What book are you reading right now?
Posted by: Chillkram on 23 May 2010
I am currently reading Suetonius, 'The Twelve Caesars'.
How about you?
I own over 700 volumes of poetry and Imho this is one of the most moving collections of poetry ever written.
I am rereading this superb book for the umpteenth time.
Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year.
'To read [Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic equivalent of the bends'. It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping... - Seamus Heaney, Irish Times.
'The language is like lava, its molten turmoils hardening into jagged shapes, still hot from the earth's core...You must read them - John Carey, Sunday Times.
'The poems come dazzling out of the darkness, and they are not answers to his critics after all, or appeals for understanding, but tender and elegiac acts of rememebrance - Nicci Gerrad, Observer.
'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value...its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future - Andrew Motion, The Times.
I have loved Moortown since we first read it at school, back in 1979. I got a first edition which is falling to bits now, but if you have ever lived or worked on a farm or the land then these poems speak to you
Slowly working my way through the Lee Child - Jack Reacher - novels : easy read escapism - but very enjoyable if you like that sort of thing
I rank Greil Marcus as one of the finest writers of his generation and I am utterly captivated by anything he has to say on any subject.
Slowly working my way through the Lee Child - Jack Reacher - novels : easy read escapism - but very enjoyable if you like that sort of thing
Brilliant books IMHO.
Great book, I also really enjoyed his first novel, "American Rust".
Fascinating book by Michael "Laurel Canyon" Walker which posits the idea that the 1960s didn't actually end until 1973. Instead of using the oft/over-cited Manson murders/Altamont marker, he uses three mega-albums and US tours of 1973 (The Who "Quadrophenia", Alice Cooper "Billion Dollar Babies" and Led Zeppelin "Houses of the Holy") to mark the birth of 1970s, and hence modern rock music.
Interesting that two of these acts (Zeppelin and Cooper) were absolutely loathed by the 1960s rock-crit cognoscenti (Marcus, Christgau, Scoppa, Guralnick, Wenner etc) who were by '73 were the establishment; although Lester Bangs, the most far-sighted of them, developed a big soft spot for Alice.
steve
The autobiography of Britain's greatest-ever film-maker. Picked up a mint copy from the local Oxfam shop for just £3.99. Result.
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Hopkirk's a brilliant writer, Lionel - if you enjoyed that, you should try his other great book:
Brilliant imho.
These Jack Reacher books are never going to win awards but they are cracking good reads. Does what it says on the tin.