Currently Reading? (contd......)

Promising so far

[quote="Lilac_Leopard|Claire|1317484588|844393|1317560977"]Stickied I don't often visit this board so I didn't know that a new thread was needed until I saw you'd made it [/quote

Nice one gaffer ]

The Night Circus was awesome, though I fear the film will be garbage.

Now reading

On Hobos and Homelessness by Nels Anderson.

Anthology of writings by pioneering American sociologist, renowed for his studies of those on the margins of American society. Very good it is too.

Since Ralph's Party I've read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender (it was ok, not amazing)

Now reading

Read Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien on the plane over to the States. Powerful, hallucinatory stuff and probably the best novel about the Vietnam war that I've read.

The Night Circus (see Wifey's post!)

Finished Trisha Ashley, was very average. Might try the recipes at the end though perhaps they will be good.

Now reading:

Recently read If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien. Top-drawer first-hand account of the Vietnam war from the point of view of a guy who was drafted and sent off to fight. Really powerful. .Phil, it's got your name all over it, if you've never read it before.

Am currently on with Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, a guy whose work I've been after checking out for a long time./ Great stuff - kinda reads like D*ckens but in the American vernacular, if you can imagine such a thing.

Just read In Search of the Blues: black voices, white visions by Marybeth Hamilton and it was really good, a sociological history of the way white folks have sought to historicise, romanticise and define the origins of blues. Fascinating stuff. James Murphy, dunno if you still read these pages but you should give it a look.

Now on with If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino. Been meaning to read this for ages. Ultra post-modern, astonishingly so in fact, but I'm quite enjoying it so far. Really interested to see where it's going to go because every time I think I've picked all it's tricks, it surprises me with another one. It's a f*cker like that, but in a good way. Might get on my tits by the end but we'll see.

The Magician and The Sorceress - Michael Scott.

Double Cross - Malorie Blackman.

Yet another series I've finally finished. Makes me feel old.

Just read The Nashville Sound by Paul Hemphill. Decent slice of Americana and pretty informative, although the constant baseball analogies got on my tits a bit and I'd definitely take issue with his claim that country music is America's only real native art form.

Taking a break from non-fiction for now and getting stuck into The Little Sister. Man, I love this stuff.

Got fairly well cracked into Death In the Afternoon yesterday and it's absolutely brilliant. It's the first Hemingway I've read in a while and it's nice to get reacquainted with one of the absolute all-time masters. Lovelovelove.

Quote: the doc, Jan 2012

Done in the Hemingway (marvellous) and am now getting stuck into Lowside Of the Road - a life of Tom Waits by barney Hoskyns. Sidecar bought me this for Christmas, which was kinda synchronistic cos we've got a copy of this at work and I've veen meaning to borrow it for ages.

Hoskyns is one of the best rock writers around and this is shaping up to be very good indeed.

I've been reading this f*cker all day and it's exceptional.

Quote: the doc, Jan 2012

Quote: the doc, Jan 2012

Done in the Hemingway (marvellous) and am now getting stuck into Lowside Of the Road - a life of Tom Waits by barney Hoskyns. Sidecar bought me this for Christmas, which was kinda synchronistic cos we've got a copy of this at work and I've veen meaning to borrow it for ages.

Hoskyns is one of the best rock writers around and this is shaping up to be very good indeed.

I've been reading this f*cker all day and it's exceptional.

Finished. Fabulous.

Been getting stuck into some serious reading again this last couple of weeks. Just read The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Great stuff, kinda like New Journalism in a sense. He was a Pole who was one of the only journalists from the Iron Curtain countries to be allowed into the free world. His travels took him all around Africa and South America, witnessing coup after coup after coup and getting into a whole heap of sh*t while he was at it. By the time he retired, he'd witnessed twenty six (or eight, can remember which) revolutions and been sentenced to death four times This book covers just a small part of that, but it's excellent all the same. .Phil, this might be one for you.

After that caned my way through Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. Been meaning to read his stuff for ages and this was brilliant. How anyone can write book can be so utterly sad and yet so absolutely f*cking laugh out loud funny at the same time is beyond me, but he pulls it off magnificently. I'd say it's like Cannery Row written by William Faulkner at the a*se end of a bender on some really nasty moonshine but I said that about Suttree so I can't Very reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy though, must have been a huge influence on the great man, especially that pitch-perfecrt dialogue. Anyway, it's all about poverty, starvation, incest and death and is well worth a read. F*cking savage ending though.

Next up is Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.

That Empty Nesters book was a bit of a snoozefest. This one is good so far Got some recipes in it too.

I'm reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
I'd like to know whether it influenced Bruce Robinson because Raskolnikov seems the literary embodiment of Withnail.

I have Little Women, The Count Of Monte Cristo, Tess Of D'Urbevilles and Moses Ascending up next.

It's been really good so far. I keep trying to second guess what will come next which is a good sign.

a completely different book from Brideshead Revisited, apart from I think in each one Waugh was trying to capture the essence of a certain way of life. The Loved One is mostly set in a Memorial Park in Hollywood and Waugh seems fixated on the American attitudes towards death and how alien they are to someone British living in America.

Elizabeth Haynes book was awesome btw the violence was quite graphic but it was a really good read.

American Gods - Neil Gay-Man.

Halfway trhough reading The Wine Of Youth by John fante as well. Wonderfu little collection of short stories about Italian immigrants growing up in Colorado in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Just read a really intertesting book called Go Down Together, which is about Bonnie and Clyde. Great piece of social history, masquerading as a true crime book. Interesting to note that until the (magnificent, if innaccurate) Warren Beatty film in the 60s, they were always referred to as Clyde and Bonnie, but that flick altered the public perception completely.

Now reading The Easter Parade by the wonderful Richard Yates. Not his best book by any stretch, but it's still excellent.