What are you reading now - and then

[robertlouis]

I've just finished reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. One of it's main themes is sexual idenity so I'd be interested to hear from other HA members what they thought of the book.

I'm lucky enough to have been drinking with Iain Banks a few times. He really knows his malt scotch! Great guy as well as an intriguing author. "The Crow Road" has the greatest personal resonance for me. Apart from the dark mystery at its heart, it reminds me so much of growing up in Scotland around the same time.

[Stavros]

Is it as good as his earlier book, "The Prize" Stavros?

In a word, no. The Prize was originally published in 1991, so The Quest begins around that time -end of the USSR, Desert Storm, Globalization, and its latest stats on the history of oil prices are from this year, so its bang up to date. At 800 pages it looks daunting but its really a sequence of longish essays on various energy topics, some badly written and over-written prose in Yergin's style (he hasn't improved on this since his first book on the NSA) but always well informed and acutely in tune with the issues, coal, oil and gas, shale, nuclear, renewables, climate change, et al -it can be superficial but that's Yergin.

His argument: The mixed-energy future is already here; conventional fossil fuels are helping the existing rich states maintain their energy security, while bringing in a new cohort of previously underdeveloped states (India and China most obviously) into urban environments at a higher level of consumption, which means he sees global peak oil set around 2030 -but, with more conservation, unconventional fossil fuels (shale), and renewables, demand will be met; the real quest for energy security longer term, is going to be met through knowledge and innovation.

It is a topical rather than an intellctual study, far too long, and like The Prize it covers a lot of politics and science, but Yergin never gets into the business history or the business issues; even in The Prize the seven sisters were not considered in the context of modern capitalism.

Yergin is a clever guy, he published his Cambridge [UK] thesis on the National Security Agency in a crowded field and must have realised if he wanted a career it lay somewhere else, and The Prize is a major improvement on Sampson, in what was at that time a neglected subject. He has cornered the market and added the think-tank element through Cambridge Energy Research Associates (now IHS) so his industry covers the history and politics as well as detailed policy. Another American, Joe Pratt writes interesting books on the petroleum industry but doesn't have the Grade A status of Yergin, who charges the earth for public appearances.

[Prospero]

I'm reading the latest three part novel by Haruki Murakami "IQ84" - a wonderfully strange and haunting novel set in two different (it seems) worlds in Japan in the 1980s. A really great and original writer.

[iago_delgado]

I'm reading tons of books at the minute. Just finished Winter In Madrid by C J Sansom. An odd book around the Spanish Civil War. But very readable.

[runningdownthatdream]

I'm reading the latest three part novel by Haruki Murakami "IQ84" - a wonderfully strange and haunting novel set in two different (it seems) worlds in Japan in the 1980s. A really great and original writer.

I read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle......................i found it similar to looking at a Dali painting: not quite sure what to make of it!

I just finished Ian McCalman's The Last Alchemist (a somewhat irreverent and highly enjoyable biography of Giuseppe Balsamo AKA Count Cagliostro). Right now I'm reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (which is far more philosophical and engaging than I thought it would be) as well as Orhan Pamuk's The New Life (which i find dense yet whimsical, contrived and mysterious all at the same time)

[Prospero]

Yes - there is a very surreal quality to Murakami. Experimental writing in some ways and yet woven into an exceedingly compelling narrative. I have the Wind-Up Bird as my next notional read- though Umberto Eco's new book "The Prague Cemetary" is also on my Kindle.

Pamuk is a great writer. If you've not read them I can recommend "Snow" and "My Name is Red."

So many books, so many girls, so many films, so much... and so little time.

[MatiasTz]

Well, I recently finished the entire d'Artagnan cycle (which comes to either 6 or 7 novels depending on the publisher and translation) by Dumas pere and now I'm bouncing between Thoughts on Life and Art by Da Vinci and Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary Wolf (which is darker and funnier than the movie loosely adapted from it).

Though the thought occurs that I probably should have balanced Da Vinci with George Carlin.

Maybe I'll do Plato-Carlin alternate read next, that should make my head explode.

[Prospero]

Plato and Carlin - lol

How about Da Vinci and the Da Vinci Code.....

or Aristotle and stephen King etc

[Stavros]

Although it was published in 1998, the best book that I read this year was Tony Judt's The Burden of Responsiblity, in which he examines the lives of three Frenchmen: Leon Blum, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron. The book is short by today's standards, and offers an incisive analysis of anti-semitism in France, and the bitter conflict between and within the left-wing and right-wing intelligentsia -in which Sartre comes off very badly indeed, as is inevitable when the facts about this pseudo-political acrobat are set in their proper context.

I also recommend Archie Brown's The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009), focused for the most part on the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Paul Donnelley's Fade to Black, A Book of Movie Obituaries has been a favourite for years; I also read Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution before seeng the film for a second time -it is a powerful and explicit film and adds a lot more than is in the story, which is a minor classic.

[Prospero]

I like Tony Judt a lot (or should that be in the past tense) but haven't read that one Stavros. Gonna order it today.