Steve's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 1-20 of 32).

Currently reading Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. A man's wife disappears so he starts searching for her in the streets of Istanbul and scouring the newspaper columns written by his cousin (her half-brother who has also disappeared) for clues.

It's not a conventional detective novel (the kind that the protagonist's missing wife used to constantly read) but more an exploration of identity and a compendium of stories about the history of the Turkish city. The protagonist becomes so consumed by his columnist cousin's articles that he gradually assumes his identity, moves into his apartment and writes his columns in his absence.

Some people find Pamuk's books a bit academic and hard going but anybody who like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Borges would probably enjoy him. I've also read My Name Is Red which was great, similar to Eco's The Name Of The Rose.

Oh yes, I meant to say Scotty = rubbish accent.

Wait! I can't believe I didn't think of this one straight away:

Most ludicrous Scottish accent in celluloid history must go to the extremely French Christopher Lambert in "Highlander".

And the very Scottish Sean Connery didn't even attempt a Spanish accent.

James "Scotty" Doohan on Star Trek, surely.

"The engines cannae' take it, cap'n!"

He was Canadian.

I am currently reading Three Things About Me by Aliya Whitely. It's an entertaining black comedy about customer service trainees. Er.. that may not sound particularly exciting but there is a hint of darkness to the novel and a whiff of the absurd about it.

I must confess that this book is a a bit lighter than the usual stuff I read but I needed a break from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All!

Hello, y'all. I moved to Glasgow a couple a months ago from Oxford via Devon via Liverpool via Hertfordshire after finally deciding that I just don't like England.

I've only been here a short time but I already love it especially all those secondhand bookshops hidden away in the West End.

And I can afford to live somewhere bigger than a cupboard up here. Wonderful!

Funny you should say this because I similarly failed to get to the end of Okri's "The Famished Road".

My general attitude differed a bit in that I was enjoying the novel and it is very out-of-character for me to give up on a book. But, like you said, with 100 pages out of 500 to go I started to think, "Yes, yes, but what's the point?"

For a long time I thought that I was at fault for missing the point of this respected novel because I hadn't read all the way to the end so I find it interesting that you should have a similar reaction to another of his books.

Oh, and I managed to read "Ulysses" last year - if I can manage it, anybody can!

It might be useful to you to read Jose Saramago's "The Gospel According To Jesus Christ" (if you haven't already) once you have finished the New Testament.

I agree, Carrie: an enjoyable book with lots of interesting ideas but it falls shy of being brilliant. I also found the prose clumsy in places and found many of the philosophical ideas interesting but a little underdeveloped.

Still, the plot is full of enjoyable misdirections and you are never sure if anyone is who they say they are (or who they say they are when they admit that they are not who they say they are).

I sound a bit negative but I did really enjoy the book even if I felt that there was something unresolved about the story and many of the ideas but, alas, not in an intriguingly ambiguous way.

"Do we really need to be told what book we're reading?"

Alex, if you continue to read then Calvino describes a scene at station and how the smoke from the train is obscuring the words of the first paragraph. He then goes on to explain that you are a character in his book.

The whole point of If on a winter's night a traveller... is to explore the relationship between novels and their readers. That first line isn't him stating the obvious because he thinks the reader is an idiot.

Sorry, I get annoyed when people vilify novels based upon the first line without even considering why the author may have written it that way. Then again, I really enjoyed Ulysses even though I didn't understand what big lumps of it meant. I may just be weird.

I thought it was solid but not great. Although a lot of disasters befell the central characters, I wasn't especially moved. Maybe my misery threshold is much, much higher than yours!

Give me the full on tragedy of Shakespeare any day.

"Woe is me. Everybody runs from me in terror. I look like a badly-stitched eight foot rag doll but I am a gentle soul who just wants to be loved. It's all his fault: my creator who abandoned me. I should find him. But how? Oh wait, what's this in the pocket of the coat I've been wearing for the last five years? Oh, it is a piece of paper with my creator's name and address in Geneva. Never noticed that before. What luck."

And so on and so forth. Ugh.

I am reading Blindness at the moment and I am gripped. Saramago does have an unusual prose style but I got into the flow of it within a few pages.

I'd agree that the characters appear more like archetypes than fleshed out individuals but I don't find that a problem: it's not that kind of novel. He is writing about the herd and not the individual sheep.

But I enjoy books that challenge my perceptions of what fiction can be and explore ideas rather than characters.

It is a harrowing and thought-provoking book so far. Enjoyable? In the sense that it is making me think and I can't wait to get home from work to carry on reading it, yes.

I too love Catch-22. It's wonderfully absurd but also frightening in its absurdity. One of my favourite books.

Oh, you read Love, etc. without reading Talking It Over first? Did you know that the former is the sequel to the latter?

I like Barnes but I prefer Flaubert's Parrot and A History Of the World In Ten ½ Chapters to England, England, but that's just me.

I love Carey - he is easily one of the best living writers of literary fiction. My favourite Carey novels are Illywhacker and Oscar & Lucinda but all of his novels are excellent.

Perceptive, funny, smart, awesome imagery and not a little weird. Brilliant writer.

I have no idea where you got this impression that I am nice person even if I do give good hugs.

I am not a literature fascist. I simply believe that many readers are idiots and wouldn't know a good book if it took them forcibly from behind.

There are people who hated it? What's wrong with them?