What is East Dulwich reading?

[Huguenot]

I've heard good things about both!

I'm just about to start 'The Prague Cemtery' - am I going to be heppy I did?

[TillieTrotter]

Read the book.....absolutely brilliant!

[Jah Lush]

Just finished Nile Rogers bigography now on Beginners by Raymond Carver. Good stuff.

[Annette Curtain]

Smut

Alan Bennett

Nette(tu)

[El Pibe]

Reading a couple at the moment

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England is a fine tome for anyone with the vaguest interst in social history. Pops lots of myths and humanises the past. Very readable and entertaining too.

ANd I've mentioned this elsewhere, but this masterly history of the misguided Soviet intervention in Afgahnistan is a must for anyone interested in current affairs. Well researched without being scholarly (it was written by the old Ambassador in Moscow) and enough anecdotes garnered from first hand interviews to make it a deeply human and sympathetic work.

[TillieTrotter]

I just finished Blindness by Jose Saramago. Very strange writing style but quite enjoyable. I'm well stuck into Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

[Jah Lush]

Started William Boyd's Restless yesterday. Reigned in and hooked from the very first page. Great stuff.

[katie1997]

How to be a woman - Caitlin Moran

Brilliant and funny.

On waxing: (Chapter 2 'I become furry')

"I can't believe we've got to a point where its basically costing us money to have a fanny. They're making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they're a communal garden. It's a stealth tax. Fanny VAT. This is money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL and CHEESE and BERETS. Instead, we're wasting it on making our Chihuahuas look like a skanky Lidl chicken breast. God DAMN you, mores-of-pornography-that-have-made-it-into-my-pants. GOD DAMN YOU."

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

Ooh! I hated that book. She's so smug I wanted to punch her.

[uncleglen]

Half way through Blood and Gold- part2 of Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin. Waiting for the latest Patricia Cornwell to come out in paperback

[Babsy]

Just finishing Agent Zigzag. The incredible true story of Eddie Chapman, a criminal turned double agent in the second world war. Ben Macintyre has trawlled meticulously through MI5 archives to tell his story.

I think MI5 said if the story was ficton, it would have rejected by editors as being unbelivable.

Thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

Funny you should mention editors. The most thought-provoking part of the book for me was whether Barrington-Ward was right not to print misinformation in The Times. Journalistic integrity (those were the days!) versus patriotism is an interesting moral dilemma.

[El Pibe]

Not what I'm reading, but on a vaguely literary link, here's a response from Tolkein regarding an enquiry as to his Aryan heritage from a German publisher in 1938.

Go JRR!

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-have-no-ancestors-of-that-gifted.html

[Jah Lush]

Umm....Tony Parsons - Men From The Boys. Like most of his stuff I find it's a bit wet.

[nashoi]

Re El Pibe's last post and strange requests from publishers.

Having bought a couple of Richard Wiseman's books, I'm now on his mailing list. Last year he published a book in the UK called, Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there. The blurb on the back starts with the sentence:

"Professor Richard Wiseman is clear about one thing: paranormal phenomena don't exist."

Then there's the following endorsement:

"People are emotionally drawn to the supernatural. They actively want weird, spooky things to be true...Wiseman shows us a higher joy as he deftly skewers the paranormal charlatans, blows away the psychic fog and lets in the light of reason."

Richard Dawkins

A fairly clear stance you would think. Imagine his surprise then when the only offers he got from major US publishers were on condition he re-wrote the book to suggest ghosts were real and psychic powers actually existed. He ended up having to self publish on Amazon.

[titch juicy]

just starting this

The Devil All the Time

[Thomas Micklewright]

book on plant based nutrition and a book by terry pratchet called money ... great stuff!

[Jah Lush]

Jean Paul Satre's Words. An autobiographical account of his childhood growing up with his grandparents after his father had died.

[bon3yard]

I've recently rediscovered Sci-Fi and after a couple of China Mievilles books am now half way throught he first of Iain.M.Banks Culture novels. Superb...and surprisingly funny to boot.

[El Pibe]

They are indeed.

I do find it weird when people say they like his Iain Banks books but not his Iain M Banks ones, as they're really missing out.

Mieville is just superb. He just keeps getting better.

His steampunkesque Bas-lag novels were entertaining if unfocussed, and then he flirted with being a new Gaimian with un-lundun and kraken, but he's really found a voice since then.

The City and the City was fantastic and am currently reading Embassytown which is one of the best books, leave alone sci-fi, I've read in years.

As a linguistics obsessive what's not to like in a novel about the nature of language and communication!!

[civilservant]

I recently re-read Neuromancer and was re-blown away

As an old SF trufan, I second the endorsements of Ian M Banks and China Mieville.

El P's assessment of The City and the City and the Bas-Lag books is spot on, but Embassytown follows the Bas-Lag pattern IMO: he begins enthrallingly well, does China, but can't quite seem to work out how or when to finish. It's probably significant that The City and the City was one of his shortest and least Gothic books.

Polite note to Bon3yard - it's SF, never Sci-Fi!

[El Pibe]

Finally finished Embassytown (I only get to read on my ten minute commute, assuming I don't bump into people, which is about 40% of the time) and have to disagree. I think, like City & the City, that he knew exactly where it was going.

I thought it his best book yet, reminiscent of the golden age of sci-fi, all about ideas, his hints at the exotic and alien nature of the world far more effective than the modern hard-sf/space opera trend for explaining everything.

I also like to think it's a book that people who'd ordinarily avoid SF could approach. The themes were very human, how and why do we communicate, how did language evolve, how vision and deceit are intertwined. It was also a great essay in societial reaction to existential threats, sketching impressions of Downfall Berlin but hinting at the ecological/end of fossil fuel stresses we face in future.

But it was the thoughts about language that really stand out*. My jaw dropped when he was talking about the universailty of thatness in language as my two year old is expressing everything in those terms. Pibi?o expressing complex thoughts come out as *points* "pibi?o's this one, pibi?o's not this one" as he can understand much but fumbling toward the faculties necessary to express it, just like the ariekine on realising they share unspoken thought.

Anyway I drivel on. Consider this one recommended.

*admittedly he muses more towards the end and the pacing dropped a bit, perhaps that's why you thought he was doing his bas-lag meandering.

[civilservant]

I read Embassytown at one go while in bed with flu... afraid that I was not in the best of conditions to appreciate the thatness of anything! I still think that the later battle scenes were a bit... over-long, shall we say?

But I agree that a lot of tedious stuff is passed off as SF these days. It seems to be sold by the pound as well - where have all the editors gone? Although you must admit that a nice bit of noir-ish cyberpunk once in a while is good fun - Richard Morgan or early Walter Jon Williams, say.

[El Pibe]

Fair point about the battles, you were rather mentally hurrying him to the denoument!

I do love stood bit of cyberpunk, I grew up with William Gibson. Am trying snowcrash. I've read some of Neal Stephenson's stuff, another chap with ideas everywhere but struggles with plot and pace. So far Cryptonomicon was his best novel that I've read. anathema was a bit clunking in its allegory but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I do like the fact that Snowcrash looks thin after his other tomes!

[citizenED]

I'm reading Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London". Bit of a nostalgia kick as I felt great empathy for "Coming up for Air" when I read it ages ago.