What books are you reading?

Finished “Between Two Fires” by Buehlman. Fairly decent, but nothing too mind-blowing. Never really felt the writing made you believe you were in medieval France, besides the people and place names. The ending was fairly good though, with Thomas’ experience in hell being fairly disturbing, and the three knocks end… 7/10

Read Scalzi’s “The Collapsing Empire”. While fast-paced and easy to read, his lack of anything relating to real science, has me viewing him as a one-trick pony. Allegories within pertaining to current events(current being 6 years ago now), it is just going over the same path other writers have been doing for the last decade or so. Including his own work. And his insistence on everyone being a comedian, is really wearing thin. “Old Man’s War did it better, and even those were just good, and not great. Still, a quick little romp in a decent universe. 6/10

Going to continue the series anyway, as they are short books, and some of the commentary on certain religious systems and how they work, is fairly entertaining. About a third through “The Consuming Fire”, and the same flaws persist, though I enjoy the political machinations more so than the first. Everyone is still a damn comedian though.
 
In
SalvadorAllende said:
Just finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Julio Verne.

Loved it. Now I'm looking for something else to read.
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If you're into the classics and have Amazon Prime there are a ton of them available on Prime reading for free and most of them have audio too.
 
mb23100 said:
In

If you're into the classics and have Amazon Prime there are a ton of them available on Prime reading for free and most of them have audio too.
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I’m fairly certain most of them(classics) are free domain. You can find them in many places online for free now. And if in America, most libraries now have digital books and audiobooks that are so easily accessible. Probably most countries now, I just do not k on ow about how they work anywhere else besides in the US. Great time to be a reader.
 
mb23100 said:
In

If you're into the classics and have Amazon Prime there are a ton of them available on Prime reading for free and most of them have audio too.
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Tried audiobooks and could not really followed them well. I usually read in bed before sleeping.

I'm also from Argentina.. I tend to buy used books online really cheap. I'm not a big reader but the most enjoyable authors have been Camus (#1), Dostoievsky, Kafka and Gabriel Garcìa Marquez.
 
Yell, Sam, If You Still Can
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Just finished this brilliant new book (well, new translation) by Maylis Besserie. The original was published in France in 2020 and won “Goncourt du premier roman”, a prestigious French literary prize for first time novelists. This translation, by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, was only just published last month. I don’t tend to read much new fiction for some reason, but this caught my eye on the shelf.

Set during the last months of Samuel Beckett’s life in the Le Tiers-Temps retirement home in Paris, it provides a fictionalised account of his slow decay, as his body and mind begin to fail him. The narrative is an interior one, largely in the first person, consisting of a mesh of memories, musings and contemplation's. It moves between his current situation in the home, but also calls up the ghosts of his past - including James Joyce, and others. This interior voice is occasionally interspersed by the colder, dispassionate voices of and written reports by the various medics and care workers who are monitoring the ailing Beckett.

It’s written very well, albeit I can’t read French to compare the original. Naturally it’s a very tall order indeed to try and imagine the internal thoughts of someone as formidable as Beckett, but Besserie does a fine job. Thankfully there is no attempt to pastiche his writing style, but I think she manages to capture the existential concerns and dark wit that Beckett had. Essentially she succeeds in imagining Beckett transformed into one of his own characters. As Besserie puts it she “reconstructs a version of Beckett from real and imaginary facts, as if he were a character at the end of his life, like those who inhabit his own work”.

Had lined up Cormac McCarthys Suttree next, after recently finishing Blood Meridian, but after reading this I was in the notion to dip into some of Sam again.


Dream of Fair to Middling Women
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So currently reading this one, which I had actually never heard of before. I’m about halfway through. It was Beckett’s first novel, written in a matter of weeks in 1932 when he was just twenty-six, and never published within his lifetime (other than a few fragments). It was rejected by publishers at the time and then simply shelved.

It is more clearly autobiographical than the other Beckett novels I have read. Our protagonist is a young man called Belacqua (an alter ego which also features in some of Beckett’s short stories), essentially being to Beckett what Stephen Dedalus was to Joyce, albeit without the distance of time. The back cover informed me that this was “very much a young man's book, drunk on its own cleverness and the author's formidable learning.”

Well by christ I would have to agree. It’s certainly a challenge for the old intellect, let's just say. When I can understand just what the hell is going on, I am enjoying the wonderfully rich writing style and the affected, almost unbelievably high-brow humour. It’s full of dense literary allusions, puns and a macaronic wit (hence why I tend to have google translate handy). Drunk on its own cleverness is right; if you ever want to get an acute sense of your own intellectual shortcomings this would be a fine place to start. Twenty-six year old Beckett is smarter than us and he definitely knows it.

In some ways it’s like reading some of the densest Dedalus sections of Ulysses; in its experimental style, nonlinear (almost nonexistent) plot and it’s profound rejection of literary realism it also hues close to Finnegans Wake (which I confess I have never gotten far with).

Yet nonetheless I haven’t stopped reading. My eyes glaze over certain passages with a combination of bewilderment, awe and humour (sometimes just bewilderment…), but there is definitely something enjoyable about it all the same. Particularly when certain passages do just click. Although it’s very high-brow, it doesn’t have the seriousness of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, or even Beckett’s later stuff. It’s wild and fun in a bawdy young man’s way, albeit filtered through a profoundly intellectual writing style.
 
20220715_002154.jpgStarted this today. Book 2 in the series. So far so good. The 2nd and 3rd book are about 500pgs and are a little longer than book 1.
 
Smokes said:
this is the first book out of the series I have read. Is there an order to them?

also read the Institute and 11/22/63. Both ok. 11/22/63 was hard to get though but worth it in the end for me.
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I enjoyed The Institute. Decent read.
 
Fraz said:
Ten Caesars by Barry Strauss
The Mongol Empire by John Man
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how is it, what does it focus on? I finished a book on genghis last year. it was good. not enough about the conquests tbh.

I'm reading Trick baby by iceberg slim. I finished Pimp and now will prolly read all his books.
 
@Threetrees you read the latest first law trilogy? I'm starting the final book. First two were good, but not great. Definitely worth picking up.

His shattered sea trilogy was excellent imo.
 
Right now I'm reading:

Thrawn (Star Wars Novel)
Simple Path To Wealth
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail
 
I'm on a Karin Slaughter kick. Pieces of Her was good enough to pickup another. Tried the tv show didn't make it past 2 eps. Pretty Girls was entertaining and fucked up and made me really want more Slaughter. I liked it way more than pieces of her. just finished Cop Town last night. Loved it, raw and gritty. Karin Slaughter hits hard and doesn't pull punches. About to start The Good Daughter
 
I got into one of my bing reading phases and opted to go the fucked up route. I read The Girl Next Door and had to go back to sci-fi to clean my mind. Next one will be We have to talk about Kevin.
 
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