Freewheeling Andy
-
Posts
1,119 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Books
Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
-
-
It may only be of interest to a Ballard obsessive like me, but there's a very good piece by Simon Reynolds here
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/04/23/ballard/index.html
about the great man, and his influence, and his style.
There are a couple of things I have issues with in all the writing about Ballard I've seen in recent days, mind you. I think it's lazy journalism to go over the Joy Division/Comsat Angels music link. And I think it's pretty lazy journalism to do the "Hey! He had an adjective!" line, too.
I'm also of the impression he had much more of an influence on British literature than some suggest, as he was at the forefront of that desire to sabotage and subvert comfortable middle-class England with shocking images transposed into that environment - a precursor, really, to the Martin Amis and particular Will Selfs.
-
Empire of the Sun is a brilliant book. But it's one of those odd books which despite being brilliant is very different from the rest of the oeuvre of the author (a bit like, say, Norwegian Wood). It might give people a slightly odd impression of what the rest of his writing was like.
That said, the breakdown of society in a closed compound, and how it reorders and restructures itself, and the emergecnce of authority figures and peoples' desires to fall in behind those authority figures and go along with their weird suggestions or orders, which does feature in Empire of the Sun, features across lots of other novels, too.
-
It plays with the idea of people getting aroused by car crashes, by the impact of destruction and technology. Fascinating and deeply disturbing. In the autobiog he talks about how he set up an exhibition in relation to it, of crashed cars, and had topless models serving drinks; and of the astonishing reaction it had, of people either getting physically violent, or, even more oddly, getting it on.
He was focussed on the psychological implications of the modern world and how people interacted and dealt with it. Utterly fascinating.
Crash is the novel that focuses on sex-and-car-crashes. Very graphic and violent, and not for the faint-hearted.
-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm
In some ways, I think he was possibly Britain's greatest post-war author. He didn't focus too hard on character, and was certainly not a traditionalist, which is why he never won the prizes. The fact he started writing for SF magazines, and the focus on sex and the breakdown of society, on trying to sabotage the conventions of dreary post-war Britain (either within his books, like the plane crash in Shepperton leading to the creation of a god who transformed the suburban landscape in The Unlimited Dream Company; or by using his books/stories with something like The Atrocity Exhibition or Crash to shock) probably led to him not being adopted by the mainstream.
But it was precisely this visionary stuff - seeing the sexual implications of car crashes; or picturing the hell of modern living and how people get isolated and how easy it is for society to break down, in books like High Rise or Cocaine Nights - that made him so brilliant. All of it, it seems, informed by his childhood spent in hyperactive pre-War Shanghai and in the Japanese camp; and by his shock at how dreadful the Britain he returned to was in comparison.
The autobiography, which I read recently, is fascinating and brilliant and explains the central thesis to his work well, and how much of it comes from that early experience.
I'm sure there's an empty swimming pool with some broken sunglasses at the bottom and a 1950s nuclear bomber flying overhead, today.
-
I apologise for coming on so strong. I've just re-read my post and it really is a bit rude. I'm sorry. I hate being/sounding rude, but I certainly did here. Again, my apologies, and please don't kick me out of the sandbox. It's way too much fun in here and I'm meeting such lovely people.
Hahaha! If anyone was being rude, and being told off for being rude, it was me for being prescriptive about what people should read, and being rude about what others' suggested. I'm right, of course, because I always am. But I wasn't exactly sticking to the spirit of the thread.
-
I think I just developed a small crush on Andy.
Me too.
-
Actually, I sometimes don't bother reading the last 20 pages because all the worthwhile stuff has already happened. All the characters are already developed. I don't know why anyone bothers, I really don't.
-
I never read Chapter 4. I feel it's a waste, and redundant. It's after the scene-setting and before the finale, so why would I bother? Eh? Huh? Think on!
-
Of course I read prologues. What a weird, weird question. Very odd indeed. A prologue is, by definition, part of a book. An introduction written by someone other than the author is another matter, because that is meta-information about the book. The prologue is a fundamental part of it.
-
Well, there are different things, I think.
List my favourite books
List books I think people would enjoy most
List books people should read
I'd come up with completely different lists for each. Clearly there are no rules, but it's a surprising list to me looking at the title of the thread.
And no, there's nothing wrong with reading for entertainment. But it seems to me to not be something I would say someone "should" read.
-
Not wanting to be rude, but "Everybody should read" Harry Potter, Twilight and Jodi Picoult? Really? They might be peoples' favourite books, but I'm hard pressed to believe everybody should read them, that there's any merit beyond entertainment...
-
Of course, the risk with going for something too adventure/page-turner-ish in a reading circle group is that, even if the book is easy to read and fun, quite a lot of adventure books don't actually have a lot to discuss outside the literal stuff of the plot.
-
re Herve This...
I'd love to read this book. I remember putting it on my wish list when the first series of Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection was broadcast.
I'm only about 50 pages in, but it's fascinating stuff if you're a foodie and interested in the science of it. So far it's very much focussed on individual dishes and how received law might be wrong or right, but explaining why. The other great science-of-food book is Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking, which explains in much more detail the science of food.
-
Yeah. Given that I'm one of the people who strongly argues that modernism defines a different form to the classic novel, I think it would be slightly unfair of me to want Hasek and Kafka and Bulgakov should be in the classic reading circle. Going to pre-1914, I think the "Eastern European" would be much more narrowed down to Russian.
Another regional one, that might be more popular, would be American, or even American adventure, books. Stuff like White Fang by Jack London, Moby Dick (of course) or perhaps better Billy Budd by Herman Melville, some Mark Twain (if we're steering clear of Moby Dick, steer clear of the obvious Twain, too, and go for something like A Tramp Abroad or A Connecticut Yankee...), if you're feeling brave you could include some Henry James or Thoreau. Or maybe slightly less heavy with The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane.
-
Well, I'd have thought WWI was more obvious - although it would take out Schweijk, Margarita and Kafka from my list.
-
My personal taste, for a book I'm going to be discussing, would be to have something a bit meatier. For all that I love reading Childrens Classics, there's only so much you can say about them.
-
Probably in terms of the amount of time I spend reading, it's probably equal between fiction and non-fiction; I do, though, find fiction easier - plot and narrative drive make it much easier to obsessively read an entire book quickly. So I read lots more novels than non-fiction books. My current non-fiction read is Molecular Gastronomy by Herve This.
Most of the non-fiction I read is travel writing, or area-specific history.
-
Yep. I'd read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase long before.
-
The difference between a book which is classy, great, high quality, etc, and a classic, is surely easy to understand.
A book which is defined as a classic, broadly, is one which has stood the test of time, apart from anything else. But also, traditionally, it's a book in the classic style - one which isn't too modernist.
Anyway, as we're allowed a cut-off of 1939 rather than 1900, say, I'd like to suggest a Russian, or maybe even Eastern European, month.
Personal choice would be
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (which everyone should read)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (ditto, although it was on the nominations list not long ago, so perhaps a different Tolstoy)
The Good Soldier Schweijk by Jaroslav Hasek (The other great anti-war comedy)
Some Dostoyevsky, perhaps Crime and Punishment
Perhaps some Kafka, like The Castle or The Trial
You could even have some Conrad, if you were so inclined.
-
Has anyone already read his latest Novel 'What i think about, when i think about running'? I haven't has time yet, but I'm very excited!
Yep. It's not a novel. It's a memoir, and quite weird, too. It partly describes his writing, but mostly it's about his obsession with marathon running and triathlons. Completely unlike anything else of his I've read, and not necessarily a book I'd recommend unless you were a runner, I think.
-
I was reading the Wiki entry on Waugh yesterday and it was explaining how Brideshead was a reflection on his ever more reactionary conservatism. Funnily, I really didn't get that at all. He clearly loved inter-War aristocratic Oxbridge type life. But to me he seems to have accepted that it's anachronistic and failing, and he is, in part, parodying and chronicling the inevitable decline. He loves it, but he knows it can't last, that it's lost.
-
As I've said up-thread, I think this is such an important book for precisely the reasons Seiichi says. It's sufficiently accessible that those of us in the ill-informed or semi-informed masses can read and understand it, and will become far better able to interpret the data when it's presented by either incompetent or deliberately dissembling journalists.
Even if the editors think they have a good story, the more people who treat the stories or reporting with the disdain they deserve, the better.
The media coverage is, perhaps, even more important than the invidious presentation of bad research by pharma companies.
-
I'm bringing this back to the top partly because Michelle's reading it at the moment, but also to let you all know that you can get the missing chapter from the book here:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/
It is released by Goldacre under the collective commons license.
The chapter wasn't in the initial print of the book because he was being sued by the protagonist, Matthius Rath. The material is now allowed out. And it's really, really shocking. I mean, really shocking. Probably the worst of all in the book in terms of the impact of pseudo-science quackery. Jaw dropping.
-
His, by the way. Evelyn was a man, surprisingly.
Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)
in Past Book Logs
Posted
Thanks for your comments, rwemad. I'm glad I'm not the only one who objects to Austenesque nonsense.
Anyway, I've now finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, and frankly I haven't the slightest clue what all the fuss is about. How did it win a Pulitzer, I wonder? It's geek central with all the (occasionally) obscure references to fantasy books which leave those of us unfamiliar in the dark. Maybe 15% is in Spanish, just random Spanish phrases thrown in, which adds another layer of lack of understanding. There are long footnotes galore on the history of the Dominican Republic, which would be fairly interesting on their own but don't belong in a novel. The structure is by someone desperate to be Philip Roth; the style by someone desperate to be Mr Cool; the result is actually pretty rubbish. Underwhelming. The only really worthwhile stuff is the link to Dominican history, but you get that better in Vargas Llosa's Feast Of The Goat.
Meh.
Right now I'm once again back on Ackroyd's Biography Of London, but will probably only last about 2 more pages before I buy something else less dull.