What book are you currently reading?

[Dayvo]

Cambodian Witness by Someth May.
A witness recollection of a Cambodain who managed to hide his past from the Khmer Rouge and survive (at times only just) where he would have been killed in the most brutal fashion had they found out.
A bit sketchy, a bit fragmanted, but it opens your eyes to how the ordinary people suffered while Pohl Pot took them back to Year Zero.

Having spent a while in Cambodia, it sounds like a book I'd like (but not from the tragic genocide point of view).

Have you read 'First They Killed My Father'? I read it there last year and it was heartbreaking, but well worth reading!

 

[pepecat]

'Rough Guide to Greece'. I quite like reading travel books anyway, but am hatching a plan to spend several weeks travelling round Greece / Crete (not by bikek though, alas) when i finish the PhD in two years time. I need something to aim for to keep the motivation going, and this is it!

 

[CycleFun30]

Herbert Girardet: Cities People Planet

 

[GrumpyGregry]

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
The Greatest Traitor - Ian Mortimer

having just finished 'The Slap' and 'The Blasphemer'

 

[martint235]

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
The Greatest Traitor - Ian Mortimer

having just finished 'The Slap' and 'The Blasphemer'

Oh what's The Slap like? I've read mixed reviews varying between gratuitous sex and swearing to the greatest Australian book of the century.

 

[Fletch456]

On Tour - Bradley Wiggins. Though I do 99% of my reading on the train to work and I cycled for 2 days for the first time in many a year this week. It's also competing with magazines like The Economist (felt like something high brow) and a cycling mag or two.

 

[SavageHoutkop]

Wading through Pillars of the Earth. Quite enjoying it but it's taking me ages as it's a huge book. Usually read a book a week but think I'm nearly three weeks in on this and still about 300 pages to go. Ouch! Probably coz I'd rather be out on my bike!

I read that recently after an unintended 24hr stopover in a foreign airport. I picked the biggest english book I could find. It was OK, I don't think it was great though.

 

[Archie_tect]

The Time Traveller's Wife.... took a while but loved it.

 

[Proto]

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli.

Female photographer in Saigon near the end of the Vietnam war. Only just started it but it's received good reviews.

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/show/review/The-Lotus-Eaters

 

[al-fresco]

I'm reading - with a growing sense of deja vu - "The Great Game" by Peter Hopkirk - the history of British and Russian rivalry in Afghanistan and Central Asia in the 17th & 18th centuries.


Al

 

[Clandy]

Britain By Bike - Jane Eastoe
The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

 

[GrumpyGregry]

Oh what's The Slap like? I've read mixed reviews varying between gratuitous sex and swearing to the greatest Australian book of the century.

Seemed the no 1 book with tourists and business travellers in the terminal at Nairobi Airport last week....

... it served its purpose well, it passed/killed time, it made me stop and think at several points, and broadly it entertained. I suspect it was deliberately aimed at both a certain type of book group member as it is big time discussion fodder and with an eye to a screenplay adaptation.

I passed it on to conservation scientist who was en route to Tanzania and who asked me if it was any good. Having finished it I didn't fancy lugging it all the way home to blighty.

Both points of (re)view are, in their way, correct; loads of graphic and largely gratuitous sex, loads of drug taking, loads of really foul language (even in Oz would you really end a question to your lawyer's secretary by calling her a see you next tuesday?), vivid portrayal of a dystopian, sexist, racist society, and quite possibly the greatest Australian book of the millenium thus far. Certainly the greatest oz book by a Greek author.

But that really isn't saying much now is it?

 

[User169]

Just finished:

London Calling by Barry Miles - a history of London counterculture since '45 taking in Julian McClaren Ross and Nina Hamnett to the YBAs. The avant-gardists Miles describes about largely manage to survive his rather dull writing.

20,000 Streets under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton - three short interconnected novels set between the wars amongst the London working class. Not as good as Hangover Square, but the dialogue is painfully convincing.

Just started:

The Face of Spain by Gerald Brenan - a diary of a 3 month trip to Spain in 1949. Nicely written and an eye-opener as to the isolation of Spain at the time and the poverty suffered by large parts of the population.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - trying to keep an open mind on this one, but I think it's going to be hard work.

 

[bof]

JUst finished Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. A book based mainly on interviews with North Koreans who have escaped and resettled in the South.



Kim Jung-il usually comes across as a bit of a comedy character, but this book paints a picture of a mass tragedy in the early to mid 90s when NK was left adrift by the fall of communism elsewhere and its economy utterly collapsed. NK's propaganda and secretiveness meant the rest of the world knew little about it. Excellent.

 

[alans]

I'm re-reading my JoGLE diary which is hosted herein
http://www.cycle-endtoend.org.uk/index.php?option=com_marketplace&Itemid=151

It's giving me itchy feet pedals