What are you reading this summer?

[milkanannan]

Just curious what everyone’s dipping into this season. At the moment I’m both inching and ploughing (sorry, pun intended) my way through Arabian Nights. My son and I start his first read of The Little Prince tonight, which should be fun. We recently got through a few comic book/novels by Raina Telgemeier (you’ve seen them, they’re the ones with emojis on the cover: Drama, Sisters, etc).

How about you? What’s on your bedside these days?

[Laura Hunt]

I just finished The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville; I'm not a huge fan of his work, but I needed a quick, entertaining read after the heaviness of Kenji Nakagami's The Cape and Oher Stories from the Japanese Ghetto.

Apart from that, I've really enjoyed Mariana Enríquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a collection of short contemporary horror stories, and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, which could be described as a mystery novel that, intriguingly, doesn't really present itself as such until well into its second half.

Now I think I'll probably grab Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry from my to-read pile, although Alessandro Baricco's Lands of Glass is also tempting me. But maybe, why not both?

[KyriakosCH]

Just curious what everyone’s dipping into this season. At the moment I’m both inching and ploughing (sorry, pun intended) my way through Arabian Nights. My son and I start his first read of The Little Prince tonight, which should be fun. We recently got through a few comic book/novels by Raina Telgemeier (you’ve seen them, they’re the ones with emojis on the cover: Drama, Sisters, etc).

How about you? What’s on your bedside these days?

1001 Nights is good
Shows what happens when you are the caliph, and you can't control your servants 

[Stupot]

I’ve never read the 1001 Arabian Nights. Really should correct that.

I recently finished The Good Thief by Hanna Tinti. A charming, easy read that has been favorably compared with Dickens’ work.

As for now, I’m reading Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s own novel based on his most recent movie. I went in expecting it to be more of a novelization, but it really isn’t. It’s more of a companion to the movie, with loads of content in the book that’s not in the film (and vise versa). It also contains reams of what are essentially just Tarantino’s essays about the movie industry disguised as the opinions of his characters.

It’s a bit of an awkward read at times. In one dodgy part, the character Cliff pick up a magazine and starts daydreaming his opinions about foreign movies through the 50s, 60s and 70s… except the book itself is set in 1969 and Cliff is not a time traveler.

But once you accept it for what it is (a vehicle for Quentin to show off his encyclopedic movie knowledge and expand the world of his crazy Hollywood movie), it’s a fun enough read. I must be enjoying it as I’m making my way through it quicker than The Good Thief.

[Snarky]

I've mainly been doing what you'd call "summer beach reading" as audiobooks while I do other things (cooking, cleaning, biking, walking…). Lots of psychological thrillers with titles like Tell Me a Secret, I Can't Sleep, A Perfect Lie, etc. I can usually turn up the speed to x1.75 or at least x1.5, so it doesn't take very long to get through them.

While they differ in plot and setting, they all have a lot in common: first-person unreliable narration, female main character (and author), and some kind of mysterious trauma in the past. By far the best of them has been Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm, which I've mentioned before in another thread. It has a bit of a Breaking Bad vibe, where tensions gradually expose the cracks in the life of a seemingly nice, normal person, and events or their fundamental character flaws drive them to do things they would never have thought themselves capable of.

Apart from that, the only "literary" reading I've done is The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford. This novel is often listen as one of the best of the twentieth century, and I've wanted to read Ford since I learned about his collaboration with Joseph Conrad. The story is about the relationships between two upper-middle-class couples ("quite good people," as the narrator puts it) â€" one American, one English â€" around the turn of the century. They meet at a spa in Europe, and become friends in a sedate, boring way for many years; always behaving strictly conventionally, their conversations consisting solely of small talk. Except, that's not the real truth. Behind the respectable facades there are deep passions, affairs, blackmail, scandals, heroism, alcoholism, cruelty, ruination, insanity, and a rather staggering number of deaths, which the narrator gradually reveals, going back again and again over the same events with new information to offer different perspectives and interpretations.

All these elements, discussed very frankly, were considered shocking indecent filth at the time it was published, but nowadays the idea of Victorian and Edwardian hypocrisy is a commonplace, and the bare plot comes across as a bit melodramatic. What remains compelling is the way it is told: Ford was one of the pioneers of the unreliable narrator (he's an obvious influence on Kazuo Ishiguro, e.g. The Remains of the Day), and the genius of this book is how we as readers start to doubt and push back against the version(s) of the story the narrator presents. He gives us his take on the characters and personalities of the people involved, but are they really compatible with their actions as he tells it? Has he misjudged them? Or is the story he's telling wrong or biased in some way? Is he omitting key information? Or is he actively lying, or using sly irony to give the opposite impression of what he is ostensibly saying? And what are his own motivations? As readers, we are put in the role of active co-creators of the story, weighing different possibilities.

It's good. I recommend it.

[Laura Hunt]

The story is about the relationships between two upper-middle-class couples ("quite good people," as the narrator puts it) â€" one American, one English â€" around the turn of the century. They meet at a spa in Europe, and become friends in a sedate, boring way for many years; always behaving strictly conventionally, their conversations consisting solely of small talk. Except, that's not the real truth.

Hey, that sounds a lot like Kaz...

(he's an obvious influence on Kazuo Ishiguro, e.g. The Remains of the Day)

...right

To follow up on my previous comment, I just finished Baricco's Lands of Glass, and for some reason it left me a bit cold. It has all those magical-realism elements that make you feel like you're reading García Márquez at times, and his prose is as poetic as always, but it didn't feel as perfectly balanced and well-rounded as his (imo) masterpiece Ocean Sea, and it can't beat either Novecento's whimsicality or the masterful intertwined narratives of Three Times at Dawn, both of which are much shorter and all the better for it. Not a bad book by any means, but not the one I would recommend to someone looking to get into his work.

[KyriakosCH]

Just a minor point, but would it really be a "pioneer" of the unreliable narrator in 1915?
Maybe in a novel. There are way more famous authors who used that technique, almost a century before (such as E.A. Poe, who makes use of it in most of his stories -one example: The Man of the Crowd).
Of course it has been around since ancient times, though usually less directly and as visible (not to be picked up immediately by the reader) part of the plot. A good example there would be the excellent "True Story", by Lucian of Samosata (I mean, it's even in the title, let alone the intro  ).
The German romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann also has a variation of it, though not strictly the one you easily identify in Poe (closer to Lucian, eg with his protagonist in The Sandman, who is rather unstable).

[Snarky]

Just a minor point, but would it really be a "pioneer" of the unreliable narrator in 1915?

Yes.

[KyriakosCH]

Just a minor point, but would it really be a "pioneer" of the unreliable narrator in 1915?

Yes.

Ok. So Poe never existed 

[Snarky]

The existence or otherwise of Poe is irrelevant to the question.

[Durq]

Within the past few months, I've read three books by Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go. I enjoyed The Buried Giant the most.

[Snarky]

Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, which could be described as a mystery novel that, intriguingly, doesn't really present itself as such until well into its second half.

This has been on my reading list for a long time. I should get to it.

I also just remembered another book I read recently, The Thursday Murder Club by (TV host) Richard Osman. A group of senior citizens living in an upscale retirement village investigate two murders that happen nearby. This is an old-school whodunnit in the cozy tradition: it's unrelentingly nice. (Even as it touches on some dark subject matters. Both drug dealers and murderers are portrayed as fundamentally decent people; only the murder victims are painted unsympathetically.) The mysteries and twists are quite solid, though, and having it solved by a team of not-quite-amateurs each bringing their own experience and expertise to bear (rather than a single brilliant detective) is a cool approach that avoids some of the common plot problems of the genre. I can quite understand how it became a bestseller, and expect a TV adaptation in the near future.

[Laura Hunt]

Within the past few months, I've read three books by Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go. I enjoyed The Buried Giant the most.

I really enjoyed The Buried Giant, although for me, the inclusion of whole chapters from other characters' POVs towards the middle of the book made the narrative sag a bit. I personally would have preferred a tighter, more focused experience, but I liked it a lot in any case. That ending <3

Funnily enough, my favourite Ishiguro is The Unconsoled, a 500-page plotless fever dream that is the absolute opposite of "tight" or "focused" But what can I say, these kind of experiments always seem to resonate with me somehow.

Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, which could be described as a mystery novel that, intriguingly, doesn't really present itself as such until well into its second half.

This has been on my reading list for a long time. I should get to it.

You should! I did not quite love the ending because, without getting into spoiler territory, it's basically a huge info-dump that leaves nothing to the imagination, but that is par for the course for the mystery/whodunnit genre, so it's more of a trope than an actual problem with the author or her style, which I found fascinating. I plan on reading Flights next before tackling The Books of Jacob, so I'm taking it little by little.

I also just remembered another book I read recently, The Thursday Murder Club by (TV host) Richard Osman. A group of senior citizens living in an upscale retirement village investigate two murders that happen nearby. This is an old-school whodunnit in the cozy tradition: it's unrelentingly nice. (Even as it touches on some dark subject matters. Both drug dealers and murderers are portrayed as fundamentally decent people; only the murder victims are painted unsympathetically.) The mysteries and twists are quite solid, though, and having it solved by a team of not-quite-amateurs each bringing their own experience and expertise to bear (rather than a single brilliant detective) is a cool approach that avoids some of the common plot problems of the genre. I can quite understand how it became a bestseller, and expect a TV adaption in the near future.

Sounds like a nice read for whenever I need something that doesn't demand too much emotional investment or brainpower. Noted.

[Mandle]

Been re-reading The Mothman Prophesies for the 57th time for a few minutes each night before trying to sleep. A great study in disjointed paranoid writing. It always gives me solace that somebody wrote something just that batshit crazy. And that they did it in the exact time in history when it could get published and blow up! Whether any of it actually happened or not is beside the point. A masterpiece!

[KyriakosCH]

Been re-reading The Mothman Prophesies for the 57th time for a few minutes each night before trying to sleep. A great study in disjointed paranoid writing. It always gives me solace that somebody wrote something just that batshit crazy. And that they did it in the exact time in history when it could get published and blow up! Whether any of it actually happened or not is beside the point. A masterpiece!

With your endorsement, I might try it!
(edit: come to think of it, we must have discussed this in the past, and possibly I even tried then  )

[KyriakosCH]

The Invisible Man. Not that HG Wells one, the short story by Chesterton.

This was meh, imo. Father Brown story, with some ties to Poe (fantastical element) but also a lot of differences and generally of much lower literary value. Also, its form is quite strange, with a double revelation (or double climax) and the formal climax being underwhelming compared to the previous and informal one.

[Manu]

Just finished:
* Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee -> incredibly interesting (and I suppose some of the principles are valid for videogames writing too).
* Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner -> not a fan of Doom, but I love reading this kind of story

Just started:
* Guns, Germs and Steel by  Jared M. Diamond

[KyriakosCH]

It's no longer the summer, but I recently read Chechov's the Seagull. Probably hadn't read it in the past. Very good ending, and all-around a nice play

Ok, it's not Oedipus the King, but let's be honest, nothing comes close to that one.