What are you filthy heathens reading atm?

The Mad Hatter

Beruthiel wrote: »

I am going on holidays in a couple of days. \0/
I'll be bringing a couple of Sherlock Holmes books with me as I've never gotten around to reading Arthur Conan Doyle.

I'd say stick with the early stuff. A Study in Scarlet is pretty good. Or at least the first half is - the second half, as parodied brilliantly by Mark Twain in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (which also features Holmes) seems for the first few chapters(!) to be unrelated. The Hound of the Baskervilles is great too. I wasn't too fond of The Sign of Four or The Valley of Fear. For short stories, stick with the first two sets: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. There are some good later stories, but Conan Doyle had grown pretty sick of the character, and sometimes it shows.

coffee_cake

Just ordered Cryptonomicon, Never Let Me Go, Fahrenheit 451, Inverted World.
Hurray!

Bannasidhe

bluewolf wrote: »

Just ordered Cryptonomicon, Never Let Me Go, Fahrenheit 451, Inverted World.
Hurray!

Cryptonomicon - loved it.
Haven't read the others yet.

MagicMarker

I have a phobia of reading books when I can't pronounce the title.

The Mad Hatter

I have to say, when I finally read Fahrenheit 451, I felt pretty massively let down. I admire Bradbury for his imagination (some of the stories in The Illustrated Man are unforgettable), but I've never liked his writing.

keane2097

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

I'd say stick with the early stuff. A Study in Scarlet is pretty good. Or at least the first half is - the second half, as parodied brilliantly by Mark Twain in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (which also features Holmes) seems for the first few chapters(!) to be unrelated. The Hound of the Baskervilles is great too. I wasn't too fond of The Sign of Four or The Valley of Fear. For short stories, stick with the first two sets: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. There are some good later stories, but Conan Doyle had grown pretty sick of the character, and sometimes it shows.

This is good advice. Study in Scarlet is great IMO.

Dades

MagicMarker wrote: »

Nobokov is a bitch to read as half the feckin words aren't in the dictionary.

But the words around them are so beautifully ordered.

Aenaes

Aenaes wrote: »

Might as well say what I'm reading. Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano, an account of Naples mafia called the Camorra. Interesting how you think these organisations might have faded away as they are no longer in the limelight but then reading stories of how they supply armies and warlords (ETA for example) and how a dress Angelina Jolie wore to an Oscars was made in a Camorra controlled underground garment factory.

I enjoyed that and would recommend it to the people who I think are a little naive. :pac: Without spelling things out it's pretty obvious they and organisations in other countries have their fingers in just about every single pie.

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

I have to say, when I finally read Fahrenheit 451, I felt pretty massively let down. I admire Bradbury for his imagination (some of the stories in The Illustrated Man are unforgettable), but I've never liked his writing.

Nice idea, read like a story I'd write when I was 12 without knowing where I was going with it.

Sulla Felix

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

I have to say, when I finally read Fahrenheit 451, I felt pretty massively let down. I admire Bradbury for his imagination (some of the stories in The Illustrated Man are unforgettable), but I've never liked his writing.

I was lucky that I read it before I knew it was apparently a classic. It's good, don't get me wrong, but the way some people talk about it, it's the be all and end all.

Turtwig

Might as well hijack this fecking thread. Any filthy heathens doing Nanowrimo?
It's almoooooost go time.

Bannasidhe

Jernal wrote: »

Might as well hijack this fecking thread. Any filthy heathens doing Nanowrimo?
It's almoooooost go time.

Son's OH, who is staying with us, is. She's hyping up on coffee even now.
Unfortunately for her I have builders arriving at 8 a.m. tomorrow and Friday to do some minorish internal work which will involve drills, kango hammers, steel girders with assorted squeaky pulleys and the noisy like...

Bannasidhe

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Son's OH, who is staying with us, is. She's hyping up on coffee even now.

You're allowing your son's significant other to stay with you? What kind of heathens are you, CoI!?

The Mad Hatter

Jernal wrote: »

Might as well hijack this fecking thread. Any filthy heathens doing Nanowrimo?
It's almoooooost go time.

Not this year Life's been too busy to do much fiction writing for the last while.

Corkfeen

MagicMarker wrote: »

Nobokov is a bitch to read as half the feckin words aren't in the dictionary.

Same applies to A Clockwork Orange, many of them may turn up in a russian dictionary though.... I spent my days reading online dictionaries for it :pac:

Gumbi

Re-reading Foundation and Earth, by Isaac Asimov. Read it when I was 14, got me into sci-fi!

Bannasidhe

Deleted User wrote: »

You're allowing your son's significant other to stay with you? What kind of heathens are you, CoI!?

Well she is COE....and I have an ancient Gaelic Irish attitude towards sex i.e as they are both consenting adults I don't care what they do as long as they keep the noise down, pay for any damages and don't alarm the dogs.

bytheglass

The happy zombie sunrise home by Margaret Atwood on wattpad, haven't read in over a year and this is currently ticking all the boxes

Obliq

Re-reading (cos I haven't got back to the library again) Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre. LOVE that book - very funny/tragic. Not very high-brow, but never mind:-)

coffee_cake

Jernal wrote: »

Might as well hijack this fecking thread. Any filthy heathens doing Nanowrimo?
It's almoooooost go time.

Yayyyy o/

MrPudding

Has anyone one tried Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London series? Very enjoyable.

MrP

Obliq

Not me, yet. This thread is great - off to the library today with a VERY long list of books to look for/order in. Nice!

pH

MrPudding wrote: »

Has anyone one tried Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London series? Very enjoyable.

MrP

Loved them - end of book 1 was slightly OTT - not really repeated later on - stick with them they're terrific. His witty one liners are superb.

Reading Hamilton's latest - Great North Road - absolutely loving it - and have Hydrogen Sonata and Abercrombie's latest to look forward to. Christmas has come early this year!

MrPudding

pH wrote: »

Loved them - end of book 1 was slightly OTT - not really repeated later on - stick with them they're terrific. His witty one liners are superb.

Reading Hamilton's latest - Great North Road - absolutely loving it - and have Hydrogen Sonata and Abercrombie's latest to look forward to. Christmas has come early this year!

I was lent the first and then chain read the remaining on my kindle. That is the risky thing about the kindle, finish a good book and the next one is just a couple of screen taps away.

I mentioned the Thursday Next books earlier, but I think they are worth mentioning again. The concept is very good, it is set in England, but a slightly different England, the Crimean War is still running in the first book. The main character works in a branch of the police that looks after literary crime, but she get involved in another shadowy group that actually works in books. A friend of mine got me into them, he used this excerpt, which is from a team meeting from the shadowy group:

wrote:

“Good. Item seven. The had had and that that problem. Lady Cavendish, weren’t you working on this?’

Lady Cavendish stood up and gathered her thoughts. ‘Indeed. The uses of had had and that that have to be strictly controlled; they can interrupt the imaginotransference quite dramatically, causing readers to go back over the sentence in confusion, something we try to avoid.’

‘Go on.’

It’s mostly an unlicensed-usage problem. At the last count David Copperfield alone had had had had sixty three times, all but ten unapproved. Pilgrim’s Progress may also be a problem due to its had had/that that ratio.’

So what’s the problem in Progress?’

That that had that that ten times but had had had had only thrice. Increased had had usage had had to be overlooked, but not if the number exceeds that that that usage.’

Hmm,’ said the Bellman, ‘I thought had had had had TGC’s approval for use in Dickens? What’s the problem?’

Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example,’ said Lady Cavendish. ‘You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not.’

So the problem with that other that that was that…?’

‘That that other-other that that had had approval.’

Okay’ said the Bellman, whose head was in danger of falling apart like a chocolate orange, ‘let me get this straight: David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim’s Progress, had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC’s approval?’

There was a very long pause. ‘Right,’ said the Bellman with a sigh, ‘that’s it for the moment. I’ll be giving out assignments in ten minutes. Session’s over – and let’s be careful out there.”

Give them a go.

MrP

keane2097

I'd hate to see one of the bad passages.

Bannasidhe

keane2097 wrote: »

I'd hate to see one of the bad passages.

I thought it was funny - but then I have wasted days trying to avoid using had had.

MrPudding

keane2097 wrote: »

I'd hate to see one of the bad passages.

If I had had more time I might have been able to come up with another passage that you might have found more appealing. As it was I was short on time and I thought that that passage I posted was ok. The books really are very good; give them a try even if you don’t particularly like the passage, even if some people think that that passage is funny.


MrP

[-0-]

John Moriarty wrote:

Clear days bring the mountains down to my door-step, calm nights give the rivers their say, the wind puts its hand to my shoulder some evenings, and then I don't think, I just leave what I'm doing and I go the soul's way.

I love this.

pauldla

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones. A colleague lent it to me during the week and I haven't been able to put it down. Well written and passionately argued, it'd make you want to heave a brick at a Tory.

Bannasidhe

pauldla wrote: »

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones. A colleague lent it to me during the week and I haven't been able to put it down. Well written and passionately argued, it'd make you want to heave a brick at a Tory.

Like I need to read a book to make me want to do that!

When I lived in London's East End during the Thatcher years one of my neighbours donated some props from Spitting Image to a jumble sale we were having at the community centre I managed - one of the props was a very realistic looking latex brick. I bought it and spent many many hours fecking it at the TV screen - there weren't many real life Tory's in Hackney so I had to make do...
Wish I still had that brick.

pauldla