I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, and I’ve just started Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows a scientist sentenced to a prison camp on a planet teeming with bizarre lifeforms. So far, it hasn’t drawn me in the way Children of Time did, though I’m only about a quarter of the way through.
I read The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken and was struck by similarities to Pratchett, for instance the part where the main character heroically defeats monsters in a wood by using knowledge gleaned from an old encyclopedia that he carries everywhere, and how he ſpeakſ like thiſ when reading aloud from it, and the part about underground camels in Wales. It references The Far-Distant Oxus at one point, which I want to read (a pony adventure story written in 1937 by teenagers).
(I know the long s wasn't really used at the ends of words, that was just a hurried example.)
For some reason I've been really enjoying stories with endless and well described repeating rooms. Borges' Library of Babel got me started, I have just finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi - which was so wonderfully described, I don't know if I'll find anything to beat it. I'm now on A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, which outright mentions Borges' novel. If anyone has any similar recommendations I'd love to hear them.
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. As with some of his other work, the punctuation can be a challenge and the prose can sometimes border on the ponderous, but I'm enjoying it. Currently about half way through.
I have a Random House audiobook version of the trilogy read by Brad Pitt. His Spanish pronunciation isn't great (although better than mine) but I enjoy his quiet voice and slightly careworn delivery. It's abridged, though, and I wanted to read the whole work.
The Recorded Books recordings of The Road and No Country for Old Men narrated by Tom Stechschulte are very good too.
It's been quite entertaining to read how he went from picking off bucket shops to going bust on Wall Street and how he proceeded from there. Old-fashioned writing that goes straight to the point.
His art-like approach to speculation is refreshing after spending time on /r/quant. I cannot say if any of his high-level speculation wisdom hold water anymore, though.
Yes, I’ve read the spy who came in from the cold, and i tried to read a perfect spy
I liked the first one but its very raw and dark, no glitter and glamour
I quit the second one, part of the book are flashback scenes and I had a hard time staying concentrated, i forgot why exactly i didnt like those scenes
It's really good. A story that still pops into my mind occasionally today. As a Brit I'd never really thought about Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The retreat in the book is evocative and really left an impression.
But I read it when I had far more free time than now.
Getting past 200 pages is the tough part. Hope I’ll get through. Also, getting used to so many characters with unfamiliar Russian names is slowing things down. Let's see.
Any tips and tricks for reading the magnum opus? Would help!
Now that you mention it, I also struggled with that to begin with. My penguin edition had a dramatis personae list at the start that I ended up referring to a few times. Rare for me to use them. So, a crib sheet if your edition doesn't.
There's a sequence with the boys out on the town which helped me cement each of the main male protagonists images in my head. Fairly early on I think. Pierre + Andrei being main characters, Nikolai (the younger) and Antole being the rest of that group.
I also I ended up classifying the characters into three generations, the young men/woman, the older parents, and the younger children.
