Reading Record 2022 - Uniquely Portable Magic - The Bear and Badger

ShabbyMcCrabby

What would be considered his best work? I've read Slaughterhouse and Breakfast

Edit: in response to Cos Vonnegut

Cos

They are certainly two of the best. Sirens is also quite well regarded but didn't really click with me. Of his other work I've really enjoyed Player Piano, Mother Night and Galapagos.

tin_robot

Cos wrote:

4. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Well off the pace for this year now but anyway. Enjoyed this in patches, there are some terrific chapters and plenty of clever observations about the nature of humanity but overall felt a bit too dry. If I was pitching it for a move I might describe it as 'Catch 22 in Space' which probably does a disservice to both but is the closest approximation. It felt like it was bumbling along at times and then packed in a bunch more interesting ideas in a short time towards the end. Above average overall but below par compared to Vonnegut's other work.

Yeah, I have a bit of a soft spot for Sirens of Titan, but I think that's a fair summary.

That said, I'd say "bumbling along" and then suddenly surprising you with the clarity of his ideas, is pretty much Vonnegut's modus operandi.

Cos

Heh. Fair point.

tin_robot

Cos wrote:

They are certainly two of the best. Sirens is also quite well regarded but didn't really click with me. Of his other work I've really enjoyed Player Piano, Mother Night and Galapagos.

I'd add "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You Mr Rosewater" to the list.

poprock

Nowadays I only really read novels when travelling/flying alone. I got to do that this week, so battered through two books that have been on my waiting list.

Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon
Within Without by Jeff Noon

Noon remains one of my favourite authors, but I have a strong sense that his best is far behind him. Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation were an incredible introductory trio to his brand of psychedelic science-fantasy and I think his Lewis Carroll meets Jorge-Louis Borges style peaked with Needle in the Groove. For me, that’s a perfect book.

So … now he’s moved on. No more sci-fi. Or … I dunno. These books aren’t set in the future (they’re actually set in an almost unrecognisably off-kilter ’50s/60s England) but each grapples with taking an outlandish, hallucinatory idea and seeing what it has to say about the human condition.

There’s a private detective, called John Nyquist. This series of books follows him on one adventure each. Nyquist is a cliché wrapped in a stereotype, but his straightforward gumshoe schtick is the thing that grounds Noon’s outlandish premises.

In Creeping Jenny, Nyquist finds himself in the countryside and has no idea how to navigate a world so different from his usual noir city streets. He quickly gets dragged into a folk-horror tale with bodies piling up around the fucked-up sleepy, creepy village that has its own secrets-in-broad-daylight religious cult and hundreds of saints’ days that dictate bizarre behaviour from the villagers.

Within Without sees Nyquist back in a city, but a new one. This is more of a psychedelic novel, fascinated with the idea of borders. It starts with literal borders, a city built on and obsessed by them, and progresses to psychological and metaphysical ones. Funnily enough, seeing Raiziel reading Kafka a page ago, his Metamorphosis comes into this tale - a book within a book about the interfaces that are crossed when things shift and change.

I dunno. This series of books about John Nyquist are always more interesting to think about than they are to read. More fun after the fact. Whereas Noon’s early sci-fi dazzled with inventive language and played with form, these psychedelic detective novels feel a bit more functional - they’re each a carrier for a single idea, allowing Noon to push that idea to bizarre limits. I like them, but I don’t love them.

Raiziel

41. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

When I started reading this book I quickly began to think that it was going to make it into my top five books of the year. But then as the story wore on it really started to lose me. I don’t mind experimental weirdness in my reads, but if I’m going to read something that’s over five hundred pages long then I really do need some sort of discernible plot. It’s a Donnie Darkoish hodge podge folly of a story that gives me the impression Murakami was free forming his way through it with about as much idea of where he was going as the reader would eventually have. And the philosophy is too slight, the themes too jumbled to hold it all up. And it’s all built on some morally wonky foundations which I wasn’t keen on at all.

I didn’t dislike it in the end, and there’s some parts here that I flat-out enjoyed—and one exchange between two characters that had me laughing out loud. But ultimately I felt let down by a book that had started so well.

regmcfly

New James Bond novel dropped and I am excited

Paul the sparky

Where's ya teefs?

hylian_elf

Why did they print the cover back to front?

Raiziel

A Htiw Dnim Llik Ot? They don’t make Bond titles like they used to.

Paul the sparky

davyK

Never read a Bond. Just never occured to me.

Raiziel

42. A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

At the beginning of this book a man finds himself confronted by a demon who promptly informs him that he has died and, because he backed the wrong religion (he’s a Mormon), he’s going to hell. Now because Zoroastrianism says that punishment in hell isn’t eternal, he’s told that one day he will escape and go to the good place. There are lots of different hells, apparently, and because the protagonist enjoyed reading in life, he is dispatched to a hell that is a library of very nearly infinite proportions. All he has to do to escape is find the book that tells the story of his life. The reader is told in the prologue that he is there for many times the time span of the universe.

I loved the premise of this. What I wasn’t so keen on was the execution. Primarily, the author doesn’t have a good ear for naturalistic dialogue; it’s all very stilted. There were also a few events that take place in the library that I thought were really dumb. I desperately wanted to like this book, and there were some minor parts here and there where it almost works. Ultimately it’s a great idea and, sadly, a missed opportunity.

Raiziel

43. Camelot by Giles Kristian

This is a sort-of sequel to Lancelot, which I read last year and thoroughly enjoyed. It’s a sort-of sequel because Lancelot was a complete tale and all nicely wrapped up at the end, and Kristian admits in his afterword to Camelot that he had no intention of following it up with anything. The best laid plans and all that. So Camelot follows Lancelot’s son Galahad, who at the beginning of this story is well on his way to becoming a priest of the Thorn, an offshoot of that newfangled Christianity that’s sweeping across Britain. But then the belligerent old knight Gawain shows up and before you know it Galahad is lopping off arms and heads like a good pagan knight.

Like Lancelot before it, the author goes for a very gritty setting where there is little or no magic. With Merlin, for example, Kristian is careful not to show the druid performing supernatural feats, and it might just be that all his magic exists only in the minds of the believers. There’s no fanciful quest for a for a religious artefact, either, but rather a gruelling journey to retrieve a (according to Merlin) magic cauldron. So only once in a while does the author touch very lightly on story beats of the original tales, and sometimes (to my slight annoyance) takes considerable liberties with the existing myths. But he’s telling his own story so that’s okay, I guess.

If there’s a criticism I can level at Camelot, it’s simply that it’s not as good as Lancelot. Galahad just isn’t as interesting as his dad, and the romance in this one isn’t a patch on the one in Lancelot; but then the love affair between Gwenevere and Lancelot was always going to be a tough act to follow. It was a good read though, and the battles, when they come, are suitably bloody and crunchy. Four Grails out of five.

ShabbyMcCrabby

You must have a very well loved and used reading nook Raiziel

Raiziel

Reading nook right now is the garden whenever the sun is shining.

Raiziel

44. The Descent by Jeff Long

Take the excellent British horror film The Descent, blow up the scale to World War Z proportions, season generously with Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and you get something like Jeff Long’s 1999 door-stopper The Descent. The premise is that Hell exists in a very physical way, and it’s right where many religions and myths said it was all along: beneath our feet and deep in the earth. When this planet-spanning honeycomb of vast caves, tight tunnels and subterranean seas is discovered the powers-that-be just can’t wait to get down there to explore it and commercialise it, even if there are some very nasty things waiting for them in the darkness. I really enjoyed it. There’s a single sequel, and I’ll be getting around to that very soon.

Paul the sparky

Sounds decent

Gremill

That's added to the list.

Edit: just bought it - can't get it on Kindle, so I've had to buy a second hand paperback. Your can have it after I've finished it if you want Sparkles.

Moot_Geeza

I didn't add that one to my list but I did add Lancelot, mentioned further up the page. Should be arriving soon.

Gremill

Oh yeah, Lancelot sounded good too.

Raiziel

Gremill wrote:

That's added to the list.

Edit: just bought it - can't get it on Kindle, so I've had to buy a second hand paperback. Your can have it after I've finished it if you want Sparkles.

Oh blast, had I known I could have sent you my copy. Well, if anyone wants my copy of the book I’ll be more than happy to post it out to you.

Gremill

Raiziel wrote:

Gremill wrote:

That's added to the list.

Edit: just bought it - can't get it on Kindle, so I've had to buy a second hand paperback. Your can have it after I've finished it if you want Sparkles.

Oh blast, had I known I could have sent you my copy. Well, if anyone wants my copy of the book I’ll be more than happy to post it out to you.

It was only a fiver, not to worry.

Raiziel

45. Troy by Stephen Fry

The third volume in Fry’s wonderful retelling of the Greek myths. Like the previous two, I did this one on audiobook because the man himself does the reading, and for my money Stephen Fry is the greatest living orator. There’s simply no one else on earth I’d rather have read me a story. He writes and delivers the story with the perfect blend of drama and humour. Highly recommended.

acemuzzy

4:50 From Paddington. Standard Christie, really - serviceable but nothing special tbh

Gremill

16. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Becky Chambers)
The fourth in the Wayfarer series and one of the best - four very different travellers passing through a wormhole hub get locked down together in a galactic motel after an accident shuts down their travel arrangements and they have to find a way to pass the time. We find out about their backgrounds, the different species cultures that they come from and why they are travelling to where they are going. Really liked this one, it's an easy read full of nice characters with some great dialogue and is just a lovely little book.

17. The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
This, on the other hand, is about as far from lovely as you can get - but may be one of the best books I've ever read. It's the story of the horrors of slavery era Georgia, the attempts of one girl to escape the plantation using the eponymous network of help and the mind-bending inhumanity of the times. It's absolutely incredible - at once both beautifully and poetically written, whilst using that gorgeous language to describe the worst that humanity can inflict on each other.

Raiziel

46. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

I don’t really have to say much about this one, do I? This time I read from the new Folio limited edition, and boy those books are big and heavy. Very early on I took to putting a cushion on my lap and placing the book on top of that for the sake of comfort. I’m also reading the trilogy through in tandem with the Reader’s Companion by Hammond and Scull, which is absolutely massive and effectively doubling the amount of reading per book. It took my three days just to get to chapter one, for crying out loud! It’s interesting, but definitely only for the most ardent of fans. Anyway, it’s nice to be back in Middle-earth. Again.

Paul the sparky

Imagine there was a game about exploring the deep dark mines of moria with a few dwarf chums?

Raiziel

I’m still waiting for a Middle-earth open world RPG that isn’t a MMO. A little slice of Moria just won’t do. And besides, there’s something down there in the dark. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories