What BOOK are you reading right now?

Oh, look, someone likes Tim Parks.

Reading two books simultaneously at the moment.

Tomorrow, a novel by Graham Swift ... which I can't wait to finish. It started well, but is seriously dragging towards the end. Luckily I have only 20 more pages to go!

Tomorrow never knows:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/08/fiction.grahamswift

... also Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens' memoir.
Early days, but very interesting & engaging so far.
I'll be very interested to see his reasons for supporting the Iraq invasion, later in the book.

Two reviews of Hitch-22
One quite flattering & the second (New Statesman) quite damning.:

In Memoir, Christopher Hitchens Looks Back:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/books/02book.html

Hitch-22: a Memoir:
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/05/christopher-hitchens-iraq-self

Colin Cowdrey's book "M.C.C. The Autobiography of a Cricketer".

I'm relaxing my brain after re-reading Canticle for Leibowitz.

My dad's boyhood hero was Len Hutton.

I saw Sir Len play in a Test Match.

Last night, I finished The Hunger Games. Today at work, I just started to listen to Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.

You'd probably get on well with my dad were it not for the fact he refuses to go on the internet.

I can live with blokes like that easily enough.

Anansi Boys for me was a bit disappointing, in large measure because I expect a lot from Gaiman.

Gaiman incorporates humor in his stories in a subtle manner and always with a dark undertone...except with this one.

Nowhere near the comic fantasies of a Terry Pritchard or Douglas Adams (which I detest) but too close for my taste.

For a great read that involes the character of Anansi, I recommend King Rat by China Mieville.

Hunger Games

Enjoyed the first two (#1 more so than #2), but it's pretty light fare which isn't really a criticism since it's intended audience is the youth market.

I got through about three chapters of the third volume and put it aside. Not good.

Reading three at once:

Postwar by the late Tony Judt. It's magisterial, which means it has a lot of pages.

The Collected Poems of Eavan Boland. Wonderful Irish poet.

The Republic of Noise by Diana Senechal. Labeled a work of sociology and education, it is actually a work of philosophy.

I highly recommend all three.

george OB recommended it here and it was very good

Every since I got a Kindle I mostly read German books, but I just finished
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and I believe it
was recommended by djjd62 - very nice read, I enjoyed that very much!

I have recently acquired a copy of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, too, Jane. It's on my "to read soon" list. Thanks for the recommendation.

Still reading Hitch-22, but have started reading another novel in the meantime. Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. I came across it at my volunteer job (the Book Room, the source of much previously unexplored reading matter). About 100 pages down so far & around 600 to go. I'm enjoying it a lot. Haven't read any of his novels, or any other Turkish writers, either, before now. "Westernized" middle class Turkish society in Istanbul, starting in 1975 to (almost) the present. Fascinating.



http://www.amazon.com/The-Museum-Innocence-Orhan-Pamuk/dp/0307266761

Orhan Pamuk's New Book, The Museum of Innocence:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/orhan-pamuks-new-book-ith_n_337726.html

perfect transit reading
entertaining but not too engrossing
a bit heavy on the lineage of Scottish aristocracy

I read Tony Judt's "PostWar" some time ago, It's justly regarded as the definative (so far) history of post war Europe. A very good read. (He's not very kind to the European Social Democrats though. I'm surprised POM liked it.

Now I'm pursuing the first work of fivction I have read in a long time - it's "The Master and Margatita" by Mikhail Bulgakov - a Russian work of the 1930s. So far, so good.

You're in for a treat. I really liked The Master and Margerita. And that's even though I don't usually like novels of the Fantasy genre.

Still grinding through Rick Santorum's manifesto, It Takes a Family. Trying to understand viewpoints I disagree with can certainly come at a price, and putting up with Santorum's preachiness is quite a price to pay.

I greatly enjoyed the Master and the Margerita. I was in my twenties and so don't have clear recall, but I loved it.

I have "Master and the Margerita" also laying around here but haven't read it yet.

Thanks. I'll use this opportunity to tout one of my long time favorites "A Hero of our Time" by Mikhail Lermontov. Written a century before Camus's "The Stranger" , but amazingly similar in the depiction of the central character, and a far better story than Camus' (though I am an admirter of his works).