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OT: Watcha reading?

GeorgeKaplan said:
Has anyone here read any Michel Houellebecq? I’ve been meaning to get any of his books for months now, and I was about to order a copy of Platform, but since it’s Friday and there’s no real rush to order it right this second, I figured I’d throw it out here to see if I should start somewhere else
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If you're going to read Houellebecq I would start with The Elementary Particles--that is his best work AFAIC. It has a vibe pretty close to Louis Ferdinand Celine. I also really like his The Map and the territory quite a lot. There's also some resemblance with Houellebecq to Virginie Despentes as in Vernon Subutex One or Apocalypse Baby.....or at least I get a similar vibe though with Despentes we're moving into more feminist territory which IMO is good because Houellebecq is pretty much into his maleness so one of each would balance each other out. All really good reads IMO.
 
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eco's bones said:
If you're going to read Houellebecq I would start with The Elementary Particles--that is his best work AFAIC. It has a vibe pretty close to Louis Ferdinand Celine. I also really like his The Map and the territory quite a lot. There's also some resemblance with Houellebecq to Virginie Despentes as in Vernon Subutex One or Apocalypse Baby.....or at least I get a similar vibe though with Despentes we're moving into more feminist territory which IMO is good because Houellebecq is pretty much into his maleness so one of each would balance each other out. All really good reads IMO.
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Much appreciated! I haven’t read any of those and I’m going to at least look into all of them
 
GeorgeKaplan said:
Much appreciated! I haven’t read any of those and I’m going to at least look into all of them
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Celine's an interesting case. He's not a contemporary writer. He died in 1961. He was a banged up WWI vet who eventually was able to become a doctor after years spent studying medical books out of a Parisian library. He was eventually found out by a rich doctor who helped him the rest of the way. He married the guy's daughter and worked for the League of Nations for a while--got bored, left wife and child and set up practice in one of the worst slums in Paris doing a lot of it for gratis. He started writing novels and became famous right off. Journey to the end of the night wasn't like anything anyone had ever seen before. It was angry and nasty on one hand and almost lyrical with a strong sense of the comic on the other. He is one of the earliest if not the earliest of what's known as black humor. The explanation of course is the war and more than probably PTSD--which wasn't a thing back then but besides there were thousands of amputees and burn victims walking around not to mention people who were disfigured and others who had been gassed so the French govt. wasn't doing anything for anyone. Anyway he eventually got caught up in the Vichy regime in WWII which kind of puts a lot of people off but Henry Miller considered him a genius and all kinds of writers have cited him like Bukowski and Phillip Roth, the Beats and Joseph Heller's Catch 22 probably would never have been written, Kurt Vonnegut and William Vollman have written introductions to some of his stuff.

Houellebecq can be crude too and Despentes was a prostitute for a while.
 
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For all the non-fictions heads, I just read All The Devils Are Here by David Seabrook a week or two ago, it’s a book of a prelude and 3 essays about some of the coastal touristy towns in England, but it’s main focus is connecting a darkish thing that happened in the area with famous books or writers that deal with that location. Most of the links between stuff in it is more coincidental or feels more ethereal than solid factual evidence, but the thing that really made it stand out is the way author really puts himself into it, he drops threads of things when he’s just not interested or gets distracted by something else, he puts in bits of him just wandering around these towns and chatting with people on the street, it’s really like nothing I’ve ever read.

It’s hard a book to explain what it is, and I don’t feel like I’ve done a great job, so I’m just going to add what each section kind of deals with:
The prelude is about T.S. Eliot having a nervous breakdown after WWI and going to one of these towns and being there gave him the final push to finish The Wasteland

The first essay is about the painter Richard Dadd going insane on a trip around the Mediterranean and coming back to England and killing his father and he connects that to Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The second is about a group of British fascists (that included Audrey Hepburn’s parents) pre-WWII and connects it to the 39 Steps (which was written prior to the fascist stuff)

And the last one is the most free flowing and tangential one, and it kind of centers around interviewing this guy who was some sort of rentboy and he let’s him go on about sordid stuff and famous closeted guys he slept with and the author connects that stuff to a book from Robin Maugham and a Nicholas Roeg movie, then there’s a really strange ending to it that connects it back to the beginning of the essay

If anyone’s interested in it, it’s kind of hard to get, i think there were only two editions of it since it came out in 2002, and I had to order a copy from the UK (out of stock on amazon and barnes&noble) and it took me a month to get it
 
Just re-read Wuthering Heights. It is rather amazing that the story pulls you in so much, considering the fact that there really is no plot.
 
I couldn't really get into the last boat from Shanghai. I just can't relate to China in the 30s. But now I'm going back to a comfortable place and reading "Bad Blood" about the Theranos scam.
 
Oh, also forgot to say I re-read Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift recently, and man, that guy could write. Easily my favorite writer at this point.

Next up I’m either going to finally finish the last ~200 pages of Under the Volcano or read Martin Amis’ The Information
 
Speaking of re-reads, I read Fahrenheit 451. Found it very topical for today. Would recommend to read or re-read to anyone
 
I've been on Ricardo Piglia's second set of diaries called the Happy Years--that covers the time period between 1968 and 1975. To me the next set of his diaries (when they come out) should be particularly interesting as in 1976 there is a military takeover of the Argentine govt. and the commencement of the Dirty War period of Argentine history in which 30,000 some people died or were disappeared by the military junta which included friends and/or associates (such as Haroldo Conti and Rodolfo Walsh) of Piglia. It's also the subject matter of his novel Artifical Respiration which is a great book.
 
Crease said:
Re-attempting Infinite Jest. This should go about as well as the first four tries.
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I’ve been really slowly working my way through it, I’ll read like ~50 pages and lose steam and then go and read other things and come back in a few months. Probably not the ideal way to read it, but if I end up liking it more than I do now I’ll most likely go back and read it through without the breaks

we want cup said:
The Defense is one of my all time favorites.

Anybody into the Malazan series?
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I still haven’t read The Defense but I’ve heard nothing but really good things about it. I’ve got a loose plan to try and finish off reading all the Nabokov books I haven’t read yet by the end of the year (excluding the collection of short stories) but I’m going to try to hold off on some of the better ones toward the end
 
we want cup said:
Anybody into the Malazan series?
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Yes and no. Am on Toll the Hounds and whole the entire saga is pretty fascinating, getting through the books can be a slog. I think that I am 5-6 years into trying to get through. Maybe more.
 
SnowblindNYR said:
Guys, if you like business bios read Bad Blood. I'm reading it now, it's a very good book.
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I finished this recently. I sped through it in like 2 days. It reads kinda like a thriller, especially the second half. Just a totally f***ed up story. I worked in banking for 5 years and Theranos was everywhere. Holmes was so famous and everyone talked up her story. It's insane how many influential people she was able to dupe into her fantasy. Crazier than fiction, honestly.

I also finished Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists. It's a pretty quick read and lays out a lot of the history surrounding many controversial political solutions being bounced around out there like universal basic income, shorter workweeks and open borders. I don't love Bregman, but it was interesting, and he writes in a pretty colloquial way, which is great for topics like this that can often get uber complicated.

Now I'm reading Serhii Plokhy's 'Chernobyl.' It's basically the major book on the story of what happened there. I visited last year and started watching the HBO show, so figured it was a good time to start the book, which I had lying around for a year. Obviously a specific topic, but I love Soviet history, so it's up my alley.
 
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