Now reading...

[paul secor]

Jean-Jacques Sempe: Displays of Affection

Actually mostly looking along with some reading. Sempe's drawings never fail to bring a smile, a chuckle, or a laugh when I look at them.

[A Lark Ascending]

The third of Downing's excellent series about a British/American journalist living in Nazi Germany. This one is set in the weeks leading up to the first setbacks in the Russian campaign in 1941 and the US declaration of war after Pearl Harbor.

Beautiful book about a family in St. Ives Cornwall during World War I with D.H. Lawrence and his wife who had retreated to Zennor nearby playing a key part.

Now really enjoying this Daphne Du Maurier/Wilkie Collinsesque ghost story:

Bev

Edited August 18, 2010 by A Lark Ascending

[paul secor]

Flann O'Brien: At Swim Two Birds

[jazzbo]

[Matthew]

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. For the longest time, I just didn't like Chandler's later work, but it seems as I get older, I'm beginning to understand and enjoy them more.

[Larry Kart]

Am in the middle of Anthony Trollope's "The Duke's Children." I've read a lot of Trollope in recent years and have yet to be disappointed. Can't imagine I would have cared for him before I got to about this age.

Also just read the most recent of Lee Childs' Jack Reacher novels, "61 Hours."

[jazzbo]

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. For the longest time, I just didn't like Chandler's later work, but it seems as I get older, I'm beginning to understand and enjoy them more.

I think The Long Goodbye is one of his best. . . certainly outshines all the others written in the fifties to me. I'm a BIG Raymond Chandler fan. When he was at his best hardly anyone could touch him.

[paul secor]

Ross Macdonald's Black Money

[ejp626]

Am in the middle of Anthony Trollope's "The Duke's Children." I've read a lot of Trollope in recent years and have yet to be disappointed. Can't imagine I would have cared for him before I got to about this age.

Also just read the most recent of Lee Childs' Jack Reacher novels, "61 Hours."

I actually read a great deal of Trollope in my early 20s, perhaps a bit too young to fully appreciate it, but I did start to get into the pacing about halfway into Can You Forgive Her? I suspect someday I will read through the Palliser novels again, though I am fairly unlikely to read Powell's Dance to the Music of Time for a second time. I'd really like to read The Way We Live Now, but I have stashed it away in storage, but maybe in a year or two... Curiously, I never read any of the Chronicles of Barsetshire books, so that is something else I have to look forward to.

Am mostly done with Karinthy's Metropole, which successfully conveys the overwhelming, pressing nature of this overcrowded metropolis the narrator has landed in. It actually is making me a bit claustrophobic.

[jazzbo]

Ross Macdonald's Black Money

Good one!

[BillF]

Very keen on English "kitchen sink" novels from c.1960

[A Lark Ascending]

I read this last about 40 years ago. The idea of returning to a place of childhood and finding it smaller appealled to me at the time; whilst I was retracing my own childhood in Cornwall a week or so back this book came to mind so, ironically, I found myself re-reading it.

Strange to read it now - Orwell was the first 'proper' author I 'got' into after reading 'Animal Farm' at school. I think I was very taken by his rather jaded, cynical take on life at the time and adopted a similar outlook in my late-teens. Reading him now I'm less comfortable - his wholesale attack on the aspects of what was then modernity (assuming that the viewes of his protagonist are his own; you certainly can feel "1984" coming). Above all a sense of superiority to everyone around who doesn't seem to appreciate the tacky nature of the world, a sense of distaste towards virtually everyone he meets. Maybe it's irony, a jab at the partially educated man.

But he has a wonderful way of evoking the power of nostalgia - his memories of a lost pre-First World War England. And the sense of menace - fascism, rubber truncheons, the ever present 'bombing planes' gives a real feel of how it must have felt in that year between Munich and the outbreak of war.

What surprised me is that my own return to childhood places had little in common with his picture of memories shattered and places distorted beyond recognition. I was amazed at how limited the changes were, how much the old spirit seemed to be there.

God knows what Orwell would have made of 2010 if he thought 1939 was tacky!

Edited August 26, 2010 by A Lark Ascending

[BillF]

I read this last about 40 years ago. The idea of returning to a place of childhood and finding it smaller appealled to me at the time; whilst I was retracing my own childhood in Cornwall a week or so back this book came to mind so, ironically, I found myself re-reading it.

Strange to read it now - Orwell was the first 'proper' author I 'got' into after reading 'Animal Farm' at school. I think I was very taken by his rather jaded, cynical take on life at the time and adopted a similar outlook in my late-teens. Reading him now I'm less comfortable - his wholesale attack on the aspects of what was then modernity (assuming that the viewes of his protagonist are his own; you certainly can feel "1984" coming). Above all a sense of superiority to everyone around who doesn't seem to appreciate the tacky nature of the world, a sense of distaste towards virtually everyone he meets. Maybe it's irony, a jab at the partially educated man.

But he has a wonderful way of evoking the power of nostalgia - his memories of a lost pre-war England. And the sense of menace - fascism, rubber truncheons, the ever present 'bombing planes' gives a real feel of how it must have felt in that year between Munich and the outbreak of war.

What surprised me is that my own return to childhood places had little in common with his picture of memories shattered and places distorted beyond recognition. I was amazed at how limited the changes were, how much the old spirit seemed to be there.

God knows what Orwell would have made of 2010 if he thought 1939 was tacky!

Like that book very much. Have read it several times.

[paul secor]

Ross Macdonald's Black Money

Good one!

Read all of Macdonald's novels about 35 years ago, & hadn't revisited them since. Decided that now would be a good time to do so.

[crisp]

God knows what Orwell would have made of 2010 if he thought 1939 was tacky!

Especially that tasteful TV show Big Brother.

[A Lark Ascending]

God knows what Orwell would have made of 2010 if he thought 1939 was tacky!

Especially that tasteful TV show Big Brother.

Quite.

I wonder if the people who created it were aware of the irony?...I suspect they never got past the idea of an all seeing eye.

The 'Britain's Got Talent/X-Factor/Be the star of a revived musical' programmes remind me of some of the narcotic entertainments in Huxley's 'Brave New World'. Where they both got it wrong was that there are a substantial number of people who refuse to be taken in.

Funny how the word 'talent' in Britain today has morphed to mean someone who can imitate someone else, however insipid, to perfection.

[jazzbo]

Ross Macdonald's Black Money

Good one!

Read all of Macdonald's novels about 35 years ago, & hadn't revisited them since. Decided that now would be a good time to do so.

I read them all about twenty-seven to twenty-five years ago. I re-read one a few years ago and enjoyed it. Since I'm nearly done re-reading all Chandler (for the fourth time perhaps?) I may grab one of his down soon.

[paul secor]

Arnold Wesker's story "Love Letters on Blue Paper" from the collection of the same name

[BruceH]

Giving the Martin Beck police series a try, with "Roseanna," the first one. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

[jlhoots]

Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses

[jazzbo]

Giving the Martin Beck police series a try, with "Roseanna," the first one. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

I'll wager you'll enjoy it once it reels you in. These were a great series of books to read. . . real and grim and with their own pace and "lighting."

[jlhoots]

David Fulmer: Rampart Street

[BillF]

Very keen on English "kitchen sink" novels from c.1960

I was a fan too, in my younger days - all part of the Smiths/Morrissey thing I was in to! What's next Bill - "A Taste Of Honey" or "The L-shaped Room"?

Just borrowed a library copy of David Storey's This Sporting Life and watched the film of Kind of Loving yesterday - mainly shot in Radcliffe and Bolton, incidentally.

[Jazzmoose]

I haven't posted on this thread much lately; I'm too embarrassed over my revisit to SF turning into a rut, but what the heck...at least it's not Harold Robbins! Currently reading Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman.

[GA Russell]

This weekend I read Carl Hiassen's current best seller Star Island.

Light fare with a few laughs. Not good enough to make me want to read another of his anytime soon, but not bad enough to discourage me from ever reading another one of his.