World Cup Month 2006: What are you reading?

Anyone read Vital Signs? by Shepherdson? I am tempted to order that as well.

My brain is clearly useless though: I once read a book only to realize about five pages from the end that "hey, I've read this before!" The book was Douglas Adams' "The long dark tea-time of the soul" incidentally, so maybe my mind just doesn't want to remember comedic novels abouts gods.

Just about to read - Tor!: The Story of German Football - Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger

If you're looking for a good football book try and find The Rise Of Gerry Logan by Brian Glanville

I'm about to start on Never Let Me Go, though. I swear it.

Now I'm reading "The Accidental Evolution of Rock N Roll" by Chuck Eddy, which isn't strictly NYC homework but feels like it might as well be. It's predictably marvellous and (I think) the fifth best book on pop music I've ever read.

Ray: in Bellos's "Georges Perec: A Life In Words" there are some fascinating explanations of the Oulipian 'scaffloding' used to construct "Life A Users Manual". You might know that already, but I suppose you might not.

Mikey: you are restricting yourself to football books and travel books this month. This could be re-stated as "this month I have gven up moomins and Brautigan."

Oh yes, I'm well stuck in to Never Let Me Go now. I can see why it gets donated to charity shops a lot. The cover is all wrong for the inside.

I hope to start on Don Delillo's Players next, and then reread some Daphne DuMaurier short stories.

i'm reading this too. it's fucking awful.

- Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome (the mediocre follow-on to his much better, now-classic Three Men In a Boat), and

- Tristan, (aka Tristan and Isolde), by Gottfried von Strassburg, in the Penguin Classic black-cover edition. Very strange courtly romance from circa 1250 AD.

I've only read My Life as a Fake out of that lot, and I didn't like it one bit. I don't like Carey's modern books as much as his historical romps, though, and I felt that this one in particular kind of flailed about looking for something to say without really saying anything.

Jed, do you really hate it? I think it's okay.

http://lrblog.typepad.com/

Even worse: it is written by John Lanchester.

I just finished Barthes' The Neutral.

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Io Non Ho Paura
Poesia in forma di rosa (Pasolini)

1. Cold Comfort by Susannah Waters
Novel about climate change in Alaska (do you see?). I know the author slightly so you must all go out and buy it immediately.
2. Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear
The third 'Maisie Dobbs' mystery. Went down easily.
3. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
More unlikely proof that Richard and Judy have quite good taste in books.
4. Past Caring by Susannah Dunn
Novel about reincarnation and growing up. Bizarrely, by another Susannah of my acquaintance though fairly distant. Purchase optional.
5. School Days by Robert B Parker
A slight return to form I think.
6. In The Stacks: short stories about libraries and librarians
Could hardly NOT read this, could I? Haven't finished it yet though.
7. The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L Carter
Huzzah, I finally finished it! I don't think it fully repaid my efforts to be honest.

It's GREAT.

Recent reading:

McEwan, Saturday - flawed, but excellent in ways

Goddard, Songs That Saved Your Life, 2nd edition - so atrociously written he gives Middles a run for his money, yet it *does* work as a chronological history of the band, and despite his weaknesses as a writer, his way of allocating themes and incidents to songs, etc, shows quite a sound structural sense.

I read it slowly and carefully, you see.

Crikey, maybe that's all.

I HATE that book. I hope I'm not alone. What did you think, mj?
I love "The Believer", and like what Eggers is doing with his time and money, but "AHWOSG" made me want to throw it in the road and watch trucks run over it.

I have finished Never Let Me Go, which promised much but did not deliver, I feel. Not sure what to read now.

Less good is Rebecca Solnit's 'Wanderlust: a history of walking' which is frequently interesting but written in that overbearingly earnest American style of feature journalism.

Well, from the little I have read, it seems to be fairly pointless, albeit somewhat funny in places.

I would not say that I hate it, but I do not know if I will continue reading it much longer. The "in-your-face" quirkiness and self-consciousness worked pretty well in the beginning, but it gets old pretty fast. And, really, the guy just is not that funny after the first couple of jokes.

What is Eggers doing with his time and money, out of curiousity?

E-mail, or send me an amazon message, or something, if more information is necessary.

Anyway, I guess it is time to get back to the, uh, relevant subject of this thread.

Then to Tatus written oh nearly two millenia ago - Leucippe and Clitophon, yes for study but there is really no other way to describe it other than lurid potboiler.

Now am reading The Day Of The Locust by Nathaniel West, it's brilliant and well-suited to these humid days, somehow.

I agree with you about him.

It's very good. Hard work, but good enough to make it worth it. So far. I wonder if the Kelly Montieth translation is easier to read than this "modern" one.

"Living" is set in the 1920s. I suppose some things don't change.

Now I'm reading "Shoedog" by George P Pelecanos, which I suppose is Washington, DC revision.

Come on, Randy Lerner!

Still digging Proust - it has funny bits! I have read more than 100 pages!

finished mulligan stew, started gaddis's 'j r'. got hammett's 'the continental op' and joe gores's 'hammett' for work reading, bcz j r is a bit much for lunchbreaks.

I didn't get all the way through vol 1 of Proust. But I don't remember finding him to be at all hard, just really really long.

christ it's an ugly book jacket:

not sure i got a lot of the jokes viz. baseball.

is sorrentino's poetry/criticism any good? and are his early novels like the novels of the people he mocks in his later novels?

i had to stop reading proust due to being told to go out and get a job whenever i did anything other than go out and try and get a job for more than five minutes, that summer. for an english teacher my mother disapproves of reading a whole lot.

maybe i should read the comic book version first.

I picked up Alexander McCall Smith's Espresso Tales in the Toronto airport, and it's nice and light and fluffy, but also intelligently written and engaging.

I am convinced Moncrieff is better, again, without actually having a clue. Lydai D writes "they all withdrew to the drawing room" or something, which STICKS IN MY GULLET!

I hope Espresso Tales is literally short stories about espresso. But I'm not entirely sure why Tom reacted so negatively to the title.

it seemed uh "lifestyle". but in a kind of very outdated way. and also it seems to indicate a bit of a tin ear.

i just read a call of cthulhu adventure in an old issue of white dwarf starring ... dashiell hammett. it was about the second thing in the box i opened, too.

Reading Granta 94: Where Travel Writing Went Next.

I recommend Jason Webster's Guerra! for any Hispanophiles. Some great summaries of key episodes of the civil war; the siege of Toledo, the Durutti Column, atrocities at Badajoz etc. The chapters dealing with his own impressions feel too clumsy and in places, contrived.

Got the Beevor Spanish Civil War book out of the library.

I also bought Lord Vishnu's Love Handles.

i've probably mentioned that, somewhere.

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Carry On, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
The Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
The Lais of Marie de France (only about 2/3rds of it)

Ill Met By MoonLight, Robert Moss (incorrectly identified as Patrick Leigh-Fermor, above: PLF was a main player in the book, but not the author. This is a diary of a Brit commando in Crete who helped to kidnap a Nazi general and smuggle him off the island. Ripping tale and whatnot.)

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (only just started it; I may not finish.)

Of these, the one most worth comment is The Fifth Business. I find I like to read a Robertson Davies book about every four years or so. He writes well, but I have to space them out, because his personal quirks emerge too strongly if I read them any closer together.

Now I shall be returning, sedately, to Portrait of a Lady from where I left off two weeks ago.

The other problem with Davies - he writes trilogies, so I always pound right through all three when I should stop at the one. Then I am done with him for several years, even though I really enjoy his books while I'm reading them. The Deptford trilogy (Fifth Business/Manticore/World of Wonders) was the first of his I'd ever read, then I had to wait 5 or 6 years to jump into the Salterton one.

And I have once more misattributed the WWII book. It was W. Stanley Moss, not Robert Moss whose daring do I read about. Please castigate me.

I finished "Walden" the other day and was quite amazed with it, as a whole.

Also, I should be getting a Frances Yates book on Giordano Bruno in the near future.

This is the first sci-fi/fantasy book I've read in my adult life -- for reasons I can't really articulate, it's a genre I've always avoided. First 50 pages or so I had issues with all the made-up creatures with silly names, but now I'm really enjoying it.

I hardly think that's the point though, do you?

Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power by Simon Kuper.

But, since I am working on a paper, I don't have time to read the above right now. Instead I am reading historical and fictional accounts of book-burning, including: Fahrenheit 451 and Bedlam Burning by Geoff Nicholson, which was the only other novel cataloged at my library with the subject heading of "Book Burning--Fiction."