What are you reading right now?

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. It's for book club but I did own it already and it's been on my (extremely long) list. About 28% through. I like it, some very hard parts as it's about the Indian caste system, Indian politics and immigration. It's very bleak at the moment and I am not sold on the writing.

Will now spend the next hour not reading it but reading this thread :-)

I'm making my way through Harlan Coben's books. I read "Missing You" and "Tell No One" over the bank holiday and started "Six Years" this weekend. He's not my favourite author tbh but they are pretty fast paced and easy to read which is what I need at the moment as feeling pretty stressed.

Murine, sorry, I only saw your post just now. I think absolutely CT's House of Names would be enjoyable for someone who didn't know the stories of Orestes, Clytemnestra, Electra and co and he plays around with some of the stories and characters, anyway. It's violent, atavistic powerful royal family in-fighting against the background of he Trojan war. A teenage girl is sacrificed by her father to get a good wind for his navy to get to sea In the first chapter, for instance.

I've just finished a brilliant collection of short stories by Mark Haddon, titled The Pier Falls. Highly recommend. And am now reading The One Plus One by Jojo Moyes. It's really good, an easy read but just what I wanted after some deeper reads recently!

I'm reading Paula Hawkins Into The Water. I'm a fairly slow reader but this sends me to sleep and isn't very knicker gripping. Just a two book publishers deal

The Power by Naomi Alderman. It's fantastic and unsettling and I will start a thread on it when I've finished it to avoid spoilers

Audible people - there is a buy 3 books get a £10 voucher offer on. I did this a while ago & was hoping for another. I'm off on holiday next week so good timing.

Although I have a subscription, the £10 voucher is good for spending on the daily deals which are usually £2-£3, can be great offerings & feels like a real treat ;)

A LITTLE LIFE
Agree with both sides - I think the reason I'll never forget this book (I seem to forget what's happened in a lot of other things I've read in recent years!) is that I have all kinds of rage - against Jude for not being happier when he gets this amazing life & friends that constantly put him first, against the author for putting him through so much and against her for not showing us more of 'courtroom Jude' who is a total badass & beyond competent - we're just supposed to believe that about him without hearing anything of that side of his character. An extra 5 pages to give at least one example wouldn't go amiss surely?! And rage in a way that his friends didn't push him a little more to share. Rage that poor Harold was left shouldering a lot of the burden of sadness & that Julia didn't make that much of an effort really-that annoyed me. Maybe there was a point about women not being in any way strong characters in this book but I didn't feel it was true to her character having been a mother to basically be a supporting actress. There were other things that annoyed me too but I can't remember them now! I could talk about it for days!

YET MORE SPOILERS

I felt that by the end of the book I - like Willem, like Harold - wanted to know. I wanted all the details, to understand Jude to his core. I felt that those parallels were deliberate; that as a reader I started to empathise with those characters in their desire to somehow fix Jude by understanding more and more about his past - that if he tells them/us, he can experience some release from that, that he attempts through increasingly invasive/invasively described self-harm. It doesn't work, of course, for them or us, but I bought into it as a reason for that level of detail.

MORE SPOILERS AGAIN

I disagree about the 'striptease' - no, we don't get the details of Jude's abuse 500 pages in, we get it before then, don't we, when Jude is being raped by Brother Luke and the men he's set up with?

I don't care that HY didn't redeem Jude because he didn't need to be, to me. I actually found the ending not exactly pleasurable but certainly refreshing from a readers POV because of her acknowledgment that, actually, for some victims, there are no happy endings, that some people can't overcome abuse and pain, just like in RL. Then again, I guess you could argue that Jude got the happy ending for him.

MORE SPOILERS AGAIN

I have no issue at all with Jude as a self-harming, self-loathing character. As you say, it's perfectly realistic, given his horrific past, if he were a real person. But he's a character in a novel, where the author decides what to tell us, and how often, and how to shape his life. It was HY's authorial decisions I took issue with. The reader knows from almost the start that Jude endured a horrific childhood and was abused, but HY does a kind of 'keep reading and you'll get to the dirty details' narrative striptease with the reader, holding out the detail of that abuse until 500 pages in, like a kind of voyeuristic pay-off for having endured his self-harm and humiliation and pain in the present.

Honestly, it felt to me like the reason some people read 'true crime' books that detail exactly what Fred and Rose West did to their victims, or what exactly went on during Natasha Kampusch's imprisonment, or look up the Lesley Anne Downey torture tapes on the internet. It's like A Child Called It minus the happy ending - for me it's verging on child abuse as entertainment. And, as if that isn't 'enough', HY then seems to think 'What else can I do to Jude?' Double amputation and then kill off his partner? Yup!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting novelists can't or shouldn't deal with child abuse and it's consequences, and they do, all of the time, but I thought that A Little Life verged on a freak show with the author piling on ever more repetitive and gratuitous scenes of horror, as if she was challenging herself to see how much lower she could bring Jude while keeping him alive.

MORE SPOILERS FOR ANYONE WHO HASNT READ A LITTLE LIFE

I think some of those are valid criticisms mum, but Jude's inability to love fully, or work through why he self-harmed, or trust that Harold wouldn't abuse him, or somehow take in and keep the sense of Willem's love and support inside him following the latter's death - to me all of these are extreme but plausible examples of a kind of repetition compulsion, where he remains this terrified, abused young child/teen even though his external adult circumstances are very different, and no amount of love or support can break into that. I think it's a pretty realistic portrayal.

The abuse upon abuse upon abuse he suffers as a youngster, and the detail HY goes into? It's just about believable and justified to me, though lots of people take issue with it as you do.

SPOILERS FOR ANYONE WHO HASNT READ A LITTLE LIFE

Of course individuals can end up in cycles of abuse and self-abuse, but there's a difference between recounting it in repetitive, voyeuristic, close-up over 700 plus pages and constructing a meaningful narrative about it. The novel starts off about four ambitious friends, but it soon becomes just a heaping of misery upon Jude with the others becoming background noise. Self-harm with razors leading to hospitalisation, continual agonising pain and self-loathing, rejecting his kind law professor, his friend JB mocking his limp, a violent boyfriend who rapes him and throws him down the stairs in his wheelchair, his legs eventually having to be amputated, finding love, but enduring sex, and then his boyfriend being killed, so that he kills himself.

And if that isn't enough, there's a kind of narrative striptease where eventually, most of the way through the novel, the reader finally gets the details of how Jude's legs were originally injured, when he's deliberately run over by the sadistic doctor who tortures him in his house after his time in the miserable youth facility after the paedophile priest who pimped him to truckers is caught, after they run away from the vicious orphanage where he's repeatedly abused by priests.

For me, there's nothing compensating or meaningful in HY's refusal to redeem Jude, it's just a monotonous assault of misery and sexual torment on the reader.

I also don't get that criticism southeast. The author subsequently said in interview that she defended/stood up for Jude's right to suffer (I'm not sure I have the phrase right, but that's the gist of it), which I think is enough of an answer to those critics.

It was really an incredible book. I never thought I'd get to the end of a 700-page book and be sad that I didn't have more of it to come.

A Little Life gets my vote as a page-turner (though it was a bit too long). I don't get the misery porn criticism at all - there's plenty of people out there who endure and have endured even worse than poor Jude. Why shouldn't she write about certain things that he goes through?

Just finished Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty. Loved it. She is great at getting to the heart of people's relationships. Just starting The Wonder.

House of Names sounds interesting, Mumchance, do you think would I still enjoy it if I'm not very familiar with the mythology/material it is based on?

I've just finished STranger Child, it was amazing. I sat out in the garden reading it and couldn't wait to see what was going to happen. I won't say more as it'd be a spoiler but I can't get it out of my mind because of something that the author said in the book.

The Essex serpent and thoroughly enjoying it.

The most recent books I have read are: The Hundrend year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared, By Jonas Jonasson.
I thoroughly enjoyed it would recommend it.
And The Damsel in This Dress by Marianne Stillings, which was ok reminded me a bit of fifty shades of grey in parts.

I am now browsing for new books, currently looking at a lot of Margaret Attwood books, as I started watching The Handmaids Tale, so would like to read the book, and some of her other books too.

Or if any of you lovely people could recommend some good reads? I love the books you start reading and can't put down.

What did you like about it, Remus?

I think The Wonder stands or falls on whether you're interested in the central situation of the 'miraculous' fasting girl, and the 'will it or won't it?' suspense that emerges towards the end. There really isn't anything else much going on -- no fully fleshed-out characters, for instance.

I really liked His Bloody Project. Just got The Wonder out of the library, but not holding out much hope for it.

Murine yay!

I liked Testament of Mary, v thought provoking

I couldn't get into either All the Light or History of the Rain but everyone raves about them so might have to give them another go. I've just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman though and want to read something similar I think but have read lots of his already.

I've just finished Emma Donoghue's The Wonder which I quite liked without feeling very strongly about it. I didn't think Lib was characterised strongly enough. She's just a barely-characterised colonial consciousness registering poverty and superstition.

Also Colm Toibin's House of Names (fictional treatment of the Oresteia, which, if you liked his Testament of Mary, you would also like -- similar in terms of giving credible voices to characters, especially female characters, from myth). Recommended.

Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project, which, not unlike The Wonder, was an efficiently-written one-question novel, but I am a bit baffled by all the acclaim. For me it didn't say anything about madness or the lives of crofters, or do anything formally interesting at all. It was an efficient whydunnit, but I was expecting something more thought provoking from the reviews.

Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, which is about two Australian sisters who come to England after WWII and the men they are involved with -- utterly brilliant, astonishing prose and characterisation, and icy little flash forwards like Muriel Spark, telling you within the first few pages that a major character will kill himself years later. Hugely recommended.

I'm taken aback anyone liked A Little Life, which I thought was a particularly nasty kind of misery porn. The idea really interested me that HY said she wanted to write about a group of friends who don't marry and have children but reading it made me just stop believing in Jude's lengthy martyrdom, apart from wondering what the author was going to do to him next.

"The Wonder" by Emma Donoghue. It took me a while to get into it but I really enjoyed it. (Just finished and reading this thread for ideas for its successor)