June 2019: Reading Thread

[Vertigo]

Started Reamde by Neal Stephenson. I generally like his work but I'm only 20 pages in and they have been a slog. I hope it picks up soon.

I'm afraid I gave up on it and it contributed to my giving up on him completely. I might have made unlucky choices but I've not liked any of his work that I've attempted.

 

[tobl]

I'm afraid I gave up on it and it contributed to my giving up on him completely. I might have made unlucky choices but I've not liked any of his work that I've attempted.

have you tried cryptnomicon?

 

[mistri]

I've just started reading 'This is how you lose the time war' which reviews describe as 200 pages of poetic prose about two time agents called Red and Blue. I'm either going to really enjoy it or it's going to go whoooosh over my head.

 

[Vince W]

I'm afraid I gave up on it and it contributed to my giving up on him completely. I might have made unlucky choices but I've not liked any of his work that I've attempted.

I've liked his work generally but this may be the first one I abandon.

 

[HareBrain]

Apart from John le Carre's A Perfect Spy, which I've set aside for a future holiday, I've got three on the go: Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, a very well-written and matter-of-fact account of his WWI experiences; London Made Us by Robert Elms; and A Book of Ghosts and Goblins by Ruth Manning-Sanders, a recently remembered and re-purchased anthology I once bought from the book club at my primary school. Most of the stories still read extremely well, and it has very atmospheric illustrations by Robin Jacques.

 

[Vertigo]

have you tried cryptnomicon?

Yes, I've tried that, Reamde and The Mongoliad I just don't seem to like his writing style.

 

[hitmouse]

I've liked his work generally but this may be the first one I abandon.

I think he gets bogged down in Reamde. Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and System are all terrific.

 

[williamjm]

Started Reamde by Neal Stephenson. I generally like his work but I'm only 20 pages in and they have been a slog. I hope it picks up soon.

I think it's the weakest Stephenson book I've read. I did like some parts of it, but it felt like two different books that had been awkwardly squashed together into a single narrative.

 

[Hugh]

John Wain “Sprightly Running”
I only read this autobiography because the author was in Oxford in the late 1940s, first as student, then as research fellow, where he was tutored by C.S.Lewis (5 pages on this), attended talks by Charles Williams (6 pages), and was an Inkling ( 7 pages) for two to three years (from age 21 and after the death of Williams). While these accounts are relatively brief, they are to the point and worth reading. I particularly like his take on Williams and feel sure he captures something of him in his description. Thank you @Extollager for the recommendation.

I found I appreciated the book more than I expected, and ended up reading it with interest. I enjoyed the flavour of the times (written in 1960) and the way he writes about his life, even if some of the references to 1950s disputes may be way over my head. I had never heard of him, other than brief references in works concerning the Inkling members, but he seems to have been a significant figure in literary circles at that time given that there was enough interest in him to merit the 1962 publication of this autobiography written when he was just thirty five years old.

A couple of minor points I enjoyed :
- first, this description of the creative process: “I know that on the rare, very rare, occasions when I have written what seems to me a successful poem or story, the chief emotion that seizes me when I contemplate it, later, is astonishment.”
- the other - at the age of nine he began a series of novels, most of them dealing with a private eye named Smellum Owte. Sadly, as the name itself deserves further reading, these were lost some years later in a burglary.

 

[Hugh]

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, a very well-written and matter-of-fact account of his WWI experiences;

I'm afraid I took in very little of "English Literature" at school, but I've always been grateful for the "O" Level in which one half of the syllabus was made up of that book by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer", and Wilfred Owen's "Poems".

 

[Extollager]

Yes, Sprightly Running is a good read.

On the literature of World War I, perhaps you've read Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory.

 

[Hugh]

Yes, Sprightly Running is a good read.

On the literature of World War I, perhaps you've read Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory.

I've never hear of it, but it looks interesting. I've made a note of it. I've actually read relatively little concerning either WWI or WWII.

The one book I mean to read concerning WWII (within the next year or so) is Vasily Grossman's "Stalingrad".

 

[Brian G Turner]

Vasily Grossman

I've got his A Writer at War on my WWII TBR pile - it'll be interesting to see your impressions of Stalingrad.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'm reading Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, by Simon Armitage. Who is the current Poet Laureate. It is some of his latest poems.

 

[williamjm]

I've continued going through this year's Hugo nominees. Seanan McGuire's Beneath the Sugar Sky was a fun read, but perhaps a bit insubstantial in terms of plot.

I liked P. Djeli Clark's The Black God's Drums better, it's an urban fantasy/steampunk story set in an alternate history New Orleans where a slave revolt lead to it becoming an independent state in the early 19th century. In urban fantasy there's a often great of importance in how it handles its setting, and I thought this did a good job of portraying its vision of New Orleans. The two main characters were interesting as well, there's definitely potential for sequels and I'd be interested in reading more about them. The plot itself is decent, although towards the end it starts to feel a bit rushed, I think the story could maybe have benefited from being a bit longer.

 

[Extollager]

I've actually read relatively little concerning either WWI or WWII.

I've read a few books on the wars that I can recommend.

There's a badly-edited but worthwhile book by Gilchrist called A Morning After War about C. S. Lewis's 1914-1918 war experience. I wrote a review called "Namarie to All That," but I don't seem to have it on this computer. Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow is very good at giving a sense of what the war was like for a variety of particular people. An interesting combination of travel book and discussion of things leading up to the outbreak of this war was Tim Butcher's The Trigger.

For the 1930s and the 1939-1945 war, I recommend Juliet Gardiner's The Thirties, Wartime Britain 1939-1945, and The Blitz. For a military history, Hastings's Inferno, which I think in the UK edition is called All Hell Let Loose.

If you want to learn about Nazism and the Nazification of society, these were very good: Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair, Phillips's The Tragedy of Nazi Germany, and especially Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler -- though the title doesn't give a good idea of the contents, since much of the book is about Germany going along with Nazification, as observed by the author.

For the interwar period, I think Richard Overy's The Morbid Age will be good, but I haven't read all of it. Incidentally I thought it was relevant not only as regards the Inklings but also Lovecraft. Overy is author of another book I have read in part, and which also impressed me, The Dictators, about Stalin and Hitler.

A friend thinks highly of Schwarzschild's The World in Trance about events leading up to the 1939-1945 war. I bought a copy but haven't read it yet. On hand is a copy of Piers Brendon's The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, which I think I will start before long.

 

[Extollager]

Overy's Dictators (pp. 13-14) mentioned the passage from True Account, the memoirs of Ernest Tennant, "an English merchant banker and industrialist" (Wikipedia), shown above. I got Tennant's book on interlibrary loan, from which the photocopy you see was made.

Ernest Tennant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Hugh]

View attachment 53766

Overy's Dictators (pp. 13-14) mentioned the passage from True Account, the memoirs of Ernest Tennant, "an English merchant banker and industrialist" (Wikipedia), shown above. I got Tennant's book on interlibrary loan, from which the photocopy you see was made.

Ernest Tennant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

...blue flash of lightning.....
That’s remarkable!
This seems to be 1934, or at latest 1935.

 

[Hugh]

Laurie Lee "A Moment of War"
Remarkable. Spain 1937, the International Brigade. Gripping. Frightening. Worrying. I can see how this generated controversy as to how much is out-and-out truth, how much is poetic licence, but that feels irrelevant.
Many thanks for the suggestion @hitmouse.

 

[pambaddeley]

Catch-up again: read The Wind Eye by Robert Westall, a 1970s time travel fantasy about Saint Cuthbert, The Grave's a Fine and Private Place, one of the Flava de Luce mysteries by Alan Bradley, Peril in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope, Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin, one of his Inspector Rebus series, The Lamp of the Wicked by Phil Rickman, and A Death to Record by Rebecca Tope.