This week, I are mostly reading....

Nemici

the lake, the villa, the meeting, by mark roseman.
very interesting - about the wanncee conference

Rredwell

I always seem to be reading about a gizillion books at once, but here goes:
This week (ie starting Monday 9th (ie last week)) I'm reading:
The Taoiseach by Peter Cunningham
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Naked Politician by Katie Hannon
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

...and that's it. I also have Ulysses and War and Peace on the very back burner (my hob is about half a mile long!). Bear in mind I only finished the two Dan Brown books, in about 1.5 days each.

honeymonster

$aints & $pinn€r$ by David McWilliams. i bought it cause I'll be doing marketing next year and wanted to get an Irish perspective plus I always try to watch agenda, on tv3. Its pretty good, i like they way parts of it are written in vernacular rather than written academically, parts had me pissin meself laughin. Really good book

simu

This week... Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

John

Picked up Catch22 yesterday and I'm enjoying it so far. Going on a flight tonight so I should get a good chunk read by the time I go to bed.

bringitdown

DDay - Stephen E. Ambrose
Jennifer Government - Max Barry

Kalikat

Just finished Lolita by Nabokov, and it was beautiful and highly disturbing. Now I'm dying to get my hands on Pale Fire and Pnin.

My current on-the-bus read is Jane Eyre, which I'm re-reading in preparation for studying Wide Sargasso Sea on my OU course. I'd forgotten how much I loved Jane Eyre - I keep wanting to surreptitously read it under the desk at work!

grumpytrousers

I'm 2/3 of the way through The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. 'The best book ever' or somesuch, proclaims the blurb, and critics lined up all over the gaff to give their opinions on it. "The first great American Novel of the 21st Century" and so on.

And yet, I'm losing the will to live reading it, or at least the will to finish the book. I probably will, but can anybody tell me if it's really worth it. I'm notorious for not finishing books (Catch 22 - bought it 13 years ago, still only made it to page 144. At a rate of one funny set piece every 70 odd pages, I didn't feel that was worth it either)

anyway - considered opinions on The Corrections, and i'd be most grateful, ta muchly

Kalikat

It was a bit of a struggle for me to get through it, but finish it I did, and I don't feel greatly rewarded by it. I'd be hard-pressed to give anyone a decent outline of the 'plot', to be quite honest. I think my main problem was that I utterly despised the majority of the cast, and I wasn't quite sure why I was expending time reading about them.

That said, I always make it a point to finish reading something I've started - who knows, you might get something out of it!

grumpytrousers

thank you for that. re the 'cast' - i just constantly feel that unless the ending involves a mass murderer and nailgun, i shan't be really satisfied...

*eyes up well-thumbed copy of PG Wodehouse short stories*

JasonRoberts

Well i'm reading Macbeth and sophies world at the same time! aaaah

Kalikat

i just constantly feel that unless the ending involves a mass murderer and nailgun, i shan't be really satisfied...

Hee! Sounds like a job for Patrick Bateman. Then again, I think even he (the king of boring minutae) would be bored to death by the cast of The Corrections.

grumpytrousers

And speaking of bateman - American Psycho was another i couldn't hack...Dunno - maybe it's the shorter attention span as I get older, but really - a book of brandnames punctuated by the occasional spot of ultra-violence, with a soupcon of soft pron thrown in.

I'm well aware that it was meant to be a satire on the mores, mentality,mindset of yuppie america...Zzzzz...

christ - it was boring!

*dons flameproof jacket*

oh - and this week i'm reading (corrections remaining on the 'to finish' pile) Tracigally, I Was an Only Twin - a collection of Peter Cook stuff. Apparantly it's hilarious, although having waded through 35 pages, i've only laughed twice...

byte

Currently reading:
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

DapperGent

byte wrote:

Currently reading:
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

****ing great isn't it?

damntheman

Today I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe for the first time. I really enjoyed it.

Kold

Dan Brown - Angels and Demons, first book I've read for pleasure in a year and a half. Damn leaving cert.

impr0v

New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

impr0v

grumpytrousers wrote:

And speaking of bateman - American Psycho was another i couldn't hack...Dunno - maybe it's the shorter attention span as I get older, but really - a book of brandnames punctuated by the occasional spot of ultra-violence, with a soupcon of soft pron thrown in.

I'm well aware that it was meant to be a satire on the mores, mentality,mindset of yuppie america...Zzzzz...

christ - it was boring!

*dons flameproof jacket*

oh - and this week i'm reading (corrections remaining on the 'to finish' pile) Tracigally, I Was an Only Twin - a collection of Peter Cook stuff. Apparantly it's hilarious, although having waded through 35 pages, i've only laughed twice...

Not a flame but I'll have to disagree with you on the American Psycho Bashing, damn good book. The brandnames, ultra-violence etc. are all there to make the point, as you know, and although it is heavy on the branding, i.e. he religiously describes the attire of almost every character, every time they appear, branded garment by branded garment, he couldn't just quit it half way through. Though it sounds annoying, I found that I was able get used to it fairly fast and almost read over it towards the end. I'll not completely disagree with you though, on there being a small element of boredom in the middle/end of the novel, but perhaps the boredom is there to make a point. In the midst of the unadultured capitalistic hedony, the animal was still bored, despite being allowed to indulge it's basest impulses. I would consider it the probably the finest example of neatly packaged satire I have read.

munkeehaven

trying to get through dostoevsky's "the eternal husband and other stories".i saw 2 versions of his story "crime and punishment" on the telly, one in spanish and one in english and both set in different eras.

da_deadman

Currently reading The Black Echo - Michael Connelly.
I read Connellys' Blood Work earlier this year, and I'm now onto my fourth book by Connelly (after Blood Work, was A Darkness More Than Night, and The Poet, and now this one). I quite enjoy his books

I got stuck when I started reading Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, but I really want to start back reading that. It's an interesting read, but it can be hard to sit and read it for too long.

pork99

"Intellectual Impostures" by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Really puts a rocket up the ass of all that French Post Modernist nonsense.

adonis

heart of darkness, joseph conrad..

good book, nice and quick!
nice passages too

impr0v

da_deadman wrote:

Currently reading The Black Echo - Michael Connelly.
I read Connellys' Blood Work earlier this year, and I'm now onto my fourth book by Connelly (after Blood Work, was A Darkness More Than Night, and The Poet, and now this one). I quite enjoy his books

I got stuck when I started reading Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, but I really want to start back reading that. It's an interesting read, but it can be hard to sit and read it for too long.

I read a load of Connelly's stuff, the trials and tribulations of Harry Bosch. He's a decent writer.

luckat

Havoc, In Its First Year by Ronan Bennett - superb. John Brigge is a coroner and governor of a Yorkshire town, and a farmer. He's also a Catholic, in a time when religious fundamentalism is joining a sharp move to the right.

This scenario makes for a tight, gripping story. But what really won me over was Bennett's precise, delicate and tough-minded writing, and the wonderful characters, each one deeply written and.... oh, not three-dimensional, at least five-dimensional!

I bought it in the airport on Tuesday on my way home from London (when I was just gobbling the last pages of Bel Canto, by Anne Patchet, also a fabulous book), and finished it on Thursday evening.

It's longlisted for the Booker, but not tipped to reach the shortlist - maybe because Bennett's treading ground already worn by people like Banville.

But it deserves to win. Apart from the story itself is the parallel with our own era - Brigge is a lone voice speaking for "mercy" against those who would defend their world against largely imaginary threats.

angeldelight

Reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy........hard work lol. Trying to read my way throught Big Read top 100 that I hadn't already read. Only another 61 to go lol

Bunnyefey

Im re-reading "The Hotel New Hampshire" for the 1000th time. This book is like my safety blanket and any of my friends have been forced into reading it too. I guess, we all have a safety book that we can identify and before anyone calls me a weird pervert or a girl who wears a bear suit, its something else that draws me to the Berry family.

Jim

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

John

Just finished Da Vinci Code and Youth by Joseph Conrad. About to start Heart of Darkness

angeldelight

Jimeatsmenu wrote:

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

Is that good? I've had it on my bookshelf for ages but always buy other books instead of reading it. If I heard it was good tho I'd read it