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.
Originally Posted by SkStu
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.
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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.
Last edited by pineapple stu; 12/06/2023 at 4:18 PM.
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.
Last edited by John83; 13/06/2023 at 3:39 AM.
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.
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
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.
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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!
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.
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
Adios and RIP Cormac. It was not to be.
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?
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.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?
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.
I definitely think it's a result of the internet / social media / etc rather than just middle-age. My mid-life crisis is already being dealt with via cars and exercise / dieting.
There was an old copy of Dr. No in my parent's house, with this cover so probably not that long after it was written. It was awful, just terrible dross altogether, and not just because it was dated. But probably still not as bad as reading a Famous Five book now...
Ten years last month since Iain Banks died, and The Guardian did an article on where to start with his work, so I thought it was as good a time as any to start Dead Air, one of three of his novels I haven't read (The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Stonemouth the others). Very tempted to re-read The Crow Road, but something new stood out. Very typical Banks, witty, fast-paced and anchored at a point in time but also - considering his range of styles and themes - satisfyingly different at the same time.
Any one else a fan?
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
I've read all of his sci-fi, and maybe half of his other novels including the whiskey travelogue. I haven't found another author like him.
I tried Banks' Feersum Endjinn years ago and just couldn't get into it, so I never went back to his Iain M Banks work. But I'm not much of a sci-fi fan truth be told. Apart from Doctor Who novels as a kid, and some Ray Bradbury short stories last year out of curiosity, I can't recall ever reading much sci-fi. Maybe I should give The Culture another go.
Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting, we'll have no trouble here!
- E Tattsyrup.
Feersum Endjinn is pretty hard to get into. A quarter of it is written phonetically, for a start. A lot of people suggest The Player of Games as the place to start. If you're not much for sci-fi, Inversions is only obliquely a Culture novel. I can't recall what gets revealed where, so I'm wary of spoiling something, but let's just say it takes place inside a late medieval civilisation that's being meddled with.
I'm crawling through this but liking it. Also forgot I was reading Dracula until this morning.
I got Kala by Colin Walsh as a Christmas present. I hadn’t heard anything about it really. The name of the author was familiar but that was about it.
It’s one of the few books I can remember, since I was a child really, that I didn’t want to put down from the first few pages to the very end. I thought it captured something about teenage emotion and friendship that I’ve rarely seen done so well. Added to that was the impact of trauma on their adult lives and having to eventually confront it.
The story absolutely rattles along. With three distinct voices and two timelines beautifully sown together. I suppose it’s a thriller in most ways, but there’s some beautiful prose that wouldn’t normally be associated with the genre.
It tackles some deep rooted Irish societal issues from an interesting angle. It’s visceral and confrontational. Maybe growing up in the arse of nowhere, rural Ireland, the secrets, the cover ups and the whispers rang very true. Fiona Sinnott disappeared from very close to home. People know exactly what happened but the ones that can produce the evidence will seemingly never tell. There’s echoes of that all throughout Irish history and I though Kala captured that cruel web especially well.
Anyway, I’d recommend it as gripping story. I rattled through it in a few days. I thought the ending was a little bit weak, after all that had come before, but it didn’t ruin the overall experience. I’ll definitely be picking up Colin Walsh’s next book.
Does he die /
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