Nice, it’s already on my very long list. I read McEwan’s Enduring Love back in the late 90s, and picked up The Child in Time but haven’t read it.

The Cement Garden is his bestest but they're all pretty good

hylian_elf wrote:

Took me ages as I don’t read often, but The Great Gatsby was… great. A lovely easy read with flowing prose. Something about the way it’s written. You just glide along with the story. And what a deep story with so many layers.

Coming towards to end of Martian Time-Slip by PKD. It’s good, picked up a bit in second half after a plodding first half. Hoping to finish it tomorrow so I can start a new book on holiday.

Hey Gatsby! My favourite text to teach. Whaddya mean etc.

Minnesänger wrote:

acemuzzy wrote:

The Cement Garden is his bestest but they're all pretty good

Cement Garden is good, aye, but obviously my personal preference is for The Child in Time.

That might actually be the only non-recent one I've not read. I should fix this.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I've not actually read any Philip K Dick before. It's always been on my to do list, but I've been largely put off I think by various people telling me along the way that his ideas are brilliant, but that others have realised them better in the many adaptations of his work. 

The other thing that put me off is the fact that I feel like I already know what happens (I'm very much driven by story, and if I already know it, I'm instantly less interested).  Again it turns out I missed a trick. I knew the broad thrust of the final revelation in this book but, it turns out, I didn't understand its context at all.

So, for anyone that doesn't know - High Castle is a dystopian novel about an alternative history in which the Germans and Japanese won World War 2, which prominently features a book which is, in turn, an alternative history in which the Germans and Japanese lost the war. In most conversations I've had about the book it's this first alternative history that people seem to focus on, but to my mind the novel is more concerned - seemingly like much of Dick's work - with authenticity, truth, art and "reality".

There's some beautifully subtle stuff in there too. For instance the racist antique dealer who is pretty central to the story, has an internal voice that echoes that of the Japanese characters, rather than the other Americans. A small note, but one which tells you a lot about his character without explicitly telling you at all.

Which I guess is the punchline for the book. There's a lot that happens, and a lot that's said.  But it struck me that all the really good stuff in there is expressed with commendable subtlety, there to be drawn out only when you're thinking about it later.  Those "better" adaptations, I find myself wondering - do they just make all that stuff more obvious?  Or perhaps ignore it at all?  (I saw a few episodes of the High Castle TV show and, yeah, it seems to be chiefly riffing on "what if the Nazis won?" rather than "what is the nature of truth?"...)

Not the easy, pulpy read I'd imagined, but all the better for it.

^I’m glad the book and the film both exist differently. Love them both for different reasons.

The Daddy wrote:

I’ve read a lot of short Dick stories, they’re predictably hit and miss but certainly more hit than miss, would recommend.

Ah I see someone is familiar with the filters option on pornhub

Sounds tasty.

Finished Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses a couple of weeks ago. Very good, although much like other McCarthy novels I've read it took a while for me to settle into the rhythm of the opening chapters.

There's a film, which was supposedly a bit of a dud, but also suffered from studio butchering. With Winestein's fingerprints all over it as a retaliation to allowing Billy Bob Thornton creative control over his previous film, apparently (the excellent Sling Blade). Matt Damon refers to it as a potential masterpiece and seems to consider it one of the best films he's been involved in, pre-interference. Even the Daniel Llanois score was stripped out at the last minute and replaced with strings and schmaltz. There's been talk of a proper director's cut but Llanois didn't want his score to go back in, so Billy Bob shelved it out of respect. TLDR: Would love to see the BBT cut.

The Employees - A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn
I'm going to start by unambiguously stating that I think this is an exceptional book, and that everyone should read it.

I feel like I have to open with that, because the words that follow may well put a fair chunk of you off - but that original statement still applies. This is a brilliant, experimental, beautiful, disturbing work that couldn't possibly work in any other medium.

So, what, actually is it?  It's a very short SciFi novel detailing the events on board a large spaceship, which orbits a planet from which the titular employees have been collecting a series of strange "objects". If you feel like you've heard a version of this story before then, yes, you probably have.  What's different here is the telling of it. The entire novel tales the form of short statements taken as part of an ongoing audit of the ship's staff. 

Each statement is numbered, though not necessarily presented in order, and several are clearly missing. There is no indication of who is speaking in any individual statement, and there's not even any specific acknowledgement of whether those speaking are human or humanoid - sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. The corporation that employees them, evidently, doesn't care.

The statements are also often very brief, usually less than a page long. As a result, whilst this is a prose novel, it often feels very much like reading poetry. There's a precision to the language (translated from the original danish), and those speaking assume their audience already knows what they're talking about, leaving the reader to do a lot of the work in piecing things together. Indeed for the first half of the novel I wondered whether there was really a plot at all - it's mostly taken up with descriptions of "the objects" and the effects they have on the crew.  There's a sense of things not being right, and a desire to read purely to try and understand what the hell's going on, that reminded me a little of the early sections of "Annihilation".

Slowly things start to move towards discussions of that other standard SciFi trope - what it means to be alive - and then quite rapidly, Things Start To Happen. Even then, whilst you're left in little doubt as to what happens on the ship, it's relayed chiefly through dispassionate corporate speak. It's only really at the end that I realised that one of the novel's true themes, made abundantly clear by the title, is not just what it is to be alive, but  the relationship between living, and working.

There's a moment in the book when one of the humans briefly remembers her life before joining the ship, when she was a mother, which to me captures much of what's going on:

"When the child puts its mouth to my breast, I was both a body and an object to it. When the milk squirted, I was both the milk and not the milk."

So, an odd book, certainly. There's no hero, the plot is largely obfuscated for much of the duration, you rarely have a clear sense of what is happening to anyone, or even who/what they are, and much of it is told either through detached corporate statements, or elliptical poetic descriptions of things we'll never see* or experience.

Despite all that, I really enjoyed it.  It's not long at all, it can easily be read in a single session - but there's more in there than an awful lot of much longer tomes, and I found myself re-reading some pages many times.

Hugely recommended.

*The novel apparently began life as a request to write a few pages for an art installation. Ravn was so inspired by the art works she wrote a lot more, with the hundred plus statements then being scattered around the installation itself.  As such, some of the object are things you can see, if you google the exhibition itself. Having done so, I'd advise against it though. The installation looks great, but nothing compared to what's in your head.

Love those books - need to read Harrow again before the new one.

tigersgogrrr wrote:

They're so fucking good. I think I like Gideon more because the second book made my head hurt too much but they are both absolutely sublime.

Yeah, first one is a far more straightforward action romp - I only half understood the second one, which makes a re-read all the more needed.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

I bought this when you lot had it in a book club thread a while back, intending to join in, but my commute was barely 25 minutes at that point.  It's close to two hours each way now, so I finally gave it a go. 

I'll dig the thread out later to see what the general consensus was, but my initial reaction is....masterpiece?  I thought it was exceptionally good.  One bit in particular nearly finished me on the way home from work last week - I ignored the wet eye wallop until I had to wipe a cheek.  I get that with mawkish country songs if I'm hungover, but tend to resist lip wobbles with books for some reason.  Not with the fish supper scene though!  Beautiful stuff.

It reminded me of Birdsong on occasion, which I remember being similarly excellent (it's been 20 years since I read that though).  Big thanks to whoever suggested it initially, will now attempt to get other people to read it.

I loved it. Deeply flawed and brilliantly complex/believable main character.

Gideon has a very strong voice so it's not going to work for everyone, certainly. I loved it but can definitely see how not everyone would.

I'll do better with my next recommendation!