Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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I do actually think High Fidelity is useful for allowing girls to understand rather normal but slightly geeky blokes (that would be almost all of us). And Fever Pitch for those girls unfortunate enough to find themselves with blokes with a footy fetish.
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He remains spectacularly popular, though, and I can understand why. It's very easy to read the books. The fact that the characters are pretty two-dimensional and the plots fairly mundane are probably neither that relevent, because the books address people who aren't normally addressed by fiction. Chick-lit in its various guises has existed for ages, but lad-lit really started with Hornby, so there are loads of blokes who read Hornby and finally have "serious" fiction address their lives.
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I've not read either of those two, but Hornby seemed to struggle with women characters in About A Boy and High Fidelity. They were very "bloke fiction", and highlighted the male characters, which is why they were so succesful.
I loved Fever Pitch when I read it, and like High Fidelity a lot. But the books seemed to get more trite and less personal and more mundane as they went on, and seemed to deliberately target a very uninteresting demographic, of 30-40ish blokes who are English middle class, and who don't really have a lot to say about anything much.
I think the hype is overplayed, and it mainly comes from the opening two books being about football and music and therefore appealing to a bunch of people who are obsessive about those subjects, whilst also being easy to read, and meaning football and music journalists would rave about the books getting them lots of hype where other books would be ignored.
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Well, I've raved on and on about Cloud Atlas, so I'll rave a bit about my other favourite modern novel.
I wandered in to Waterstones today to get a coffee, and there it was, sitting lonesome on the shelf, next to about 20 copies of the spectacularly inferior Mr Phillips, and, amazingly, no copies of the excellent Fragrant Harbour.
The Debt To Pleasure, by John Lanchester. I picked it up as a gift (and because I can't lend my copy as that was lent about 3 years ago and not returned). By the time I finished the coffee I was again 20 or 30 pages in, and wanting to finish it. I refrained, because it is, after all, a gift, and I don't want to give it in a tatty, already-read state.
I don't know what to say about it without giving it away, but it's the funniest, most brilliant, most obsessively foody, fun, and wonderful book. You love and hate the narrator, you love some of his comments, and his outspokenness, you despise other parts of his snobbery.
But he is not really the narrator. He is the first person author of a cookbook.
The novel is written as a cook book and offers fantastic cooking advice, apart from anything else.
I can't tell you how utterly in love with this book I am.
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I shall be baking hot cross buns tomorrow morning.
Anyone else?
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Life of Pi is definitely in my "To Read" list, although not yet in the bought pile beside the bed.
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I read then first book, Titus Groane (I think), ages ago. It's quite a peculiar book. Definitely in the realms of fantasy in terms of the environment, but it lives with the fantastical descriptions of what's going on in the Gormenghast castle rather than having a great deal of plot. At least that's what I remember of it. It was way too far outside of what my normal reading zone was for me to really "get" it. I was much more into narrative than descriptive when I read it. It's clearly brilliant, but it's one of those things that won't be to everyone's taste.
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I know. It's shocking, isn't it. But it does happen every now and then. I'm back on the obscure stuff now, though.
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I agree with Kell. It's one of those books that takes half an afternoon to read, and which any age could (and should) read. But that doesn't take away any of the impact. It's an excellent, excellent little book.
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You've tried my Nike-steak, then?
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It's because BBQing is so easy that anyone can do it, and it makes men feel as if they offer something in terms of food. And it's playing with fire.
Honestly, though, amongst my friends I think the men enjoy cooking more than the women.
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And James Joyce? Well, I read the Dubliners. Then read the first two paragraphs of Finnegans Wake, and it took me about four days to get that far, and I decided it was probably a lost cause... So no more Joyce for me.
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The biography/autobiography thing is interesting. I can't face reading auto-biogs that are actually ghost-written. And if I'm reading biog/autobiog I want it to be someone who's lived a full and interesting life. Charles Darwin biography is OK. Wayne Rooney biog is not. Not that I read much of either, but a 20 or 30 year old can't have that much to say about their own lives.
But I also struggle with how friendly and personal biographers are about their subjects. I hate it when reading, say, a Darwin biog the author always talks about Charles, as if they were good friends.
Not reading the Mills&Boon/Jilly Cooper/Danielle Steele stuff should be taken as given from me, too.
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I think so. Either into a tv series or a film.
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I've only ever read one "Western" book worth reading - Lonesome Dove. But it is a bloody fantastic book.
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I stubbornly refused to read the HP books, too, after seeing a bit of one film, and hearing some of one read by Stephen Fry on Radio 4. The whole thing seemed so utterly risible, but now I'm refusing out of stubbornness rather than out of any rational, thought-through process.
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Me, I stubbornly refuse to read Pratchett because people have been talking him up since the beginning of time, and every time I see him on TV he's irritating, and the "in" jokes people tell from his books just seem very unfunny to me.
And I can't face the thought of those depressing dark "i had a difficult childhood" Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer type books, either.
And I always struggle desperately when trying to read any pre-20th century novels.
Anyone else?
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The life span of TVP is nil.
It is inedible as soon as it comes into existence. Don't let any weirdo try and tell you otherwise.
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Maybe not Turkish, as such, but Claudia Roden's Book Of Middle Eastern Cookery is excellent on the whole Eastern Med's cuisine (and north african).
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The Kapuscinski is just brilliant. Wonderful, brilliant, astonsihing, insightful and shocking reportage. I've just finished the piece where he's in Congo when the President is killed and everyone goes on a rampage killing all the whites in the city, then they escape by pure chance, end up in Burundi and put in prison as suspected allies of the Congolese (who were going to kill them), and again escape by pure chance the day they were going to be shot. Gobsmacked.
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I've started Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Soccer War. He's a legendary Polish foreign correspondent, and he covered all of the massive changes of the 60s. This is a shortish book, and covers his time observing something silly like 30 revolutions over 10 or 15 years. So far, so good. He sees loads and writes in a lovely, light, interesting style.
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Well, back to this - I've finished reading How The Universe Got Its Spots. A great read, covering some really hard physics - but starting from close to scratch so you get the history of physics thought along with tricky maths and then to the concept of the strange topologies of space. But being written as a series of letters it touches repeatedly on the personal and the personal life. Some of the Amazon reviews thought this was a bad thing - but I think it lightened the impact of the tricky physics. Others thought it was meaningless to have the personal in there because of the way the personal life seemed to have no direct relation to the physics.
I actually think this is good, because it leaves two parallel threads telling two important stories. The first about cosmology and topology. The second saying that even the hardcore scientist is not some mysterious freak living a soulless life, but actually lives a (fairly) normal life doing normal things, and no matter how much people often want to describe the glorious confluences between peoples' lives and research, the reality is that it doesn't actually work that way, any more than me going out on a date or going to the pub has any major impact on my work.
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Sounds very similar to something from Nice called "socca" that I've tried making a few times.
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And I was hoping this would be less bonkers, but instead of the anal-wow consumption factor and the world being run by the godess Ishtar, instead I get transfinite maths (infinity + infinity = infinity). Argh!
Fat Andy's Magical Book List
in Past Book Logs
Posted
Well, my birthday has added so much to this list. Quite a lot of it looks like heavy, serious, factual reading, too. Orhan Pamuk's memoirs of Istanbul, the 1812 book, about Napoleon's march on Moscow, Marco Polo's travels, a book on the Persians, a strange looking Indian novel, the new Ismael Kadare novel, so much stuff.