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What are you reading these days?

'Devices and Desires' by PD James. Inspired by reading Iain Sinclair's magnificent hatchet job on Ms James in 'Lights Out For The Territory'.

'Devices and Desires' is a very strange book indeed, encompassing many of the moral panics of the time it was written (1989), with a ludicrous plot and remarkable death toll (at least 10 when I stopped counting).
 
Wolf Hall, the first in the Hilary Mantel trilogy I received at Xmas.
Magnificently told, You’d swear she was there at the time, she must have researched the period for decades! I heard the 3rd book was not up to the first two so will probably give it a miss until I can get it for a quid somewhere.
 
Magnificently told, You’d swear she was there at the time, she must have researched the period for decades! I heard the 3rd book was not up to the first two so will probably give it a miss until I can get it for a quid somewhere.

Mrs BM has just finished it and was very impressed - she has re-read the first two multiple times. (It`s very thick)
 
'Chatterton Square' by E H Young, published in 1947 but set some ten years previously, just before the outbreak of WWII. An interesting theme of the book is the younger generation's ignorance of, and indifference to, the sacrifices of their parents' generation in WWI.

The book's location is Clifton, at a time when it was just beginning to slide down the social ladder; Angela Carter's early novels, published in the late '60s, chart its further decline before it was re-gentrified in the '70s.
 
Have just finished re-reading Post-War by Tony Judt. I got more out of it on a second read, and there’s not much to argue about in his analysis or conclusions, given that the book was first published 15 or so years ago.

There is one blatant error in the book, which I failed to spot first time around. Judt states that the National Trust was founded by the post-war Labour government, when in fact it was founded some 50 years previously by a group of wealthy individuals. (He also seriously dislikes punk rock, but that’s probably just an age thing).
 
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. Quite academic but quite readable all the same. It starts from the idea that we are born in guilt, with a sense of owing our birth to a higher being and owing our upbringing to our parents. We are born with a sense of debt that is reinforced by religion and our place in a natural order.

Food for thought.
 
Just finished The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu. It won the Hugo Award for best novel in 2015 so I was expecting great things. I'm not sure that I got them though. The concept was interesting enough and quite, er, novel in its conception, but as a piece of writing I was less convinced. Partly that may be down to the translation, and partly (according to the translator's and author's notes at the end) because the Chinese writing tradition is different to the western one. There was very little attempt at characterisation or empathy for the characters and it may be that this is the Chinese way, rather than it being a fault of the author.

It's the first of a trilogy and it has left me intrigued enough to order the second volume (which is translated by somebody else, so I'll see if that changes anything materially).
 
Just finished The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne, and The Desert Prince by Peter V Brett, now reading The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie.
 
Just finished The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu. It won the Hugo Award for best novel in 2015 so I was expecting great things. I'm not sure that I got them though. The concept was interesting enough and quite, er, novel in its conception, but as a piece of writing I was less convinced. Partly that may be down to the translation, and partly (according to the translator's and author's notes at the end) because the Chinese writing tradition is different to the western one. There was very little attempt at characterisation or empathy for the characters and it may be that this is the Chinese way, rather than it being a fault of the author.

It's the first of a trilogy and it has left me intrigued enough to order the second volume (which is translated by somebody else, so I'll see if that changes anything materially).

The Trilogy as a whole does what classic sf has often attempted - tell an epic story on a vast canvas of space and time. I think it achieves that, the conceptual stuff just keeps piling up all the way through. (Book two I found a bit of a slog though.)

And like a lot of classic big story sf it suffers in terms of characterisation and writing. (The Foundation trilogy has all the literary style of a Haynes Manual.) I also suspect the translation doesn't help in this case, but for its sheer ambition over the course of three long books I'm willing to ignore the minor failings. There are sections of Book Three that I think push the envelope for imaginative writing in SF.
 
Iain Sinclair: The Gold Machine, in which the author goes to Peru in search of some family history. (I've only read the first couple of pages so far)

John Burrow: The History of Histories. Fascinating study of how history evolved over the centuries.
 
John Nichol - Spitfire then Lancaster now part way through Tornado. He has a very readable style.
 
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
One of the opening quotes “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from” - David Bowie
 


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