October Reading Thread

[Bick]

I'm now starting Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. I'll review it this on this thread, in due course.

 

[Foxbat]

Hemingway often uses prose in poetic ways, working toward an effect rather than just a description or a detailing of action. It's been 30+ years since I read it, but I recall reading it at a galloping pace for me -- I'm used to Hemingway-esque prose since he was one of the strongest influences on hard-boiled fiction -- and wouldn't have cut a word.

You've made me curious what I'd think of it now.

Randy M.

There’s one chapter in particular where Pilar recounts the atrocities committed in her village. She effectively goes through them one by one. It makes for a harrowing and exhausting read but it left me with the distinct impression that this was no longer fiction. I felt (perhaps wrongly) that Hemingway was using his novel at this point to recount real events and to, in some way, memorialise those that had died in real life through his work of fiction.

 

[HareBrain]

I've now started Susanna Clarke's Piranesi which coincidentally is another story about a character with memory issues in a vast and mysterious structure although other than that not very similar to Harrow the Ninth. It's also not much like Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but it is good so far.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Piranesi.

I'm slowly plugging on through The Magus, now alternating it with my first ever (!) reading of The Wind in the Willows, which I recently bought as a secondhand hardback with Arthur Rackham plates.

 

[Hugh]

Derek Jarman: Modern Nature, Journals 1989-90
For me this was an unexpectedly good read. The main focus of these diaries is his love for his garden/house and the landscape of Dungeness, though he also goes into some detail on his early life and current friendships. All this of course is written in the shadow of the nuclear reactor at Dungeness, his own diagnosis as HIV positive, and the increasing deaths of close friends: sadly in the second year of these journals he has several serious hospital admissions.
While I appreciate his individuality and anti-establishment stance, I've had minimal knowledge or interest in much of his career and milieu. What I really enjoy in the book is his account of working in the garden and the ever changing weather. I've always been dismissive of the frequent citings of his garden in the media, and never saw it as a particularly big deal, just part of his increasing sanctification, but his tender love for and interest in anything growing and his observations of the changing seasons shine through in this book. I began visiting Dungeness in the early nineties, soon after I moved to the coast, not that far away, and its strange bleakness drew me back once or twice a year until fairly recently, so there is much that I can connect with in this book.

 

[Randy M.]

There’s one chapter in particular where Pilar recounts the atrocities committed in her village. She effectively goes through them one by one. It makes for a harrowing and exhausting read but it left me with the distinct impression that this was no longer fiction. I felt (perhaps wrongly) that Hemingway was using his novel at this point to recount real events and to, in some way, memorialise those that had died in real life through his work of fiction.

I expect you're right. In some ways the Spanish Civil War was a warm up for WWII, the Germans siding with Franco I believe, and many Americans volunteering to help fight the Nationalists. I can't recall how (if?) Hemingway was involved, but I would not be surprised that some of what he wrote reflected either what he saw or what was reported to him, maybe supplemented by his involvement as an ambulance driver in WWI.

Randy M.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'm currently reading The Beat Goes On, by Ian Rankin. The Complete Rebus Short Stories.

 

[tobl]

I expect you're right. In some ways the Spanish Civil War was a warm up for WWII, the Germans siding with Franco I believe, and many Americans volunteering to help fight the Nationalists. I can't recall how (if?) Hemingway was involved, but I would not be surprised that some of what he wrote reflected either what he saw or what was reported to him, maybe supplemented by his involvement as an ambulance driver in WWI.

Randy M.

i believe he was there during the war

 

[vanye]

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson - (...) And this is where my problems began. The whole book is obsessed with and set around the world of high fashion, branding and marketing. I absolutely loathed this aspect, even if it is meant to be satirical (and I'm not sure about that) it still a world of backbiting, appearance-obsessed, yuppie sociopaths and I hate everything about them. I did back then and I still do now. This meant that I simply could neither like nor empathise with any of the characters and the writing was completely filled with Gucci this and Prada that making me skim over at least a third of the actual prose. I suspect that will prevent me from reading further in the series. (...)

Bad memories? Have you read Richard Morgan‘s Market Forces? If yes, would you share your thoughts?

 

[vanye]

.Much better was Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien de Castell, the first in the Greatcoats fantasy series about a former king's magistrate and his two best friends who are out to restrain the power of evil dukes and bring law back to the land, and I'll try and do a longer review when I finally work out my feelings about it. It's not without flaws, some rather hackneyed tropes among them, and when I came to list them, all the good points I could think of about the writing and the story were heavily outnumbered by the not-so-good. Nonetheless, I read it through quickly with scarcely a pause, and immediately went out and ordered the rest in the series.

I felt similarly about Traitor‘s Blade. What can I say? The third book has become buried in my TBR pile. It might ossify.

 

[kythe]

This year I havent really been in a horror mood for Halloween, but I decided to read Hell of a Deal by Mark Huntley-James. Told from the first person perspective of a demon trader, this story portrays a very active "underground" supernatural world through tongue-in-cheek humor.

This story feels like it could be part of the TV show Supernatural. I keep half expecting the Winchesters to come in and bust it up. But this group of occultists, witches, and religious extremists can hold their own.

 

[Dragonlady]

Reading Black and British by David Olusoga. I should be reading loads of stuff relating to what i'm trying to write but I'm determined to finish this without getting sidetracked and putting it down

 

[Danny McG]

Reading Black and British by David Olusoga. I should be reading loads of stuff relating to what i'm trying to write but I'm determined to finish this without getting sidetracked and putting it down

I remember a TV series a few years ago with that title, was it based on the book you're reading?

 

[Dragonlady]

@Danny McG i thought it came out this year, but yes, it is linked to a TV series, he's done quite a bit of TV stuff recently

 

[Vertigo]

Bad memories? Have you read Richard Morgan‘s Market Forces? If yes, would you share your thoughts?

Yes I have read market forces though sadly it was in one of my busy periods and didn't get a full write up from me. I found it very good and gave it 4 stars. It is an interesting comparison; I think Pattern Recognition almost glorifies the puerile obsession with high fashion and yuppies, maybe it is meant to be satirising them but, for me, if that's the case it failed. I find/found that whole world so shallow and obnoxious that I winced everytime he ran through all the brands being worn by all the players in PR so that in the end I just skipped all of those descriptions and that meant skipping 50% of the prose. Market Forces on the other hand is utterly scathing about the lack of morals of big corporations which is absolutely something I can get behind. He has two dedications in the book one of which reads;

It's also dedicated to all those, globally, whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out by the Great Neoliberal Dream and Slash-and-Burn Globalisation.

Which sort of says it all. In other words I could get behind the philosophy of MF but not PR. That said I certainly wouldn't say MF was an easy or even enjoyable read, really; it was just all too painfully plausible to be easy reading!

 

[vanye]

To be sure, I could relate to Market Forces very well. Especially the car thing cracked me up. What a great image to describe corporate culture and then to take it over the top like that - pure genius!

So I take it you‘re not in the habit of hanging your jacket on the coat rack inside-out so everybody can see the brand?

 

[Vertigo]

To be sure, I could relate to Market Forces very well. Especially the car thing cracked me up. What a great image to describe corporate culture and then to take it over the top like that - pure genius!

So I take it you‘re not in the habit of hanging your jacket on the coat rack inside-out so everybody can see the brand?

You really don't need to see the F+F brand labels on my clothes! (for the non Brits that's a popular supermarket clothes brand! )

 

[vanye]

I would break a lance for marketing as a discipline, though. Going digital has been turning it inside out. It‘s been an interesting two decades.

 

[williamjm]

I finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is one of my favourite fantasy books so I was always going to be interested in Clarke's second novel. It's definitely a very different book to her debut, where that was long and packed with detail and a large cast of characters this is a much shorter book (it's a little over 200 pages) which doesn't even feature a single footnote. It's also got a much smaller cast, in one of the early chapters our narrator (who may or may not be called Piranesi) gives a complete list of all the 15 people who have ever lived in the world, 13 of whom are dead. His world is a seemingly endless structure consisting of many huge rooms most of them filled with statues, it's a fascinating setting and many of the journal entries in the book are devoted to the exploration of it. As the book goes on it also gradually fills in the backstory to explain how the lead character came to be there, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many things he is ignorant of.

It may be a very different book to Strange and Norrell but in its own way I think it is successful as the earlier story. The protagonist is a likeable character and his quest to try to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding his existence make for a compelling story and I thought it had a satisfying ending.

I'm now reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Masquerade in Lodi, the latest of her Penric and Desdemona novellas (although it's set some years before several of the previous novellas). I always enjoy these stories and this one is no exception even if it does have a slightly more low-key plot than some of the others.

 

[Danny McG]

A crime thriller today.
Killer past by Maris Soule

 

[Hugh]

Poul Anderson: The Star Fox (1965)
I thought it disappointing - Poul Anderson is usually better than this. There's also a heavy-handed message in favour of the Viet Nam War which may even have been the reason for writing the book. (I note that despite his hawkish beliefs Anderson never served in the armed forces).
There's one rather wonderful anomaly:
"The intercom brought clicking noises. C.E. must be using his Naqsan equivalent of a slide rule....."
....... slide rules being used in interstellar travel!