Read Any Good Books Lately?

newspaperguy said:
I mean, any good - non photography - books?

I'm just finishing Michael Houellebecq's THE MAP AND THE

TERRITORY. (Translated from the French... not the original.)

The novel, which won the Prix Gonocourt for 2011 centers

around a photographer/cum artist, both subjects the author

seems familiar with. Anyway, a good read if you can find a

copy at your local library.

(Roger Hicks can probably pick up a signed original. 😉 )

Rick
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Great timing, Rick!

I have been meaning to stop by Barnes and Noble to check on some books for reading over the next few months. Now I have a thread to review and research!

Will you know if I find something interesting!:angel: And that is going to be a long-shot as all the reading I did in law school has left me with no real desire to get into anything remotely deep...never liked sci-fi, etc. OTOH, I never read a single Hemingway book. Maybe this is the year.
 
Rob-F said:
"The Grand Design" and "A Brief History of Time," both by Stephen Hawking. Particle physics--quantum mechanics--is mind-blowing. The notion that a particle can be everywhere at once, or can take all possible paths from A to B simultaneously, is beyond mind-blowing. According to Hawking, it's been experimentally proven. And he says that gravity, like light, is considered both a wave and a particle. And did you know that bodies have only a limited amount of gravity energy, and eventually run out of it? Like an empty gas tank. Well, if Stephen Hawking says so, I guess I believe it.
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Try some Brian Green. "Elegant Universe", or go to the source and read some Richard Feynman.
 
ChipMcD said:
My vote: Tinker Tailor. The Smiley character is perfect. The BBC miniseries with Alec Guinness was great. I avoided the recent movie.
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Excellent as the BBC series was -- one of the very best things I've ever seen on TV -- the book is even better, and rewards the effort to puzzle through the spycraft jargon, period lingo and convoluted plot. Smiley is one of the great, morally complex characters in modern fiction, and the evocation of Cold War Britain is spot on.
 
mfunnell said:
I've really enjoyed those.

...Mike
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Steinhauer's latest, An American Spy, is just out, and wraps up a trilogy. I liked them so much I was inspired to tackle his earlier East-bloc spy novel quintet, which led me back to Alan Furst and thence to Eric Ambler. I hadn't read Ambler since I was kid, and realize now that he started it all. First, but unsurpassed.
 
Just read "Daily Life in Ancient Rome". Strangely, it was about daily life in Ancient Rome. Now reading "Citizen of the World" about Pierre Trudeau.

As for LeCarre, my favourite is "The Honourable Schoolboy". Any votes for that one?
 
nightfly said:
Also recently read the new Murakami book "IQ84" and the new Neil Stephenson book "Reamde" both again interesting but neither of their best works. IQ84 desperately needed some editing as it was much longer than necessary and Murakami's language lacked it's usual vivacity. Reamde was also overly long, although not by Stephenson's standards, and was more of a plot driven page turner than the feast of interesting ideas facilitated by a plot.
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Agreed on both counts. I didn't get through the Stephenson. Also, the Murakami felt a little...pervy? That doesn't usually bother me in ficiton but it did this time around. I usually adore him.

Really into the series of dark Thatcher-era British crime novels by Derek Raymond. And Tom McCarthy's bizarre Remainder, a hugely influential book for me, and one of my favorite new novels of the past decade.

The stories of Lydia Davis and Alice Munro always get my motor running, too.
 
mfunnell said:
It's my favourite of the Karla trilogy. I also liked his The Looking Glass War and a few others of his earlier books.

...Mike
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I enjoyed Schoolboy a lot, but regard it as the outlier within the Karla trilogy -- neither Karla nor Smiley figure very largely in it. I appreciated the setting, being familiar with SE Asia and Brit expats in Honkers. Smiley's World picks up in the aftermath of Tinker Tailor, and Schoolboy feels like an excursion from the Smiley/Karla tango.
 
I've been rereading the Rutherfurd books dealing with England - Sarum, London, and The Forest...plus I've been reading the Hornblower novels...good very enjoyable stuff!
 
Just finished reading "The Hunger Games"

pretty good book, and a fast read.

Not sure if I'll read the next ones in the series.
 
In previous posts I've been touting Eric Ambler as a father of the modern detective story. Now that I think about it, one of his best is Epitaph for a Spy, in which a major plot point depends on what make of camera the suspect uses. Our hero uses a Contax, and the spy he is trying to uncover also shoots a Contax. (In order to remain above suspicion, I use a Leica.) Besides being very suspenseful, this is also a rather funny (haha) book.
 
I just read The Go-Betweens by David Nichols, a history of the 1980s Brisbane indie group. To be honest the only reason I read it was because I saw it in my local library. I'm of the same era as them and grew up in Sydney however I pretty much ignored them when they were around as I hated most of the music of the '80s. I grabbed this book as I like reading histories about the places and era of my youth. The book was first published in 1997 and revised in 2003. It's an interesting read about a talented group that never made it. Chances are they'd be much more popular if they were around today.
 
dave lackey said:
Great timing, Rick!

I have been meaning to stop by Barnes and Noble to check on some books for reading over the next few months. Now I have a thread to review and research!

Will you know if I find something interesting!:angel: And that is going to be a long-shot as all the reading I did in law school has left me with no real desire to get into anything remotely deep...never liked sci-fi, etc. OTOH, I never read a single Hemingway book. Maybe this is the year.
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Go sit down on a nice park bench with a cup of coffee and the Nick Adams Stories (by Hemingway), you wont be able to leave that bench for a good bit.
 
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