Freewheeling Andy Posted January 8, 2007 Author Share Posted January 8, 2007 OK. Let's just continue this on into the new year, eh, rather than split it aritficially at Jan 1st. So, on the Christmas hols I read Dance, Dance, Dance by Murukami which was brilliant, and probably my favourite of his other than Wild-Sheep Chase. Complex and lovely and weird and cut between mundane and fantastical. Ah, yes. And then Disgrace by JM Coetzee which was equally wonderful in a very different way, all about race and fear and love in modern South Africa, and how people deal with what goes on. And then Field Study by Rachel Seiffert, a bunch of short stories by an old school-friend who was nominated for the Booker a couple of years ago. Great stories, some of them, others perhaps a little bland. Generally ones about normal people living normal lives. Others, and possibly the best ones, about the fractures in modern Germany. And I've just started Eric Newby's A Traveller's Life, which is so far rather fun but not much to do with travel in the first few pages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted February 3, 2007 Author Share Posted February 3, 2007 Well, I really should catch up. I finished A Traveller's Life, which at times was excellent but was slightly unfulfilling as a book. Newby writes lovelily and had done more cool stuff in his lifetime than anyone rightly should. But the book is sort of a mix between autobiog and travel writing, except that it leaves out all the stuff he's written proper books on, so it skims over the best parts of his life. Probably the best chunks of the book are his wartime experiences. Now I'm on to The Bookseller of Kabul. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amanda1 Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 Well, I've finally finished Snow. Good grief. It's a book that should have fascinated me. The subject matter itself is great. But they style of the book is horrible, the way the author imposes himself more and more into the book, but does it in such a clunky way. The long, tedious, moping descriptions of emotions, of the tender, oh so tender and delicate and fragile emotions. Please. ****ing please. Gah! And, instead of being a fun tale of a revolution or coup, it's all about a bloody poet. And the bloody poet has poems "come to him" yet we never get to see them. It's all created by deus ex machina, but with no explanation, and no point. It's meaningless. Bleh! And the bloody hyperemotional poet/main protagonist annoys me so much, with a page of "oh, how miserable he felt when he saw in her eyes that she didn't truly love him but wanted instead to show him compassion" followed by him doing something on impulse with no explanation. Book moved on by "He suddenly saw a man and felt he had to follow him". Aaaaaaargh! Thank god its over. I'm reading Yes Man by Danny Wallace now. Thank god for fluffy books. I read My Name is Red and felt exactly the same way, maybe it's list in translaton but I have no desire to read anything more by him. Life is too short Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted February 5, 2007 Author Share Posted February 5, 2007 To be honest, Amanda, I felt exactly, exactly the same after reading My Name Is Red. Unfortunately someone had bought me a copy of Snow, then a couple of people said how much they liked it. Then I thought it was a modern novel, so going to be different. And it had been sitting on the shelf for a year and a half making me feel guilty and I had a holiday in Turkey coming up. So circumstances forced me to pick it up and see. The trouble is that anything you hated in My Name Is Red is still here. Possibly even worse. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amanda1 Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 How does he get such good reviews? I thought it was me not being high brow enough but I find him totally souless Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted February 5, 2007 Author Share Posted February 5, 2007 Grr! I just lost my post. Anyway, I was saying that there are people whose opinions are usually completely reliable who love Pamuk; and ones whose opinions are usually completely reliable who hate him like I do. I think it's really a matter of taste. Of whether you like Thomas Mann, almost. That deep introspective "poor frail emotional me" stuff. I'm sure some people find it to be a fascinating insight. Me, I think it's tedious crap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted February 13, 2007 Author Share Posted February 13, 2007 I finished The Bookseller of Kabul the other day. Pretty good, with some interesting insight, but perhaps I was expecting more from it. There just didn't seem as much, well, action as I'd have hoped. And I think most of what you're told about the lives of women in Afghanistan are things you probably already really knew anyway. I've now started on Adam Zamoyski's monstrous 600 page history of Napoleon's 1812 march on Moscow. So far it's an absolutely stonkingly brilliant bit of historical writing, telling you about political intrigues between the various emperors, kings, dukes, marshals, counts, princes and everything else, and making it interesting and exciting and wanting to turn to the next page. It's a hell of a mucked up era, late-Napoleonic Europe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted February 14, 2007 Author Share Posted February 14, 2007 Well, 1812 continues to be great. It's proper romping history. Full of grand-sweep stuff, full of failures due to backstabbing, to vanity, to ego, to stupidity, to cynicism. I love this kind of history. I want history full of generals who screw up because they're only interested in their troops parading in straight lines and not really caring about how to fight wars, about armies that take ages to move because the commander has too many carts full of his various wigs and costumes and scents and jewellery. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted March 1, 2007 Author Share Posted March 1, 2007 1812 is finished. And it continued to be as good as when I started it. A really good bit of history, with a really nice narrative way of writing, so you want to know what happened next. And what happened next was almpst always deeply incompetent and unpleasant, and Napoleon's failure turns out to have been almost entirely hubris, and the Russians' success had nothing to do with their generals who were venal and incompetent on the whole. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted March 2, 2007 Author Share Posted March 2, 2007 And today I started on Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. You can tell I'm down in the amongst the last dregs of the TBR pile, of things that are thoroughly worthy and thoroughly uninspiring. And it gets worse from here on in, but I'm trying to see how many I get through before succumbing to the lure of Waterstone's and fainlly buying some BS Johnson. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted March 22, 2007 Author Share Posted March 22, 2007 Well, un-grabbed by Strachey and distracted by Namibia guidebooks, I succumbed to advice and the lure of Waterstones yesterday, and came home, rather scarily, with War&Peace and All Quiet on the Western Front. What the advice was, and what makes me very happy, is that Craig Murray's book is out in paperback. The first three chapters are lovely writing and the subject matter is great. Expect me to go on and on and on and on about this book. He was the UK ambassador in Uzbekistan during the "War on Terror" phase when the government and US were turning all kinds of blind eyes to Uzbek abuses. He's also a thoroughly engaging interesting man who enjoys the sauce and the women, so it's a mix of politics and gossip. It's a book designed for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted March 29, 2007 Author Share Posted March 29, 2007 Just finished Murder in Samarkand. A fantastic book, certainly my favourite bit of modern political writing. Not exactly rigorous, but about as entertaining as a book about our government supporting a country which boils people to death can be. Torture, generally, being a rather un-entertaining subject matter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted April 12, 2007 Author Share Posted April 12, 2007 I've finished on Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. It's odd, I started finding it so dry, and really dull because I had no idea really who the people were. Also, it's odd because it's famous as a fairly vicious evisceration of reputations and it felt very mild. Yet the book grew on me as it went on and was actually quite fun reading as biography. But to the modern eye it really was just normal biography whereas I guess Strachey was writing in an era when hagiography was normal and the famous weren't to be criticised. Anyway, it's pretty good stuff but doesn't live up to the billing. Most interesting was the last piece on General Gordon, just because of the modern resonances of someone claiming to be the Mahdi and leading a huge army; of western fear and the running the neo-imperial campaigns against him because of fears of how it would ruin the middle east, but doing it in a bit of a half-baked way. Oh, and also of Darfur being a complete violent mess, even back then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted April 12, 2007 Author Share Posted April 12, 2007 And now, lucky me, I have Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace sitting next to me. I am scared. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted May 22, 2007 Author Share Posted May 22, 2007 Well, a month and a half on, and I'm half way through. It's worth it, though. Properly good book. Some times I'm a bit bothered by the "suddenly, he changed his entire world view" stuff, and the "She was the most radiant, beautiful girl, and everyone who saw her melted" stuff. It seems very shallow and almost Danielle Steele-like in its bad-romance stuff. But the family politics, the proper politics, and the battle and war stuff more than make up for any romantic deficit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted June 11, 2007 Author Share Posted June 11, 2007 War and Peace was actually pretty damned great. It romped along nicely, only annoying me when interrupted by too much analysis of history. Although that's part of the key to the book. My thoughts are mostly on the Tolstoy thread, but I'm very very happy to have read it at last. I'm now on to All Quiet On The Western Front, which is much much shorter, and very readable, although has the same dark and graphic and unpleasant battle scenes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted June 14, 2007 Author Share Posted June 14, 2007 I'm quickly through All Quiet On The Western Front. It's interesting alongside War and Peace, because both describe the horrors of possibly the two nastiest wars ever fought; but the contrasts are stark in the simplicity of All Quiet, and in the fact that it's all from the point of view of the infantryman, rather than from aristocracy. Anyway, it's really easy to read despite being very, very grim in places, and an incredibly strong anti-war novel. I really can't think of any obvious criticism. Excellent stuff. I'm now reading the much easier still "Millions of Women Are Waiting To Meet You", which is an internet dating memoir thing, and is disturbingly, worryingly familiar, and my girlfriend asked me whether I was the author when she read it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Polka Dot Rock Posted June 14, 2007 Share Posted June 14, 2007 ..."Millions of Women Are Waiting To Meet You", which is an internet dating memoir thing, and is disturbingly, worryingly familiar, and my girlfriend asked me whether I was the author when she read it. Oh dear! Now that is worrying comment! Last month, The Guardian had this as it's Paperback Choice of the week. He reviewer said he found it a bit disturbing in parts (I forget why) but that he really enjoyed it. Funnily enough, he could relate to it too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted June 15, 2007 Author Share Posted June 15, 2007 I bumped into it ina bookshop at bought it for the girlfriend as we'd met on the on-line dating thing. It's just so very, very, very disturbingly familiar. And funny. So far, I'd recommend it to anyone who's ever tried internet dating. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted June 22, 2007 Author Share Posted June 22, 2007 I finished Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You. A really enjoyable book; not particularly highbrow but very enlightening. The author is a bit sleazy, but that's part of the fun - you go through his occasionally sordid romantic past in parallel with his internet dating experiences. I think it would probably be a reasonable book for most girls to read to get a bit of an insight into the male brain (in the way that perhaps High Fidelity once was, too). And it has a world of sensible pointers for anyone about to embark on internet dating, even though that's not really what it's trying to do. And it still could almost all have been written by me, as it's all set around where I work, and the author has so many of my tendencies (particularly terrible commitment-phobia). I have no idea what I'm reading next. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted June 25, 2007 Author Share Posted June 25, 2007 I've started on a book called Raven's Exile which is a description of a season on the Green River by the wife of a ranger, the couple spending their summers repeatedly running the river in Desolation Canyon. It should be fascinating, given that I've just come back from a week rafting a (different) section of the Green River. But 25 pages in and I'm about to abandon it; it's my least favourite kind of travel writing, the stuff that uses 25 adjectives when one will do, that fills the pages with the most tediously flowery writing, and it feels like this is being done because, well, there's no content. There's been a little description of geology and, well, that's it so far. Lots of words about fluttering, flowing, shimmering , whispering rivers, and all that rubbish, but nothing actually worth reading. I may give her 120 more pages, but she's driving me mad - not only the writing style, but the author yammering on about sprituality in ravens or the search for the inner soul in desolate landscapes or some such drivel. Argh! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Janet Posted June 25, 2007 Share Posted June 25, 2007 But 25 pages in and I'm about to abandon it; it's my least favourite kind of travel writing, the stuff that uses 25 adjectives when one will do, that fills the pages with the most tediously flowery writing, and it feels like this is being done because, well, there's no content. There's been a little description of geology and, well, that's it so far. Lots of words about fluttering, flowing, shimmering , whispering rivers, and all that rubbish, but nothing actually worth reading. I may give her 120 more pages, but she's driving me mad - not only the writing style, but the author yammering on about sprituality in ravens or the search for the inner soul in desolate landscapes or some such drivel. Argh! Oh, it's so annoying when that happens - why do people do that - do they think it makes them clever?! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrathofkublakhan Posted June 25, 2007 Share Posted June 25, 2007 <snip> Lots of words about fluttering, flowing, shimmering , whispering rivers, and all that rubbish, but nothing actually worth reading. I may give her 120 more pages, but she's driving me mad - not only the writing style, but the author yammering on about spirituality in ravens or the search for the inner soul in desolate landscapes or some such drivel. Argh!</snip> I'm a-guessing your response is more entertaining than the book, it's hilarious! Ha-ha-ha ... drivel indeed, well said Andy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted June 26, 2007 Author Share Posted June 26, 2007 Well, I feel no shame in having abandoned it and hidden it at the back of the bookshelves. I'll feel no guilt about not reading it. I've now started on the fascinating "Unspeak" by Steven Poole, about the use of heavily loaded language to spin what people are saying without explicitly spinning. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freewheeling Andy Posted July 12, 2007 Author Share Posted July 12, 2007 I finished Unspeak. The premise was solid, and the writing OK, but it was somehow a bit underwhelming. Oddly, one of the most underwhelming aspects was the way it focussed on US and UK governments, and took a very traditional lefty approach, so although early on it mentions Friends of the Earth, most of the time the criticism is of Freedom and War on Terror and Bogus Asylum Seekers. All, admittedly, horrible abuses of language. But the one-sidedness of it got frustrating and some of the time it felt a bit like reading a Ben Elton monologue from the 80s. There was enough that was enlightening, though, to make it worth reading. I'm now reading something called "The Cyclist - A Novel" (which should please various people on the board), which I picked up for $2 in Newhaven, Ct when I had nothing to read a couple of weeks ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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