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What are you reading now? vers. "So I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress"

Finished reading Save me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald which was a very insightful and entertaining read, if a little anachronistic for today.


Now onto Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell.
 
Is she the one that got strangled by her long scarf when riding in a convertible?

edited to add: apparently not, she died in a fire while locked in a room in a psychiatric hospital awaiting shock therapy. The fire escapes were made out of wood and caught fire too. Fun.
 
I'm reading Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernieres which is everything his writing normally is, beautiful and joy inducing in spots in spots, sad and beautiful in others, occasionally profound, and with the occasional sentence I'll read 4 times because it's so damn well constructed. I always love reading books that still make me hit the dictionary occasionally too! And every time I look up a word it's to find that he not only has he a huge vocabulary but manages to use each word perfectly.

It's a series of vignettes all constructed around the various happenings and people in a small English town (seemingly randomly jumping between times occasionally) and it's kind of nice to read Bernieres talking about his home country - you can really get a sense of the things that have inspired him as both a child and an adult.

It's only a short book and when I'm done tomorrow I will either read Company by Max Barry or Filth by Irvine Welsh, both of which I'm looking forward to.
 
^ <3

I'm doing my best right now with Marry Me by John Updike. Despite the offensive title, I was expecting a lot from my first Updike. I'm half way through, and while it's not quite Marian Keyes, I don't feel as if it's that much more insightful.

Really hoping it gets a lot better soon.
 
Just finished Rosemary's baby by Ira Levin, and commencing This perfect day by the same author.
 
I enjoy this thread some good recommendations.


Also Vanth u answered your own question before I read it :-)

Flatmate got me this book for xmas

UK%20You%20Are%20Not%20a%20Gadget%20cover.jpg


love the cover
 
I'm reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. I watched the movie in Melbourne with Katmeow when I was too hungover too move and very sick and absolutely loved it. She lent me the book and it's taken me nearly a year now to get around to reading it (I was supposed to have read it by now and sent it back to her!) because I forgot I had it.

It's made me fall in love again with the southern setting and the characters. It's a non-fiction crime novel which makes it hard not to draw parallels to Capote's In Cold Blood, but I wouldn't call it derivative because it's well written enough to stand on its own.

I just flew through Company by Max Barry. His writing is quite quirkily similar to Ben Elton and he has the same way of using very stereotyped characters that you grow to love quickly, with the same sarcastic social insights. There's a sort of running gag with a donut involved that actually made me laugh for about a minute straight when the situation was resolved - so shallow and humourous. Office workers who hate their job should love this book!
 
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Impractical Jokes by Charlie Pickering. Got a few chuckles out of me. Funny little true story about two dads and their escalating pranks.
 
Just finished Girl with the dragon tattoo, was a cracker, loved it.

Am now onto High Society by Ben Elton, was a very thoughtful bday gift from a good friend of mine. She claims its better than Stark, I'm finding that hard to believe but we'll see.
 
I'm on to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest... i really enjoyed the first two, this one is turning out to be a cracker as well. I'm almost a little hesitant to finish it, however, since there is no books after it- you never find out what happens to Lisbeth, damn it to hell!
 
I just finished How it Feels by triple threat (actor/writer/director) Brendan Cowell.

It wasn't terrible, but everything just felt so dramatic. Like, the main character's (obviously a fictionalised Brendan) girlfriend couldn't just have a miscarriage, oh no, she had to get SLICED IN THE STOMACH WITH A MACHETE. She had another miscarriage later on, too, but that was much more normal, it was just when they were having a bath together while fucked up on ice. (!!)

There were some nice moments and subtle writing, but at the end of the day it felt like depth of character was substituted with melodrama and I was pretty disappointed.

Maybe it all felt obvious to me because I know Cronulla, and Cronulla's reputation, pretty well, so it didn't feel like there was anything new or interesting in the book. Actually, in a lot of ways I felt like Cowell was kinda cheating. He wasn't really using his upbringing or knowledge of the area to delve into some of the darker issues which I think need to be explored about the Shire, and instead just mentioned in passing how insular the area is and how people from there are so patriotic and arrogant. Perhaps someone who wasn't from Sydney would appreciate it more.

It could've been good, but in the end it was just silly.

Anyway, now I'm reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Well, kinda. I'm reading the play of the book (both by Didion). Should probably read the actual book first, but the play was only $3, and after How it Feels I wanted to read something I knew would be good.
 
^
good book. I thought the reputation was a bit overrated reading it (for no particular reason, just being my usual anti-self), but it rolled along nicely and made a lot of sense. Even though it switches between author, character and reader constantly.

I got given another awesome book for xmas, one which i've promised to myself I wont properly read until I have a garden

orwelldiaries.jpg



i Love how Orwell goes into deep details about how his chickens laying capacity changes depending on environmental conditions
 
^ I thought I had read everything Orwell had to offer but I haven't read that. Will have to check it out. I've read the 50+ of his essays and some of them such as the death of an elephant one, and the one about witnessing a hanging are brilliant, but just for extreme British nerdism I'm in love with the one about how to make a decent cup of tea:

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/nicecupoftea.htm

"Lastly, tea—unless one is drinking it in the Russian style—should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water."
 
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up all night said:
I just finished How it Feels by triple threat (actor/writer/director) Brendan Cowell.

It wasn't terrible, but everything just felt so dramatic. Like, the main character's (obviously a fictionalised Brendan) girlfriend couldn't just have a miscarriage, oh no, she had to get SLICED IN THE STOMACH WITH A MACHETE. She had another miscarriage later on, too, but that was much more normal, it was just when they were having a bath together while fucked up on ice. (!!)

There were some nice moments and subtle writing, but at the end of the day it felt like depth of character was substituted with melodrama and I was pretty disappointed.

Maybe it all felt obvious to me because I know Cronulla, and Cronulla's reputation, pretty well, so it didn't feel like there was anything new or interesting in the book. Actually, in a lot of ways I felt like Cowell was kinda cheating. He wasn't really using his upbringing or knowledge of the area to delve into some of the darker issues which I think need to be explored about the Shire, and instead just mentioned in passing how insular the area is and how people from there are so patriotic and arrogant. Perhaps someone who wasn't from Sydney would appreciate it more.
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Interesting.

I agree some of the moments were fairly melodramatic but the voice was a fairly self-indulgent one, all through the book (deliberately so, I thought) so it didnt bother me too much - teens and early 20's types are generally annoying so I felt it added authenticity.

Though I had an inclination that Cronulla was rascist, I was genuinely surprised at how much so. Going into deeper, darker issues within the community would certainly have been more confronting but as an outsider I did find it interesting.

Some recent treats:

Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Paul Auster - Sunset Park
Exley - Brock Clarke

There's also a new collection of short-stories from Kurt Vonnegut. I haven't read it as yet but it is supposed to be a quality posthumous release, not some money making venture.
 
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I've read 4 or 5 Vonnegut books but the forward for Timequake helped me immensely in a "You are not alone in thinking everything is fucked" kind of way when I was heavily depressed over a year ago. So here is the relevant quote and the preamble (I'm like double preambling here) I wrote when I posted it on FB:

You know, living in a beautiful, Western country, kicking it with a full-time job actually doing something I enjoy, and on a sort of visible path to the future I want (and by sort of there's still track ahead where I can see it fading uncertainly into overgrown undergrowth, but I imagine I can see it meandering along above me, further up the mountain side), it is probably unreasonable for me to be a depressed, borderline-alcoholic loser, who spends way more time systematically dedicating his free time to sustained self destruction than could ever be conceivably called healthy. Fuck it though, as an atheist I deal in facts, and I won't lie to myself.

The reason I listen to music, read books, and occasionally watch movies is that sometimes I stumble upon someone with a similar view, which makes me happier in the fact that I'm not alone, other people think this way, and that assures my continued existence. So anyways, this whole preamble was just to introduce a passage from the Kurt Vonnegut book, Timequake, I'd like to share because it is bullshit awesome:

Vonnegut said:
It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse. Never mind extremes of discomfort, such as idealists' being crucified. Two important women in my life, my mother and sister, Alice, or Allie, in Heaven now, hated life and said so. Allie would cry out, "I give up! I give up!"
The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: "I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood." That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter Jean a few days earlier. Among those he wouldn't have resurrected were Jean, and another daughter Susy, and his beloved wife, and his best friend, Henry Rogers.
Twain didn't live to see World War One, but still he felt that way.

Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are they that mourn," And "Blessed are the meek," and "Blessed are those that do hunger and thirst after righteousness."
Henry David Thoraeu said most famously, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody the end of the world can't come soon enough.
My father, Kurt Senior, an Indiapolis architect who had cancer, and whose wife committed suicide some fifteen years earlier, was arrested for running a red light in his hometown. It turned out that he hadn't had a driver's licence for twenty years!
You know what he told the arresting officer? "So shoot me," he said.

The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."
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After many years of procrastination, I've decided to start reading The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri :)
 
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