FURY's not Rushdie's finest, sadly, but it is unique in his oeuvre in that it's short. Heh. A worthwhile read, though. Can't speak for anything else on your list.
The weekend's post about reading - or the lack of it - lingered at the back of my mind for a couple of days. I had a vague, melodramatic sense of millions of unread books lying around the house, so this evening I did what I always do when I need to get a grip on something: I made a list.
The problem is much as I suspected (allowing for the fact that millions was always something of an exaggeration), though thankfully not entirely out of control. I have become a bookflirt, enchanted by pretty faces but never actually getting between the covers. I buy, but I never read. My eyes are bigger than my belly, I'm putting my money where my mouth is but I've got no trousers on. Or something.
In approximate order of purchase, this is what awaits me:
- Mark Mazower - Dark Continent
- Michael Cunningham - A Home At The End Of The World
- Jenny Diski - Don't and Only Human
- John Lanchester - The Debt To Pleasure
- Peter Ackroyd - London: The Biography
- Various - Yeats Is Dead!
- Henry Rollins - Solipsist
- Hannah Weitemeier - Yves Klein
- Jack Kerouac - On The Road
- Friedrich Nietzsche - The Portable Nietzsche (Collection)
- China Miéville - Perdido Street Station
- Salman Rushdie - Fury
- Alan Warner - Morvern Callar
So there we have it, I really have my work cut out for me. In addition, I have untouched catalogues from some of the exhibitions that I saw this year (Van Gogh & Gauguin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Lucien Freud) and also the enormous catalogue from the Royal Academy's apparently fabulous Paris: Capital of The Arts show at the start of the year.
Then there are the books that I read during 2001 about which I can barely recall any details. Last year was a complete workaholic blur for me; I had no life at all, which is partly what prompted me to focus more on my own interests this year. At some point I should re-read Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, Naomi Klein's No Logo, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius and Roy Porter's London: A Social History.
As if all of the above wasn't enough, on Saturday the Guardian included an article on Alasdair Gray's fabulous Lanark, which makes me want to read it again. Also, via Pete Hall's site, I've discovered that the incomparable Michael Marshall Smith has his own website so now I want to re-read all of his stuff too.
It's 10pm and I'm going to do something I haven't done in a long time - I'm off to bed with a book. G'night.
Posted by Hg on Monday 14 October 2002 at 22:02.
Received 7 comments so far.
Comments
Thanks Chris. I went for Morvern Callar first because it's even shorter and I wanted a "quick win". Was thinking about reading Fury next, so I could be setting some kind of reverse-chronological-order pattern here...
I'm not sure why I'm irritated by this post. It could be because I'm defensive about having a similar problem of wanting to read a much more urbane list of books, the hautiest of which is probably Umberto Eco's Kant and the Platypus. The rest are popular science books, science fiction, and some texts.
It could be that I'm unsure as to whether you're simply dropping names, or that your tastes are so much more refined than mine that I can't tell the difference between sincerity and sophistry. Even if you're dropping names, I can't keep up, so that could be a source as well.
Odd, but no offense intended. I just got lost in the list and this is my honest reaction. Of course I feel stupid for posting it, but nothing bad ever came of honesty, eh?
I can be a shameless namedropper on occasions, but nothing was further from my mind in this case. I had stacked all the books up and thought "why not post a list and see if anyone has any comments" (about the books, not the list!).
Is the list that highbrow and impressive? God, maybe I'm cooler than I realised ;-)
Bear in mind that the reason I'm not reading these books is that I'm mostly reading newspaper colour supplements instead!
Well, I'm impressed, whatever that embodies. I get precious little time to read at all, which is at the heart of the thing most likely. The reading I've been doing of late is mandatory, for an English literature class. That, and blogs, but I can't exactly crack open a Greg Bear novel at work. Lately, of course, I'm questioning the wisdom of cracking them open at all (Greg Bear novels, that is).
Fantastic. You might well be the first person I've impressed this week/month/year (delete as appropriate) :-)
Haven't heard of Greg Bear - just checked him out briefly on Amazon and he's sci-fi. I'm not really in touch with contemporary sci-fi lit and I'd like to know more.
Last-but-one book that I read was Arthur C Clarke's fantastic The City And The Stars, don't know whether you were a Hydragenic reader when I mentioned that a couple of months ago.
Also at the bottom of this post if you don't know him already check out the link for Michael Marshall Smith - sort of a cross between William Gibson and Douglas Adams.
I tend to watch sci-fi more than read it. I know there's that cliché about the pictures being better in the books than on TV, but in my case the pictures are annoyingly blurred. Anyway, I don't want to 'see' my own vision of the future, someone else's is much more interesting.
Eerily, in between you writing that and me reading it I had thoughts about making a similar list. In fact I might, now!
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