I'm reading Frequent Flyer by Kinky Friedman, the writing is ok, but the storyline isn't all that at the moment.

I'd recommend Sirens of Titan, toro toro. An incredible read that builds and builds and ties together everything perfectly at the end, despite it all seeming rather disparate and all-over-the-place on the way there.

I've just read two books in one sitting, which I don't think I've done before. The first was 'Lathe of Heaven' by Ursula Le Guin, who's one of my favourite authors. A good read, although not in the same league as Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. The premise is good (a man who changes the world with his dreams is used by a utopian scientist) but it's a little clunky in places (the scientist is called Haber- Habermas- and the dreamer is George Orr). The end doesn't quite work either, but I'd still recommend it to anyone after some intelligent sci-fi.

The other was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I know there was a long thread about it on the old board, and I'm afraid I have to join the 'don't get the fuss' group. A great page-turner and a good account of father/son relationship, but I found it very underwhelming overall. I was riveted, but never shocked, never appalled and didn't have my faith in the power of humanity restored like all the reviews told me I would.

It seemed to be in a strange limbo between Samuel Beckett (the old man tapping his cane talking in semi-riddles was straight out of Waiting for Godot) and that ITV post-apocalypse drama 'The Last Train' from about 1998.

I actually think it might make a better film than it did book- and I hear Viggo Mortenson's playing 'Man', so I've reasonably high hopes for that.

FH, did you read my Lathe of Heaven post on the old board? I'd be interested to get your thoughts.

Has anybody else here read The Sportswriter then? (I'm sure I recall Ford's name being mentioned here when it meant a lot less to me.) The more I get into it, and I'm about halfway, the more I'm beginning to think it is a seriously good book.

I just have, GY. I'd not given much thought to the lack of character development of Orr. Compared with main characters in other Le Guin stories we certainly know little about him, though his thought processes are spelt out fairly clearly, so we sympathise with him from the off. I didn't see this as any particular literary tactic other than to cut the book down; perhaps Le Guin experimenting with a more direct form of writing (this fits in with her saying that she wanted to write a book like Dick). The character of Orr is not important, just as the ideology (communist/fascist) of a utopian movement is not important- any attempt at designing a static utopia is doomed to failure.

I've started reading one of those Jasper Fforde books you see all over the place but after 57 pages it's starting to grate. 1 in 4 supposedly funny bits are funny but the other 3 are painful. I didn't like The Hitch-Hiker's Guide as a novel much, so I guess I'm unlikely to like a second-rate Hitch-Hiker's. I'd probably like it as a radio serial, though...

I really can't decide what to start next but I think Fowles' The Collector might just win the day.

Frequent Flyer finished well but was a tough slog for a while, it was a bit too much of a mystery for the first 3/4 of the book.

Onto Gold by Dan Rhodes, which has started very nicely, reads really well. I read his book of "2 paragraph" short stories Anthology years and years ago, it was aces.

The Freud was excellent, far better for getting a handle on what he thinks and why it makes sense than any of his "theoretical" writings. I was reading Our Man In Havana and loving it, until I lost it on the tube two pages from the end. Ironically, I'd been out at a Salsa night with an old friend and her Cuban fiancé, wearing a Vuelta Ciclistica A Cuba Socialista t-shirt. I suppose something had to give.

I'll finish it in a bookshop.

I'm reading Ezra Pound's Selected Prose right now - thoroughly deranged, but utterly brilliant. This morning I finished Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal; a superb and courageous work, extremely rigorous, yet never remotely detached from the incredibly personal nature of its message and reflections. Not quite right in every argument, but certainly one of the best books about homosexuality - and about politics generally - that I've ever read.

It took me a while to realise why I was getting the eye from so many blokes on the tube while reading it. Duh.

I'm just about to start Saul Bellow's Herzog now, meandering through the introductory essay, which I do hope doesn't Pale Fire it all to hell...

Speaking of which. I have finally decided to start Pale Fire. I did not read the introductory essay.

It's interesting so far but I can't help wondering if I'm missing something. Or will it all fall into place later on? I mean, I think I get what's going on but I thought I ought to be more overwhelmed by it. Maybe it's because following a commentary is too much like work. The kind of bitchiness about the critical process is pretty funny, and the stuff about variant readings I like a lot, and all the kind of metanarrative flights of fancy are really nice.

also I think I might have to call one of my chapters 'the innocent author' although I will no doubt be the 8,957th person to do so.

From the programme I'm watching at the minute:

QUOTE:
Nobody's really familiar with Pound.
They just fake it.

Toro's proving them wrong by the looks of it. I wish I had the space in my head to read stuff like that.

Have just finished JG Ballard's "Kingdom Come" - it was absolutely awful. It's not particularly long but it was a real struggle to finish - in fact, I'm not sure why I bothered.

The start is moderately promising but, for the most part it's just plain silly and I can't think of any other book I've read where I've finished up knowing virtually nothing about the central characters (and caring even less).

Even the proofreader did a crap job - one of the main characters, Tom Carradine, is twice described as David Carradine.

Ly - the prose is actually pretty straightforward and accessible. Deranged, and very erudite, but he's explaining what he means as he goes along, rather than assuming you can read greek letters, chinese ideograms, egyptian hieroglyphs, and are intimately familiar with all the same books of history, economics, and provencal troubador poetry that he is, as he does in the Cantos.

I mean, it would be hard to stress enough how necessary a commentary is for that book. The prose is extremely clear, though.

I don't claim to know what he means, but he sounds totally far out

Ah, brilliant!

I love that poem.

"Damn it all! All this our South stinks peace!"

He writes pretty much as he sounds, actually...