What are you reading?

[Fueco]

 

[FlyingMonkey]

I'm (re)reading Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. Even after all the films that have been made of her work, I still think she's underrated.

 

[HORNS]

 

[FlyingMonkey]

I've been working my way (backwards chronologically) through Gunnar Staalesen's 'Varg Veum' series of detective novels set in and around Bergen, Norway. He's been writing them since the 1970s, but they've only just started to be translated in the past couple of years. The recent ones are excellent and highly recommended, but the first couple are very self-consciously imitative of, almost parodying, hard-boiled US detective fiction. There have been films made of most of the books in recent years too, but they are terrible action thrillers that remove all the character development and nuance in favour of violence in scenic Norway.

 

[edinatlanta]

It's rest day on the Tour and Wimbledon is over.

 

[noob in 89]

Fragmented vacation reading. Bits of Robert Musil’s diaries (really, really good!) and individual sentences by Don DeLillo.

(DeLillo is hard for me to read now because his sentences are not only perfect, but discoverable; the mechanics are so easy to discern and replicate, I get caught up in note-taking).

 

[edinatlanta]

Me and @FlyingMonkey are sometimes book soulmates. Finished the gun by fuminori nakamura in a half day. Good read. Really gets into an existential soul searching about evil and our capabilities for violence and lifes capriciousness.

 

[Harold falcon]

The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Holy damn.

 

[Harold falcon]

“Sometimes you dream strange dreams, impossible and unnatural; you wake up and remember them clearly, and are surprised at a strange fact: you remember first of all that reason did not abandon you during the whole course of your dream; you even remember that you acted extremely cleverly and logically for that whole long, long time when you were surrounded by murderers, when they were being clever with you, concealed their intentions, treated you in a friendly way, though they already had their weapons ready and were only waiting for some sort of sign; you remember how cleverly you finally deceived them, hid from them; then you realize that they know your whole deception by heart and merely do not show you that they know where you are hiding; but you are clever and deceive them again—all that you remember clearly. But why at the same time could your reason be reconciled with such obvious absurdities and impossibilities, with which, among other things, your dream was filled? Before your eyes, one of your murderers turned into a woman, and from a woman into a clever, nasty little dwarf—and all that you allowed at once, as an accomplished fact, almost without the least perplexity, and precisely at the moment when, on the other hand, your reason was strained to the utmost, displaying extraordinary force, cleverness, keenness, logic? Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impressions, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited; your impression is strong, it is joyful or tormenting, but what it is and what has been told you—all that you can neither comprehend nor recall.”

**** your War and Peace.

 

[Fueco]

I’m reading a not-so-sunny look at the future.

 

[FlyingMonkey]

Just finished the latest Harry Hole novel by Jo Nesbø. On one level this is completely ridiculous, melodramatic, unrealistic, grand guignol kind of crime writing with outrageous twists. This series has always been primarily about Harry, and he's an absurdly damaged character, always making himself or his family and friends targets for the worst killers, who would never in real life be able to function as a detective or in any relationship, and yet he does - at least sporadically. Serial criminals from previous books come back and at the same time there are a few jaundiced nods to social and political reality. But despite feeling that surely this time Nesbø had jumped the shark and despite the particularly outrageous twist we get in this one, he pulls the whole thing together and it's just all so well-written and constructed. Technically, this is a lesson in crime-writing, if you can suspend your disbelief...

 

[Dashing Chris]

Oh I just completed Alchemist it was good, actually, I like the ending, right searching for some good books, any recommendations?

 

[dragon8]

Just finished "Dueling with Kings." It's about the rise of fantasy sports

 

[edinatlanta]

It would be harder to be more derivative of Tom Wolfe. At least the author acknowledged it and at least he does it well enough.

 

[dragon8]

It would be harder to be more derivative of Tom Wolfe. At least the author acknowledged it and at least he does it well enough.

Better to visit Hawaii than to read it.