What are you reading now

[SkStu]

I've gone through a bit of that at times over the last ten years or so - on and off - but on a great stretch now over the last couple of years. I would put my house on it being device related ADD... (on another note, I am completely off of all social media for the last 2 months - facebook. instagram, twitter and reddit - wasnt on any others - and feel brilliant for it)

What has worked for me with reading has been a few things - my advice... to get back on the wagon, pick a book you know you will be really interested in based on the subject matter. Secondly commit to building the habit with 10-15 pages a day and stick to it. Have the next book selected and beside you before you finish the current one. Building the habit is the key for me - that and not taking a break between books. I'm a bedtime reader so I just went to bed 30 minutes early intentionally so i wouldn't be too tired to read.

[ontheotherhand]

I just finished Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars by David Hepworth (a British music journalist and industry guru - was instrumental with NME, Smash Hits, Q and others). The book is a great read, charts the journey of rock music through each year from the mid 50's to mid 90's (each year is a chapter and focuses on one rock star in the chapter; each chapter ends with a bit of a song list/album list for the year). Really engaging book. Loved it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30965762-uncommon-people

Just started reading Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton about the disastrous Belgian-led Antarctic expedition from the very late 1800's that saw the crew get lodged in ice and stranded for about a year without sufficient supplies and food. Complete sh*t show. Only about 40 pages in but it has already got me a bit hooked. As an aside, it was one of Roald Amundsen's first expeditions and it appears he was the one who ultimately ensured they got out of there alive.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54900051

Disclaimer: i tend to love almost every book i read

Madhouse was very good although I read Endurance afterwards and it somewhat blew it away.

And I only read paper books. Had a kindle but couldn't get into it. How do you show it off on your bookshelf afterwards?

[ontheotherhand]

Paper, always and only.

Having a prolonged bout of attention span struggles though, anyone had that ? & any advice on cracking it ?
I'd have always had a book on the go but the last couple of years it has slipped away & I'd like it back. Read it was smartphone use related maybe in one article but fcuk knows.

I'd blame the smartphone as well. Awful yokes.

My trick is to pick a book or series of books I've already read and enjoyed and have the nostalgia drag me along until I'm back in a rhythm.....although it must not work that well because I haven't read anything start to finish in months........

[John83]

Reading Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.

He gives a very high level overview of ten major world maps/regions including why they formed and a sort of SWOT analysis to show their position in the world and the tension it creates internally and externally.

Enjoying it so far. It puts everything into very simple terms and gives a nice perspective on why various powers are in conflict or alliance.

I thought he had a pretty good analysis of China and Russia, and after that it declined pretty badly. It felt like he had two good chapters and then had to flesh out a book somehow.

[John83]

Quick question for the readers in here...

do you tend to read from a device (iPad, Kindle, etc) or the old fashioned paper and ink?

I exclusively read printed books.

I spend months per year abroad for work. I prefer paper books even now, but the Kindle's ability to fit a library into a pocket-sized form is invabluable to me. I also like being able to look up an unfamiliar term simply by long pressing it, and highlighting an interesting or funny passage saves it automatically to a clips file that's nice to review once in a while.

[osarusan]

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

About 100 pages in and already know I'm going to enjoy it, enjoy Ishiguro's twisted sense of story-telling.

[CraftyToePoke]

I've gone through a bit of that at times over the last ten years or so - on and off - but on a great stretch now over the last couple of years. I would put my house on it being device related ADD... (on another note, I am completely off of all social media for the last 2 months - facebook. instagram, twitter and reddit - wasnt on any others - and feel brilliant for it)

What has worked for me with reading has been a few things - my advice... to get back on the wagon, pick a book you know you will be really interested in based on the subject matter. Secondly commit to building the habit with 10-15 pages a day and stick to it. Have the next book selected and beside you before you finish the current one. Building the habit is the key for me - that and not taking a break between books. I'm a bedtime reader so I just went to bed 30 minutes early intentionally so i wouldn't be too tired to read.

I'd blame the smartphone as well. Awful yokes.

My trick is to pick a book or series of books I've already read and enjoyed and have the nostalgia drag me along until I'm back in a rhythm.....although it must not work that well because I haven't read anything start to finish in months........

Definitely agree on the device / smart phone side, it does coincide with that and surely linked.
Read a Guardian article on it about attention spans being stolen and it made perfect sense. Friend of mine, an avid reader gone the same way. I don't have any SMedia installed on the thing but they are still accessible & I'm a news & forum hound with 50+ bookmarked. The camera is the reason it stays, you do catch some lovely stuff you'd otherwise miss & in my job that has become very useful.

Stu, a break after a series I loved was key the moment, other books couldn't follow the one I finished so I put a few down unimpressed and lost the knack ( with help from my phone ).

Have a few days off this week so I'll try again, I have never read a book twice, wouldn't be my way at all but maybe you are right OTOH, maybe that is whats needed here.

[pineapple stu]

A site like Goodreads may help encourage you along (or not of course) - you can set a reading target for the year and log books you read. It's technically social media - you can connect with friends and so on - but way quieter in terms of notifications, etc.

It has a bar indicating how you are against your target as you go along, which can be useful as a prompter or motivation. Though I have heard others say it's annoying to always told you're behind on target - so like I say, maybe not for everyone. But said I'd throw it out there.

[John83]

I like the reading challenge too, but you have to set a realistic target to get any use out of it. I used to set it to 24, but after falling short a few times, I dropped that to 20, which I hit more often than not.

If you're struggling with it, it's worth remembering that the median number of books people read per year is 2, I think. Most people barely read or don't read at all.

[Eminence Grise]

I’m very lucky that I’ve never lost the yen for reading, but it has definitely slowed down in the last decade. About five years ago, I started making an annual list of every book I read, and I set a target of three a month – not sweating it if I only manage two some months once it evens out. I make it a rule to read every night, if only for a few minutes, and it has helped keep the habit going. I usually have three or four books on the go at the same time (a good novel, a trashy novel and a collection of short stories or poetry – the fourth might be one I haven’t admitted to giving up on! I used to reread a lot, though since I’ve bought far too many book in recent years (seriously, I've probably close to 150 to read) I’m only rereading when I need a book as a comfort blanket – often children’s books like Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mr Tom, Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword or Anne Holm’s I Am David (bit of a theme there!) – or it’s an absolute classic like John Banville’s Birchwood.

I consider read proper books as my proper reading, but I use my phone as a back-up – if I’ve finished my news apps on the way to work, or I’ve a quiet lunch to myself the phone is handy, and I tend to read or reread a lot of classics on it. You can’t beat a book, though – the smell, the feel, the weird bookmarks people leave in them when they send them to second-hand book shops… And it’s too damn expensive to swat every fly with a Kindle!

Right now, I’m reading for fun. Up to the start of last month I was reading up on phenomenographic pedagogy for a journal article, intertwined with stuff on critical media literacy (which is why I said a few pages back that factual reading is too much like work… it really is my work). Since then, I’ve reread Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (on my phone); Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (she can write in the blank spaces on the page as only the really gifted can: it’s one of those instant classics); and Robert Harris’ Act of Oblivion (top notch historical fiction, though, unusually for him, a main character you couldn’t really root for).

I started Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Labyrinth of the Spirits at the weekend – one of those books I’ve had on my shelves for yonks and kept being turned off by the length (805 pages), but it was easy to fall into it. It’s the last in his Cemetery of Forgotten Books cycle, where each novel (The Shadow of the Wind, The Angels Game, The Prisoner of Heaven) is freestanding, but shares the same major characters and overlapping storylines, and can be read in any order. Glorious, twisty-turny stuff in the early years of Franco’s regime.

After that, who knows? Sebastian Barry and George Saunders are fluttering their pages at me, but I’ve a hankering to reread SE Hinton’s The Outsiders for the first time in – must be – 30 years. Mind you, Osarusan has flagged Klara and the Sun and that's a real possibility too...

I’ll keep you posted.

[passinginterest]

Ah The Silver Sword and I am David have stirred some happy memories for me. I am David is one of my favourites and one of few books that I've read multiple times. I've been going through a fairly dry spell reading wise. My mother in law bought me Mans Search for Meaning and Crime and Punishment for Christmas. I read the first half of Mans Search for Meaning didn't go back to it when it started into the more theoretical second half. Haven't really picked anything up since. I did get an Amazon Fire tablet last week and it prompted me to read the first few chapter of Treasure Island again. Not sure if that comes as standard with the Kindle app or if I downloaded it at some stage, but it's another old favourite and I might just finish it again.

[Eminence Grise]

My mother in law bought me Mans Search for Meaning and Crime and Punishment for Christmas.

Um, does your mother-in-law not like you or something? That's seriously weighty stuff. Mine is more likely to give me a Bernard Cornwell, John Connolly or Robert Harris - probably knows it will keep me quiet and out of her way for a few days!

I did get an Amazon Fire tablet last week and it prompted me to read the first few chapter of Treasure Island again.

Arrh, PI lad, you can't go wrong with RLS. I've reread Treasure Island and The Black Arrow (young D1ck Shelton is the feeblest hero in literature, but still gets the girl - there's hope for us all!), and The Master of Ballantrae for the first time, in the last two years.

[osarusan]

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Seeing as he's 89 and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously, he must be getting one soon.

Adios and RIP Cormac. It was not to be.

[dahamsta]

On the news front, I found reducing the number of sources improved my QoL no end. I use a feed reader for news / blogs / updates / etc and found that just deleting one or two news sources, particularly the ones that are a bit spammy - I'm looking at you Guardian and BBC - mostly called a halt to the news doom scrolling.

And in the case of news it really is doom scrolling, news is so negative in general it tends to make me angry and disillusioned, so it improved both my time management and my mood, to a certain extent. These days when I Pavlov my way into the reader, there's only 10 or 20 items there so I'm gone again in a minute. In fact I don't even bother with most of it, I just scroll past the headlines. Because they're mostly pretty boring.

I'm still not back into books unfortunately, I went through The Satsuma Complex fairly quickly but The Thursday Murder Club just isn't taking me, ditto The Cuckoo's Calling, and for some odd reason I then segued into HG Wells' A Short History of the World, I think because the chapters are short and snappy. I've taken to reading that with my kids now, so I've moved on to Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Kindle free sample of Klara and the Sun on my mobile. And lots and lots of Wikipedia!

This discussion seems to be more about The Fall Of Reading than actual books. Are we on the cusp of an Age of Whatever-The-Opposite-Of-Enlightnement-Is?

[John83]

This discussion seems to be more about The Fall Of Reading than actual books. Are we on the cusp of an Age of Whatever-The-Opposite-Of-Enlightnement-Is?

It's just a recent seque in the conversation. I think we're just all middle aged and suffering from crises of self-reflection and/or work/life balance.

Having rewatched all of the Bond movies during covid, I picked up the first couple of the books. They've dated as you'd expect, though it's still fun to see where the writers have borrowed and where they've patched. Casino Royale is mostly set in the no longer glamourous northern coast of France. Live and Let Die is oddly determined to use the word Negro as often as possible. I've read that some people prefer the term even now for capturing something uniquely African-American, but reading "The Negro walked onto the dock" where "The man walked on to the dock" would suffice seems a bit off to my eye. Anyway, I could rationalise that term, but then the term "n*****head" popped up for a buoy (or possibly an overwashed rock). I had to look that one up.

I'm currently reading another book because of a movie I watched: Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. It's a collection of short SF stories, the titular one being the source material for Villeneuve's Arrival. It's some of the best SF I've read in years.