[Misc] What Book are you Currently Reading?

Cheeky Monkey said:

Fiction - 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' (don't ask!)

Non-fiction - 'Fighters in the Shadows, a New History of the French Resistance'

Use your local library or lose it! (No one needs to own books, Do you ever read them more than once? So many books, so little time and all that)

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Cheeky Monkey said:

Birdsong by Faulks. About 20 years late to the party with this one I appreciate.

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Rich Suvner said:

Just finished this today. Can't stop thinking about it. Superb and haunting.

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Cheeky Monkey said:

Use your local library or lose it! (No one needs to own books, Do you ever read them more than once? So many books, so little time and all that)

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Rich Suvner said:

Just finished this today. Can't stop thinking about it. Superb and haunting.

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tinycowboy said:

It's a cracking read. Read this when I also bought Moonglow and A Visit From The Goon Squad when I fancied some chunky American novels - three good purchases.

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Buzzer said:

I'm working my way steadily through the Man Booker Int'l longlist with varied results. It's certainly not a vintage year from what I've read so far.


Jenny Espenbeck - 'Go, Went, Gone'

Another 'refugees in Europe' story. I suspect that this will be a recurring theme in the prize longlists. I guess it's as good a subject as any with plenty to say for itself, this tale being about a retired Berlin professor who befriends African migrants. This book however doesn't deal with it well. It's all rather anodyne, saccharine even, with plenty of hand-wringing and references to a mythical nobility of the poor. The worst crime though is not its worthiness but that it's dull - really, really dull. You're much better off reading last year's Booker-listed 'Exit West' by Mohsin Hamid if refugee-lit is your cup of tea.


Ariana Harwicz - 'Die, My Love'

A short book, more a novella but it probably needs to be. It's pure stream of consciousness where traditional narrative has a losing battle on every page with the malevolent, vicious dreams of a woman suffering post-natal depression. It's extremely difficult to describe but it is a lot of fun and the wordplay is as good as anything you'll read. Some of the bon mots will stay with you a long, long time. Check these out for example:


"She lived in her body as though it were an infested house, as if she had to tiptoe through it not trying to touch the floor."


"My husband says to me: My heart almost stopped. Is that my fault? I ask."


Wu Ming Yi - 'The Stolen Bicycle'

This is the closest approximation of a traditional novel as you'll get from this year's list. Hailing from Taiwan, it tells the story of an author searching for the truth behind his father's disappearance by tracing the history of the bicycle he rode off on. You get a real understanding of the importance of the bicycle in Chinese and Taiwanese recent cultural history alongside a primer on the birth of modern Taiwan. For a book about discovery it feels quite sedentary, pootling along in third but is extremely well-written/translated so that even the differences in nuance between Mandarin and Taiwanese words are understandable. Even better is that the translation is into British English although occasionally American English translations are used (does anyone this side of the Atlantic ever use the word 'happenstance'?) which did break up the flow a bit. It's a minor quibble, the book is a quite lovely read.


Laszlo Krasznahorskai - 'The World Goes On'

Apparently a collection of short stories. I couldn't tell you for sure because it's yet another of his books I've given up on. Page after page and I've not got a clue what the author is on about. I'll go back and give it a second shot when I've finished the rest of the list but I'm not holding out much hope.


Antonio Munoz Molina - 'Like A Fading Shadow'

It's two stories in one. The fictionalised account of the flight of James Earl Ray after he assassinated Martin Luther King and alongside it the narrations of the author about his life as he writes the book. The former is infintely more interesting than the latter, the latter attempting, in my opinion, to be both a guide in how to write a novel and a way of showing how well read Molina is. Boy, does he like to name-drop. I can see what the author was trying to do with the structure of this book but he fails on all counts.


Laurent Binet - 'The Seventh Function of Language'

Molina may like to name-drop but Binet absolutely knocks the previous book into a cocked hat with this story. Metafiction at its very best, this book is unapologetically pompous in a way that only a Frenchman could be and it's hilarious for it. Set around the death of French philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980, it becomes a sort of Dan Brown conspiracy meets Fight Club and starring all the great French and Italian language thinkers of the 20th century. There's Michel Foucault, there's Derrida, Sartre, Bernard Henri-Levy, Lacan,Levi-Strauss et al and includes my literary hero Umberto Eco (who would have loved this book) all playing/hamming up their part in this philosopical whodunnit. If you've ever read Eco's 'Foucault's Pendulum' then you'll love this nod to it.


Olga Tokarczuk - 'Flights'


Another collection of short stories all based around the subject of travel/departure. This is the first I've ever read by this Polish author but on the back of this book I'll definitely check out her other writings. She writes in a similar style to Kafka with some stories being no longer than a paragraph and others stretching to numerous chapters. Unlike Kafka however, there's a levity that makes it very readable. Probably intentional, this book would make a good travel read, you can start at the beginning or dip into it at a random page just as easily. Highly recommended.

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

Too much time on your hands?

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