Finished David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It took me a month to get through it. I've read it three times now. It's completely the opposite of most literary fiction that I like, but it is one of the best novels I've ever read.

Started Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. The writing style is very different from Dickens, but the plot is one he could have used.

Love DC. One of my favorites.

Disgrace is great. David Lurie is a compelling anti-hero. Really quick read.

Funnily enough, I ordered Disgrace a couple of weeks ago having just studied Summertime (Coetzee's third instalment from his trilogy Scenes from a Provincial life). I ordered it because I am considering writing my Masters on something about Coetzee and randomly chose Disgrace from his corpus. Not sure when I will get the chance to read it which is problematic given the aforementioned goal and the fact I have a wheelbarrow of readings required for this upcoming semester.
In any case, I will be interested to hear what you think of it.


Currently I am reading Ellison's Invisible Man. I am almost finished reading it. And I am regretting the fact I am near the end. A feeling which is usually a good barometer of how I feel about a book.

Finished Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. I expected a lot from this book and got little.

The dialogue is very poor, just horrific.

It fails my "Proust" test of having me want to exclaim "Yes, that's the way it really is." Coetzee appears to have read something about character change and decided to force it to happen to make an intellectual point. There may be nothing worse a writer can do. I kept thinking (in a variety of different situations), "No, no one would handle it like that."

The premise of the protagonist finding a secular salvation and/or absolution for his sin by forsaking his values and adopting those of new prevailing ruling class just doesn't work for me (it could argue against what I've said about character change and suggest that he began as a coward (or a man without self-discipline) and ended the same, but I don't think so).

Also the whole binary analogous thing (old, white, male, heterosexual, conservative, white oppressor guilt, etc. vs. young, female, lesbian, liberal, willfully accepting and justifying her own degradation and repression etc.) was too heavy handed.

After I finished, I looked up James Woods review (I had not read it previously) and he says something like: It reads like a book written for an awards committee. I agree. The real disgrace is that it won an award for anything. Poor writing, bad character change and poor plotting do not make great literature. It delivered the message the sort of people who populate awards committees were looking for at the time.

It is literature with the author's idea showing. It doesn't get much worse than that, but Coetzee adds bungled dialogue and heavy handed character change. Did I say I was disappointed?

Started Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo.

Finished Childhood's End. It was quite good, but I liked Rendezvous with Rama more.

Now I started The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Ensayo sobre la lucidez by José Saramago. I am not sure which of those I'll read. Probably the Saramago book as I only have a week visiting my family to read it.

I moved on to The City and the Stars by A.C.C. after Childhood's End and it's also really good. Will do Rama next.

Also have The Rook by Daniel O'Malley on queue. Anyone read it?

Just finished Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago, the first of his I've read. What a beautiful book.

Finished Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo. I liked it, it is funny and entertaining. I lived in Italy in the late 1960's and early 1970's so I can relate to why it was written.

Started Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano.

The Gillian Flynn novel I just read, Dark Places, wasn't very good, even by bestseller standards. It was no Gone Girl. The Dark Places movie is coming out in early August, Charlize Theron etc. She seems a little old for this role!

I've been reading a bunch of thrillers with no literary merit whatsoever.

I listened to a few of Gillian Flynn's other novels and had the same thought that they were not as good as Gone Girl. The other one was Sharp Objects I think.

Which ones?

I've read Red Sparrow and it's sequel Palace Of Treason. Both very reviewed thrillers set in the "new cold war" (Putin has a cameo in RS, and a bigger role in POT).

- The writing is very good and plenty of people have assigned Matthews the sobriquet "New Le Carre".

- Matthews is former CIA and this is quite obvious, the spycraft is very detailed and "authentic".

- The books are both too long. I would excise ~50 pages for each of them.

- The books are excessively Manichean. All CIA are good guys (except for the traitors), all FSB are evil (except those that spy for U.S.A). This gets pretty weary, especially in the second book.

- The plotting is exceptionally good. Unputdownable, pageturner etc. all apply. The individual scenes (U.S spy is spotted by FSB talking to a Russian agent, both try to escape) are enthralling, the story is coherent, the twists are excellent and believable.

When I read Red Sparrow 18 months ago, one thought stood out 'This would make an amazing movie'. Lo and behold, Fox purchased the screenrights for 7 figures and tapped Darren Aronofsky to direct. Aronofsky dropped out, and David Fincher came in. Allegedly. I can't find anything written in the past year about the film. But I do think it will get made, and be a big hit, if it has a good director. Needless to say the American heroism and Russian villainy won't harm it's box office chances.

Dark Places is the first novel of hers I read and it was so bad, it will probably be the last.

I finished one from the James Patterson book mill this weekend and have started another. I have a feeling his cowriters do the lion's share of the writing, but he gets the lion's share of the credit.

If I was a writer and asked to cowrite a book by Patterson, my reaction would be an unChristian one.

Some by Gerald Seymour which are OK, but a bit samey, one compared to Le Carre that was so bad I abandoned it, some Irish noir that's OK but not great, particularly Adrian McGinty's books.

I read it and found it fairly entertaining. Def a quick read with good pace

Data and Goliath is a near must-read if you're into the whole privacy/data/surveillance/snowden/etc. Very comprehensive and well-reasoned from the guy who wrote the original book on cryptography when it was still classified as a munition and illegal to sell overseas.

Need metafiction autobiography recs like lunar park and 10:04

Finished two books:

The Arizona Rough Riders, by Charles Herner and Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria, by Nicholas Halasz.

First book was a fun even if at times a dry read. But well researched and accurate in detail. Oh, those crazy Americans.

The book on the Captain Dreyfus Affair (Pup. in 1955) was excellent. Just more massive evidence that people are stupid, ignorant, self-serving and herd animals that can't see past the end of their nose most of the time. Also shows that a few dedicated individuals, if they have influence enough, can buck the tide. Most pungent part from the Dreyfus Affair book: June 18, 1906: High Court of Appeal, brought final victory (no crime had been committed and in fact could not even have been committed) and closure to the case. When this was announced----

"The audience stared. Was everything about this drama unreal? Had it all been a crazy structure of forgeries and lies built on nothing for no reason, a nightmare dreamed during a nightmare?"

The answer of course is: Yes. Oh, those crazy French. I highly recommend this book to all.

Just started; The First Salute: A view of the American Revolution, by Barbara Tuchman. I've read two of her other history books, both first rate. This is shaping up to be in the same category. Emphasis on the American Navy during the Revolution and the historical underpinnings, going back hundreds of years to the marvelous Dutch. Perspective is always useful. Well written with witty barbs salted in for extra pleasure.

Finished Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano. It's not Modiano's best work, but still worth reading. The story doesn't take shape until late in the novel (which is very short) and is a revelation of the interior of the narrator and not about Dora Bruder.

Started Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery.

Have The banker The professor and The suicide king that I just started reading.

one of the first non required reading books I ever read, may have to reread for nostalgia sake.

Before I'd finished reading your sentence I was all ready to recommend 10:04. My other suggestions would begin with Jenny Offill's recent Dept. of Speculation, which is interesting in its own right and quick to read. Rachel Cusk's Outline (2014), would also fit in, if "autobiography" means autobiographically-based fiction like 10:04. I note that it is often referred to by reviewers as a novel but in the note on the author at the end of the book it is referred to as one of her three memoirs. It has become a work, along with Ben Lerner's, often mentioned in the autofiction discussions. (See Elaine Blair’s review, which become one of the key documents in this discussion—driven to some degree by the sensation around Knausgard: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...NjAwMTk1ODczS0; also Jonathan Sturgeon’s essay, on Flavorwire: http:/http://flavorwire.com/496570/2...of-autofiction.)

Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? could be included too. (Sturgeon does include it in his discussion.) However, I'm allergic to Heti's writing.

But if you like Girls you will probably like this book.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but Ruth Ozeki's Tale For The Time Being is 50% about a Canadian author called Ruth. It was OK, ish. It also draws somewhat on an early c20 genre in Japanese fiction, the 'I novel', which was all about novelists writing about novelists undergoing scandalous experiences that the actual novelist had experienced, albeit in a different context to the contemporary phenomenon.