear magazine coz he had an article there -- a shitty article, it turned out) which gets a 20/20. The last book I read is more recent, and is a historical work on the 1967 Shanghai Commune. 10/20 for good facts and terrible analysis. Also finished, for class, a work in the history of British Colonialism called The Lion's Share which gets 17/20 for being really good. Have been reading many short stories lately, from Conjunctions and The Paris Review -- TPR gets 10/20, and Conjunctions gets the usual 19/20.

The last book I read was Ocean Of Sound by David Toop. I'd give it 18/20 for the most part, but some of the discussions of the post-rave stuff inevitably feel a little dated now.

I agree with Mr Bourke on London Fields. It did bugger all for me, like the rest of Amis Jr's output. A 5/20 at the most. The Rings of Saturn, OTOH, I enjoyed more than anything else I've read so far this year.

_Ashes of Victory_ by David Weber, the latest entry in my favorite tacky space opera, the Honor Harrington saga. Not only is Honor beautiful, she also completely infallable and supernaturally capable. Plus, she's empathic thanks to her six-limbed sidekick, Nimitz. The series spends much time painting both conservatives and liberals as wrong-headed, which coincidentally fits in with the teachings of Maimonedes. (Although, the liberals are shown to be misguided while the conservatives are actively evil. And the communists and religious fundamentalists come out of it even worse...)

Anyway, 15/20. Weber still hasn't gotten back to the level of _Field Of Dishonor_ yet, although _In Enemy Hands_ came close. This one was good, but not stunning.

There was some funny parts in London Fields but everyone just seemed like a caricature and the premise was completely silly. All that talk about the millenium pissed me off and I thought the book was a load of postmodern wank.

1. Like Tom E I start many books, or read bits of many, but finish very few.

2. Nick D, you never rated At Swim-Two-Birds.

3. Synge, Playboy Of The Western World. Hm - 14/20?

I think the last book I read to the end was "The Battle of Dorking" by some serving army officer under a pseudonym. Written in 1871, it's a nightmare vision of England invaded by the Kaiser's Germany. It's great fun.

Valis by Phillip K. Dick. i give it a 18.9 hehehe

"BrainDroppings" by George Carlin. Very funny, philosophically pretty much on point - "if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem".

London Fields isn't about conventional plot, nor do nukes have all that much to do with it. View the two suspects as authors, and as mirroring what happens between the narrator and the (absent) MA. Think in terms of modernity, in terms of novelistic modernity and modernity in a class sense -- realize that sex and creation are linked in the book's schema, and fit the babies into that context.

This is not postmodernism per se. Much more so, it is metafiction. Rereading The Information after LF, I saw a whole new richness.

The Peacock Manifesto by Stuart David. It's OK, bit of a one-trick pony though and not a patch on Nalda Said. Call it a 12.

Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love by Dan Rhodes. Because everything goes in circles eventually.

"Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time" - Marcus Borg. 8/20 Strange book, loved by many, I thought it quite one sided.

I'm reading The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth. No comments, 'cause I'm too damn intimidated by them big words everyone's been usin' on this thread. Maybe 16/20 so far - the man can write.

what, did you all stop reading all of a sudden?!

anyway, finished the last book i read today. gabriel garcia marquez's love in the time of cholera, which i chose over the universally-lauded one hundred years of solitude for two reasons: 1) thomas pynchon wrote a phosphorescent review of it for the new york times. 2) i chose the book, literally, by its cover. cholera is a part of the penguin great books of the 20th century series that i love so, and the title is better as well.

anyway, quite a brilliant book. a love triangle of sorts that ends or, rather, begins some 50 years on. humorous and heartrending, unabashedly sentimental and gaining transcendence despite or maybe because of that. i thought he was losing control of the story near the end, but he ends with one of the best last pages ever. a solid 19/20.

So far rolling thru ILM I've picked up two adjectives I intend to use elsewhere: "phosphorescent" and "pie-faced"

Spent Jan/Feb very low rereading LeCarré and first-time reading Graham Greene, unsure in the latter case whether I was reading Greene after Greene because I was depressed or depressed because I was reading Greene after Greene. "The Confidential Agent" 18:20/"The Comedians" 18:20. Couldn't finish "The Power and the Glory" after I realised I wanted them to catch the priest and string him up, like, NOW [second or third chapter]. No LeCarré gets more than 13:20 cuz he can't do women.

Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman

17. Quite good.

"The Power and The Glory" is the best thing GG wrote. Read again, Mr. Sinker, if you haven't already.