What book are you reading, ιf' - Iff you read books

[Kyriakos]

Rough list of the FB stories I personally liked (to varying degrees) up to now, half-way through the third collection:

Col1: The Invisible Man, less so: The Secret Garden, The Eye of Apollo, the Queer Feet
Col2: Really no story was that good in my opinion, but I liked elements in The Head of Caesar
Col3: The Arrow of Heaven, the Oracle of the Dog (but I have to note that imo the quality rose very steeply in col3, so maybe there will be more of interest )

In red are the stories which I had already read before.

Honorable mention, from Col1: The Sign of the Broken Sword might have had made a bigger impression, if the main idea wasn't (later) used by Borges in a way closer to my taste.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Rough list of the FB stories I personally liked (to varying degrees) up to now, half-way through the third collection:

Col1: The Invisible Man, less so: The Secret Garden, The Eye of Apollo, the Queer Feet
Col2: Really no story was that good in my opinion, but I liked elements in The Head of Caesar
Col3: The Arrow of Heaven, the Oracle of the Dog (but I have to note that imo the quality rose very steeply in col3, so maybe there will be more of interest )

In red are the stories which I had already read before.

Honorable mention, from Col1: The Sign of the Broken Sword might have had made a bigger impression, if the main idea wasn't (later) used by Borges in a way closer to my taste.

I liked The Sins of Prince Saradine and The Duel of Dr. Hirsch, not so much The Eye of Apollo.

I see that upcoming in Collection 3 are The Strange Crime of John Boulnois, which I remember that I liked, and The Fairy-Tale of Father Brown, not really a detective story but a dreamy picturesque little tale. There is also my least favorite Father Brown story, The God of the Gongs, which apart from being vilely xenophobic is so incoherently written I couldn't make head or tail of it.

 

[Kyriakos]

Iirc both Boulnois and Fairy Tale are in collection 2 (at least in my pdf ). I recall both of them, but liked neither...
The Duel of Dr. Hirsch is the one about the double existence, I suppose. Can't say it was of interest.
Prince Saradine, this is the swamp/isolated river estate? If so, the theme imo simply lost too much by randomly happening when Brown was there.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Well, I'll reserve judgment until you've finished the entire collection, but until then my tentative diagnosis is that it's more of a case of hard-to-please reader than a hard-at-pleasing writer

---

Nice little passage from Swann's Way (about the narrator's favourite writer Bergotte):

Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: "He has a charming mind, so individual, he has a way of his own of saying things, which is a little far-fetched, but so pleasant. You never need to look for his name on the title-page, you can tell his work at once." But none of them had yet gone so far as to say "He is a great writer, he has great talent." They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not speak, because they were not aware of it. We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

An awful lot of words for an awful lot of nothing

So, for instance, every Saturday, as Françoise had to go in the afternoon to market at Roussainville-le-Pin, the whole household would have to have luncheon an hour earlier. And my aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly exception to her general habits, that she clung to it as much as to the rest. She was so well 'routined' to it, as Françoise would say, that if, on a Saturday, she had had to wait for her luncheon until the regular hour, it would have 'upset' her as much as if she had had, on an ordinary day, to put her luncheon forward to its Saturday time. Incidentally this acceleration of luncheon gave Saturday, for all of us, an individual character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. At daybreak, before we were dressed, without rhyme or reason, save for the pleasure of proving the strength of our solidarity, we would call to one another good-humoredly, cordially, patriotically, "Hurry up; there's no time to be lost; don't forget, it's Saturday!" while my aunt, gossiping with Françoise, and reflecting that the day would be even longer than usual, would say, "You might cook them a nice bit of veal, seeing that it's Saturday." If, at half-past ten, some one absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, "I say, an hour-and-a-half still before luncheon," everyone else would be in ecstasies over being able to retort at once: "Why, what are you thinking about? Have you for-gotten that it's Saturday?" And a quarter of an hour later we would still be laughing, and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt Léonie about this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when some one, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, "What, only two o'clock!" feeling the heavy throb go by him of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as a rule passed no one at that hour upon the highways, deserted for the midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the banks of the bright and ever-flowing stream, which even the angler had abandoned, and so slipped unaccompanied into the vacant sky, where only a few loitering clouds remained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus: "Why, you're forgetting; we had luncheon an hour earlier; you know very well it's Saturday."

I still love the book, but I have to read so much of it

 

[Josu]

Ended Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield.

I misread the synopsis, I expected more presence in the story of the persian side, so I enjoyed below book's quality

Started The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

 

[Narz]

Finished The Institute by Stephen King, reminded me alot of Firestarter altho not as good, nevertheless a smooth read 7/10

 

[Smellincoffee]

The Dangerous Years, a bit of historical fiction about an English naval officer whose postings after the Great War have him rescuing White Russians, encountering hurricanes, and rescuing missionaries in China while having the ocassional fling.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

More from Swann's Way:

As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, then, instead of taking us home at once, my father, in his thirst for personal distinction, would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my mother's utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far as the viaduct, which began to stride on its long legs of stone at the railway station, and to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of civilisation, because every year, as we came down from Paris, we would be warned to take special care, when we got to Combray, not to miss the station, to be ready before the train stopped, since it would start again in two minutes and proceed across the viaduct, out of the lands of Christendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the farthest limit.

I know exactly what he means

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Another unironic banger

We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a ruin which endures for all time. I would by now be dragging my weary limbs, and ready to drop with sleep; the balmy scent of the lime-trees seemed a consolation which I could obtain only at the price of great suffering and exhaustion, and not worthy of the effort. From gates far apart the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up an antiphonal barking, as I still hear them bark, at times, in the evenings, and it is in their custody (when the public gardens of Combray were constructed on its site) that the Boulevard de la Gare must have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their alternate challenge and acceptance, I can see it again with all its lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon.

(It's from the same paragraph as the previous quote!)

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

In between books now. Last one I read was Joe Turner's Come And Gone by August Wilson. You might know him from Fences.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

This is one of the worst sentences I've read in this book so far

However that might be, Françoise had come, more and more, to pay an infinitely scrupulous attention to my aunt's least word and gesture. When she had to ask her for anything she would hesitate, first, for a long time, making up her mind how best to begin. And when she had uttered her request, she would watch my aunt covertly, trying to guess from the expression on her face what she thought of it, and how she would reply. And in this way—whereas an artist who had been reading memoirs of the seventeenth century, and wished to bring himself nearer to the great Louis, would consider that he was making progress in that direction when he constructed a pedigree that traced his own descent from some historic family, or when he engaged in correspondence with one of the reigning Sovereigns of Europe, and so would shut his eyes to the mistake he was making in seeking to establish a similarity by an exact and therefore lifeless copy of mere outward forms—a middle-aged lady in a small country town, by doing no more than yield whole-hearted obedience to her own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit of mischief engendered by the utter idleness of her existence, could see, without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her daily life, her morning toilet, her luncheon, her afternoon nap, assume, by virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the interest that was to be found in what Saint-Simon used to call the 'machinery' of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on her features would provide Françoise with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror, as did the silence, the good humour or the arrogance of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.

 

[damunzy]

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin the author of John Dies at the End (which I never read but the movie was decent). It's a pretty easy read and enjoyable. Courtesy my local library.

I'm also reading the 3rd Murderbot novel on my phone- Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries. Murberbot is becoming more lovable and human all the time. Thanks Anna's Archives and my local library for this series.

And current audiobook I am listening to: Dragonsteel Prime by Brandon Sanderson. Stream it free on Youtube, download the audiobook, or the ebook. Free and legit from Brandon Sanderson.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I finally finished Hugh Howey's Silo trilogy. Wool, Shift and Dust (2011-2013). It was fine. The first book was good. I can only recommend the 2nd and 3rd books in the sense that if you read the 1st book you'll more than likely want to know what happens next. They were kind of a slog. I never really gave a crap about any of the characters introduced in the 2nd and 3rd books. The end of the 3rd book seems to be the beginning of a new story that could easily be more interesting than the 2nd and 3rd books were. The Apple+ series seems to have taken the first book and stretched it out a bit, which I think has worked so far. I hope they skip most of the 2nd book, compress parts of the 2nd and 3rd books into one season, and then do a season about what happens after the end of the 3rd book. That's what I'd do, anyway.

--

This is one of the worst sentences I've read in this book so far

Then I started The Refrigerator Monologues (2017) by Catherynne Valente, which is outstanding so far. It's about women who are analogues of characters who were "fridged" in comic-book stories. So far I've met Gwen Stacy Paige Embry and Jean Grey Julia Ash. I really like Valente's writing style. It remains to be seen where the story goes or how much it presumes the reader is a bonehead. I mean, a book like this almost has to be 'preaching to the choir', because only the proverbial choir would pick it up in the first place. But the choir doesn't need to hear 'Psalms for Dummies'; the choir is pretty sophisticated and has likely been attending this church most of their lives. The choir are graduate students, not middle-school kids. That's not to say you shouldn't preach to the choir, it just means you have to raise your game. If I get to the end and it's all just "misogyny is bad, m'kay?" I'm going to bang my head on my desk. Like I say, though, I like her writing.

---

This is one of the worst sentences I've read in this book so far

Those passages you've posted make me feel better about having ground through Shift and Dust.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Mahoma and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian.

Pretty interesting history book about late Roman empire - early middle age. The author claims the definitive ending of the Roman world came with the Islamic invasions which made the Mediterranean too dangerous for christian trading cutting Bizantium and western Europe communication. According to the author before the coming of the Islam, the barbarian invasions in the Western Roman empire, while changed the ruling class, didn't modified the Romanized civilization that much, there was decadence, but the barbarians were assimilated and didn't aport that much (except the Anglo-Saxons in the British isles). The Islam however changed everything, not only in the invaded countries as Spain, but in France too, where the power changed from the more romanized and Merovingian Neustria (southern France) to the more germanized Austrasia (northern France) where the Pipinians (later known as Carolingians) where from. So from a decadent Roman empire we entered in the middle ages as we know it.

The amount of data and references about such dark period is amazing. Didn't know there was so much material remaining about the 6th-9th centuries, the Merovingians the Visigoths, and all kind of weird ancient people.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Mahoma and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne, a Belgian historian.

Pretty interesting history book about late Roman empire - early middle age. The author claims the definitive ending of the Roman world came with the Islamic invasions which made the Mediterranean too dangerous for christian trading cutting Bizantium and western Europe communication. According to the author before the coming of the Islam, the barbarian invasions in the Western Roman empire, while changed the ruling class, didn't modified the Romanized civilization that much, there was decadence, but the barbarians were assimilated and didn't aport that much (except the Anglo-Saxons in the British isles). The Islam however changed everything, not only in the invaded countries as Spain, but in France too, where the power changed from the more romanized and Merovingian Neustria (southern France) to the more germanized Austrasia (northern France) where the Pipinians (later known as Carolingians) where from. So from a decadent Roman empire we entered in the middle ages as we know it.

The amount of data and references about such dark period is amazing. Didn't know there was so much material remaining about the 6th-9th centuries, the Merovingians the Visigoths, and all kind of weird ancient people.

I've had my eye on that book for a while. Don't know if I'll ever get round to reading it though

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I've had my eye on that book for a while. Don't know if I'll ever get round to reading it though

You should if you are interested in that period. It is very academic though with references for almost every sentence.

 

[Kyriakos]

"After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking".

Ie the ridiculous Candide.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Just Proust waxing lyrical over a bush:

And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion, because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially festal—but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour,' and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray, to the 'plain,' if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the 'stores' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.' High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place in the hedge, but as different from the rest as a young girl in holiday attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are staying at home, equipped and ready for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed already to form a part, it shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether delightful.

 

[Kyriakos]

There is a new translation of Kafka's diaries, but in reality it tries to be sold primarily as containing more negative passages by Kafka about people around him; originally censored. Which clearly would have worked better as a separate volume (assuming it could reach book size on its own, which is questionable).
From the pages uploaded by the publisher, I can't say this adds much. I could live without the (no longer censored, thus "new") note that "Felice looked like a maid" - after all he did get engaged to her two times, likely none after plastic surgery. I recall someone on CFC (not myself) once memorably describing Dora Diamant as "looking like a Russian maid", so it was by no means an exception with Kafka. In the case of Diamant, however, given she is the source of the most probably fake and saccharine "Kafka and the doll" story, I am of mixed emotions.
The non-reader of Kafka is unlikely to even know who those people are, or care if he would know. Apart from Kubin, the rest didn't have any artistic success and have been long forgotten.