I managed to get through a whole book without putting it on here. I finished Viva South America! by Oliver Balch today, a travelogue round the continent in the footsteps of Simón Bolívar (sort of) which takes in some of José de San Martín's life as well - it has to, since he goes to Argentina, Chile and Paraguay - and a visit to Brazil.

Oddly and to me disappointingly, he totally ignores Uruguay, but then its politics could be said to be the dullest of Latin America's nations during the last century (this is not a bad thing) I suppose.

Overall I enjoyed it. It's whetted my appetite!

I'm starting The White Tiger tomorrow, four weeks before my flight to Buenos Aires - hopefully I can get in finished by then...

I've finally read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at my wifes insistance (before we go see the film) and was disappointed by it really. I don't usuually read much modern crime (Campion please!) and the hype probably didn't help. The plot wasn't anything marvelous and I had some issues with the writing/translation. The language was very clunky in places and I really couldn't stand the constant mentioning of brands and consumer items. That's the sort of over the top detailing that niggles at me, why should I care that the main character uses a specific type of Freeware for his word processing? Do I need to know the processor speed of the Mac laptop another character wants to buy?

It really failed to grab me in the first hundred pages or so and while it's not a terrible book it wasn't anywhere near as good as everyone had told me it was.

I've also devoured The City & The City by China Mieville. It's criminal that this has been banished to the SF and Fantasy section of the bookshop purely on the basis of the author. Not that there is anything wrong with SF and Fantasy but more peopel would read it if it was on the same shelves as strict non-scifi like Margeret Atwood.

Again its a book about crime but in this case the crime isn't the purpose of the book but just a thing to give some shape to our perception of Beszel the city where we begin. I'm not very good a criticism, to the point where I wonder why I try to contribute to this thread, but The City & The City was a brilliant read.

Ricky Lenin wrote:
why should I care that the main character uses a specific type of Freeware for his word processing? Do I need to know the processor speed of the Mac laptop another character wants to buy?

Of course you shouldn't, but the manufacturers have probably given the author a wedge of money to get their name in the book...

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We

Good, but - unexpectedly - my attention keeps drifting. His narrative intention was to capture events as you would through the window of a car (from the inside, presumably) which is a fine idea. But once you've taken in the futureshock it meanders like a Swindonwards trip out of London with added sex-panic, I think, despite being both short and concise. Fifty pages to go, though, so it could still pull it out of the bag.

Not that there is anything wrong with SF and Fantasy but more peopel would read it if it was on the same shelves as strict non-scifi like Margeret Atwood.

Is that true? I mean I think it's likely that a wider range of people might read it, but in terms of sheer numbers is it so? Also are The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake in SF sections as well as general fiction, because you could equally argue that they lose readers if they're not?

Amor de Cosmos wrote:
Not that there is anything wrong with SF and Fantasy but more peopel would read it if it was on the same shelves as strict non-scifi like Margeret Atwood.

Is that true? I mean I think it's likely that a wider range of people might read it, but in terms of sheer numbers is it so? Also are The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake in SF sections as well as general fiction, because you could equally argue that they lose readers if they're not?

I do think that a book would be exposed to more people as well as a wider range of people if it is in the general fiction part of a bookshop as opposed to a genre section. But you are right Oryx and Crake isn't seen in Sci Fi and Fantasy and is unlikely to be so in the future.

But then, thinking about it more these books are still in the bookshop to be bought and it's the fault of the buyer if they don't stray from the part they are familiar with. It does seem odd that fiction can be broken down into Sci Fi & Fantasy, Crime, Classics and everything else.

Apart from Hatchards that is, who have a Historical Fiction section.

I've finally finished "My Name is Red". From page 250 to page 400, it had to be one of the most boring books I've ever read. However, the rest of it was pretty good, but those "I am Master Osman" chapters, holy f*ck they were dull.

I read the first 50 pages of "Erasure" by Percivil Everett this afternoon and I'm loving it. Light and intellectual, just my kind of thing, I'm really looking forward to the novel within the novel part of the book ("My Pafology").

We pulled it out of the bag.

And I don't want to be all, "Books? Rubbish!" but Marcel Bénabou's Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books isn't shaping up too well. The whole Oulipo thing looks great at first, but lawdamercy they're some unimaginitive tweeds at heart. Imagine a band of proggers who'd bought a pack of Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards and done exactly what they were instructed to, at the expense of their own intuition. George Perec has his moments but tests your patience pointlessly in the end (which you can't say about Robbe-Grillet, who tested it to great effect, in shorter novels to boot).

I'm talking to myself here, aren't I.

Sorry, dear, did you say something?


Anyway, I've just finished the utterly compelling Game Change by Heilemann and Halperin, about the 2008 US election and the run-up thereto. Fascinating, well-researched and lightly written. It's a page turned in both topic and form.

Hillary comes off looking much worse than you'd think, and Palin much better (in the sense that you gain some sympathy for how far out of her depth she was, yet carried on out of a sense of duty).

I just finished Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers. It's a nonfiction book about a Syrian-American man and his family in New Orleans. He decided to stay in the city during Hurricane Katrina to check on his rental properties and his contracting business' clients' homes. His wife and their children left. The book is about his experiences, and what happened to him after the storm. I don't want to give it away, but I'll just say that it's probably the best indictment of the Bush Administration and the domestic and security policies in that dark point of American history. The book is equally heartbreaking, angry, and inspiring.

If you only know Eggers from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, read this. I doubt anyone back then could have imagined what he's done since--his work in the 826 foundation, his book What Is The What, a fictionalized memoir of a Sudanese man's experiences, and now this.

Read Zeitoun. Read it now. Easily the best book I've read in years.

Having finished The White Tiger very comfortably before my flight - it's bloody good isn't it - I started on Monday a more ambitious attempt for what is now a two-week read: Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, which I may have mentioned further up thread when I first bought it, having waited however many years for his second novel to be published after the brilliant Carter Beats The Devil. 60 pages in (out of 500-odd, in large hardback) so far and enjoying it thoroughly.

I finished "Erasure", which I really liked, but the main character was a bit too cool for school in my opinion. I then read "Falconer" by John Cheever, which I was very disappointed with, it made prison sound like a holiday camp for intellectuals.

Now I'm onto "Last Evenings on Earth". Is it possible to dislik Roberto Bolãno, he could write about any subject and I'm sure I'd find it interesting.

In amongst the usual parade of crap I read More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss which I think wants to be the new We Need To Talk About Kevin, but for me was nowhere near as successful. Similar 'controversial' themes about modern American families blah blah blah. Too much stuff about race, too, but I guess that's part of writing about American society.

now I'm reading The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton which is fascinating and fabulous.

Have any of you read Andrey Platanov's The Foundation Pit? I only started it today, but already it's looking phenomenal.

I just finished The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge by Adam Sisman, which was excellent. Fantastically well-researched and -written account of the relationship between the two and their families, wives and friends. Fascinating as always to trace the erratic path of Coleridge's procrastinating genius and Wordsworth's progress from Revolutionary firebrand to dull reactionary. A remarkable view of an age's politics through two equally remarkable personalities.

I'm hovering around Isabel Allende's House of Spirits now, but it appears to be a bit magical realist and I'm not sure magical realism and I are friends.

I think it was steveeeeeeeee who didn't like Falconer; I remember it beng pretty good, but I like Cheever.

But you are right Oryx and Crake isn't seen in Sci Fi and Fantasy and is unlikely to be so in the future.

That's where I found my copy in Blackwells.

What else could you recommend, Ignatz? I really want to like him after reading some excerpts in LRB, which I loved. The problem I had with Falconer was the freedom the main character had inside prison, I enjoyed a lot of the passages where memories of his past are triggered, it was just the prison stuff I found a bit unbelievable. It appeared less rigorous than boarding-school, not that I've experienced either.

I've almost finished "Last Evenings on Earth", which I've absolutely loved. I'm glad I read this after "The Savage Detectives", I think a few of the stories would've irritated me had I not known his style/personality beforehand. What I love about Bolaño is that I never get the impression it's fiction, it just reads like a diary of events that have happened to him or people he knew, and all of those people are absolutely fascinating when described with his pen, even though I'd probably find them completely mundane if I were to have ever met them.

Once that's finished, I'm going to have my second stab at reading Fernando Pessoa. The first stab was "The Anarchist Banker", which I had to put down after 5 pages. The next attempt is with his book on Portuguese language.

You could try some of his short stories; the Swimmer for example is magnificent. And miles better than what Burt Lancaster did to it. There's a fantastic and beefy one-volume edition of his stories which is a treat to dip into.

Novels, I really like The Wapshot Scandal, The Wapshot Chronicle and Bullet Park. They're very, very good. He has this mix of the elegiac and the highly peculiar that I really love.

Cheers, I'm pretty sure it was The Swimmer that I read the extracts from, I'll see if I can find a short stories collection on book depository.