back by popular demand it's the 2017 reading challenge thread

[Sea Star]

7. Salems Lot ~ Stephen King
not as good as I remembered. It's quite repetitive, slow, and extremely wordy. Started the first Game of Thrones book yesterday and quite excited about it.

 

[polly]

1/29 Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
2/29 Raymond Chandler, The High Window
3/29 Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases
4/29 Dennis Covington, Salvation on Snake Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
5/29 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
6/29 Octavia E Butler, Kindred
7/29 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
8/29 Bill Beverly, Dodgers
9/29 Xiaolu Guo, Once upon a time in the East

10/29 Paula Lichtarowicz, The First Book of Calamity Leek

I enjoyed this, was weird, funny and sad. It's a bit like The Handmaid's Tale but it's not making any serious points.

 

[kropotkin]

Right Mr kropotkin - here's a couple that fit your request and that i think are worth the time:

Stuart hall - Cultural Studies: a theoretical history. Ignore the wanky title, it's just a collection of a weeks lectures that he did in america in 83, essentially introducing a lot of of US based types to the whole discipline. Simple language used to develop and clarify complex concepts.

This is really very good, thanks for the recommendation.

But the one i would urge you to make time for is Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex byNick Dyer-Witherford as it ties together pretty much all the above.

This is up next. Last year I started the followup book and gave it up as it was toss. He kept peppering useful passages with completely useless digressions and literary allusions that looked try-hard and superfluous and just wasted my time. Hopefully the original will deliver!

Do not read Paul Mason. repeat - do not read Paul Mason.

Message received. Over.

 

[kropotkin]

1. Tom Rob Smith - child 44
2. Louisa Lim - People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited
3. Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami - Burning Country: Syrians in revolution and war
4. Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow
5. John Courtenay Grinwood - Arabesk
6. Harsha walia - undoing border imperialism
7. Howard zinn - a people's history of the united states
8. Simon Mawer - the glass room
9. Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism - Cindy Milstein (Editor)
10. Platform Capitalism - Nick Srnicek
11. The Meaning of Race - kenan malik
12. The name of the wind- Patrick Rothfuss
13. Folding Beijing - Hao Jingfang
14. Stories of your life and others- Ted Chiang
15. House of God - Samuel Shem
16. The Sellout - Paul Beatty
17. Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher
18. The Clockwork rocket- greg egan
19. Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class - Immanuel Ness
20. The power- naomi alderman
21. Stalin: court of the red tsar - Simon sebag-montefiori
22. The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
23. Violent Borders - refugees and the right to move - Reece Jones
24. Cultural Studies: A Theoretical History - Stuart Hall

 

[Pickman's model]

20/50 georges simenon, a crime in holland (london: penguin, 2014)

21/50 georges simenon, maigret and the man on the bench (london: penguin, 2017)

 

[Orang Utan]

1/60 Richard Price - The Whites
2/60 Ali Smith - Public Library & Other Stories
3/60 Hannah Eaton - Naming Monsters
4/60 Jeff Vandermeer - Authority
5/60 Simon Garfield - To The Letter - A Celebration Of The Lost Art Of Letter Writing
6/60 Claire North - The Sudden Appearance Of Hope
7/60 Dan Lepard - Short & Sweet
8/60 Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
9/60 George RR Martin - A Feast For Crows
10/60 Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
11/60 Adam Roberts - The Thing Itself
12/60 Roger Crowley - Empires Of The Sea The Final Battle For The Mediterranean, 1521-1580
13/60 Philip Hoare - Leviathan, or The Whale
14/60 Johan Hari - Chasing The Scream (don't bother reading this, it's shite)

 

[gawkrodger]

14/60 Johan Hari - Chasing The Scream (don't bother reading this, it's shite)

Did you honestly imagine anything by this snivelling fraud would be anything else?

 

[Orang Utan]

Did you honestly imagine anything by this snivelling fraud would be anything else?

I wanted to read a book about the drug war and i wanted to find out how much of a snivelling fraud he was.

 

[gawkrodger]

For reasons I won't bore anyone with I'm a bit behind my reading

1 - Kilcullen - Out of the Mountains
2 - McAlevey - Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) - re-read
3 - Srnicek - Platform Capitalism
4 - Frase - Four Futures
5 - Dickens - Night Walks
6 - Ellis & Henderson - English Planning in Crisis
7- Beaumont - Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London
8 - Dunn - Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City
9 - Mieville - The City & The City
10 - Benjamin - One-way Street and other writings
11- Schlosser - Gods of Metal

 

[gawkrodger]

4. Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow

what's this like - Got given it as an Xmas present a few years ago and not sure I've even ever read the back cover!

10. Platform Capitalism - Nick Srnicek

What did you think of this? I really rated it (with the usual cavaets when it comes to his work)

19. Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class - Immanuel Ness

yet another of those which has been sitting unread on my shelf

 

[D'wards]

1/26 - Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy (reread)
2/26 - Dead Funny: Horror Stories by Comedians - Edited by Robin Ince and Johnny Mains
3/26 - Frank Skinner on the Road by Frank Skinner
4/26 - Karlology by Karl Pilkington
5/26 - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
6/26 - Pennine Walkies by Mark Wallington
7/26 - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (reread)
8/26 - All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
9/26 - 2001 A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (reread)
10/26 - Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
11/26 - The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
12/26 - Dead Funny Encore: More Horror Stories by Comedians - Edited by Robin Ince and Johnny Mains
13/26 - The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend (reread)
14/26 - IT by Stephen King

 

[kropotkin]

what's this like - Got given it as an Xmas present a few years ago and not sure I've even ever read the back cover!



What did you think of this? I really rated it (with the usual cavaets when it comes to his work)

yet another of those which has been sitting unread on my shelf

Thinking fast and slow is interesting, and very detailed. Worth reading, and helpful for programming your defenses against cognitive error.

Platform capitalism was also good, but not great. Southern insurgency, on the other hand is the best thing I've read since Inventing the future.


Sent from my SM-T800 using Tapatalk

 

[Pickman's model]

21/50 georges simenon, maigret and the man on the bench (london: penguin, 2017)

22/50 georges simenon, the dancer at the gai-moulin (london: penguin, 2014)

 

[gawkrodger]

Thinking fast and slow is interesting, and very detailed. Worth reading, and helpful for programming your defenses against cognitive error.

Platform capitalism was also good, but not great. Southern insurgency, on the other hand is the best thing I've read since Inventing the future.

Sent from my SM-T800 using Tapatalk

I've cited the Ness book a number of times so probably should read it! ha

Will have to give the Kahneman book a shot then.

 

[stockwelljonny]

1/20 Claudius the God - Robert Graves
2/20 - Thus Bad Begins - Javier Marias
3/20 - Slow Burn City - Rowan Moore

 

[marty21]

1/75 Sanctuary : After it Happened Book 5 - Devon C Ford
2/75 1916 : The Morning After - Tim Pat Coogan
3/75 Last Stand at Saber River - Elmore Leonard
4/75 After : The Shock - Scott Nicholson
5/75 After : The Echo - Scott Nicholson
6/75 After : Milepost 291 - Scott Nicholson
7/75 After : Whiteout - Scott Nicholson
8/75 After : Red Scare - Scott Nicholson
9/75 Surviving The Evacuation : Ireland - Book 9 -Frank Tayell
10/75 Crisis - Frank Gardner
11/75 Outcast London : A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society - Gareth Stedman Jones
12/75 After : Dying Light - Scott Nicholson
13/75 The Ruins - T W Piperbrook
14/75 Confederates - Thomas Keneally
15/75 Black Water Lilies - Michel Bussi

*************
16/75 The Revenge of History - Seumas Milne

 

[BoatieBird]

1/65 - Laurie Lee - Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year
2/65 - John Irving - A Prayer for Owen Meany (1/10*)
3/65 - Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho
4/65 - William Boyd - Any Human Heart (2/10)
5/65 - Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
6/65 - John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat
7/65 - Andrew Michael Hurley - The Loney
8/65 - Tana French - Into The Woods (Dublin Murder Squad 1) (3/10)
9/65 - Larry McMurty - Lonesome Dove (4/10)
10/65 - Denise Mina - The Dead Hour (Paddy Meehan 2)
11/65 - Ian Rankin - The Flood
12/65 - Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife (Paddy Meehan 3)
13/65 - Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
14/65 - Bill Beverly - Dodgers
15/65 - Ruth Rendell - The Face of Trespass
16/65 - John Irving - The World According to Garp (5/10)
17/65 - Val McDermid - Out of Bounds
18/65 - Stuart Maconie - Hope and Glory: A People's History of Modern Britain
19/65 - Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
20/65 - Kate Atkinson - Emotionally Weird
21/65 - Roald Dahl - Madness

22/65 - Tana French - The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad 2) (6/10)

 

[Pickman's model]

22/50 georges simenon, the dancer at the gai-moulin (london: penguin, 2014)

23/50 georges simenon, madame maigret's friend (london: penguin, 2016)

 

[inva]

1/60 The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America by Naomi Murakawa
2/60 The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights by William P. Jones
3/60 The Lost Promise of Civil Rights by Risa L. Goluboff
4/60 Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican: Essays, articles and her translation of the Communist Manifesto edited by David Black
5/60 All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement by Carlotta R. Anderson
6/60 Behind the Crisis: Marx's Dialectics of Value and Knowledge by Guglielmo Carchedi
7/60 The Long Drop by Denise Mina
8/60 From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America by Leah N. Gordon
9/60 Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary by Carolyn Ashbaugh
10/60 Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation by Paul Mattick

 

[kropotkin]

Is that Mattick worth it inva?

 

[inva]

Is that Mattick worth it inva?

yeah I really rate what I've read of his. it doesn't add a whole lot to what I got from his Marx and Keynes book I read last year, but it's a very well and clearly written series of pieces mainly about the crisis of social democracy/keynesianism. and still highly relevant to today

 

[kropotkin]

Thanks inva.

 

[Threshers_Flail]

1/50 Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory
2/50 Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
3/50 Steve Reicher - Mad Mobs and Englishmen?: Myths and realities of the 2011 riots
4/50 Stuart Jeffries - Grand Hotel Abyss
5/50 Sean Birchall - Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-fascist Action
6/50 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
7/50 Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
8/50 Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed
9/50 Justin McGruick - Radical Cities
10/50 Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism
11/50 Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem
12/50 Martin Ford - Rise of the Robots
13/50 John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
14/50 Franz Kafka - The Trial (re-read)
15/50 Robert Baxell - Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism
16/50 John Berger - Ways of Seeing
17/50 Bill Beverly - Dodgers
18/50 Susan Sontag - On Photography
19/50 James Baldwin - Another Country
20/50 Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
21/50 Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
22/50 Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
23/50 Cormac McCarthy - Child of God
24/50 Nathan Hill - The Nix
25/50 Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
26/50 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/25 Ken Follett - World Without End
2/25 Frances Hardinge - Fly By Night
3/25 Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
4/25 Roald Dahl - Madness (short stories)
5/25 Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
6/25 David Rodigan - My Life in Reggae
7/25 Alan Garner - The Owl Service
8/25 William Goldman - The Princess Bride
9/25 George Orwell - Burmese Days
10/25 John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
11/25 Bill Beverly - Dodgers

12/25 Brian Jacques - Redwall

 

[Beats & Pieces]

25. Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction - Elliot Liu

 

[Orang Utan]

25. Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction - Elliot Liu

I think you should read something like The Da Vinci Code next

 

[Beats & Pieces]

I think you should read something like The Da Vinci Code next

I've read that, and it was terrible. Eco offered the best comment on Dan Brown, about which it would be impossible to disagree.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Orang Utan]

I've read that, and it was terrible. Eco offered the best comment on Dan Brown, about which it would be impossible to disagree.

Thanks for the suggestion.

ok then, maybe Game Of Thrones, something light?

 

[Beats & Pieces]

ok then, maybe Game Of Thrones, something light?

I've not watched the series, but have heard people speak highly of it and of the books upon which they are based. I don't know enough about the genre to know if this is true, I've read Tolkein (and hated it, but would give it a go. Are the books up to much?

 

[Orang Utan]

I've not watched the series, but have heard people speak highly of it and of the books upon which they are based. I don't know enough about the genre to know if this is true, I've read Tolkein (and hated it, but would give it a go. Are the books up to much?

They have many faults, but they are pure entertainment. The reason i posted was that you never seem to read anything for entertainment, which i find curious. I always had to have something on the go, even when i was studying.