Who's reading what,when & the experience

Aishah

A fantastic steal and i bet they aren't those awful photocopies I seem to be buying lately?? Are they original remainders? Ed McBain - very popular author amongst the ahem older generation borrowers in the library where I once worked in Blue Mountains!
My Franny and Zooey - I paid top money for, then discovered it was another one of those damn pirated editions. i should have inspected inside before I bought it - printed pages lined up skew-whiff, chopped at the Title on the top of the page and not straight, and occasionally the photocopier must have run out of ink.. very annoying for 219rupees!

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capt_mahajan

Nope, not photocopies. Second hand.

Nobody writes those kinds of books better than McBain.

Aishah

Lucky you!!

capt_mahajan

I just looked up my copy, bought from a regular shop 2 years ago, when the USD was higher... 239 rupees.

I never buy new books from anywhere except regular bookshops.

Btw, that Nine Stories? 9 short stories, and the best one is about Seymour Glass, mentioned often in Franny and Z.

Casey

I am on a Haruki Murakami kick. I just finished A Wild Sheep Chase and am in the middle of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I know he is not eveyones cup of tea; you have to enjoy a certain amount of surrealism (which I only like when it is done well).

iwantogoback: I was going back over this thread to see what you've been reading and I came across one of your old posts mentioning Proust. Are you still on it? I always take one of those books or authors that I feel I should read (Atlas Shrugged was one). Perhaps Proust will accompany me on my next trip.

Leith

Not a bad online read.

http://www.tomthumb.org/travelbooks.shtml

Leith

Aishah

Another traveller with no money? All been done before by the looks of it...wonder if our Closed Thread fellow got his idea from here?
Captain - yes, would be most interested to read the Seymour story and discover the reasons for his suicide.I'm assuming that will come into it...

capt_mahajan

Yes, they do, kind of.

Leith's link is interesting, though have to complete the story.

machadinha

Nice reminder, thanks. The guy says he's an editor of and has written a lot for http://www.roadjunky.com/, an interesting and funny travel site in itself.

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iwanttogoback

casey, proust is coming along slowly, it's the kind of book that you need to have peace and quiet for, and we've just had six weeks of school holidays.

school is back today so i'll pick it up again. he does write wonderfully well, can you imagine spending several pages just on waking in the middle of the night?

Casey

I finished The Painted Veil by Maugham. I enjoyed it and found it to be different than others I have read by him. I also just read The Killer Inside Me by an American author Jim Thompson and am going to start another by him. Very well written dark crime novels that really capture the essence of the late 40s early 50s. I think I will then read A Bend in The River. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while and I think it's about time I read it.

Nick-H

She by H. Rider Haggard.

Fed up with 'Literature' (as noted somewhere above) I needed a light adventure story.

Curious how the reaction of of the British adventurers to the wildlife of Africa is Kill! Kill! Kill!

Also curious how it was written at a point in history when quinine was recognized as preventative and treatment for malaria, but they did not know about the mosquitoes, thinking that the disease was carried in the bad swamp air.

I'll probably be ready for another Nobel Prize winner after this.

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Aishah

Interesting about malaria in the old days - I find reading novels from an older period fascinating from an historical point of view. Even those early Agatha Christie's can be quite entertaining from this persepective.
I've nearly finished Monica Ali's Brick Road - mentioned before on this thread I think. I thought a marvellous read - a terrific writer - very entertainiing with thought provoking issues. Unlike The Inheritance of Loss which I found boring and tedious in the end. This book is slightly faster moving, and her writing style is never boring.

machadinha

From the bit-of-pedantry department, that's what it means: mal'aria = mala aria = bad air ([archaic] Italian, from the Latin). The explanation for it is correct.

Finally picked up Lahiri's The Namesake. Too early to judge, let's see if I finish it first. So far so good though. Took me a bit to get into it, which may have been a translation issue, a certain technical detailedness that may be natural in Americanese but is less so in some other languages. Starting to grip me now though.

Some interesting cultural sidenotes strewn about its pages; one on that "good name" issue again, having me convinced now that, as often explained on this forum too, it's more than just a funny case of Hinglishm, it is indeed asking you for your formal name, rather than the informal one.

Another how the main character at the start of the book feels utterly lonely and lost as an immigrant Bengali housewife in the USA in the later 1960s, and observes how despite their miniskirts and ostensible displays of sociability and their otherwise "open" ways, Americans are in fact very fond of their privacy and are difficult to get into closer touch with. Had me thinking of all those threads on women's dress etc. here; and how indeed there may be this dichotomy of a greater traditionalism in India yet in many ways less social inhibition and greater social closeness at the same time on the one hand (or at least among one's peers, and always generalizing of course), and a certain modern Western emphasis on the right to individualism and its expressions, coupled with a strong sense of the right to privacy at the same time on the other hand. Interesting.

Well, more later.

Shiver me Timbers

I'm currently reading 'Grains of Sand' by Martin Buckley.

I love travel books, and I've now gone through all the Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron and Dalrymple stuff, so now I've found this.

Buckley spends two years travelling across the world's deserts, starting off in Chad, working his way across the Sahara, then down to the Namib desert, then across to Chile, up to Arizona/New Mexico. Finally, he travels across the great Asian deserts (the Gobi, Xinjiang, Thar) before ending up in the Middle East.

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