Donny osmond wrote:Just finished Dark Eden by Chris Beckett. Good read, engaging and fast paced, good characterisation and commentary on the nature of individuals in a society. Its sold as a sci-fi novel, but I feel it has more in common with traditional fantasy fiction tbh.
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and in fact just finished the follow up novel, Mother Of Eden which manages the neat trick of being both disappointing and engrossing simultaneously. Mother... is a better book, much more commentary on the power of individuals in society, what makes a society tick, the power of symbolism (particularly relevant in Scotland/UK right now), and the nature of idolatry... the birth of religion, which I suppose you could guess from the title.
I didn't like the ending, both books have endings that read like the author is setting up another book, rather than ending a story in itself. I really don't like it when that happens.
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. This was a gift, which I wasn't sure I was going to like. I should have trusted the friend who gave it to me to chose something that would hit the mark as she's never missed it yet. In short, wife, 4 daughters and an unhinged Baptist dad set off from darkest Georgia to play missionary in the Belgian Congo in 1959. They take up residence in the arse-end of nowhere and the father sets about trying to convince the locals to baptise their kids in the river - a river brimming with crocodiles. In a masterpiece of mutual misunderstanding, the locals get the notion that the mad dad is fixing to offer their kids up as sacrifices to tata-Jesus. Throw in independence, civil war, a plague of fire ants and a foul-mouthed parrot and it all worked out to be quite an entertaining read.
Keith Jeffery's Ireland and the Great War. A cracking collection of 5 essays by one of the best if under-sung Irish historians who sadly passed away in February this year.
John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. I think that this was the 2nd of Steinbeck's works to be published, so not what you could describe as 'vintage', but it is wonderful. 12 interconnected stories of life in a small farming community in the 1930s. How the feck did I ever manage without having read Steinbeck?
Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account. Long-listed for the Booker and a Pulitzer finalist in 2015, I expected a great deal more than Lalami delivered in The Moor's Account.
SerjeantWildgoose wrote:John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. I think that this was the 2nd of Steinbeck's works to be published, so not what you could describe as 'vintage', but it is wonderful. 12 interconnected stories of life in a small farming community in the 1930s. How the feck did I ever manage without having read Steinbeck?
SerjeantWildgoose wrote:John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. I think that this was the 2nd of Steinbeck's works to be published, so not what you could describe as 'vintage', but it is wonderful. 12 interconnected stories of life in a small farming community in the 1930s. How the feck did I ever manage without having read Steinbeck?
Which novels have you got left to read?
About half a dozen, including East of Eden. I've been rationing them for some time.
SerjeantWildgoose wrote:John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. I think that this was the 2nd of Steinbeck's works to be published, so not what you could describe as 'vintage', but it is wonderful. 12 interconnected stories of life in a small farming community in the 1930s. How the feck did I ever manage without having read Steinbeck?
Which novels have you got left to read?
About half a dozen, including East of Eden. I've been rationing them for some time.
East of Eden, Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men are my favourites of his, East of Eden is a masterpiece imo.
Jason Burke's The New Threat From Islamic Militancy. Burke's The 9/11 Wars was superb and this follows his style of digging into the detail to find the all-important patterns. In this (Orwell Prize long-listed in 2016) extension to The 9/11 Wars, Burke examines the development of IS and its differences with AQ, he looks in detail at the affiliates of both, taking in Afghanistan, the Far and Middle East, The Gulf and Africa (north, east and west), and finishes off with a detailed expose of the so-called lone wolves (A nomenclature that he effectively dismantles) who have rampaged so violently through Europe, pointing out that prisons pose a far greater danger in terms of radicalisation, than the internet.
Good read and essential if you want to understand the bloke that is currently planning to carry a bomb onto the bus you will travel on tomorrow.
Rattled through a couple of novels in the last week or so.
Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist. Given the brilliance of his Booker winning The Long Road to the Deep North, the disappointment of this contrived and clichéd story was immense. Steer well clear of it.
Joseph O'Connor's Inishowen. There were moments when I thought that this book might break the bonds of being a good enough read and become very good indeed, but these were matched by times when it pitched pretty steeply below the bar and into the territory of not very good at all. Sadly the final dozen pages were spent deep in the latter. Marginally better than Desperados, which I read 5 years ago and vowed not to read anything more by him for some time. This is still brimming with the usual Irish stereotypes and one or two American ones for good measure.
Don't bother with either of these for the beach this summer.
Philip Orr's The Road to the Somme. first read this book shortly after its publication in 1987 and have revisited it ahead of an upcoming trip to Picardy and Flanders. It is written with the general reader in mind and I am surprised, going back to it, how emotionally gripping it is 2nd time round. In particular, it takes the reader through the same moral journey that was taken, I am sure, by many of the men of the UVF and 36th (Ulster) Division. It is a journey that we of today's still-divided Ireland must yet take.
Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety. Best novel I have read this year so far and one for the Americana lovers among you. This one kicks off in 1930s (Depression) Wisconsin and, via a brief trip to Florence, ends up in 1960s New England. It follows the friendship of 2 bookish couples and while some reviews suggest that not very much happens along the way, I found it to be superbly written and gripping. There's much of the gentleness of Williams' Stoner about it; Highly recommended.
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Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune. One of the lesser-known but nonetheless classics of Great War literature. Originally published under an alternative title of Her Private's We, Manning's visceral account of the fighting on the Somme and Ancre in 1916 was heavily censored. Only when it was published in its original form did it achieve its deserved reputation as one of the few books written in the English language that truly captures the Great War infantryman in all his agony.
Paul McVeigh's The Good Son. This is a cracking novel of puberty in the Ardoyne at the top of the Troubles. Convincingly colloquial (but this shouldn't put anyone off), and self-pissingly funny in parts, McVeigh's debut novel has been lined-up for a hat-full of prizes and deservedly so. Recommended.
Ryszard Kapuściński's Travels with Herodotus. I must admit that despite the best efforts of modern critics to discredit him, Kapuściński remains one of a handful of authors that I would list as true favourites. He could write a health and safety manual and make it readable.
Travels with Herodotus was his last major work and is a mash-up of his own reminiscences and his thoughts on The Histories. These only rarely occur in geographical conformity and this leads to a book that does not flow as easily as his classic works. Nevertheless he brings the same touch of humanity that he always does and this to me is the true magic of the man. Recommended, but if you haven't read him before, start with The Shadow of the Sun or The Soccer War.
I have never read a David Irving novel. Which one do I start with?
Blinking FER-LIPPP! There's me thinking its going to be a festival of smack and the Proclaimers and it turns out to be the Holocaust denier!!!
Ignore my last and send correction on Irvine Walsh, Over?
Mare's Nest is about the V1 & V2 rockets and V3 Hochdruckpumpe. The holocaust isn't mentioned. It's a very well researched book (so well researched in fact that British Intelligence asked Irving to remove references to Enigma, to which he agreed).
Per Petterson's I Refuse. Having been so mightily moved by Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, it was impossible not to pick up something else of his to read. It is difficult starting with an author's most acclaimed work; subsequent reading is always going to struggle to live up to it (As I learned recently with Richard Flannagan's The Unknown Terrorist).
I needn't have worried. I Refuse is superb, evocative and human. Brilliantly written, and a translation that loses none of the atmosphere of small-town Norway. If you enjoyed Out Stealing Horses (And if you haven't read it you should), read this one too.
1 Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beacher Stowe
2 To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
3 East of Eden - John Steinbeck
4 Crime & Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
6 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
7 Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
8 Wild Swans - Jung Chang
9 Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
10 For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
11 The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
12 In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck
13 Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
14 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15 Germinal - Emile Zola
16 To A God Unknown - John Steinbeck
17 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
18 The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
19 Memed my Hawk - Yasar Kemal
20 Roots - Alex Hayley
Other favourites include Maxim Gorky's My Childhood, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, & Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. The anti-war trio, Red Badge of Courage, Slaughterhouse Five & Catch 22 are also great reads, along with the German classic All Quiet on the Western Front. Of course, I could include many other classics by authors I've already mentioned, notably Dickens, Steinbeck, Heminway and Dostoyevsky . . .
Non-fction
1 Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
2 The People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
3 The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe
4 Gaza in Crisis - Noam Chomsky
5 Tangata Whenua - Anderson, Binney, Harris
6 India - John Keay
7 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
8 Man's Conquest of the Pacific - Peter Bellwood
9 The Great War for Civilisation - Robert Fisk
10 Heroes - John Pilger
11 A Modern History of the Kurds - David McDowal
12 Hegemony of Survival - Noam Chomsky
13 In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
14 Rogue State - William Blum
15 The Blood Never Dried - John Newsinger
16 Britain's Gulag - Caroline Elkins
17 Ottoman Centuries - Lord Kinross
18 Blood of Brothers - Stephen Kinzer
19 The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond
20 Paradise Lost - Giles Milton
Another non-fiction classic was Hemingway's history of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America and Precopius' Byzantine Histories are great texts which I read online. Muhammad Ali's autobiography an interesting read, while the best autobiography about Turkey I've read was Irfan Orga's Portrait of a Turkish Family.
If they're good enough to play at World Cups, why not in between?
