What book(s) are you reading currently?

[otokonomidori]

"The War That Ended Peace" Margaret Macmillan

[charliels531]

"The Family Fang" by Kevin Wilson.

All families are fucked up. If the parents are performance artists who include their children (Child A and Child B) in their performances, it leads to unusual upfuckedness.

[scoundrel]

Once again I am revisiting my youth - but this is a bit of a minor classic, for all the extremely dated and in some respects racist background assumptions and attitudes. I wasn't very impressed when I learned recently that the name of Laura Ingalls-Wilder is not acceptable to be used for a children's book prize because she expressed racist positions in The Little House on the Prairie ~ - a story of the pioneering American West in which conflict and animosity would have been integral to the real history. It is revisionism disguised as political correctness and in which people are to be pilloried as scapegoats for expressing the spirit of their own times. Indeed, a pirate character in The Coral Island rather accurately describes political correctness, well over 100 years before political correctness existed as a dictionary term.

Bloody Bill: There’s a set o’ soft-hearted folk at home that I knows on who don’t like to have their feelin’s ruffled; and when you tell them anything they don’t like—that shocks them, as they call it—no matter how true it be, they stop their ears and cry out, ‘Oh, that is too horrible! We can’t believe that!’ An’ they say truth. They can’t believe it, ’cause they won’t believe it.

The Coral Island is the story which later inspired the classic dystopian Lord of the Flies by William Golding. In The Coral Island the adolescent child characters encounter and conflict with evil people as part of their passage into manhood - Golding inverted that narrative and made a story in which the absence of social structures set at liberty the evils lurking within the characters and the evil comes from them, not from external bad guys.

RM Ballantyne had never been to the South Pacific and some of his lack of knowledge is easy to see in the book, for example in his inaccurate description of coconuts, not so easily cracked open in real life. But this is an imaginary universe after all, so IMHO that sort of thing is not important. His descriptions of the island are still engrossing, and the group chemistry of the three teenaged boys who are shipwrecked upon it is very well created. The pace of the storytelling is fast and avoids boring interludes - Ballantine makes a point of missing out anything which is beside the point of the actual story - there isn't much padding in this book.

The narrator is Ralph Rover. It isn't his real name but he has always been restless and inclined to explore new places and earned the nickname from his shipmates even before his voyage to the South Seas began. He tells the story as an older person looking back on his teenage years and is 15 when the adventures begin. His two fellow survivors are Peterkin Gay aged 13, who is somewhat daft as a brush but also clever and inventive, and Jack Martin, aged 18, who proves to be a natural and talented leader and a very good craftsman, for example able to design and do most of the work to build a very reliable small boat using only local materials and extremely limited tools. Ralph's contribution to the group is as an earnest (not much sense of humour) but stalwart and dependable person who keeps everyone steady; he is also the reflective and philosophical one.

The book narrative splits into three main sections. In the first section, the boys survive their shipwreck and stabilise their group, establishing a long term survival outpost and micro-community, with even a pet cat which they find marooned on the island and adopt. In the second section, Ralph is abducted from the island and the group by a pirate ship and forced to survive very different perils. His gift for getting along with people works again, though the challenge this time is that his companions are all murderers, pirates and worse - but by keeping quiet and observing, he gradually identifies the one pirate who dislikes the life and regrets his own involvement in the life, and who could potentially be an ally in a future escape.

In the final section, Ralph has escaped the massacre of the pirate crew by the population of a native island whom they tried to brutalise and rip-off; his one friend on the pirate crew helped him get away in the pirate schooner but died of wounds afterwards, passing peacefully because his final deeds were honourable and he is no longer accursed. Ralph can navigate and has managed to obtain the ship's log and chart and so finds his way back there in an ocean capable vessel in order to spring his friends and seek a return to the rest of humanity.

This return must pass via the South Sea Islanders, who are not necessarily friendly...

It is a good story and entertaining. The book also explores some rather dark themes. Even though it is frankly imperialistic and celebratory of western civilisation, the book deals with some stark honesty with the villainy and squalor inherent in the exploitation of other peoples and cultures; Ballantyne is very fair in describing how the fate of the British pirates at the hands of cannibal islanders is no more than they deserve, and though they are also bad guys, the islanders totally have justification. We have seen on a previous island that the crew were chased off for trying to steal sandalwood without payment and the captain fired a cannon with grapeshot into the islanders on the beach, with results so grim that even the rest of the pirates are shocked, and wish he hadn't done it. Although the values of the book are black and white, the story includes a lot or moral relativism and shades of grey.

[Cindy Soek]

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austin

Early Austin and not published until after her death. It’s an effortless novel. Of its time, as in the story only exists in the narrow bubble of Austin’s experience (all her work does). It’s superb and very funny... and not her masterpiece by a long chalk!

[73north]

Strips

• Strontium Dog- A Safe Haven by writer Alexi Conman and artist David Parsons
• Strontium Dog- Black & Blue And Red All Over by writer and artist RoboMonkey147
• Strontium Dog's- Just In Time by writer Iain Purdie and artist Dan Goodfellow
• Strontium Dog's- Relationships by writer Mark Howard and artist Brian Rankin
• Strontium Dog's- Stealth Mission by writer Luke Foster and artist David Broughton
• Strontium Dog's- Unforgivable by writer Mark Howard and artist Simon Bennett Hayes

Simply a Joy to read - a lot of these Fanzine's have stories the equal to actual Comic that are the ' First Team '
available to buy from ' FutureQuakePress.co.uk ' for only £ 3

[loplop]

An excellent book about the making of 2001: A Space Odyseey and dynamics involved between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.

[rosestone]

I read a couple of his about 10 years ago, and they all have a similar feel, strangely lonely and mythical (although not) - or is the word 'mythological'? Whichever. Pretty good reads, anyway

[jesegr]

Originally Posted by rosestone

I read a couple of his about 10 years ago, and they all have a similar feel, strangely lonely and mythical (although not) - or is the word 'mythological'? Whichever. Pretty good reads, anyway

Great book, although my fave of his will always be Blood Meridian, or An Evening Redness in the West. Check that one out if you haven't.

[GraemeAU50]

I've got a bookcase full of books I'm working my way through and just finished reading the Nile Rodgers autobiography

Really good read from his sickly childhood through to becoming a world famous producer and session muso and surviving through the excesses of fame

[Clouddancer]

Have just finished A Prayer Before Dawn about a guy from Liverpool who received a 3 year prison sentence in Thailand. Gritty & harrowing stuff, all caused by drugs of course.

On a lighter note I also finished, for the third time in my life, both Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome & The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith just to cleanse the soul a little.