Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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I read more fiction than non-fiction books, but because I tend to spend longer over each non-fiction book, I'd think I probably spend about the same amount of time reading each.
But, although I read lots of non-fiction, it's almost never the kind described at the top. I'll rarely read reference or learning books, if ever - it will be travel writing, or history, or biography, or popularised science, or those grand-theme-economics books, or reportage, when I'm reading non-fiction. I just can't get grabbed by learning books.
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Now you mention it, I can hardly think of anything decent I've read about Germany. The only exception is Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time Of Gifts. And that, of course, is someone travelling on foot in 1933, so not really relevent to modern Gemany.
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I'll absolutely second the brilliant A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Road, although very different books.
Cloud Atlas is an interesting suggestion, but as only a small section is actually post-apocalyptic, it may not do the job.
I'd throw in to the mix the early JG Ballard's, The Drought, The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Hello America and (if you can find a copy) The Wind From Nowhere.
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So, it's been a while since I was here, and since then I've read Atomised by Michel Houllebecq, which I really wanted to like but, frankly, was just bleak and a bit annoying and a bit like the irritating child in school showing off how much he can talk about sex. I'm sure it's meant to be very clever, but it was like Will Self, all desperate "look how shocking I am" showboating.
After that, In The Devil's Garden by Stewart Lee Allen, about foods and sins. Not quite as bonkers or fun as his book about coffee, although probably less historically nonsense, too. Fun enough, but not magnificent.
And since then, The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman which I'm really enjoying at the moment, about how people shipped ice-blocks which were cut in winter in New England, all over the world, and that's how everyone got ice in the 19th century. Particularly intriguing is Britain's refusal to adopt the stuff, which still seems reflected in our pitiful sized fridges and so on. Britain really does hate change and modernity.
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From what I've heard on the grapevine, it's fairly unreadable and very hard work. More a triumph of intellect than necessarily a good read. From what else I heard, the Simon Mawer book sounded by far the most interesting.
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Ooh. Another interesting list here. I've got Hunting Mr Heartbreak on the pile of unread, at home. And I've just read Restless which really is fantastic. But what's really interesting is the Robert Millar book which, for some reason, I didn't know about.
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Again, a long time since I read it, but isn't the story meant to be one of the protagonist going to hell for the murder, indicated by the way that the experience repeats?
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Ooh. Some fantastic suggestions from Blencathra here. Bad Science really is a book everyone should read.
The Leopold Kohr book sounds fantastic. I'll have to hunt it down.
I chose mostly fiction because, well, almost all of my reading is fiction, but also I think that in many ways it tells more to a person than a non-fiction book; it is easier to carry morals using fiction.
I still included If This Is A Man by Primo Levi because, in many ways, I think it just about the most important book anyone could ever read.
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At-Swim-Two-Birds is a book I remember as one of my favourites of all time, although it's too long - 10 years or more - since I last read it. Flann O'Brien really was a comic genius; I'm very disinclined to laugh when reading, yet reading his newspaper pieces - collected as The Best Of Myles these days, as he was writing under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen - I found myself being stared at by commuters as I was practically creased up on the train.
Anyway, back to At-Swim, etc. The nesting of the stories, the whole meta-ness of the fictions and the way he takes the wee out of meta-fiction at the same time, is a work of brilliance.
Funnily, though, the insane tales I remember best from Flann are from other books - the meeting with St Augustine under the sea or the quantum mechanics, policeman, bicycle property transference thing...
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I think the same thing happened with novels as happened with CDs. At some point the technology arrived to make binding of longish novels easier. So people filled up the available space. Although with CDs they usually filled them up the rubbish, and people are now moving back to 40 minute albums because they realise they don't have 60 or 70 minutes of decent music in them.
Books, though, pander to the vanity of the author quite a lot, where authors often think they have brilliant magnum opuses (magnum opi?) and try and write great, grand novels. Forgetting that conciseness and preciseness is actually a skill that should be valued more than verbosity.
There is, also, a reader thing, I think, where there's a desire for value for money. And if a book is written in a fairly simple style you'll be through a 200 page novel in a day and perhaps feel short-changed.
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Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, is about Snow.
Unfortunately, it's by Orhan Pamuk, so it's dreadful, self-absorbed toss. Which is a shame, because a book about a political coup in a snow-bound city in Eastern Turkey should be interesting. Pamuk, though, has a magic ability to make interesting stories into utterly awful books.
Go for the Hoeg. Miss Smilla is a really good book.
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I finally read Oryx and Crake over the summer and was going to start a thread on it, but never got around to it. So perhaps this is as good a place as any for some thoughts.
It is, actually, a really good book. Really enjoyable, nicely constructed. And I really liked the ambiguity at the ending, so I'm not too excited by the prospect of a sequel.
But I do have a bit of a criticism - first up, the "brand names" on everything, like the "AnooYoo", were just annoying. They weren't clever enough to be clever, and the satire is just too easy, it's just too simple to have a go at that sort of thing.
The other thing that struck me was how Atwood seems to be playing on very cliched fears of change in the world, how all her targets, again, are the really obvious ones - oh look, isn't genetic engineering and the fear of ageing and damage to the environment so very terrible. And, you know, it just reads like it's very hand-wringing left wing stuff.
Fortunately, she's a really good writer, and the plot's good enough to get me past this, but the politics seems to be that of an environmentally aware 14 year old.
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I think my atheist, empiricist skepticism makes it generally hard for me to read books with miracles or god or heaven in them, with angels or ghosts in, with the supernatural or magic in them. I tend to like books where things I understand happen, and this comes probably from my broad position on religion/faith/supernatural, etc.
That's not to say that I can't read and enjoy books with some mystical elements in them, it's just that it's a substantial barrier for me to get past in my enjoyment of a book.
Religion, on the other hand, is fascinating, and novels that deal with religious elements without actually having any mystical-action, tend to be things I enjoy.
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I'm not that fussy, but I do tend to enjoy reading books set in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I think this is because the setting is real, but is alien to me, and also given the recent histories of these areas, because there's always political flux and ethnic tensions and weird despotic leaderships, it creates for fascinating tensions and plot lines that can't come from sedate anglo-saxon settings. (I think this is also evidence of why I don't tend to like mild-mannered traditional books of characters and emotions. I want things and stuff happening and weirdness).
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You've read nothing since April?
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I remember Amsterdam by Ian McEwan having a Lake District walking element to it. But I thought it was a pretty rubbish book, so that's not a recommendation...
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Two pet peeves
1 - very long paragraphs. Generally a trait in older, more "classic" books. Where authors write huge volumes of description without pausing for breath. And I'm too lazy to read large blocks of unbroken stuff.
2 - super-introspective characters, who are super-emotional and pathetic and appear to change their behaviour/mood/opinions of others on some really trivial thing, and treating it as a terrible slight that, say, someone didn't hold the door open for them, and then go off on a huge whiny complaint about how that person really therefore doesn't like them, and that means the whole of the group they are with doesn't, and that really changes the characters intentions for his whole life, blah blah blah. God, these characters want a proper slapping.
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And I have the same opinion of it that I have of Marmite...
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So, just finished this and have been completely engrossed by it.
Directly, it's a British journalists quest to meet and catch up with the remaining nine men who've walked on the moon; but it's much more than just that.
It definitely comes from the tradition (and often references) Tom Wolfe's magnificent "The Right Stuff". And, unsurprisingly, doesn't quite match up, because Wolfe's book is one of my very favourite ever.
But, unlike Wolfe, it doesn't really end up being all about the glory. Instead it's a much more poignant book, about how the Space Race and the Apollo programmes were doomed ventures, dead-ends, and how - as a result - we're left with an ever decreasing group of men who've ever left near-earth orbit, and who've ever walked on the moon. And how nobody has the vaguest of plans to ever return. That, not too long in the future, there'll be nobody left who's been up there.
All of the men who were there are fascinating in their own ways, and Smith is open to them. There's none of the bitterness you sometimes here. And they fill the bulk of the book; but the interesting thing is how Smith parallels Apollo with politics and with pop/hippy culture, and in particular how the naive optimism of the hippy-culture mirrors Apollo, although superficially there were so different.
A fascinating book. Flawed - Smith does that annoying-journalist thing of "I had this great insight that the person I'm interviewing had never heard before", which bugs me. And, clearly not as wonderful as Wolfe's book. But, if you're anything bordering on a space-geek, then this is pretty much essential reading.
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I don't have any "wishlist" at all. There are just too many books I want to read, and too many books I don't know I want to read which will actually be good, for me to bother trying to list any of them, or prioritise.
I have a "TBR" pile, in the sense of the books I've got which I've not yet read, and I try and keep that down to between 5 and 10 books; even lower if I really push it.
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Why on Earth should people read this?? Okay, yes, I haven't read it myself, so maybe I can't trash it (no wait, it's Twilight, so yes I can!) but from what I've gathered there's absolutely nothing to gain from those books!
Please, prove me wrong.
Well, from my experience reading Dan Brown, perhaps you should read it so you can actually honestly comment that it's the most risible dross you've ever had the misfortune to suffer through. I've no idea whether that's true for Twilight, but I can assure you that's the only reason one should read Dan Brown and perhaps that's also true of Ms Meyer's oeuvre.
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Oooh! I love, absolutely love, this book. It's one of the greatest novels ever, probably the first great post-modern novel, before post-modernism existed. It's wonderfully funny, engrossing, intelligent, glorious. And I don't even understand the references and parallels and satires on Soviet Moscow that are going on in it. One of the very few books I've read more than twice.
As for Margarita, I never quite understood her devotion and sacrifice for the master; I wonder if there's a religious parallel or a parallel in idea of the Soviet people following the communist leadership, but I don't really know. And it's still a few years since I last read it, so I'm not really in a position to discuss the real detail.
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I don't know if you saw it, but Gyre posted on another thread that Atwood has written something of a sequel to Oryx and Crake, called The Year of the Flood, which is centred around God's Gardeners. I, for one, am looking forward to it.
Ooh. Thanks for the pointer. I may well look out for that soon, although I actually like the ambiguity of the ending of Oryx and Crake, so to some extent don't want to know any more.
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Restless is another book I'll be getting, Andy. It's not often you say something's fantastic!
Hope you're alright, fella.
All is good. Just back from my travels, so got lots of work to catch up on, but I'll probably post proper reviews of all 4 books when I have time.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
in Previous Reading Circle Books
Posted
THIS THREAD WILL OPEN ON
1st NOVEMBER
IT IS ASSUMED YOU HAVE READ THIS BOOK BEFORE READING THIS THREAD, THEREFORE SPOILER TAGS MAY NOT HAVE BEEN USED IN ORDER TO FASCILITATE EASIER AND MORE OPEN DISCUSSION
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murukami
Synopsis:
Toru Okada's cat has gone missing. It is this, very mundane event, in a very mundane life, in a mundane part of suburban Tokyo, that leads on to a series of increasingly bizarre but interlinked events which never fully crystalise. Multiple themes re-emerge, from exploration of the subconscious, to the rarely spoken of (in Japan) atrocities of World War II.
Frankly, it's almost impossible to make any sense in a one para synposis, so I'll stop now.
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Some basis questions to start discussion off, then, beyond the general:
What did you think of Toru Okada? Did his passivity, and acceptance, bother you?
Are you content or frustrated by the way the book concludes, leaving so many loose ends and so much to your own imagination?
What is your opinion of the interplay between the mystical/magical, and the mundane, in this book?
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Other Works by Haruki Murukami published in English
Pinball, 1973
Hear The Wind Sing
Norwegian Wood
Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World
A Wild Sheep Chase
Dance Dance Dance
The Elephant Vanishes
South Of The Border, West Of The Sun
Underground
Sputnik Sweetheart
After The Quake
Kafka On The Shore
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
After Dark
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running