What Are You Reading?

Just this evening started Mark Lewisohn's book on The Beatles. It's reassuringly well-written so far, which is good news, considering there are 900 pages. I like to luxuriate in Beatles lore, so should get through this quickly.

Threw caution to the wind today and picked up Denise Stellberg's Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an, about perceptions of (and dealings with) Islam in the early Republic. Good stuff, so far, intellectual history (heavily reffing Servetus and George Sale) capable of maintaining one's attention through a bar show from one's friends and a few fleeting glimpses. Worthy reading to once more interrupt the pile.

Oh cool - Al Roosten is the one that stood out for me the most as well. Felt like he settled down a bit there, quit giving me scifi cliches and just told me a story, and it was a distinct improvement.

About 70 pages into The Goldfinch, and it's great so far, easily exceeding even my highest expectations. There's a storm early on, and the rain is described as 'bouncing whitely'. I liked that, in an envious way.

Three out of four books I've read in the past week or so - Ernest Cline's 'Ready Player One', Robin Sloan's "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore" and Timothy S Johnson's "The Furnace" - all had male protagonists whose lives were saved/changed by underwritten sexy female companions, who of course love and shag them for little-to-no reason other than the hero is the hero. It's like the Manic Pixie Dream Anthology. The books weren't awful, but dammit I wish they'd tried harder there.

(The fourth, Scarlett Thomas's "The End Of Mr. Y", was female-written and a whole other kettle of fish - a smart, involving & complex novel of both action and ideas, almost completely ruined by a last-minute twist.)

Next, from the Xmas stash, are Lance Parkin's Alan Moore biography and Jake Arnott's "House Of Rumour".

I had just a blast with Ready Player One. Judkins, yeah, "candy" is the right word. It got critical praise? I can't see it as anything more than dumb fun.

Finished Freedom. I thought it was very, very good. I was kinda ready to not like it, just because blahhhh, Franzen, does that dude ever shut up? But nope, I thought he nailed it.

Just finished David Benioff's City of Thieves, which I picked up on impulse just before Christmas. Strange bird, this: a relatively light-hearted novel about partisans on the Russian front (this sounds like an insult, though I don't consider it one, but it's almost like a kids' version of a movie like Come and See). Even if I didn't know who Benioff was, I'd have known the writer had experience with film and TV: the action's so straightforward and uncluttered. Compared it with a technically genre work like one of Alan Furst's historical (and contemporaneous) thrillers, it feels light and breezy (though the stark choices facing Soviet partisans don't necessarily compare with the moody introspection of Furst's heroes, even if both involved life and death issues). Its simplicity almost makes me look askance at its critical tongue-bath, though I suspect my own literary prejudices come into play there. A great (and swift) read in any case.

I finally finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell about a week ago.  It got particularly exciting in its latter half,and I finally see why it's consistently ranked among the best fantasy of the 2000s.  I did a re-read of The Road, which, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but it's not really a very Christmas-y book.  And now I'm about a third of the way through All the Pretty Horses, which is great so far.  It's funnier thus far than I was expecting it to be, and it leaves me constantly in awe of McCarthy's prose.  And I'm something like 2/3 of the way through Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, which is also fantastic.

In the middle of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which I'm enjoying.

I'm reading John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and I'm loving it so far. I'm also reading David Foster Wallace's Both Flesh and Not and quite like it.

I've still got Red Seas Under Red Skies to read in the middle of my twenty-thick pile before I get to ROT (and I prefer paperbacks, so I may be waiting a while).

Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, Ishmael Reed's The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and some of Heinrich von Kleist's short stories. The first surprisingly swift and sharp, the second entertaining but depressingly misogynistic and essentialist, and the third still too early to tell, though "The Marquise of O_" is quite intriguing thus far (I've almost gotten to the secret reveal, which I think I know but which seems a little too obvious; I suspect he's got something up his sleeve).

Thinking maybe Blood Meridian for my 2014 firstie.

I'm finishing up Ready Player One, and then I'm going to start in on Railsea. Which I might manage to finish by tomorrow, as I'm going to be a passenger on a 2 hour drive.

'Clean' by Alex Hughes - first of a SF detective procedural series about a ex-addict telepath helping future police. Set-up for the world is interesting (computers are limited after the brutal Tech Wars and there's a Babylon 5-like Psi Guild, but there's also Blade Runner-type flying cars!), the writing is solid & the way they describe the 'Mindspace' of the psi users is clever. Solid pulpy fun, with several more in the series.

Wow, how is Mr. Goodbar? I skimmed that book in like seventh grade looking for dirty parts, which as I remember I did find.