Prompted by the fact that Flix was having a James Bond-athon and because I'd already read books #1 and #2 in the series (Casino Royale and Live and Let Die), I decided to read Moonraker. In the movie adaptation, it's given a preposterous plot that sends James Bond into space, which is practically synonymous with a movie franchise that has begun to suck. I don't know why they didn't adapt it properly because the original Ian Fleming novel is sufficient on its own, dealing with a
mad ex-Nazi who has infiltrated the British upper crust as a rags-to-riches industrialist who plots to detonate a nuclear warhead in the heart of London.
Now that I've finished Moonraker, I'm going on to a story about a completely different sort of adventurer:
This book is in the public domain, so I downloaded it from Manybooks under the less interesting alternate title, The Viceroy's Protégé.
There's a Shakespeare reading group that I've decided to participate in, and the first play selected is Romeo and Juliet, so I'm listening to that in a version from LibriVox and also reading along with this edition of the complete works:
This second edition not only contains the canonical plays and the complete poems, but also the Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration The Two Noble Kinsmen, the full text of Sir Thomas More (many critics believe that Shakespeare is "Hand D" of the collaboratively written manuscript), and Edward III, a history play now believed to be coauthored by Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, as well as descriptions of the lost plays Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won.
Ironically, while I was reading the introductory material for the book, one of the pieces the Music Choice classical station played was a "Shakespeare Suite" by Humperdinck. I considered that a good sign, although my knowledge of classical music tells me that any number of composers have written works for productions of Shakespeare plays (the most famous being Mendelssohn's for A Midsummer Night's Dream) or inspired by the plays (as in Tchaikovsky's famous "Overture-Fantasy" Romeo and Juliet), as well as adapting his plays into operas, so it's not really an exceptional coincidence. I even know of incidental music by Kuhlau for a play about Shakespeare's life.
A Prince of Swindlers was an enjoyable book, though I thought the private detective Klimo would pay a larger role than proved to be the case. That's what I get for coming to hear about Simon Carne and Klimo from the Thames Television series, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Roy Dotrice played Carne, and he may now be better known for narrating the audiobooks of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series). Boothby's character struck me as a precursor of Simon Templar, though somewhat more self-interested, so now I've been inspired to read this on Kindle:
I listened to Murder at the Vicarage on our drive back from Thanksgiving in Maryland last year. We all enjoyed it.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
I've finished the first four and enjoyed the heck out of them.
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest- just started.
I've been a sneaky in-between reader. A few days ago, finding Night Falls Fast a bit too depressing, I decided I needed a pick-me-up and reread this:
Then, because the former book is a quick read and I still didn't want to return to Jamison's book, I read this and finished both in the same evening:
And this was nearly as funny as Brosh's book. It's been claimed to be an "Islamophobic" novel, but to my mind this is based on the same kind of superficial reading that gets Huck Finn declared "racist". In fact, the target of Houellebecq's satire is Western values and the propagation of patriarchy. The irony of the book is that this Western establishment figure, an expert on a decadent novelist working at one of the West's oldest universities, who has anonymous sex with escorts and drinks enough for three, finds the imposition of Islamic practices (including veiling, keeping women from the workforce, plural marriages, and madrassahs) quite congenial. At the end of the book, he converts not because he feels that Islam is the truth, but merely because his anomie makes him feel like he might as well do that as do anything else. Houllebecq's focus on figures like these has been consistent through his career, starting with Extension du domaine de la lutte (the English title Whatever sums up the mood of the novel, if not its title), so it's kind of odd to see him being so consistently misread now.
I also finished Murder at the Vicarage, so now I'm listening to an audiobook from another celebrated French writer:
This audiobook is read by Guy Sorrel, in the translation by Stuart Gilbert.
These have all been relevant to a reading challenge I'm participating in, and this novel will fit one half of a two part task titled "Awareness". The first book will be about someone who is struggling with mental illness or addiction (here I'm torn between Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, featuring a narrator with Capgras delusion, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, about an alcoholic British consul) and the second is to feature someone who helps others, which is clearly what Dr. Bernard Rieux does in the Camus novel. Since Under the Volcano could fit in another category, I may end up reading both.
So far I'm only up to the start of Book 3, but I may have already passed the most difficult bit. In The Iliad, there's a passage in Book 2 detailing the geographic regions of every leader of the Greek and Trojan forces together with their names, their relatives' names, etc. that is as boring as the endless list of "begats" in Genesis.
Last edited by Nullifidian; 04-03-2016 at 09:30 PM.
This is a fun read, set in Victorian England, and with lots of reversals. A lot of nights I found myself staying up really late just to find out what happens next.
Now I get to go back to reading about the Berlin before WWII, which is just as interesting, but not so much fun.
Been reading a surprising amount. It turns out that I read eight books last March, and I've already got three finished this month: Murder at the Vicarage, The Plague, and Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. My current Kindle book, The Saint Closes the Case, is bound to be finished within a couple days at most, as Charteris is always a quick read. Then I'll turn my full attention to The Iliad, which I have as another ebook.
But finishing The Plague and Night Falls Fast means I'm without an audiobook or physical text. So my next ones will be the following:
A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
I became aware of this book thanks to a two-person theatrical adaptation of it by the Fugard Theatre of Cape Town that was broadcast on radio by the BBC. Dramatizing the series of prison interviews that formed the basis for this book, the two characters were the author, Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela, a lawyer working for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Eugene de Kock, a notorious death squad leader of the Apartheid regime who was serving a 212-year prison sentence. It was a morally complex and thoughtful work, though I'd be willing to bet €200 that even such a powerful adaptation is just a pale imitation of the book.
The audiobook, which should last me a while, is this:
The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, read by Charlton Griffin.
This book, in the Benjamin Jowett translation, will go well with The Iliad, the one being a fictionalized account of a probably historical battle, and the other being among the first Western nonfictional accounts (with Herodotus on the Persian Wars) of a major war.
It's an odd coincidence that all my non-U.S./British Isles reading for this challenge comes in groups of threes. First I have three books by writers from miscellaneous countries (The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov, Ukraine/Soviet Union; The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, Malaysia; and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's book, South Africa), three books by French writers (The Plague by Albert Camus, Submission by Michel Houellebecq, and Man's Fate by André Malraux), three books by Latin American writers (Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector), three books by German writers (Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, whose name is even more improbable than that of his leading character; Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane; and The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch), and finally three Greek works. And the Greek works are in three different versions of Greek: The Iliad in Homeric Greek, The Peloponnesian War in Attic Greek, and Fourteen Byzantine Rulers: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus in Byzantine Greek, though all of them are now translated into English.
Last edited by Nullifidian; 04-06-2016 at 11:49 AM.
Reading Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. Vernon is a 15 year old boy whose best friend has killed half his class in school and who is now suspected of being involved. So the subject is pretty serious, but the book is hilariously funny.
I bought Geek Love by Katherine Dunn on Audible so I'd have something to listen to on the long drive from Atlanta to Austin. The drive wasn't long enough though, so I opted to buy the book when I got here and just finished reading it. I liked it a lot.
I did read The Magus. I also found it... interesting.
I've just started reading it on my Kindle.
The Magus by John Fowles.
I've given up on this one now. For me, it started out a bit long-winded but readable, but about a third of the way in it became increasingly ridiculous as well.
I read The Innocent by Ian McEwan which blew my mind. It's got spies and Berlin in the 1950's before the wall and romance and it's funny and tragic. So yeah I read Atonement before and liked it but this is better.
I moved from that to William Boyd's Restless which also has spies but this time it's a daughter who finds out in the 70's that her mom was a spy in ww2. Also very good so far. One of those books that look at you reproachfully when you are not reading it.
Re: What are you reading?
I read Atonement before and liked it but this is better.
Linear Mode
