Haven't posted anything here since I set up the blog back in August. Early New year resolution to use this thing regularly!
Now, what's this reader's life been like these past few months? Highlights include discovering, with awe and wonder, the sheer delight of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe novels; being blown away by my first taste of William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying - I'd never appreciated til then just how flexible the novel form could be; and enjoying with satisfaction the deeply impressive debut of the hugely talented David Mitchell, Ghostwritten.
Least favourite of the recent bunch would definitely be The Outsider (L'Etranger) by Albert Camus, which I actively loathed while reading it. Good prose but hideous philosophy - didn't appeal to my sensibilities at all.
Finished my first Michael Chabon novel a few days ago, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. This was very entertaining, if a little esoteric. Chabon is quite the wordsmith: some delicious sentences, the best metaphors since, well, Chandler; and a great sense of humour. His Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is on the bookshelf at home - I look forward to cracking its formidably wide spine some time next year.
Right now am enveloped in the warm-duvet-on-a-cold-winter's-morning-like delights of Wodehouse's Leave It To Psmith. Effortlessly funny and a great way to distract myself on the way to work on the bus which habitually has broken heaters.
Christmas approaches but I'll be back in January.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Books read in 2008
At some point I'll attempt to review them all...
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene
Much Obliged, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland / Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Pan by Knut Hamsun
The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Saturday by Ian McEwan
number9dream by David Mitchell
Howards End by EM Forster
The Aspern Papers by Henry James
The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard Cornwell
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse
The Apple by Michel Faber
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Sharpe’s Triumph by Bernard Cornwell
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Germinal by Emile Zola
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Sharpe’s Fortress by Bernard Cornwell
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Fatherland by Robert Harris
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Last Day Of A Condemned Man by Victor Hugo
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Watchmen by Alan Moore / Dave Gibbons
Though I usually like to follow one book with something on an entirely different subject, for some reason I followed a World War II theme for a while there in the autumn (The Book Thief through to The Remains Of The Day).
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene
Much Obliged, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland / Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Pan by Knut Hamsun
The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Saturday by Ian McEwan
number9dream by David Mitchell
Howards End by EM Forster
The Aspern Papers by Henry James
The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard Cornwell
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse
The Apple by Michel Faber
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Sharpe’s Triumph by Bernard Cornwell
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Germinal by Emile Zola
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Sharpe’s Fortress by Bernard Cornwell
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Fatherland by Robert Harris
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Last Day Of A Condemned Man by Victor Hugo
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Watchmen by Alan Moore / Dave Gibbons
Though I usually like to follow one book with something on an entirely different subject, for some reason I followed a World War II theme for a while there in the autumn (The Book Thief through to The Remains Of The Day).
What I'm reading now
The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James.
I'm about a third of the way through this American classic, and I'm enjoying it so far. Celebrated by scholars as the greatest of James's early works (before he became increasingly obtuse), it's the story of Isabel Archer, a heroine who could easily be bracketed with those other great independent women of 19th-century literature, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Whether her life ends us as tragically as those two unfortunate adultresses I don't yet know.
I will post a full review when I've finished the book. Which could be a while... You have to read James very slowly because each and every sentence is so intricately constructed - skim-reading would yield absolutely no meaning. He was a master at getting under the skin of his characters and there are few other authors whose creations you feel could easily step off of the page, so realistically and psychologically accurate are they depicted. James is definitely not an author to be read by those who demand a page-turning plot - he would bore the pants off those with impatient minds. His elegant and insightful prose offers up deeper, more satisfying pleasures.
If you haven't read Henry James before, I highly recommend his most famous short work, the chillingly brilliant ghost story The Turn Of The Screw. It's the most elliptical, suggestive thing I've ever read - spooky in the way films are that keep their monsters in the shadows. If you don't like the sound of that, give Washington Square a try - a much shorter novel than Portrait. I read it a couple of months ago and really enjoyed it. It's a fairly simple - for James - story in an almost Jane Austen-like style, very witty with entertaining characters and interesting moral conundrums.
I'm about a third of the way through this American classic, and I'm enjoying it so far. Celebrated by scholars as the greatest of James's early works (before he became increasingly obtuse), it's the story of Isabel Archer, a heroine who could easily be bracketed with those other great independent women of 19th-century literature, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Whether her life ends us as tragically as those two unfortunate adultresses I don't yet know.
I will post a full review when I've finished the book. Which could be a while... You have to read James very slowly because each and every sentence is so intricately constructed - skim-reading would yield absolutely no meaning. He was a master at getting under the skin of his characters and there are few other authors whose creations you feel could easily step off of the page, so realistically and psychologically accurate are they depicted. James is definitely not an author to be read by those who demand a page-turning plot - he would bore the pants off those with impatient minds. His elegant and insightful prose offers up deeper, more satisfying pleasures.
If you haven't read Henry James before, I highly recommend his most famous short work, the chillingly brilliant ghost story The Turn Of The Screw. It's the most elliptical, suggestive thing I've ever read - spooky in the way films are that keep their monsters in the shadows. If you don't like the sound of that, give Washington Square a try - a much shorter novel than Portrait. I read it a couple of months ago and really enjoyed it. It's a fairly simple - for James - story in an almost Jane Austen-like style, very witty with entertaining characters and interesting moral conundrums.
How I choose what I read
I've always loved reading fiction. When I was a very young boy you'd often find me with my nose stuck in a book, devouring exciting tales by the likes of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton (well, they seemed exciting at the time!). At around the age of 11 my school had reached an important anniversary and the headteacher made the obvious decision to celebrate this fact by... designing a teatowel. And on this never-to-be-used kitchen accoutrement, many children, myself included, were asked to put their name and a little comment of their choice, to commemmorate the fact that they were pupils at this school on such an occasion. My parents still treasure their copy of this graffitied dishcloth and there, amongst the obvious messages such as 'Tottenham Hotspur rule!' and 'New Kids On The Block forever!' is my contribution: 'I love Books!'
As a spotty adolescent I became enamoured of the works of Tolkien and having voraciously sped through assorted myths of elves and hobbits moved on to pale imitations such as The Sword Of Shannara. Then when I left home to study at drama school at the naive age of 18, I more or less stopped reading novels, having far too many other things to do...
But in my twenties, I started again, and after reading quite a lot of dross - and, with the critical eye I'd garnered through studying plays as a student, realising it as such - decided that I would find out what were considered the really essential novels. Having been geekily obsessed with swords and sorcery in my teenage years, I'd missed out on a lot of great books. So, using the mighty power of the Internet, I did my research and found out about the classics and the modern works that would mean I'd be a well-read individual. As I tentatively started this delightful hobby, I soon realised that these books were classics for a reason. Whether it was a 19th-century novel about revolutionary France (A Tale Of Two Cities) or an anti-establishment escapade set in an asylum (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) , it was really, really good. Of course, some were better than others (take a step back, Heart Of Darkness, I didn't like you very much) but the fact that they had been filtered through years, decades or sometimes centuries of other readers' experience and still held up as monumentally entertaining or enlightening reads meant that almost every time I turned the first page, I was guaranteed a fantastic new experience.
So now I try to only read really great books. As someone once said (I think it may have been Dr Samuel Johnson, though I could be wrong and in any case I'm paraphrasing), life's too short to read bad books. Sometimes I'll be so impressed by an author that I'll read most of their other works, even those considered not so good, but usually somebody capable of writing a masterpiece shows merit in whatever else they've penned. And I sometimes read new books, but I usually wait a few months or a couple of years for any hype to die down so I can see whether it's really worth it. A couple of favourite books of recent years are David Mitchell's brilliant genre-hopping, century-spanning Cloud Atlas and Susannah Clarke's utterly brilliant historical fantasy (yes, I sometimes return to the genre) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Not to mention the jaw-dropping, superlative-exhausting, Pulitzer-Prize winning, future-classic The Road by the utterly unique Cormac McCarthy. The last pages of that had me, literally, in floods of tears. It's definitely one of the best books I've ever read, though whether I can put myself through that harrowing experience again, I'm not sure.
I like to mix up my reads so that something heavy and dark, like a novel by Emile Zola or Thomas Hardy, is followed by a frothy, fun experience like the incomparably excellent PG Wodehouse. I may jump straight from a Victorian behemoth like The Woman In White to a modern, cerebral chin-stroker like Ian McEwan's Saturday. I hop from Tsarist Russia in Anna Karenina to a Cold-War paranoid 70s Britain in Graham Greene's The Human Factor. So though I may not be the world's expert on one area of literature, in this way I experience a wonderful panorama of life - lives - across time and space; and gradually I tick the boxes of those 'Best Books Ever' lists periodically published in papers and literary supplements.
Reading is the finest hobby I know. You can do it anywhere, providing you're not supposed to be doing something else! As Groucho Marx said "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." All you need are some printed pages and your own eyeballs to possibly undergo the trip of a lifetime. Television, film and theatre are all very fine - and I'm a fan of the best each of those entertainments have to offer - but nothing can parallel a reader's own imagination. That one-to-one dialogue between a great writer and an attentive reader can be the one of the most scintillating conversations you ever have.
So that's me, and how I choose what I read.
If there's anybody out there, what do you like to read, and why?
As a spotty adolescent I became enamoured of the works of Tolkien and having voraciously sped through assorted myths of elves and hobbits moved on to pale imitations such as The Sword Of Shannara. Then when I left home to study at drama school at the naive age of 18, I more or less stopped reading novels, having far too many other things to do...
But in my twenties, I started again, and after reading quite a lot of dross - and, with the critical eye I'd garnered through studying plays as a student, realising it as such - decided that I would find out what were considered the really essential novels. Having been geekily obsessed with swords and sorcery in my teenage years, I'd missed out on a lot of great books. So, using the mighty power of the Internet, I did my research and found out about the classics and the modern works that would mean I'd be a well-read individual. As I tentatively started this delightful hobby, I soon realised that these books were classics for a reason. Whether it was a 19th-century novel about revolutionary France (A Tale Of Two Cities) or an anti-establishment escapade set in an asylum (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) , it was really, really good. Of course, some were better than others (take a step back, Heart Of Darkness, I didn't like you very much) but the fact that they had been filtered through years, decades or sometimes centuries of other readers' experience and still held up as monumentally entertaining or enlightening reads meant that almost every time I turned the first page, I was guaranteed a fantastic new experience.
So now I try to only read really great books. As someone once said (I think it may have been Dr Samuel Johnson, though I could be wrong and in any case I'm paraphrasing), life's too short to read bad books. Sometimes I'll be so impressed by an author that I'll read most of their other works, even those considered not so good, but usually somebody capable of writing a masterpiece shows merit in whatever else they've penned. And I sometimes read new books, but I usually wait a few months or a couple of years for any hype to die down so I can see whether it's really worth it. A couple of favourite books of recent years are David Mitchell's brilliant genre-hopping, century-spanning Cloud Atlas and Susannah Clarke's utterly brilliant historical fantasy (yes, I sometimes return to the genre) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Not to mention the jaw-dropping, superlative-exhausting, Pulitzer-Prize winning, future-classic The Road by the utterly unique Cormac McCarthy. The last pages of that had me, literally, in floods of tears. It's definitely one of the best books I've ever read, though whether I can put myself through that harrowing experience again, I'm not sure.
I like to mix up my reads so that something heavy and dark, like a novel by Emile Zola or Thomas Hardy, is followed by a frothy, fun experience like the incomparably excellent PG Wodehouse. I may jump straight from a Victorian behemoth like The Woman In White to a modern, cerebral chin-stroker like Ian McEwan's Saturday. I hop from Tsarist Russia in Anna Karenina to a Cold-War paranoid 70s Britain in Graham Greene's The Human Factor. So though I may not be the world's expert on one area of literature, in this way I experience a wonderful panorama of life - lives - across time and space; and gradually I tick the boxes of those 'Best Books Ever' lists periodically published in papers and literary supplements.
Reading is the finest hobby I know. You can do it anywhere, providing you're not supposed to be doing something else! As Groucho Marx said "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." All you need are some printed pages and your own eyeballs to possibly undergo the trip of a lifetime. Television, film and theatre are all very fine - and I'm a fan of the best each of those entertainments have to offer - but nothing can parallel a reader's own imagination. That one-to-one dialogue between a great writer and an attentive reader can be the one of the most scintillating conversations you ever have.
So that's me, and how I choose what I read.
If there's anybody out there, what do you like to read, and why?
TBR pile
The following are the books I hope to read by the end of 2009. My aim is to read around 40 books a year, depending on length, and of course work and family commitments! These are all sitting on the (heaving) bookshelves at home, calling to me...
Camus, Albert - The Outsider
Chabon, Michael - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chandler, Raymond - The Big Sleep / Farewell, My Lovely / The Long Goodbye
Cornwell, Bernard - Sharpe's Prey / Sharpe's Rifles
Dickens, Charles - The Mystery Of Edwin Drood
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Fforde, Jasper - Lost In A Good Book
Grossmith, George & Weedon - The Diary Of A Nobody
Ibsen, Henrik - Hedda Gabler
Irving, John - The 158 Pound Marriage
Le Carre, John - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
McEwan, Ian - The Cement Garden
Mitchell, David - Ghostwritten
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying Of Lot 49
Trollope, Anthony - He Knew He Was Right
Turgenev, Ivan - First Love
Sansom, CJ - Dark Fire
Shakespeare, William - The Winter's Tale
Spark, Muriel - The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie
Updike, John - Rabbit Redux
Wodehouse, PG - Leave It To Psmith
Camus, Albert - The Outsider
Chabon, Michael - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chandler, Raymond - The Big Sleep / Farewell, My Lovely / The Long Goodbye
Cornwell, Bernard - Sharpe's Prey / Sharpe's Rifles
Dickens, Charles - The Mystery Of Edwin Drood
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Fforde, Jasper - Lost In A Good Book
Grossmith, George & Weedon - The Diary Of A Nobody
Ibsen, Henrik - Hedda Gabler
Irving, John - The 158 Pound Marriage
Le Carre, John - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
McEwan, Ian - The Cement Garden
Mitchell, David - Ghostwritten
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying Of Lot 49
Trollope, Anthony - He Knew He Was Right
Turgenev, Ivan - First Love
Sansom, CJ - Dark Fire
Shakespeare, William - The Winter's Tale
Spark, Muriel - The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie
Updike, John - Rabbit Redux
Wodehouse, PG - Leave It To Psmith
Books read so far 2009
Most recent first:
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
The Drinking Den (L'Assommoir) by Emile Zola
Something Fresh by PG Wodehouse
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Theban Plays (Oedipus The King, Oedipus At Colonus, Antigone) by Sophocles
What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Washington Square by Henry James
Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Teechers by John Godber
Nation by Terry Pratchett
Sharpe's Trafalgar by Bernard Cornwell
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Child In Time by Ian McEwan
Arthur And George by Julian Barnes
Dissolution by CJ Sansom
Running total: 24
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
The Drinking Den (L'Assommoir) by Emile Zola
Something Fresh by PG Wodehouse
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Theban Plays (Oedipus The King, Oedipus At Colonus, Antigone) by Sophocles
What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Washington Square by Henry James
Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Teechers by John Godber
Nation by Terry Pratchett
Sharpe's Trafalgar by Bernard Cornwell
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Child In Time by Ian McEwan
Arthur And George by Julian Barnes
Dissolution by CJ Sansom
Running total: 24
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