What are you reading?

[Faust]

Re: The Road

William Vollmann - Europe Central

[mick]

Re: The Road

Crime & Punishment.Train on the way to work isn't really ideal, better than not reading at all though.I'd forgotten how much i like reading, letting the author take you to some other place.

[AKA*NYC]

Re: The Road



[quote user="Faust"]William Vollmann - Europe Central
[/quote]</p>

Thumbs up. I saw the author read from this several years ago. Amazing book. </p>

[Faust]

Re: The Road



[quote user="mick"]Crime k&amp; Punishment.Train on the way to work isn't really ideal, better than not reading at all though.I'd forgotten how much i like reading, letting the author take you to some other place.[/quote]</p>

You should read Mikhail Bakhtin's essay on the dialogical imagination of Dostoyevskiy. This takes it to a whole other level.</p>

I agree, AKA - I just started, and I love his writing style. Besides, it's always very interesting to see how well a writer can conjure up a time and place that is not a part of his history.
</p>

[soultek]

Re: The Road



Just picked this up yesterday. I'm afraid it might border on too nerdy even for me, but we'll see:</p>

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</p>

[TypicalFashion]

Re:

Pastoralia - George Saunders

[Nullsleep]

Re: Re:



Soultek, that actually sounds really interesting -- and don't worry I'll distract with something even more nerdy. In the middle of this right now:
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[dontbecruel]

Re: Re:



[quote user="TypicalFashion"]Pastoralia - George Saunders
[/quote]</p>

Was browsing in a bookshop a few days ago and noticed that the new Bloomsbury edition of this book has a cool Racquel Welch-style front cover:</p>


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Plus I have to boast that this book is my (rather unimpressive) claim to fame.
In my former career as a reviewer this was the only time I made it onto a front cover. You can't quite read it in the mini-scan above, but a quotation from my review in The Independent on Sunday is below the title. It reads:
"This stuff is gold dust... fiercely inventive, unforgettably funny and sentimental in all the right places."
Since this book, I think George Saunders has gone a bit downhill though. Not sure I still want to be getting name-checked as his cheerleader.
</p>

[Faust]

Re: Re:

i'm glad you are famous, dbc. and i'm glad you are back from the dead! [&lt;:o)]

[dontbecruel]

Re: Re:



Back from France actually (almost the land of the dead, but not quite). I took Man Without Qualities along with me but my bookmark is stalled at about page 400 (exactly where it was when I set off from Blighty). Too busy eating to read. Have you managed to get any further than me, Faust? I found Musil/Ulrich charming, funny and insightful for 300 or so pages but after that the book had already started to become a bit mannered and repetitive.
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[Faust]

Re: Re:

Not even close to you. It's not subway book reading. I need to take a sabbatical from life to fully experience something like that. I did find him incredibly witty right off the bat. I also wonder how it reads in English as opposed to Russian. Maybe it's better?! I have not been much impressed with the late Russian translations.

[theaddict]

Re: Re:

Haruki Murakami: Hard boiled wonderland! Man, i am totally in the obscure sceneries in his books...

[Rubbish]

Re: Re:



My grandmother has been hounding me for years trying to get me to read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and though I promised her I would, I've always been a little overwhelmed by it. A promise is a promise, though, so I'm trying to build my way up to it by reading some of his earlier works, so right now I'm reading Heart of a Dog.</p>

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I wish I could read this in its original form, but my Russian has never been very good.
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[dontbecruel]

Re: Re:



[quote user="Faust"] I did find him incredibly witty right off the bat.
[/quote]</p>

Me too. And I read those first 400 pages in just a few days of staying up late in bed.</p>

But unlike "A La Recherche..", which everyone always compares this book to, I don't have the impression so far that there are thousands of pages of witty psychological insight there for me to savour. Once the plot set-up is complete, the joke kind of stays the same. Not sure about the translation. Received opinion has it the the new English one I am reading is a great improvement on the previous version, but it's by no means a work of art. Has it been translated into Russian more than once? If so, that's pretty surprising!
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[Faust]

Re: Re:

[quote user="Rubbish"]

My grandmother has been hounding me for years trying to get me to read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and though I promised her I would, I've always been a little overwhelmed by it. A promise is a promise, though, so I'm trying to build my way up to it by reading some of his earlier works, so right now I'm reading Heart of a Dog.</p>

</p>

I wish I could read this in its original form, but my Russian has never been very good.
</p>

[/quote]</p>

If you don't read Master and Margarita, in Russian or otherwise, I will hunt you down and kill you. Heart of a Dog is awesome in its own right. You should watch the film (if your Russian is good enough for it).
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