What good books have you read recently?
I thought for those of us in need of some inspiration a blog post may be in order so here we are. Please comment below with your recommendations.
Great books you have read recently……
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Recently I read The Bees by Laline Paul & absolutely loved it. It is set in a beehive & all of the characters in it or Bees! It sounds pretty poor I grant you but it is mesmerising! I was hooked & sorrty to finish it. This is also £1.99 on the kindle store at the moment so well worth a gamble if you are looking for a book to read.
So it’s basically Watership Down that’s heavy on honey and light on bunny?
Great buzz about it though
Well played sirs! 🙂
p.s. apologies for the huge amount of typos in that post!!!
Is there a sting in the tail?
Gives me hives. They’re making a B-movie.
That’s enough drone-ing on, I think.
Don’t be so queeny. Buzz off.
Chiming in far too late, to agree with @seanioio– ‘The Bees’ is excellent. Very unusual and imaginative.
The Peripheral by William Gibson. Takes about 60 pages before you have any idea what is going on, but one of his best two or three.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
Dear god, what a book. I have no idea how you’d even start to go about writing such a thing; it’s relatively short, but incredibly dense, full of the most horrendous violence sandwiched in between some of the most beautiful use of language I’ve ever read.
I’m reading this at the moment! I had to give up on the relentless bleaky grimness of The Road, but this – despite not exactly being a barrel of laughs either – is something else. It’s pretty much plotless yet it’s gripping, and the writing is, as you say, unique.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
An absolutely devastating piece of writing. I regard it as the finest American novel of the past 40 years.
Just a thought about Bingo’s “relatively short” comment about Blood Meridian. At 350 pages, it is indeed short by today’s litfic standards (hi, Donna!). But there was a time when novels could be weighty and considered to be important without coming in at 700 pages plus. Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold … all managed to get their respective jobs done in under 350 pages.
I blame that Norman Mailer. An able writer but, Christ, could he go on.
Good point. Heart of Darkness, the novel Blood Meridian most called to mind for me, is less than 200 pages long. That’s a short novel.
Can’t really disagree with duco01’s assessment.
My memories of Blood Meridian are liking it but feeling that it never again rose to the excellence of the first indian attack scene fairly early on. In a sense the book came a bit too early.
The Indian attack near the start is the most visceral bit. But it’s actually the very final chapter that I found the most arresting and haunting,
You know, I think I should re-read it.
I have just got this on my kindle so will report back. It sounds right up my street & I really enjoyed The Road so all signs are good. Cheers
I’m interested in Cormac McCarty’s “Suttree”. Some people clearly consider it a masterpiece of poetic prose, while others find it really hard going.
Have any Afterworders read “Suttree”? Did you like it?
Oh, that Indian attack! Maginificent, chilling imagery…
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
White stockings and a bloodstained wedding dress! It don’t get much scarier.
It actually does, when they start sodomising the dead and dying!
The writing above is preposterously good.
And The Outsider by Camus, one of the greatest novels of the C20, comes in at a mere 128pp.
Surely it’s all that 19th century lot to blame – Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Balzac et al – never happy unless weighing in at around 800 pages….
Although a lot of them were published as monthly serials.
I love a bit of Cormac – try ‘All the Pretty Horses’ next if you fancy some more of his beautiful language (significantly lighter on the violence though).
Blood Meridian is a serious candidate for “greatest novel by an American in the twentieth century” IMHO
Yes, I think it’s better than Gatsby.
I am currently ploughing through the original Ian Fleming Bond series, cant believe how good they are. Written in the mid to late 50s so obv none of your Bond film high tech stuff but really good rollicking spy stories, grittier than I thought….so far read Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever From Russia With Love and Doctor No….and just started Goldfinger…
Read them endlessly as a nip and reread Goldfinger recently to see if they still hold up…they do!
Two crackers from me which have restored my faith in modern fiction, both mercifully short and without 300 pages of extra padding which novelists feel are so necessary to show off.
– A whole life by Robert Seethaler. It’s just wonderful, take my word for it. The life of a ‘simple man’, and the changes in a mountainside community in Germany (or maybe Austria – he’s an Austrian writer) IN the 20th century. There isn’t a word out of place and both witty and moving. Perfect.
– The house at the edge of the world by Julia Rochester. A short family saga (does that make sense ?) set in Cornwall and London. A satisfying plot, believable characters and an appropriate ending.
I re-read The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. Every time I read it I think it’ll have lost its magic but it still blows me away. Weirdest and funniest book I’ve ever read.
Kids by Patti Smith. Heartfelt, informative and engaging. A really excellent and moving book.
Clothes, Music, Boys by Viv Albertine is a good read too.
http://www.clivetemple.com/clive-temple-photography?tag=BOOKS
The last one I read was RC Sherriff’s The Fortnight In September which my wife thrust into my hand guess when?
Nothing happens but it does so with wonderful observations on England, modern manners, passage of time etc. Thoroughly recommended
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/the-fortnight-in-september.html
Interesting, big fan of their books. Must check this one out.
Two good history books, Anne Applebaum´s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, concentrating on the DDR,Poland and Hungary between 1945 and 1956 and showing the methods and results of the Stalinist takeover of almost every aspect of daily life. Well structured and layered and would appeal to anyone who likes modern European history.
Geert Mak´s In Europe – part travelogue, part social history as a Dutch journalist sets off around Europe in 1999 to find what unites us and makes us different.From Sarajevo to Rome,Moscow, Berlin, London and Srebrenica and points in between. It´s humane, revealing and spot on. The few pages on Northern Ireland are particularly well done.
I recently read The Beacon by Susan Hill. Chiefly known for The Woman In Black (now there’s a pension), she’s an under-the-radar writer who has got a very simple and understated style. In 150 odd pages set in somewhere high and rural like Cumbria she explores the lives of 4 children of an oppressive mother. She covers the bonds that can crush lives between parents and children, and between tight-knit families and the wider world – but most of all she deals in memory, real and imagined, and how it is used and abused by family members as a shared resource to be nourished, exploited or destroyed. At the heart of it is the publication of a misery memoir along the lines Angela’s Ashes – but to give away to much more would risk spoiling it. It has a claustrophobic atmosphere from the start, and hands out its plot points like grenades. Not for everyone, but I think it’s brilliant.
Susan Hill writes mainly detective stories these days, but she wrote some excellent novels in her early career, and I’d recommend Strange Meeting as a pretty good place to start if you are unfamiliar with her other work.
From the Kindle of Mr Theref:
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (Dee Brown) – eye opening. Well, not eye opening as the issues outlined in the book are, I think, well known. But to have them laid out in quite that stark a detail…
Max Arthur’s oral history The Dambusters is a great piece of work. Minimal evidence of editing, it reads just like listening to it being recounted. Really enjoyed it.
I’ve also gone back to the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. They can fluctuate a bit in quality, but when she’s on, Sayers is really on.
I got for my birthday 1-2-3-4 by Anton Corbijn. No words but lots and lots of lovely pictures, even if one too many are of U2. ‘Oh that was an NME cover’ ‘oh that one of Tom Waits/Depeche Mode’ The most affecting are at the end, a quite stunning collection from a tour of the states by the Slits. Not cheap but I can tell you now that several people here @black-celebration for example would love it for Xmas.
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman. Everything of his is really good anyway, but this is one of the better ones. Not quite up there with American Gods or Neverwhere, but pretty close.
Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Just perfectly composed, laugh-out-loud and, for an eighty year-old novel, surprisingly relevant anti-verbiage. There are more brilliant throwaway bon mots within than can be considered reasonable or fair.
Part way through Danny Baker’s Going Off Alarming and although find him a bit chippy on the page, at £1.99 for a Kindle’s worth it’s hard not to see it as a bargain to help with the occasional train-bound commute. His description of sussing whether a new pub would be one which would entertain a lock-in is a thing of joy and wonder for gentlemen of a certain age. I’m warming to him, and to his long-suffering bank manager who is described in glowingly affectionate terms.
Just finished Robert Lurie’s 2009 biography of Steve Kilbey and The Church – No Certainty Attached which is a warts-and-warts depiction of the band’s rise, fall, fall, rise, fall and fall. And slight rise at the end. It’s quite the read in that virtually nobody comes out of it looking good or smelling of roses. The account of Kilbey’s car accident in Stockholm is sobering reading indeed. Might be fun to compare notes with the bass player’s own book, out earlier this year. I’ve read complaints that it doesn’t cover the later part of the band’s career in quite the detail that Lurie does, but after reading the latter’s book, that might just be because Kilbey can’t remember any of it…
Still deeply into ‘The Balkan Trilogy’ by Olivia Manning. Engrossing to say this very least. Goes well along side any of Patrick Leigh Fermors accounts of walking across the same region prior to it all kicking off.
Much is observed at second hand as Rumania worried, vacillated and capitulated to the Nazis. No one had a any real clue what was afoot.
A John Cheever collection. None of us are simple souls. We’re all difficult pain in the arses.
Beezer!
*swishes opera cape*
*twirls moustache*
The very same.
Just finished H Is For Hawk by Helen McDonald. Very moving and beautifully written debut about the relationship between recovering from the loss of her father and training a hawk – may sound a bit odd but very compelling.
re earlier references to Cormac McCarthy – I loved the Border trilogy : All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain – some of the best writing and storytelling Ive ever come across.
H is for Hawk is an absolute belter.
Ive just finished Moneyball, which is an absolutely fascinating read.
I’ve no real interest in baseball, but my first ever visit to a game in Boston recently reminded me that I bet the book was better than the film. And it is.
Just started The Sea Inside by Phillip Hoare, and it’s fab. The bit about beaked whales is ace. I love beaked whales and I’ve even seen one (two actually)…
I’ve just read Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin which was way less dated than I thought it was going to be. Never read a thing by him before which I should rectify. It’s really good.
I read it because I also recently read “Between The World And Me” by Ta Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison said he was the new Baldwin. Having only read one Baldwin I have no idea how true that is, but I can say that it’s a brilliant piece of cold anger which everyone should read.
After around 10 weeks I’ve just finished Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Written in 1960 but not published until the 80s it is a massive novel covering the battle of Stalingrad, and the oppression of Stalinist Russia. If that makes it sound like it isn’t a barrel of laughs, well, it isn’t. But it is as powerful a novel on war, and on what it must be like to live in a country where you don’t know from one day to the next if you are in or out of favour, and who may be informing on you. A magnificent read
Just finished Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Bought as a Kindle cheapie months ago and only just got around to reading it. Engrossing. There’s an interesting mismatch between the jaunty tone and dark, complicated themes. There’s a ‘twist’ early on and it’s difficult to say too much about the book without chucking in a massive spoiler… Suffice to say, it’s a lot more interesting than the family narrative it seems to be at first.
Yes, I too enjoyed We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
And that ‘twist’ … is quite a twist.
A few corkers over recent months…
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf, a joyful and life-affirming novel about a growing friendship between a widow and a widower. Definitely not just a book for oldsters.
Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson, as recommended by Sir David of Hepworth, inventive and page-turning thriller with a most unusual cast of characters.
Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley, a delightful Gutenberg freebie about a puckish old gent who drives around New England in a mobile horse-drawn bookshop.
The World at Night by Alan Furst, always thought that if I became a novelist I’d like to be Alan Furst, writing brilliantly written and researched historical thrillers with a kick. Just doing the research must be a lot of fun. This one’s about a film producer in Paris who’s forced to make some hard choices when the Germans arrive in 1940.
The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Europe of Celtic Europe by Graham Robb. All those dead straight Roman roads? The Romans just built them over Celtic roads. Why wouldn’t they? Absolutely fascinating book about the Celts and their sophisticated civilisation, all but forgotten by the time the Romans ruled the world.
John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport series (all with a “prey” in the title). I’m just finishing off the last (number 23 or whatever it is). Start at the beginning, because the protagonist (and everybody else) ages and develops, convincingly and involvingly, throughout the series. Yes, they are “standalone” stories – but there’s no point in breaking the chronology. If you like the first you’ll enjoy the rest. There’s a couple of books mid-series where the quality dips, but you can drop those or speed-read.
Points against: difficult to remember either the author’s name or the name of the book you’re reading.
Plus points: dense plotting, thrilling action, great dialogue, funny. I’d much rather have a drink with Davenport than the relentlessly downbeat Harry Bosch. And great women. Unlike Connolly, Sandford’s women are believable and unstereotyped.
Plus/minus points: the viloence is detailed, and very nasty. These aren’t cosy murder mysteries.
http://www.johnsandford.org/books.html
In a private email, HPS tipped me off to the pleasures of John Sandford, and I can heartily endorse his up.
Arcie Valparaiso wilfully chose at random, picking one of the duffer ones, and hurled it into the hedgerow after being driven to a fury by a dangling modifier in the early pages. Hard man to please, Archie. (Jehovah’s Witness, you know).
This farrago of innuendo and baseless allegations cannot be left uncorrected. I read two. They were fine – not quite Westlake-as-Stark fine, but still fine. Two of any series is usually enough for me. So much to read out there and so little time.
So … the Jehova’s Witness thing …
A tissue of fabrication and groundless rumour.
Was the modifier dangling from a curtain rail?
DuCool and I ( and the other three members of our book circle) have all just read Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wouldn’t try to over-hype it as novel of the decade or anything. But if you want a highly readable page-turner set in 60s London, Nick’s your man.
He’s very good at creating believable, likeable characters and writing excellent, rather amusing dialogue. Not a flashy writer who is constantly trying to impress with how clever he is, he doesn’t bowl the reader over with verbal pyrotechnics, I think we all developed a bit of a crush on Sophie, the central characte. The fact that she bore a stunning resemblance to 60s sexpot Sabrina is completely and absolutely irrelevant.
Fair dinkum!
That. is. extraordinary. And all done without the aid of hooter jokes.
“It really is hot!”
This is my favourite film of all time.
I shall never watch anything else.
Great holy cripes.
Read The Narrow Road to the Deep North on my hols. One of the best Booker winners for years. What’s it about? I reviewed it here:
I would also mention Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A beautifully written book that follows a handful of Nigerian students as they try to make their way in Nigeria, the UK, and – as the title implies – America.
She has some really sharp observations expoloring this issue:
”
“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.”
For those in need of a “lighter” read can I suggest “The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simsion. Its the story of a Professor who is Autistic and decides at the age of 40 that he would like to get married. So he of course creates a questionnaire to decide upon the best candidate for marriage……Ok Im not really selling this but honest it is a lovely read with some real laugh out loud moments…
I agree. Very funny, with hugely likeable characters and some hilarious set pieces. I’m just about to start the sequel.
Point taken – I’ve taken both books out at the library today. Read the first twenty or so pages and already laughed out loud which has to be a good sign.
Another shout for Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”, which is wonderful.
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi was one of my favourite reads of this year. A near- future shock noir-esque thriller set in the south western USA when water shortages are so acute that states are engaged in proxy wars over rights to water – & cities that fail to secure rights literally die.
A terrific fast paced blend of savvy politics & genre pulp, it deservedly gained real traction in the US where the protracted California drought is making many real consider for the first time what a future of scarcity might look like.
Also really dug The Son by Phillip Meyer, a dynastic saga of land grabs, native American race politics & oil power in Texas, from the mid 19th C to the 1970s.
Knüt Håmsün’s “O Woe! The Bleakness Of The Pines” is a 900pp meditation on loss set in Bümføndelstådt, a tiny dwindling hamlet at the bottom of a fjord in Sweden. The local paper mill is failing, clogged by its own pollution, and the remaining inhabitants are plagued by goitres. When the smørgåsbørd harvest fails, the locals resort to cannibalism. In an unforgettable climax, alcoholic pastor Øyvind Påntselåstik eats his sister’s goitre before torching the rotting houses that remain in the polluted fjord.
I found it by turns an elegy for lost innocence and a scathing indictment of contemporary Scandinavian mores.
Brannagh to the play the lead in the BBC4 TV version perhaps?
He’s reading it in the original Finnish as we speak, immersed in a sensory deprivation tank for ambience.
I can recomment The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall. Great would be a stretch, but it is a very good read.
A scientist is tempted back from the United States to lead a project to reintroduce wild wolves into the part of Cumbria where she grew up. Science, contemporary politics, the personal story of an interesting woman and a bit of a twist in the ending.
I’ll recommend a book of poetry if I may. The Wrecking Light from Robin Robertson.
Devastating, haunted writing.
Simply wonderful.
Robin Robertson? Oh yes, I’ve got one of his earlier collections, “A Painted Field”. Good stuff. And he did that St. Kilda project with Alasdair Roberts, didn’t he?
Cheers for the tip, Pencil. I’m certainly inclined to check out “The Wrecking Light” now, too.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy it @duco01 especially as you are already acquainted with his writing. I think on balance The Wrecking Light may well be his best writing to date.
I’ve yet to check out his collaboration with Alisdair Roberts. I must rectify that. Thank you for the reminder.
“Travels with a Tangerine” – Tim Mackintosh Smith
An award winning travel account from a few years ago. The writer, an Oxford drop-out and resident of Yemen for the past 20 years, follows in the footsteps of a legendary medieval Moroccan traveller, Ibn Battutah. The journey takes him from Tangiers to Oman by way of Egypt, then onto Syria, Anatolia, Istanbul and the Crimea. Packed full of dry wit, medieval folklore and architectural history. He really gets under the skin of the Middle East with a cast of amazing characters you’d never see or hear about in the mainstream media. His gift for colourful prose is a delight.
Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan books. The first starts quite slowly but you will be hooked by the middle and then have to speed-read the following three.
From Deborah Orr: ‘Ferrante’s books are a success because they feed a hunger for something simple yet rare – literary masterworks without pretension, mannerism or sentiment, epic yet domestic, as compulsive as a good thriller and as thought-provoking as a self-conscious “novel of ideas”. ‘
I’ve just finished the five semi-autobiograpchical ‘Patrick Melrose novels’ by Edward St. Aubyn, i.e.
Never Mind
Bad News
Some Hope
Mother’s Milk
At Last
Superb writing and disturbing content. A colossal achievement.
Has any other Afterworder read the set?