Do you read?

[mjmooney]

Of this I have no doubt: if Dumas were alive today, he'd be in Hollywood show-running an absolutely ass-kicking action-packed TV series.

(and tbf, since, like most authors of the period, his works were written for serialization, reading TCoMC or The Three Musketeers is rather like watching a DVD of a TV series: you get all the episodes without having to wait another week/month/whatever to find out what happens next!)

The original work was published in serial form in the Journal des Débats in 1844. Luc Sante describes the effect in Europe at the time as follows:

The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled ... is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else.

Wikipedia

I finished it. Fantastic book.

[AVFC_Hitz]

Just finished DBC Pierre's Lights out in Wonderland.

Wonderful style and narrative from a great writer.

Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is thinking terminal. His philosophical enquiries, the abstractions he indulges, and how these relate to a life lived, all point in the same direction. His destination is Wonderland. The nature and style of the journey is all that's to be decided. Taking in London, Tokyo, Berlin and the Galapagos Islands, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell's remarkable global odyssey. Committed to the pursuit of pleasure and in search of the Bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties, Gabriel's adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu ovaries, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin's majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way we see a character disintegrate and re-shape before our eyes. Lights Out In Wonderland carries you through its many corridors of delight and horror on the back of Gabriel's voice, which is at once skeptical, idealistic, broken and optimistic. An allegorical banquet and a sly commentary on these End Times and the march towards insensate banality, DBC Pierre's third novel completes a loose trilogy of fictions, each of which stands alone as a joyful expression of the human spirit.

[coda]

^ Don't read Ludmila's Broken English, absolute shite after Vernon God Little.

[AVFC_Hitz]

Yeah I listened to an audio copy of Ludmilla's Broken English and it was it a bit crap to put it mildly. Vernon God Little was a great book but this one I really enjoyed.

[CI]

Just re-reading The Decline & Fall of The Roman Empire

An epic read

[mjmooney]

Just re-reading The Decline & Fall of The Roman Empire

An epic read

Clive James finds him indigestible. He says to read Gibbon requires a “Quiz Kid retentivenes” just to get to the end of a sentence “without being driven back to sort out” initial references lost in various sets of “formers” and “latters.” Reading Gibbon, adds James, is like trying to get through a Grand National with “a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well as forwards; and you have to carry your own horse.”

Link

I've had a copy of Gibbon on my bookshelf for nearly forty years, and have not so far attempted it. I wouldn't read it for history - because it's mostly based on 18th Century received wisdom and much of it is plain fiction. Which leaves reading it as a piece of Enlightenment literature. And going by the account of Clive James (and others, it must be said), I'm not sure it would be worth the effort. I do feel I should though.

[Rodders]

I read a few chapters when I was doing Ancient History as an undergrad, it's perfectly fine in chunks I think. That said it's been 6 years so far and I haven't gone back to finish it off yet.

[saturdaygig]

I liked All families are psychotic - haven't read girlfriend in a coma yet, worth a try?

Absolutely, I thought it was excellent.

[irreverentad]

Has anyone read A life Too Short?

It has just won the William Hill Sports Book of the year. It is about the Ex German Goalkeeper, Robert Enke who killed himself.

I have added this to my must read list.

[Eames]

Just re-reading The Decline & Fall of The Roman Empire

An epic read

Clive James finds him indigestible. He says to read Gibbon requires a “Quiz Kid retentivenes” just to get to the end of a sentence “without being driven back to sort out” initial references lost in various sets of “formers” and “latters.” Reading Gibbon, adds James, is like trying to get through a Grand National with “a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well as forwards; and you have to carry your own horse.”

Link

I've had a copy of Gibbon on my bookshelf for nearly forty years, and have not so far attempted it. I wouldn't read it for history - because it's mostly based on 18th Century received wisdom and much of it is plain fiction. Which leaves reading it as a piece of Enlightenment literature. And going by the account of Clive James (and others, it must be said), I'm not sure it would be worth the effort. I do feel I should though.

I've got the audiobook read by Philip Madoc and that is soporific enough.... I can only listen to it in the car. I would never attempt the book, and think the Grand National analogy a very good one.

[leemond2008]

Just finished the harbour by John ajvide lindqvist (let the right one in, handling the undead)

It's took me over a week to read which is fooking ages for me to do a book in but I have been disrupted pretty much everytime I've picked it up, I have read 240 pages of it tonight to get it done.

Any way its a real good book , I think this author does tend to go off on a tangent and lose about 50/100 pages in each of his three books that I've read by him so far, hes got another book called little star or something like that, I'll haveto invest in it tomorra

I've got 2 other books to start now, through a glass darkly-James hussey and White devil-Justin Evans (looking forward yo this one as his first book a good and happy child was brilliant

[leemond2008]

a girl at work has passed me this to read, ive read one other book by him called the absence, it was a great old fashioned horror, a little disjointed in parts but still good

he manages to paint quite a good picture in your mind as you are reading it

The Demons have woken, the Dreaming has begun...

When a young man goes missing from the Fen village of Crow Haven, Inspector Jack Trent is sent to investigate. He finds an isolated, insular community which harbours a shocking secret. A secret he has already glimpsed in his dreams. Now, in a race against time, Jack must piece together the mystery surrounding Dr Elijah Mendicant and the ancient Darkness of Crow Haven. He must save the life of an innocent child and stop an ageless evil from rising once more.

But doubt remains. Can Jack overcome the demons from his past? And what will he make of the Doctor s final, devastating revelation?

The Doctor will see you now...

'A truly skin-crawlingly terrifying book.' - Bertrams Books

'The best horror novel I read this year.' - Dark Wolf

'An unnerving joy.' - Mathew F Riley

'Horror is alive and kicking and it has a name...Bill Hussey.' - Garry Charles, author of Heaven s Falling

[leemond2008]

It was the dead thing they found hanging from a tree that changed the trip beyond recognition.

When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise.

A shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare scenario that could cost them their lives. Lost, hungry, and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

But then they stumble across an old habitation. Ancient artefacts decorate the walls and there are bones scattered upon the floors. The residue of old rites for something that still exists in the forest. Something responsible for the bestial presence that follows their every step. And as the four friends stagger in the direction of salvation, they learn that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees . . .

finished this last week

really good book, it reads more like a film than a book to be honest.

First half of it is just based around 4 friends going hiking and they end up lost in a realy thick dense forest, things start to get strange and then dangerous, the second half of the book takes a while to get into because of the way the whole sotry has just swapped and the lead character is now fighting for his life against what appears to be a pretty shit enemy that suprisingly works quite well

id give this book a good 8/10 good old fashioned horror book

plus the author is a brummy

[leemond2008]

this is the one i'm looking forward to

Andrew Taylor is on his last chance. After being expelled from his previous school in America for drug use, his father pulled all the strings he possibly could to secure his son a place in the prestigious public school of Harrow in Greater London. A school immersed in history, tradition and most importantly - success.

However, upon his arrival at the school, Taylor begins to feel an eerie presence in the musty air of the age old building. Vivid dreams begin to creep into Taylor's sleep. Stories of 'The Lot Ghost' whispered to him by his fellow classmates and the school's matron, don't exactly make life any easier for him. And then early one morning, Taylor witnesses his newly acquired friend, Theodore Ryder, being strangled to death by a haunting blond-haired individual who simply disappears into thin air after the boy dies.

Harrow school for boys is quite understandably shook up pretty bad by the ordeal. Rumours begin to spread around Taylor's connection with the dead boy. Even after the pathologist announces that it was a natural death, still Taylor is deemed an outcast and one to be watched. And through it all, the dreams continue to haunt his night-time hours. But they're becoming too vivid to be just dreams. There seems to be something more in them.

When another classmate named Roddy Slough becomes struck down with similar symptoms to the deceased young boy, Taylor realises that the haunting is much more serious than he had originally judged. Soon enough people begin to pick up on Taylor's uncanny resemblance to the great poet of the nineteenth century - Lord Byron who himself attended Harrow. With the help of his housemaster Piers Fawkes, the school's resident archivist Dr Judith Kahn and his blossoming relationship with Persephone Vine (the only girl attending the school), Taylor begins to uncover the connections between the haunting, Lord Byron and Byron's mysterious young lover - John Harness.

The truth is there, locked away in the depths of the history behind the great school of Harrow. A hidden stash of letters to Byron opens the doors wider to the painful past that was suffered in the very halls of Harrow. A love that was extinguished by a perverse jealousy gone sour. A cruel revenge that to this day lingers in the dank depths of the school's basement. A memory that simply won't die...

[legov]

Clive James finds him indigestible. He says to read Gibbon requires a “Quiz Kid retentivenes” just to get to the end of a sentence “without being driven back to sort out” initial references lost in various sets of “formers” and “latters.” Reading Gibbon, adds James, is like trying to get through a Grand National with “a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well as forwards; and you have to carry your own horse.”

To be fair I find myself being "driven back to sort out initial references" pretty often regardless which (non-fiction) book I read.

[PauloBarnesi]

Attempt to read some ‘better’ books than normal;

Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Secret Agent by Ford Madox Ford

All very enjoyable.

Portrait of the Artist as a young man by Joyce up next and then on to some poetry by Betjeman.

[mjmooney]

The Secret Agent by Ford Madox Ford

Joseph Conrad, Shirley?

As for FMF, if you like "The Good Soldier", you really must read "Parade's End".

Time for me to quote one of my own Amazon reviews again:

Until quite recently I was barely aware of Ford Madox Ford. When people list the great writers of the early 20th Century his name usually merits only a footnote. However, a short article in a national newspaper appraising "The Good Soldier" as one of the great English novels prompted me to read it. And great it is.

That led me onto this weighty quartet, which has lived with me for the last couple of months. And it confirms my suspicions that Ford is indeed one of our greatest writers, whether he is currently fashionable or no.

One of my first reactions was that - notwithstanding to the publisher's blurbs and cover illustrations - this is NOT a novel "about" the First World War. Yes, the war is an important theme, but it is by no means the only one. In fact the military action, such as it is, features only in the third of the four novels making up the sequence.

No, this book belongs in the pantheon of the great "social" novels - it stands up extremely well against Galsworthy, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Anthony Powell, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and even Marcel Proust, who are Ford's true contemporaries. Indeed, it shares with those writers' works an experimental approach to exploring characters' psychological motivations and thought processes that was so characteristic of the 1920s "Modernist" movement. Rarely has a writer captured so well the way in which peoples' minds REALLY work - with confusion, doubt and sudden impulsive decision galloping along in rapid succession. Ford has a rare gift for bathos - broad comedy and real human tragedy can inhabit the same page in a way which can be unsettling, but always rings true.

This is very much a novel of its time - and especially - social milieu. Almost all the main characters are members of the English upper-middle classes, and the book charts mercilessly the unravelling of their once-secure world, as Britain shifts into the modern, post-Victorian era.

Structurally, it is equally impressive. Ford has a breathtaking ability to "time-shift" back-and-forth without ever losing the reader's attention; each chapter starts off with a major leap forward from the one before, so that we are initially unsure of what has happened in the meantime. Then, via a series of "flashbacks" and subtle conversations, the missing jigsaw pieces are slotted into place and the picture becomes clear.

Interestingly, almost every scene consists of dialogue, with one, two and occasionally three or four characters interacting in a single location - it is almost as if Ford had one eye on a possible stage dramatisation of the story. As such, it would - in the hands of the right screenwriter and director - make a superb TV adaptation. We've had "A Dance To The Music Of Time" and "Brideshead", so come on BBC/Channel Four - why not?

You'll have gathered by now that I love this book. It may not be to everyone's taste - Ford's use of language can seem slightly odd to modern ears, for example - but if you enjoy a book you can "live in" for an extended period, I urge you to give it a try.

Amazon

And my suggestion has been taken up - I understand a BBC TV series is due some time soon.

[wiggyrichard]

Do you read every day Mike?

[mjmooney]

Do you read every day Mike?

See this thread. Specifically, page 53.

Yes, of course, every available moment.

[wiggyrichard]

Do you read every day Mike?

See this thread.

Thats what made me ask.

How many books have you got on the go at the moment?