What are you reading at the moment?

seany65

I'm in the last third of "Thus spoke zarathustra".



No ruddy idea what it's about though.
:-S

lloyd

Grunfeld;722240" said:

Leaf Fielding, "To Live Outside the Law"



Pretty cool.  The story of the Operation Julie drugs bust on a massive LSD factory and the supply chain.  Just from a personal point of view I remember the pre-Julie acid that presumably must've come from this place was incredible.  After Julie it was so shit that I didn't bother any more.  But that aside, it's an interesting story from someone who was at the centre of it.

Added to my wish list, too many to get through for now.

Sibelius

Just about to start Bad Pharma  by Ben Goldacre

Grunfeld

seany65 said:

I'm in the last third of "Thus spoke zarathustra".



No ruddy idea what it's about though.
:-S

What I love about Nietzsche is that after reading him for a fortnight you start talking in aphorisms.  So not "no ruddy idea what it is about" more "I renounce the concept of understanding -- utter joylessness!"  sort of thing. 

SRich

I'm currently on "You Never Give Me Your Money", story of the Beatles business affairs and much more........I think it was recommended in this here forum. Thanks @TBM .

I have "Dear Boy, the life of Keith Moon" waiting in the wings to start when I get to it.

boogieman

SRich;724298" said:

I have "Dear Boy, the life of Keith Moon" waiting in the wings to start when I get to it.

Great book, my favourite rock bio. Quite sad reading though, Moon was a very tortured soul.

I picked up Dr Sleep in the charity shop yesterday, will make that my next one after the C J Sansom.

tbm

@SRich - hope you like it. I think it's a great book.

Takes me ages to get through books under normal circumstances but I was just on a work trip for a week and got through the Sammy Hagar bio -  I think its call Red - and Bad Vibes by Luke Haines.

The Hagar book is cool. Confirms what a pair of rimjobs the Van Halen brothers are, and also reveals Sammy to a canny bollox. Most of his money comes from non-musical ventures. 

The Luke Haines book is excellent. He hates most everybody and everything associated with Britpop. It's hilariously caustic. It made me wish I actually liked his band (The Auteurs) but they're pretty dull and I really don't like his voice. Defo worth a read though.

SRich

tbm said:

.....the Sammy Hagar bio -  I think its call Red

The Hagar book is cool. Confirms what a pair of rimjobs the Van Halen brothers are, and also reveals Sammy to a canny bollox. Most of his money comes from non-musical ventures. 

I have that at home.......the VH brothers behaved terribly towards Sammy it seems...

I love music / rock biographies

goldtop

The White Cities by Joseph Roth.

It's a collection of newspaper columns written between the wars by a German who found himself (in both senses) in France.

Beautifully evocative writing, so much so that next year's holiday is a road trip to Avignon/etc to trace his footsteps.

scrumhalf

The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis.

It's something I've never come across before, about Americans who left the States in the Great Depression and emigrated to the USSR. They start off by being welcomed but are soon subjected to the same sort of terrifying shit that other Soviets citizens were so luckyto enjoy.

smigeon

Jalapeno said:

Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle - just started book 2 - ruddy marvellous !

I just got this and I agree. It's fantastic!

EricTheWeary

Viv Albertine's Clothes, Music, Boys - highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the punk era and some nice stuff about restarting in music when middle aged.
Read a Peter May novel that was guff and now part way through the Martian based on a recommendation on here by @grunfeld IIRC. Sort of Robinson Crusoe meets Curious Incident of the Dog in space.

Bogwhoppit

Having just finished "The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350-1750", I'm now taking a break and reading ' The Paston Letters", before moving onto "The Cistercians in the Middle Ages" - again 

d8m

I'm over 50% thorugh the Clapton biography now.

Starting to drag........

Rocker

It is only a small book but I strongly recommend that you get a copy of No One Shouted STOP! by John Healy.  ISBN 0 951263911 9.  The book is about the death of a town in Mayo, Charlestown, but it probably could be about any town in Ireland, Scotland, Wales or England.  Towns that the Government forgot existed.  Do yourself a favour and read it.

Tex Mexico

I'm about fifty pages into Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and I hate it. It's the first of his I've read after years of hearing rave reviews, and it's just not for me at all.

I'm rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Papa, having just finished Green Hills of Africa.

I'm also partway through a second read of Blood Meridian, and McCarthy bears reading several times if only for the art of his language. His stories are powerful enough on their own but his prose has a stark beauty to it that needs another pass to really enjoy. Apart from maybe The Road, where the story is so fundamental it's more like reading an epic poem.

I just finished a reread of Last Exit to Brooklyn, which is one of my favourite novels of all time, along with Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and Forster's Howard's End. And Stephen King's The Stand, but I tend to leave that one out when I'm trying to impress people.

I recently reread An American Dream by Norman Mailer and to be honest it's the only novel of his I've really liked. Ditto In Cold Blood by Capote, although that one has an inevitable uniqueness.

I've promised myself to have another crack at Joyce's Ulysses before the end of the year, but frankly I don't think it'll be any more successful than my previous attempts.

I'm also reading the collected works of W. B. Yeats but that's more for dipping in and out of. Do people still read poetry anywhere but at school?

DesVegas

I've started Congo by Michael Crichton .. i do quite like his work. However, this time i am picking random pages and paragraphs throughout the book and reading them, then picking another random section and reading that etc and trying to work out what is going on.

It's quite good fun actually.

d8m

Just finished the Clapton biography.

Was a real effort towards the end but I stuck at it!

Now onto this:

I'm a big fan of Franks and this book has been getting good reviews from all the right places.

hungrymark

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Never read him before, interesting style.

d8m

hungrymark said:

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Never read him before, interesting style.

One of my all time favourites!