What book(s) are you reading currently?

[OldSchool47]

The Exterminator (1960) by William S. Burroughs. Started it yesterday. Not Exterminator! (1973). 2 different books.

[BondJmsBond]

I'm reading The Flashman Papers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flashman_Papers

It's hilarious, and quite educational about British history.

[noodlesoup]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

If You like the book,You probably shouldn't watch the movie..

ACTUALLY, I enjoy the movie for what it is. It is a totally different take on a similar theme, hardly an adaptation. I plan on watching it again someday soon.

[legboy]

I'm currently re-reading the Foundation Trilogy.

I read this when I was far too young - probably around 12 - so a huge amount of it obviously went over my head.

I didn't know for example that Tamerlane was the inspiration for the character of "The Mule"...and many other things...

[blondifan]

Biography of Anthony Kiedis, by Anthony Kiedis with Larry Sloman.
I enjoy biographies of artists, both visual and musicians.

This one's okay, providing you don't expect any revelations.

The last I read was 'Captain Beefheart by Mike Barnes'.

[Clouddancer]

Have just finished two books.
The Dark History of Hollywood: Keiron Connolly, nothing new or shocking came to light, just a rehashing of the usual stuff. An easy read however.

Company Confessions; Christopher Moran, mainly dealt with CIA policies regarding ex employee´s publishing memoirs after retirement.It was interesting to read about the angst & moral dilemmas of running a secret service in a democracy that takes it´s civil liberties so seriously. The trouble is with books like this which are written by ex Spooks, who are very well trained to lie for a living, is are they telling the truth now??

[palo5]

Originally Posted by Clouddancer

...The trouble is with books like this which are written by ex Spooks, who are very well trained to lie for a living, is are they telling the truth now??

Almost certainly not. You should at least be skeptikal

I worked for the Soviet Government for much of my life, but never believed anything they said at face value. I know the West is no better

If you mean individual "spy stories", take them with a pinch of salt

[ultimatewarlord]

Originally Posted by legboy

I'm currently re-reading the Foundation Trilogy.

I read this when I was far too young - probably around 12 - so a huge amount of it obviously went over my head.

I didn't know for example that Tamerlane was the inspiration for the character of "The Mule"...and many other things...

Try the bbc radio version of it. It's outstanding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixjsI15IS2Y

The dramatisation of Caves of Steel is almost as good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z_GJrRDxwo

[Pinkpapercut]

Originally Posted by palo5

I am certain our respected British Members, including colleague-mods who think the saintly British can do no wrong, know nothing about this, because they simply aren't taught it in school.... or anywhere else in England... or America, for that matter

But in USSR we always knew about this

Here is an excellently researched and documented account of what the British were really up to in India, namely ripping the country off and acting like cutthroats

Cutthroats???

Yes. According to their Malthusian logic, The British said India could only sustain so many lives, so they let 35-million people die of starvation over 200 years when they could have prevented it. Of course, they never applied the same logic to themselves

But, it's not my story, and I'm not Indian


"By (author) Shashi Tharoor
In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannons, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial 'gift' - from the railways to the rule of law - was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy"

I'll just leave this here...

http://quillette.com/2017/04/14/revi...hashi-tharoor/

[scoundrel]

BTW the copy I first read came from a public library in the 1980s and was a hardback in a tasteful plain red colour.

I read this a very long time ago and found it unusual and intriguing: an adolescent war novel with somewhat more grown up themes than you ordinarily find. It has been out of print for most of the intervening years and I doubt if it will ever be re-issued except as a free book on Project Guttenberg one day. I happened to mention to my friend Tabler that I could not find this book anywhere and he spent ten minutes on Ebay and acquired for me a copy costing one penny plus postage: Thanks, Tabs. As an aside, there seems to be a wealth of books and films with the same name; the sky is evidently bad tempered.

Since I doubt whether many people will read it for themselves I dont mind condensing the story. The rest of this is one big fat spoiler.

The Characters
Flying Officer - later Flight Lieutenant Raymond Cox.
Rachel Boland - who goes on to be a pilot and junior officer in the Air Transport Auxilliary.
Dorothy Boland, mother of Rachel and Jack Boland.
Lieutenant (JG) Charlie Dee of the Eighth Air Force.
Lieutenant Louise Daintree of the US Womens Army Corps.
Squadron Leader Jack Boland, CO of the RAF 69th Fighter Squadron, to which Raymond is posted as a Flight Lieutenant to replace a flight commander lost in action.

The book is themed around the uncertainty and the potential cruelty of fate and the need to live now, in case now should be all the time we have. Reading it now after a gap of nearly thirty years I see the randomness of fate as a key theme. The setting in the middle of the North West Europe air campaign between early 1943 and D Day lends itself to this sense of fate and to war as a form of heightend reality.

In a sequence which is stylistically different to the more conventional main narrative, we meet Raymond as a crashed pilot in a field close to a church and vicarage which, with no rudder control, he only just managed to avoid stuffing full of his ruined Spitfire; and we meet Rachel Boland as the daughter of the vicarage, who came running out expecting at best to be trying to drag a wounded man clear before the aeroplane goes up in flames. The style of the writing in this opening passage emphasises the suddenness and abrupt transition in which Raymond Cox finds himself in a total transition from flying to near death to walking with a pretty girl to take tea with the vicar. Luckily, though rather shaken, Raymond is mainly wounded in his pride. He has just been bounced and shot down by a P47 Thunderbolt when he was woolgathering after coming safely home from an intruder mission. Also in the vicarage is Rachel's older brother, Squadron Leader Jack Boland, who is almost bedridden due to secondary malaria and not yet a presence.

Next we see Raymond visiting, rather reluctantly, on a diplomatic errand to USAAF Stiplowe, a Norfolk airfield which is home to the fighter wing which shot him down and to Lt JG Charlie Dee, the man who did it. The event is a ball thrown to inaugurate the base as a operational facility but the RAF have been invited to kiss and make up as it were. To his own surprise, Raymond hits it off with Charlie and feels sympathy for the elaborate way in which Charlie has been forced to apologise for what was an honest mistake; almost like being put in the village stocks. But the event takes a hugely significant turn when Raymond is enthusiastically seduced by Lt Louise Daintree, who lures him to her quarters; there are several hints in the book that others at the base, including the CO, connive at what could easily be a disciplinary matter, and that it suits the USAAF to look the other way.

In fact this is the first really interesting development. Raymond is 23 years old, has been a warrior since the Battle of Britain without a break, has achieved six kills so far (ace status of course) and is a man of respect in the RAF. There are a number of hints in the book that he also looks the part and that women notice him. But he has no experience with women at all, not even a childhood sweetheart. To Louise, this is like finding a gold bar casually abandoned in the middle of her path: she is rather openly smug and delighted to have not only bedded a handsome war hero but to taken his virginity as well.

But of course, actions create momentum. Louise has tasted the apple every bit as much as Raymond and is eager to eat the rest of it. However, the war is continuing, Raymond is heavily involved in it and in her role as assistant to the Stiplowe base intelligence officer, she is involved too, and in a position to know what Raymond and his squadron are doing. For all of his life, Raymond has lived with loneliness as a natural state of being. His parents divorced, his mother died when he was too young to know her, and in a flashback sequence we get to see the exquisitely painful rejection Raymond suffers on the one and only time he meets his own father (or is he only a man his mother happened to be married to?). Raymond is so lonely that he didn't even know it until Charlie Dee shot him down and triggered off a whole series of new social connections. He is such easy meat for Louise to take down that she feels protective and nurturing and full of pity when she starts to realise: but she also quickly grasps that he is as loyal and faithful as a dog and that she can have him for life if she wants to. She has had disappointing relationships with bad and untrustworthy men so it is not long before she also grasps that she has hooked a damned good fish and she wants to keep him.

Raymond has friends among his colleagues in the RAF but lives constantly with death and doesn't like to get too close to anyone there: almost the first thing we learn about his war is that his squadron is flying outdated Spitfire Fives and has lost five pilots in a week. Strangely enough, just as quickly as Louise becomes the love of his life, Charlie Dee becomes a very valued friend; it turns out that Charlie is himself an orphan and will almost certainly make his career in the US military, which is all the family he has. He and Raymond have a lot in common.

The wildcard turns out to be Rachel Boland and her family, especially Jack Boland. Jealousy is another strong theme in the story and just as Louise adopts Raymond so does Rachel's mother, Dorothy Boland. Dorothy is also quick to detect a motherless boy and in her case she covets a sort of unofficial foster child; the vicarage quickly becomes a place where Raymond can come and go almost as a home. But Jack Boland's attitude is mysterious, whereas Louise from the beginning is inclined to mistrust the Boland family and to dislike the competition, even though Raymond has no sexual feelings for Rachel Boland at all.

Quite quickly, Jack Boland obtains Raymond as a replacement flight commander: Raymond is suitable for the post, quickly adapts to flying Hawker Typhoons, and there is nothing strange in any of this...yet. But Louise has inside knowledge as an intelligence officer and soon begins to realise that Jack is behaving strangely and in ways which will put her new lover in clear and present danger. A low level reconnaisance run to film strange new rocket aircraft is a success and Raymond is well seen by RAF Eleven Group; but Louise gently asks why he was ordered to do it when the RAF has specialist Mosquito squadrons for this sort of thing. Why indeed?

Then it seems that fighter squadrons involved in escorting American daylight raids will send personel to fly a raid each with the big boys to get the inside knowledge of why they are needed. Raymond will do this for Jacks 69th Squadron and it so happens that he will do this on a raid in July 1943 which is going to bomb a factory in Regensburg where they make Messerschmitt Bf109s and which will fly onwards all the way to Tunisia. Louise knows that Jack lobbied for his squadron to send someone on this particular raid. Raymond is the someone Jack wants to send. Hmm.

It is only afterwards that Raymond realises that Louise is not being paranoid: in fact, Jack is actively trying to kill him. The knowledge is intensely shocking, doubly so because in the end Jack tries to do it personally. When Jack is missing, presumed dead, and the squadron has the traditional piss up to mark the passing of the CO, Raymond takes the night air because he needs alone time, only for his new wingman to join him and tell a ghastly secret. The new guy caught the CO deliberately attacking Raymond's plane and drove him off, possibly shooting him down. Since Jack Boland is missing, no further action can be taken; but now Raymond knows that Louise was telling him the truth.

But Jack isn't dead. He crashed his plane into the sea just off the Norfolk coast and not far from his family home and has been hiding out there. Raymond is not his only target; he has it in for Charlie Dee as well, whom he wrongly suspects of corrupting Rachel's morals. He joins one last raid when the sky is insanely full (D Day), using his remembered status as the previous CO to force a mechanic to start a spare P51 so that he can follow Raymond and try again; and when Raymond and the others have flown too far to be caught, he finds a target of opportunity: Charlie's P51.

Charlie is in hospital and about to sent back to the USA with a cannon shell in his leg. His P51 was being ferried for repairs. And now Jack Boland is absent again and ATA pilot Rachel Boland has gone missing as well along with a P51 belonging to Charlie's wing...

The Gods are capricious and cruel and kill us for their sport. Louise is a lucky lucky girl because her man ran this gauntlet and made it through. Raymond is a little bit bit crestfallen because his promotion to squadron leader is a ground job, and a senior RAF liason officer to the Eight Air Force. But his bosses in the RAF have suddenly realised that Raymond has been on active service for almost four years without even a serious leave of absence and have hurriedly called time before he gets chopped the hard way. His new squadron commander drily observes that it is well known in HQ that Raymond has excellent relations with the American forces and is a perfect choice for this role. But there is a hint that Louise called in a favour, maybe even that seducing Raymond in the first place is the favour her superiors owe her and which she can call in. She has cried into her pillow for long enough and has earned her luck.

But Dorothy Boland has had the cruellest luck of all. One year ago she had a family and after D day she doesn't. The vicar died of alcoholic poisoning in the winter as Raymond is careful never even to speak of to anyone; but he knows. There is a very very sad scene when Raymond visits the vicarage to find that when Jack broke out on D Day he shot the family dogs because they wanted to stop him and Dorothy is so paralysed by grief that she is unable to even get out of her chair, where she has been for days, just hoping for death to come and take the pain away. Raymond has to start the machinery and remonstrate bitterly with the people of the village who should have called to see how she was, and did not call. Poor woman, to still be alive after losing everything which made her life meaningful; and all through sheer blind rotten bad luck.

The end chapter is written in a similar voice to the first chapter but features the activity of a historic preservation society who are doing an achaelogical dig in 1980 to recover an unidentified war bird from the earth. It turns out to be a P51, riddled with American calibre point five bullets, and with the remains of a woman pilot in the cockpit.

Not that this is a classic novel, but it is rather good and it is full of the fear, loss and sadness which goes with war and is yet also a part of ordinary life in peacetime as well. I liked this book in 1989 when I last read it but I feel that I understand it better now.