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What are you reading right now?

Just finished the most recent Inspector Rebus novel from Ian Rankin Exit Music and I'm halfway though Stuart Macbide's Broken Skin (another police procedural, this time set in Aberdeen).
 
eddy_L said:
Just finished the most recent Inspector Rebus novel from Ian Rankin Exit Music and I'm halfway though Stuart Macbide's Broken Skin (another police procedural, this time set in Aberdeen).
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As another fan of the Rebus series, how do you rate Broken Skin? I could be interested. Ta.
 
The Stuart McBride stuff is excellent, definitly in the same genre as Rebus but a bit 'grittier' maybe, the charachterisation is excellent and some of the Aberdeen-isms are laugh out loud funny.

Start with the debut book, Cold Granite...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0007193149/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21

The next one (Dying Light) is better as the charachters develop, I'm about 2/3rds though Broken Skin and it's better still, in fact I'm still guessing who's done what.

Ed.
 
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Tony Wilson's 24 Hour Party People - the book he wrote of the film. Written in a slightly annoying style but plenty of anecdotes about Martin Hannet and the Mondays to keep me interested.
 
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford.

Fascinating book documenting the rise (and inevitable fall) of the Mongol empire. Revisionist, in a nice way. The book is well-documented, and sympathetic to Genghis Khan to a point that is quite surprising, at least for a reader brought up on the standard history books where the Mongols were the wild beasts coming in from the East. Genghis himself comes across as an astute and comparatively open-minded ruler. From the back cover blurb: "Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege".
It must be said his armies also massacred untold thousands of civilians that had unwisely refused to pay tribute, but that was the norm in those days when you took a city.
 
Who killed Martin Hannett by Colin Sharp. It lies somewhere between interesting and cringingly bad - it is clear that Sharp, though there for a key period of Hannett's life, has approximately 27% of the information required to write a book of this length. Much is repeated, much is clearly embellished / exagerated, but what irritates most is much is viewed / recorded from Hannett's perspective and details his thoughts about a given situation that, unless Mr Sharp has some extraordinary superhuman ESP power, is quite simply fiction. Still worth a read though; Hannett is someone who unquestionably deserves to be the subject of a book and to date this is the only one.

Tony.
 
Elmore Leonard "The Hot Kid" .. like all his books I'm hooked in the first paragraph & couple of pages later I've just got to finish it .. wonderful writer.
 
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" -- Oliver Sacks

Lots of amazing case stories about odd cases he's seen in his career as a neurologist.
 
Ned Sherrin's book of theatrical anecdotes. I suppose next will be Alan Coren's 'The Cricklewood Diet', which I've had in the bookcase for a while, now he's popped his clogs too.
 
Damien Hirst 'The Making of the Diamond Skull' Signed 1st Edn. A rather sparkly guide to artistic and financial immortality.
Goes rather nicely with my signed screenprint of the skull.
 
Time to resurrect this thread:

Just halfway thru "Culture Clash... Dread Meets Punk Rockers" by Don letts. Its pretty good. We have all read the punk histories with so many different angles by people who were there and by people who wished they were there Don Letts was definitely there and he managed to cross the boundary and help start the dialogue between roots reggae/dub and punk which in my view shaped the music and creativity of the punk and post punk generation.

I am looking forward to finally seeing the documentary "Punk Rock the Movie" which uses his source material filmed on 8mm camera at the very first birth pangs of the punk movement at the Roxy and elsewhere... this book is a companion to the documentary and even though its very fast and annoyingly light on details, I'm pleased he wrote it.

Tony, you should get this (if you have not already got the hardback)
 
Just finished The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson; also reading 'Crooked House' by Agatha Christie, selected writings of Thomas Nashe, and Herman Melville's short stories. Oh, and 'A Study in Scarlet' by Arthur Conan Doyle.
 
Hey Joe, did you find Illuminatus! hard going? I don't think it would have hurt them to use paragraphs...

Currently reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Previously read Neverwhere by the same author, a wonderful book and thoroughly enjoyable. Also reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryston.
 
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