Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)

[NiceguyEddie]

 

Then I read The Business by Iain Banks, which took all of about 2 days and is a great fun tale of a modern global version of the East India Company, running large chunks of the world. Hugely fun.

 

And I've started on The Human Stain by Philip Roth, which seems like a more sordidly fun version of Coetzee's Disgrace so far.

 

Both good books. The Human Stain is the one that will linger longest in the memory though.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Sounds very interesting. If I've never read Pynchon before, would you recommend this as a good starting point, or should I try something else first? It sounds a bit daunting.

 

Others have said that Vineland is about as easy as Pynchon gets. I, though, preferred Mason and Dixon, which would probably be in my top 20 novels. They're both pretty daunting (as, apparently, are all his books). But they're sufficiently wonderful that it's well worth the effort. I'm surprised there's no Pynchon thread on BCF, actually. Perhaps I should rectify that.

[Kylie]

Yes, I did a search for Pynchon to see what other people thought, but it just returned a whole lot of posts by you!

 

Thanks for the tip. I will give it a bit of thought.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I got distracted from The Human Stain for holiday related reasons, and have read Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium in the mean time.

 

It's an astonishingly good book. The insight of one of the great foreign correspondents of the 20th century on the Soviet Union, and in particular his travels in the country during the course of its disintegration from '89 to '92.

 

One of the best books of reportage that I've ever read. He's a man who's been there and seen it, all over the world, and he brings home quite what the horrors of the Soviet Union were, and how they hit individuals, and how the country was falling apart finally unable to control its constituent parts.

 

Genuinely brilliant.

[Kate]

I'm a historian and have studied the Cold War at university, and that sounds like a really good read. I'll have to keep my eyes open for it

[Freewheeling Andy]

The Human Stain took me much longer than it should, and I kept getting distracted.

 

Now, going through the nested novels, I've started Haldor Laxness's Independent People properly this time, and suddenly it's much easier to read having got through the first couple of pages and into the swing of his writing style. I reckon it could end up being nearly as good a book as it's purported to be.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, a month later I've finished Independet People. It's a good book, but there were times when I completely lost connection with the characters, and sometimes the writing style got a bit wearing with Laxness's tendency to drift off from plot and talk about "this is what farmers do", and so on. It's a narrative tool, I understand that, but it just grated with me.

 

Also, the last section just had me almost completely lose interest. The focus on how modern life ruined everything until Bjartur meandered off back to a more traditional croft, just didn't seem to belong.

 

Now I'm reading Gillian Tendall's "The House By The Thames". Down to four unread books on the shelf, and getting more and more into the turgid and difficult. But satisfyingly close to clearing the backlog.

[Roland Butter]

Now I'm reading Gillian Tendall's "The House By The Thames".

 

Good book, that one - Bankside is an area I know well, but even so this book really gave me a new slant on the area. Enjoy.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I'm quite familiar with Bankside - I lived by the Imperial War Museum and later Elephant&Castle for about 10 years, and spent a lot of time meandering around the south bank. Thanks, by the way, for your comment. I was expecting to be a bit intimidated (of that's the word) by the book, as I've begun to find the histories that I've been reading have taken me a long, long time. Just a little "I enjoyed this" from a normal person makes it seem like I'm going to struggle less. So far that's been true, too. It's a pretty easy read and generally fascinating stuff.

[Roland Butter]

I'm quite familiar with Bankside - I lived by the Imperial War Museum and later Elephant&Castle for about 10 years

 

That almost makes you a South Londoner.

 

Commiserations.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I then moved to Battersea and am now in Wandsworth. Apart from a few years around University I've spent all my life living in either Oxford or South London. It's very civilised in the south.

[Freewheeling Andy]

So, in the meantime, I got a little bored by "House by the Thames", there was something about the writing that began to really frustrate me - I think it's partly the smallness of the subject, which is something I generally have difficulty with; and partly it's the heavy personalising, talking of distant characters in friendly terms. I have a problem when biography does that, too. So I read an insane book called "Round Africa with my Bicycle" by Riaan Manser, who, well, decided to cycle along the coast of Africa from Cape Town to Cape Town. It's terribly written and great fun. Really poor writing, but the subject matter is sufficiently interesting that you don't care. Because there's so many different Africas - and so much violence and corruption, and so many bad roads, and so many civil wars, that no matter how badly you write you probably can't make it too boring, going through that many countries.

 

Finished House by the Thames after that, but was still in Road Book mood and read the rather wonderful Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson. It's got most of what I want from travel writing. Somewhere slightly unfamiliar, a writer who's familiar with the region but not blase; and who has affection for it without being positively besotted and unable to see the bad side. It has lots of humour, and a nice mix of history information, anecdotal stuff about the people he meets, and stuff about the travel itself as he hitch-hikes from the southermost tip of Japan to the northermost.

 

Still in a Japanese theme, I've just started Murukami's memoir "What I talk about when I talk about running". I'm 2 pages in and have no thoughts on it yet.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, the Murukami wasn't very Murukami-like. It was lightly interesting, although I think I'd have loved it if I was a runner.

 

I basically still don't have many thoughts on it.

 

Now I'm on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, which is the most important book I've read this year, and possibly the best. After a couple of chapters, anyway.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Finished Bad Science. I was right about it.

 

Now reading Three Men on the Bummel, which is Jerome K Jerome's sequel to Three Men In A Boat.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, since I last joined you, I finished Three Men On The Bummel, which is perfectly fun and light and fluffy and entertaining enough, but probably not in the same league as Three Men In A Boat. It plays perhaps a bit too hard with stereotypes as the men travel through Germany, but the episodes remain entertaining.

 

After that I read the very excellent Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon, who has sort of redeemed himself. Kavalier and Klay, of course, was brilliant, but it had felt a bit like a one-hit-wonder reading a couple of other things by him. This time, though not as good as Kavalier and Klay, he's back to something like form. A mixture of alternate-history and police thriller, it's excellent. A jewish mix of Raymond Chandler and Philip Dick, perhaps. Set in a world where the Jews were given an Alaskan homeland before the holocaust really started, and playing out the scenarios that came from it.

 

A really excellent mix, making some very strong political points about the US and Israel and the US's relationship with the jews, alongside a great fun gumshoe tale. Well worth reading if you can cope with some made-up yiddish colloquialisms and an assumption that you know a little bit about Jewish culture.

 

Now I'm reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral which, I think, is very very good indeed, but the writing is very dense which means it's taking me a long time to make much headway, and there's something about Roth's Zuckerman character that's beginning to annoy me.

[Freewheeling Andy]

So I've finished American Pastoral. I'm pretty sure it's a great book. Lots of insight and anger and stuff. But I'm really not sure it was for me. The writing was dense, the prose was heavy, the style, deliberately elegiac I think, always looking back at the past, meant that what story there was, in the present, was interrupted and fragmented. It was just very, very heavy work.

 

Right now I'm reading an old Vanity Fair, but next up should be JG Ballard's autobiography.

[Freewheeling Andy]

So, finished the JG Ballard autobiography, which was fantastic and fascinating - the first 2/3 of which should be genuinely fascinating for anyone who doesn't care about Ballard's work or literary London - the last was a bit less impressive in that regard.

 

Now reading Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls, and having a really hard time getting started on it.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Well, since I was last here, there's been some more reading.

 

Redemption Falls was OK. It's sort of a big, western kind of thing, post civil war, out in the sticks.

 

I can see why people would love it, but it wasn't really for me. The mixed up writing style was just a pain - some newspaper reports, some diaries, some pamphlets, some regular narrative. I can see the use of multiple voices, but it became a mess rather than coherent.

 

And then there's his over-obsession with Oirishness. It felt like it was deliberately written to appeal to those Americans who are more in love with their Irish roots than knowledgeable about them. Very corny.

 

All in all, a tad disappointing. Although not actually bad.

 

Then, in about 2 days, I read JK Galbraith's The Great Crash of 1929. What a brilliant little book. Certainly the best book about economics I've ever read. Very funny, very nicely written, proper economics and economic history.

 

And full of huge numbers of fascinating parallels (and non-parallels) with our current crash. Ever wonder why we're so screwed? It's leverage. Leverage is very bad stuff.

 

And, as I was in Istanbul over the weekend, I started Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, Memories of a City. I was given the book by my mum; after trudging very bored through Snow and My Name Is Red, I really didn't want to read it, but it's actually much easier to read than his novels, and fascinating. He still has some annoying introspective nonsense, but much less of it. Not bad.

 

Best of those three books my a mile, though, is Galbraith.

[Freewheeling Andy]

So I've finished the Pamuk and, well, he just annoys me immensely. The book is worth reading for the Istanbul stuff, which I kind of love. But he really is just one of those really irritating self-obsessed existentialist types who thinks the personal human condition is vitally crucial, and that the personal human condition is all about the misery and melancholy we feel inside blah blah blah. Tiresome. Very tiresome.

 

But the photos in the book are lovely, and the stuff about Istanbul is great.

 

The contrast, in terms of author memoirs, between Pamuk and Ballard couldn't be more stark. And perhaps that's why I prefer Ballard's books too. He had a proper experience as a child of a properly interesting world. And he wanted to contrast it with boring modern Britain. Meanwhile Pamuk, a spoilt little middle class kid, has that horrible European tendency to want to do art for the sake of art, some nonsense ideas of purity and so on. He just wants to product art, rather than to actually try and do something with his art. There's no agenda, it seems. Some people love that stuff. Not me.

 

Next up on the list, I don't really know. I've been reading little bits of Molecular Gastronomy by Herve This; but might read Brideshead next, or possibly Netherland.

[rwemad]

Well, since I last joined you, I finished Three Men On The Bummel, which is perfectly fun and light and fluffy and entertaining enough, but probably not in the same league as Three Men In A Boat. It plays perhaps a bit too hard with stereotypes as the men travel through Germany, but the episodes remain entertaining.

 

I have never heard of a sequel. I am looking for a 'shocked' emoticon!!!

 

Three Men in a Boat is one of my all time favourites. I have a very old copy signed by my dearly departed Grandad. It is one of the few books I have read time and time again. I actually do laugh out loud.

 

I will look up Three Men on the Bummel.

 

I feel slightly embarrassed. Is there more I should know about?

[Freewheeling Andy]

I think that's about it for Jerome. I don't know of anything else he wrote, and I'm pretty sure there's nothing else in that series.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I finished Netherland, which is an excellent, excellent book. Really interesting. Love the central character, and the whimsical way it plays with misplaced stuff, all - it seems to me - working on the sense on unreality in New York post 11/09.

 

The dutchman playing cricket, cricket in new york, etc. themes. But also the way that it works back to the fact that the dutch and cricket were in NY long ago. The broken and re-fixed romance was also very real, but seemed, too, to talk of New York itself and how everyone's relationship with it seemed to change in those years.

 

Fascinating stuff, and beautifully written. Not really my normal style of book, but light enough writing and none of that usual introspective garbage that kills, for me, some of those books which are more characater than plot.

[Freewheeling Andy]

So yes, that's one of my recent favourites, I'd say.

 

Next up is, probably, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

[Roland Butter]

Yes, Netherland appeals to me, too. I should bump it up the pile a bit.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I'm kind of surprised there's no thread on it here; there's been a fair amount of hype. Maybe people are put off by the cricket references, although they really have no need to be.