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.

OK. This is interesting, very interesting. It's a different list, I think, to the best books I've ever read. It's certainly a different list to my favourite books. So, what do I really think other people should read. Everyone should read. I think that means the book has to be readable. But it also has to be important, it has to have enough message for it to be essential that everyone should read it. It shouldn't, for me, just be entertaining fluff. It shouldn't be brilliant but difficult Russian literature, like The Master and Margarita. It probably shouldn't be post-modern comedy like At-Swim-Two-Birds. Actually, although I love the post-modern playing and think it makes for the best books, the ones that make you think, I really don't think it makes for really important books that are essential reading. And, interestingly, it probably can be non-fiction. So, therefore, I will start with If This is a Man by Primo Levi (and The Truce as they come in a dual edition) This, basically, is probably the single most insightful piece of writing that I've ever read. Deep, profound, compassionate, yet funny, along with being utterly brutal. It describes Levi's time in Auschwitz, and despite the bleak subject matter he keeps the touch light enough for you to want to keep reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller This is the war novel, isn't it? The one that most describes the brutality and violence and horrors and utter stupidity of war. And it manages to be great fun, very funny and a great romp at the same time. Utterly worth reading. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee Another of those books that manages to tell a vital moral in a brutal historical context, yet isn't preachy or naggy, and is instead beautifully written and very readable. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (provided you skip over the pointless and tedious philosophical explanations about how history works, which are redundant, annoying, and break the flow of the book) Remarkably easy to read for such a legendarily long and difficult novel, actually an entertaining romp, mostly. But it also gives massive historical insight into the Napoleonic wars and into the hubris that great men acquire. It is actually probably as good as its reputation. and lastly, it's hard - there's too much war and history and profundity in here already, and I want to include David Mitchell or Haruki Murukami or JG Ballard or Ismael Kadare, as they're basically my favourite writers, but there's nothing about their books that make them essential reading for others. So instead, it's back to history and war and obscure eastern European stuff, I fear, with The Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andric This book tells a bunch of tales, almost like fairytales, woven around the existence of a bridge in Bosnia. It is fantastic, powerful, and wonderful, and within the book you also learn most of the history of how the Balkans became such a messed up mucked up part of the world. Genuinely brilliant.

They were probably mostly written by me...

I'm no expert either, of course. I have a feeling, though, that the quest thing is something that has existed in folk-lore and tales since the beginning of time, whether the quest is for the Holy Grail or a magical ring or in Greek mythology. That's what I mean by generic, even if it's the first of the new fantasy type books.

Cloud Atlas is the best book of the last decade. Unless someone's told you it was the best book of the last century, that's not over-rating. Meanwhile Atonement - sludgy, dreary, slow, boring, self-important, predictable, tedious, painful waste of time. Lord of the Rings - generic quest filled out to 3 insanely long volumes with a tonne of insufferable poetry and utter pointlessness Life of Pi - The bit on the boat was fine, but the 100 page prologue; and the end drove me mad. So it was just a fun adventure romp bookended by annoying pointlessness. Nothing like as good as claimed. (And then there's Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the rest, but that's probably another matter). -- As for On The Road, I think it's a book to be read at a certain age. It was great as a teenager, but I went back to it at about 28 or so, and it was very self-indulgent. I wouldn't necessarily say over-rated, too. It is great for a late-teens wanting to feel rebellion kind of mood. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is utter dross, but I didn't think many people rated it these days.

If an author thinks a book is non-fiction, it has to be defined as non-fiction, even if it's, say, deeply self-aggrandizing autobiography; or if it's Erich von Danicken; or whatever. There's nowhere else this stuff belongs.

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.

It's a while since I read the book, but I do remember it being a bit grating and annoying, and the whole romancifying of what McCandless was doing seemed a bit awry. It wasn't exactly a bad book, but it just could have been much better. Perhaps the material was a bit thin, but I don't think that's a great excuse.

I hate reading plays. And plays, of course, aren't written to be read. So it's entirely reasonable to not bother reading them. Plays are written to be acted and played on the stage. If I want to enjoy a play, I'll go and see a performance of it, in the medium for which it was designed. (Or possibly in film, as that carries a great deal of the same features). The Crucible is brilliant, by the way. Well worth having a copy of the text to look at the details after you've seen a performance.

The books of the year for me have been Bad Science by Ben Goldacre Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones and I'm currently very much enjoying The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon - If I had to pick one, it would probably be Imperium, which is a really majestically brilliant book. But it's basically a decade old. But any book which charts a brilliant journalist's own experience as he travels around a collapsing Soviet empire (and his previous experience under a super-strict Soviet regime) really has to be brilliant, and one by Kapuscinski doubly so. But Bad Science, Mister Pip and Yiddish Policeman's Union are all fairly new this year - either new in paperback or completeley new. If I had to pick a book of 2008 (rather than a book I read in 2008), it would definitely be Bad Science, because it's so spectacularly enlightening and adds layers of justifiable cynicisim to so much that you read and hear in advertising and reporting. Excellent stuff.

Blade Runner.

Yep. There's a thread of mine on it down the page. I think it's possibly the best, most important book of the year. Everyone should read it.

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon is all over the counter-culture. I'm not sure it's his best book, but possibly one that's most obviously part of the counter-culture. There's a choice between "alternative", when stuff like JG Ballard or Haruki Murukami or Will Self come into play, or whether you're concentrating very much on beat/hippy counter-culture in particular, when the Hunter S Thompson, William Burroughs stuff clearly gets the most play, or Tom Wolfe's early stuff, or crazy nonsense like Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head (and, I suppose, Philip Dick's A Scanner Darkly).

Why wold you read Shakespeare? Shakespeare's all about the plays, and the acting. Reading Shakespeare would be a bit like saying you liek Tchaikovsky despite only looking at the scores and not actually hearing the music.

The Road isn't explicitly nuclear aftermath, but that would also be one of my suggestions. I'd also say A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is probably (possibly) my favourite of all. Good choices by Gyre. Also I'd recommend Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. You might also like The Postman by David Brin, although it's nothing like the quality of the others on this list. And, although I've never read it, Nevillle Shute's On The Beach is one of the other classics of the genre.

I think Carl Sagan's position is flawed, though. You reserve absolute judgement until all the evidence is in. But until then you can make a best-guess, and hold it as your de facto position. In the case of extra-terrestrial life you can say: Well, the earth's been here for 4.5bn years. There's been life on it for 3bn years. In that period, there's only been "intelligent" life, capable of flight, long-distance communications, and so on, for maybe 100 years. So only 30 millionths of the time that life has existed has there been any chance of communication with ETs. That suggests that only 1 in 30 million life-bearing planets will be of real interest, which itself suggests we'll never meet anything more than bacteria and microbes. You make a best estimate.

I've got to agree with Fish and Chips. The terms is meaningless, because there can be no atheists by your definition unless they are being wilfully irrational.

Disagree with that. An understanding that gods are exceedingly unlikely to exist is clearly a position of atheism. A position of agnosticism is one of not having an opinion, of thinking of the positions as basically equal. Dawkins is definitely not of the "Well, they're almost equal hypotheses" persuasion, and is therefore an atheist. Not a "hard atheist", as he can't state "god doesn't exist", instead he's a soft atheist saying "Given that any god's existence is pitifully unlikely, I think I'll assume there's no god, live as if there's no god, because that's by far the most likely scenario". But it's definitely atheism, not agnosticism.

Well, there are two answers I'd give to that - first, and perhaps most obviously, you'll never know if a books worth re-reading if you don't read it once, so it's impossible to make that call before you begin to read. And, secondly, sometimes I read for blithe, trite, fun entertainment, and then everything's really about the plot, and then a book generally isn't worth reading a second time.

I think I read it in '92. From what I remember it's a perfectly entertaining, rather low-brow late Victorian romp. There was nothing very classy about it, but it did, at least, keep the suspense and drama and pace going all the way through.

I'm much the same as Ruth. I've picked up Blindness more than once, because of the reputation, but I just look at a few pages and the writing style beats me down and I think "Nah, I'll take something less consciously annoying".

Ah. Yes. I see your point. The perhaps there was more purpose to that coda than I'd thought before.

I'm not sure they considered it an amusing blip - but they certainly considered it an abberation. I suppose Atwood is telling us that reversion to conservative society may happen, but in the end it just won't last and that society will eventually progress. Arguably, it's a very positive message to have at the end of a book that's generally pretty grim about the human motive.

I think that's fair, ii. I think most of my problems come from Brontes and Austen and Dickens and Hardy and that sort of stuff. I never read Flaubert or Hugo, and have only read War and Peace of Tolstoy (and loved (most of) it). And, I suppose it's relevent, my favourite modern classics are also, generally, European. I'd rather read Kafka or Boll or Sarte or Hesse or Camus or Andric than read Henry James, say. My sensibilities are perhaps more European. I think I'd be much more likely to participate in the Classics circles if they were more varied in their focus and travelled around a bit. That said, sometimes translations of European classics seem very functional in English, they don't seem to carry much poetry of language through and seem a bit cloddy and straight. I'm sure this is just accident. I was thinking about this the other day, though, when I saw a Naguig Mahfouz book in the shop and thought about buying it. I opened and read half a paragraph and the writing seemed deeply simplistic, bordering on trite, and I think that's probably a consequence of bad, literal, translation.

So what does everyone think of the feminist agenda in the book? Superficially it's very obviously feminist, talking about how men take positions of power and dominate women given half the chance, about how the "establishment" hated feminism and lesbianism, and the feminists in the end became the great freedom fighters. And yet, there's also a slight anti-feminist side to the descriptions by the Gilead state, of how feminism and licentiousness between them had destroyed the fertility of the planet and eventually was going to completely cripple western civilisation unless something was done. Do you reckon there's a deliberate ambiguity? Am I reading too much into the second interpretation? Is the second interpretation just some propoganda presented by the Gilead state but a description of reality?