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What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.

The Man Who Watched Women by Horth & Rosenfeldt and The Past by Tessa Hadley, both advance proof copies for Amazon Vine review.

The first is "scandinavian crime noir" holiday reading-type pulp, the other, a standard novel about "an ugly secret" at a remote cottage where a group of family members descend.
 
Just finished Reginald Hill - The Woodcutter but I didnt really like this at all. I miss Pascoe and Dalziel!

I wanted to read some sciencefiction and ended up reading:
Enchantress - James Maxwell
 
xterra said:
Neither. It appears to be a function of the software.

I am reading the book through the OverDrive app on a 10" tablet. The usual touch-screen swipe-to-enlarge gestures do not work in OverDrive, so there is no way to make the graphics larger. I can set the font size, but that does nothing to the graphics.

I might try to download the book in a different format to use with a different reader, and see if the graphics can be made bigger.
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The bane of my life with maths books. Equations are graphics and so tiny they look like lines sometimes. In play I can at least increase the size of the graphics. In Kobo I have to use a magnifying glass.
 
Started Flashman and the Seawolf by Robert Brightwell, about Harry Flashman's uncle.
It remains to be seen if the series is as good as the original.
 
I am up to book 12 in the audio versions of Inspector Salvo Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri. Superbly read by Daniel Philpott. Very funny at times too.
 
Having being infuriated by _Gravity's Rainbow_, I thought I might give Pynchon another chance. Other difficult books don't make me feel like I'm reading antic manic gleeful ********. There's something about Pynchon. He has to cram six impossible things in every page, maybe.

So, _Vineland_. Same thing. But I relaxed and just read it as a comical but lyrical riff on 80's California culture, and that at least reduced my indignation.

Beneath all the glad banter, I'm an earnest lad.

Maybe a more serious Pynchon would be....David Foster Wallace. That is, he wouldn't have survived to write more wanky (but somewhat brilliant) books.

I'm trying to ease into _Against the Day_ but there's already a hot-air balloon and a dog that can read and several hundred other silly things.

Any Pynchon fans here? Someone might be able to say a few words and adjust my attitude, so that I can enjoy his work.
 
Fortress by the late Ian Hogg, 1975. No matter how much else I read in mil. hist. and related topics, I always learn things from Hogg. And he wrote wittily and well.
 
calebprime said:
Having being infuriated by _Gravity's Rainbow_, I thought I might give Pynchon another chance. Other difficult books don't make me feel like I'm reading antic manic gleeful ********. There's something about Pynchon. He has to cram six impossible things in every page, maybe.

So, _Vineland_. Same thing. But I relaxed and just read it as a comical but lyrical riff on 80's California culture, and that at least reduced my indignation.

Beneath all the glad banter, I'm an earnest lad.
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http://www.wikihow.com/Read-a-Thomas-Pynchon-Novel

9. Unlearn what you have learned. I've read a couple of those reviews that called "Gravity's Rainbow" "unreadable". They were written by people who operate under a certain theory of how literature inherently should be. Let the book go where it's going to go, because it's going to go there anyway. Resistance is futile.
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Also, try The Crying of Lot 49.
 
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In order of complexity and the effort required:

Re-re-reading Reginald Hill's "Deadheads".

Reading for the first time Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch".

Reading for the first time Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici" (out loud, as I'm recording it, and I don't think I'd personally be capable of comprehending and relishing this luscious C17 prose in any other way - Sir Thomas was 11 when Shakespeare died so the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of English were as in flux as they are in Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, he is making up the language as he goes along.)

All the above highly recommended, though "Religio Medici" is not for sooks.
 
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Just finished reading Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee and White Hunger by Aki Olliainen, based on the natural famine 0f the 1860's that saw 15% of the population of northern Sweden and Finland wiped out.

Currently reading Winter War by Philip Teir, translated from the Swedish about middle-class ennui in Helsinki. Shades of Jonathan Franzen.

I was amused to note the protagonist, Max, is an addict of forums such as this one. Had to smile.
 
The Library At Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. Saw this in my Science Fiction Bookclub offerings and got the Kindle version.
A wild ride so far. One reviewer described it as "American Gods as American Gods should have been."

We have an individual who may or may not be God...Or at least "a" god, various other supernatural critters, and a group of adopted individuals who call this being "Father".
It's not a pleasant household.
 
Kitchi-Gami
Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway by Johann Georg Kohl

Less racist than Henry Schoolcraft on same subject. That's all I can say so far.
 
To The Beat of a Different Drum. The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. By Jagdish Mehra 1994.

Read it several years ago and decided it's time for a re-read. This book is light on his social life and instead focuses on going over his work in science in greater detail. It has all the math :)
 
'Viriconium' by M John Harrison, for the third time. Linguistically speaking the best fantasy writer I've read second to China Mieville. I was interested to learn that Mieville also rates him highly and Harrison's influence can be seen in several of Mieville's novels.

At the moment also reading Stephen R Donaldson's 'The Last Dark', Mieville's 'The City and the City' for the tenth time (best book I ever read), 'Buddhism for Beginners' - Max Kornfield, 'Perv' - Jesse Bering and 'Time Reborn' - Lee Smolin. Oh, and 'Hallucinations' by Oliver Sacks, again.
 
_Dead Souls_ -- Gogol

I'm about 7 chapters in. We're not told, so far, why our main character is buying up the souls of serfs. But as he goes from estate to estate, we meet the owners, each more eccentric than the last. And all can be persuaded to sell.

This is great, and a real consolation.
 
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