Reading The Midden by Tom Sharpe at the moment and really enjoying it.
Satirical fun.
Cheers,
Neil.
I have managed to get through and come out the other end of More Pricks Than Kicks by Samuel Beckett; a novel I think that the average reader might struggle to complete without a passing knowledge of Dublin and perhaps some previous acquaintance with Joyce or Flann O'Brien. I don't think I'll miss the sentences that last longer than most writers' paragraphs but it's an entertaining read.
I also just read Trevor Baylis's autobiography, Clock This, which was excellent.
In the Sotadic Zone, apparently.
I've just abandoned The Book of the New Sun Volume I:Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe after sticking with it for 430 pages. The occasional few pages showing promise but mostly unreadable and this is a genre I usually enjoy reading.
I've got 10 Ken Follett books to start reading now.
Eddie
Whole chunks of my life come under the heading "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
I've just finished Capital by John Lanchester and really enjoyed it. It captures London really well and touches on terrorism, the economics crisis, immigration and even premiership football without any of these becoming any bigger than the story of a disparate group of neighbors living in a street in South London. I saw Lanchester earlier in the month at a reading which prompted me to pick this up and once I'm through my current reading list I think I'll pick up Mr Phillips.
In the Sotadic Zone, apparently.
I read all of that as it's got so many good reviews, and sort of liked it. But I am in no rush to read Volume 2. I think it helped that I was on holiday and got through it quite quickly.Originally Posted by swanbourne
I find his sax playing more interesting than his writing...
Seriously though, I'm some way into "Nemesis" by Philip Roth. So far, it's outstanding.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/View-From-Th...1883917&sr=8-1
Look no further than that for some rib breaking laughs!
The anthology of reminiscences collated by rob reisner is the best book on bird . I think it's called 'bird , the legend of Charlie Parker '
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
My 2p about Lee Child - tons of foreplay and no climax.
More on-topic, I've started reading 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever'. Looks promising.
Blast from the past...i read them in my twenties (which was a while ago!).....i seem to remember i found them hard going.
Ive just started re-reading books I havent read in about ten years. Ive started out with Starship Troopers by Heinlein and will soon move on to A Breave New World by Huxley.
I started reading Ken Follett's "Code to Zero" last night, it's looking good.
Eddie
Whole chunks of my life come under the heading "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
I read them about 10 years ago. Took a while to get into, due to the the language used, and the fact the main character is so unlikable. However as they progressed, I got more and more into it. I didn't quite finish them all and he added some more recently too.
Having been mostly disappointed by the recent TV version of Blandings (where is everything is pretty much wrong) I've just started re-reading my old PG Wodehouse books.
Light hearted and very amusing.
Excellent stuff before retiring for the night.
Cheers,
Neil.
I've never read Wodehouse, I really ought to I think.
I'm 3/4 the way through my all-time favourite book, think I've read it 4 or 5 times now - Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy
My copy was published in the early 90's and it is starting to show it's age
couple of ones i really enjoyed....
'bringing the heat' by mark bowden.
'lt: over the edge' by lawrence taylor.
cheers.
I just read "The Man in The High Castle" again by Phillip K Dick ( I may have mentioned I'd read it somewhere before on this thread ). I love the collecting/acquiring slant to the book, and also the alternate alternate history of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", the Cult Underground novel by Abendsen, and the discussions about it in the story.
Stonker ! 10/10
Been enjoying Brett Battles' "The Cleaner" series featuring his hero Jonathan Quinn.
Thanks to Eddie, I have become a huge fan of Scott Mariani. If you like thrillers send me a pm and i will give you some titles
Paul
GOT...TO...KILL...CAPTAIN STUPID!
I am reading Caleb Carr's 'Angel of Darkness' which is the follow up to his 'Alienist'.
Think: Jack the ripper/Sherlock Holmes/Victorian CSI/New York/Criminal Minds FBI profiling.
Holiday season bumperoo
Read some very good thrillers lately
David Baldacci - John Puller series 1+2. Zero Day + The Forgotten,if you like the Jack Reacher books then you'll enjoy these.Very,very similar
Joe Lansdale - Hap and Leonard series.Read all these and they were all excellent
John Gilstrap - Jonathan Grave series 1+ 2. No Mercy + Hostage Zero,very good,non stop action about a government sponsored hostage rescue/assassin.
Warren Ellis - Gun Machine,very good and hopefully the first in a series as the characters were excellent
There is always a turd hidden amongst the roses and that turd was called Inferno by Dan Brown,a truly shocking book - horrible.
Didn't even finish it and I can usually finish most books,garbage of the worst kind - avoid
Cheers,Mick
The Passage by Justin Cronin. Very well written
Just finished a couple of books, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and the graphic novel Watchmen.
I'm just starting the Wool series by Hugh Howley - apparently, if anyone liked The Passage, they'll love these!
I'm not an avid book reader but after watching Corleone on Sky Arts & holidaying in Sicily I found Excellent Cadavers by Alexander Stille 'un-putdownable'.
It's not just about the characters in the mafia nor rise of the Corleone clan but really illustrates the shocking links between the mafia and Italian politics that made the work of some in the judiciary eg. Falcone, a death sentence.
Inferno by Dan Brown is possibly the worst book I've ever attempted to read. I lasted about 100 pages
Just read 'Wolf Tickets' by Ray Banks. A UK crime novel which is as foul mouthed and violent as you could hope for. A great read and much more enjoyable than all the identikit police procedurals clogging up the shelves at the moment.
Half way through the Bowers Files books by Steven James. Really good. I don't know if they have been mentioned before as I would rather read books than the whole of this thread LOL. I recommend them anyway.
Miss Buncle's Book - I really needed such a reading these days (a holiday is past its due time), made me smile all along.
Just finished NOS-4R2 by Joe Hill. A little uneven in places but he is turning out to be a pretty good horror/supernatural writer.
Just started on Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle". Enjoying it so far.
I've just finished Vulcan 607 by Rowland White. It is absolutely riveting.
From the blurb:
"April 1982. Argentine forces had invaded the Falkland Islands. Britain needed an answer. And fast.
The idea was simple: to destroy the vital landing strip at Port Stanley. The reality was more complicated. The only aircraft that could possibly do the job was three months from being scrapped, and the distance it had to travel was four thousand miles beyond its maximum range. It would take fifteen Victor tankers and seventeen separate in-flight refuellings to get one Avro Vulcan B2 over the target, and give its crew any chance of coming back alive.
Yet less than a month later, a formation of elderly British jets launched from a remote island airbase to carry out the longest-range air attack in history. At its head was a single aircraft, six men, and twenty-one thousand-pound bombs, facing the hornet's nest of modern weaponry defending the Argentine forces on the Falkland Islands. There would be no second chances . . ."
I couldn't agree more, although I suffered to the end. Recently I started reading David Baldacci so far I've read The Innocent, The Hit, Split Second and I'm part way through Hour Game. I've enjoyed all of them and will carry on until I've read all his works.
Reading, "the mating season" by PG Wodehouse at the moment.
Superb, as is usual with his stuff.
Cheers,
Neil.
Did you know that the Wodehouse estate has authorised Sebastian Faulks (who wrote the Bond novel 'Devil May Care') to write a new Bertie Wooster novel?
No, I didn't.
Gawd knows what that would be like.
Cheers,
Neil.
Not read it but TBH I only want to read the stuff by the original author not, "in the style of" and although I could imagine somebody having a go at Fleming ( a few have) Wodehouses stuff is far more idiosyncratic.
Fortunately PG left a huge body of work.
Cheers,
Neil.
Really good read.
You might also find 'Sea Harrier over the Falklands' by Sharky Ward intersting - good account of the air battle and some of the political issues around it.
Just finished the following over the last couple of months:
Osama - Chris Ryan
The Tombs - Clive Cussler
Zero Hour - Clive Cussler
Live and let die - Ian Fleming
Moonraker - Ian Fleming
Same opinion on both points.
Rather obviously, I'm a big fan of P. G. Wodehouse... my cell phone rings with the BBC series theme song.
Bank on-topic, I'm reading Metro 2033, a post-apocalyptic novel set in Moscow's subway net. There are all sorts of dark creatures... yet the Russians still drink tea. Got to love them :)
I second that
Chris, thanks for the recommendation, I really enjoyed Vulcan 607 so I'll get a copy of that too.
About a year ago, I read all the Bond books back to back, from start to finish. I really recommend reading them all in sequence and getting really immersed in them.
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer.
A brilliant tale about a young female agent recruited and dropped into the France during WW2 to extract an important scientist from occupied Paris. Very good. Very tense. Very humbling too.
I enjoyed that too, but for me the best first-person narrative of war has to be Chicken Hawk by Robert Mason, the story of flying unarmed UH1 'Huey' helicopters in Vietnam. The sequel - Chicken Hawk, Back in the World - about his disastrous return to civilian life, is also well worth a read.
Have this on my kobo - next to read after the Stephen Leather novel i just started.
Just finished The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow, an incredibly good crime novel.
Finished The Quarry on the flight home yesterday.
Some of the dialogue is excellent. And Guy's vitriol & bitterness is actually moving - especially considering the situation Iain was in at the time of writing.
It reminded me of the wasp factory - in being told from the perspective of the offspring with a 'condition'. Shame there won't be any more from Mr Banks. RIP.
z
Recently finished my first ever Dickens - Bleak House
The Sheltering Sky, for the second time.
Finished The Rachel Papers, again, yesterday.
Will be starting The Handmaid's Tale, again, this evening.
Last edited by markbannister; 4th September 2013 at 07:04.
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