What are you currently reading?

[zamyrabyrd]

Show and tell for Moby Dick, was ignominiously nailed to the mast...

[Parsifal]

Just finished The Crystal Palace by Amitav Ghosh. It is a historical novel that begins with the removal and exile of the last king of Burma and follows the lives of various members of his household down to the late 20th century. The protagonists in the later part of the tale are not members of the royal family, but descendants of the queens servant and the wife of the Indian official put in charge of the exiled king. Interesting themes are treated, including the role of India troops in the British imperial army during colonial times and up to WWII. A very interesting and rewarding book.

[NikF]

Crazy Cock (Miller, Henry)

[asin]0802132936[/asin]

[Jo498]

I have about 100 pages to go in N. Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". This author had been recommended to me several times and I finally got around to read first "Snow Crash" a few weeks ago and then what is probably his most famous book. Snow Crash was a wild ride and a fairly quick read and quite entertaining, despite a somewhat weaker ending. It must have been amazingly impressive in the early 90s when the internet and virtual reality were still in the future.

Cryptonomicon is about 2.5 times the length (about 900p in my pbck edition) and a little too ambitious for its own good, I think. It takes almost a 3rd of the book to pick up a decent pace but then it gets quite good although I find the "dotcom" part of the action (contemporary with its publication in 1999) not as interesting and even slower than the WW II part.

(I also wonder it Stephenson found it necessary to invent German words to make the Nazis even more obtuse or if he/the publisher were simply too lazy to check the German words for errors (most of them are slight but obvious for a competent speaker/reader). This seems amazingly widespread (both the "Fringe" TV series as well as a book or two by Ben Aaronson are even worse in this regard), considering that German is not an exotic language and it should be easy to find someone to check such stuff)

[SimonNZ]

[Mahlerian]

Just finished this book:



Do music critics influence taste?  Mark Grant says...maybe?  Sometimes?  He doesn't provide any definitive answer to the questions he asks, which may be just as well, but a range of personalities are found within this lively and very readable history of American criticism, from those who loved everything new they came across to the most bitter of reactionaries (I hadn't known, or had forgotten, that Henry Pleasants lived long enough to see the thesis of his anti-modernist screed completely disproven).  Olin Downes' fawning letters to Sibelius are excerpted, as are the usual panoply of derogatory bon mots which some critics loved to traffic in.

[Florestan]

Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

A splendid page turner, full of humanity, humor, tenderness and nostalgia. Highly recommended.

[Bogey]

and

[Jaakko Keskinen]

I recently bought Warren Darcy's study of Rheingold. Can't wait to dive in.

[aligreto]

....because I know virtually nothing of Holst or his music [other than the obvious].

[Ken B]

On Bogey's recommendation Make Me, a Jack Reacher novel, by Lee Child.

Straightforward easy reading fun, which I appreciate after the last 2 weeks solid craziness at work.

[Eli]

Crazy book

[NikF]

The Garden of Eden: Ernest Hemingway.

[asin]0684804522[/asin]

[Harvey_20]

The new Harry Potter

[Brian]

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G.B. Edwards

Wow - loved this novel. Part of a genre I have fallen in love with this year, of novels spanning the entire lifespan of an ordinary person and their ordinary emotional ups and downs, made extraordinary by poetic narrative and empathetic author. Stoner by John Williams was another great one. Hoping the Ferrante series might be of similar quality.

[Crudblud]

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

Re-reading this one. A welcome relief to be back with my favourite author after enduring my first (and last) Tom Wolfe phonebook.

[arpeggio]

The Southern Reach Trilogy of Jess Vandermeer.  Kind of a hybrid fantasy scifi novel.

[NikF]

Going through the trilogy - Plexus by Henry Miller.

[asin]0141399120[/asin]

[Parsifal]

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G.B. Edwards

Wow - loved this novel. Part of a genre I have fallen in love with this year, of novels spanning the entire lifespan of an ordinary person and their ordinary emotional ups and downs, made extraordinary by poetic narrative and empathetic author. Stoner by John Williams was another great one. Hoping the Ferrante series might be of similar quality.

Sounds too interesting to pass up, have obtained the Kindle edition.  The last two books on my list have been historical novels describing horribly violent phases of human history. I'm hoping to find something gentler on frayed nerves.

[Drasko]

Iliad for the first time since high school, and I'm immensely enjoying it, far more than back then.