eyes down for a full house reading challenge thread 2021

[StoneRoad]

14) HMS Surprise by P O'Brian (underway 28/1/21)

15) Secret Norwich by E Walne (underway 29/1/21 - note ; I'll class this as a biography of some lesser known aspects to Norwich !)

 

[Sweet Meiga]

1/50 Michel Houellebecq - The Map and the Territory
2/50 Adam Stout - Glastonbury Holy Thorn: Story of a Legend

3/50 Michel Houellebecq - Submission

 

[QueenOfGoths]

1. "Exile" - James Swallow
2. "Rules For Perfect Murders" - Peter Swanson

3. "False Values" -Ben Aaronovitch. I think the series is getting a bit jaded and I didn't really enjoy this as much as the previous novels

 

[braindancer]

1/20 - The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
2/20 - The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

 

[kropotkin]

1. Dark Voyage - Alan Furst
2. The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi
3. Milkman - Anna Burns

 

[marty21]

1/70 The Bitterroots - C J Box
2/70 Black 13 - Adam Hamdy
3/70 A Dangerous Man - Robert Crais
4/70 City of the Dead - Sara Gran

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 Roger Steffens - So Much Things To Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley
2/45 Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind
3/45 Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
4/45 Liz Braswell - Unbirthday
5/45 Michael Wood - In Search of the Dark Ages

6/45 Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

 

[imposs1904]

1/35 Dancing in the Dark by Stuart M. Kaminsky
2/35 Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan (ReRead)
3/35 Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump
4/35 Who Goes There? by John Wood Campbell Jr.
5/35 Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action by Sean Birchall (ReRead)
6/35 Leighton Rees On Darts edited by Dave Lanning
7/35 The Left Left Behind by Terry Bisson

8/35 Bobby Dazzler: My Story by Bobby George

 

[Biddlybee]

1/20 - Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch
2/20 - The Tiger in the Well - Philip Pullman

 

[Threshers_Flail]

Oh, Jackie Wang snap! What did you make of it? I think I felt a bit lukewarm about it just after finishing, but the final section has really stuck in my head. I think I liked the poetic bits more than the academic bits, but mostly I just wish more of the book had been somewhere in the middle ground between the two? Also I remember hating Primitive Rebels back in the day, been around a decade since I read it though.

Sorry, missed this! Tbh I didn't think much of the poetry. The penultimate essay was very good and I'm planning on revisiting it soon. Overall I wasn't that impressed and felt like she hadn't covered much that's I'd not come across before. To be fair I was struggling to sleep when I read it so was always a bit lightheaded from CBD oil!

 

[StoneRoad]

14) HMS Surprise by P O'Brian (underway 28/1/21) completed 2/2/21

15) Secret Norwich by E Walne (underway 29/1/21 - note ; I'll class this as a biography of some lesser known aspects to Norwich !)

16) Mauritius Command by P O'Brian (underway 2/2/2021)

(can I count completely re-reading a complex tender submission ? This was in order to update it, if I needed to do so - I didn't need to do any alterations, by the way)

 

[hitmouse]

(can I count completely re-reading a complex tender submission ? This was in order to update it, if I needed to do so - I didn't need to do any alterations, by the way)

Complex tender submission, eh? Sounds a bit steamy.

 

[StoneRoad]

Complex tender submission, eh? Sounds a bit steamy.

Hahaha, no. Sorry to mislead you, t'was for something that hooks on the back of the loco's tender ...

 

[StoneRoad]

[QUOTE="StoneRoad, post: 16950287, member: 48530"

(can I count completely re-reading a complex tender submission ? This was in order to update it, if I needed to do so - I didn't need to do any alterations, by the way)
[/QUOTE]

Having just checked, it was getting on for 3,000 words plus a couple of appendices, with about another 1,500 words between them ...

 

[Chairman Meow]

4. Three Hours - Rosamund Lupton
5. Making Things Better - Anita Brookner (this was depressing even for Brookner)
6. The Monster in the Box - Ruth Rendell (again)

 

[Pickman's model]

1. Roderick Conway Morris, 'Jem: memoirs of an Ottoman secret agent' (London: Corgi, 1989)
2. Heather Ann Thompson, 'Blood in the water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its legacy' (New York: Vintage, 2017)
3. Laird Barron, 'Worse angels' (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2020)

 

[Fozzie Bear]

3/30 Christopher Hill - Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England.

The very comprehensive documentation makes this a bit of a trudge but also some good analysis. Suitably doomy atmospherics for the season.

 

[Pickman's model]

3/30 Christopher Hill - Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England.

The very comprehensive documentation makes this a bit of a trudge but also some good analysis. Suitably doomy atmospherics for the season.

brought to mind

 

[QueenOfGoths]

1. "Exile" - James Swallow
2. "Rules For Perfect Murders" - Peter Swanson

3."False Values" -Ben Aaronovitch

4. "The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" - unusual, interesting and at times scary thriller. I really enjoyed it.

 

[belboid]

1/30 - Tim Harford - How to Make the World Add Up
2/30 - Andreas Eschbach - The Hair-Carpet Weavers
3/30 - Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire - Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn
4/30 - Chris Mullin - The Friends of Harry Perkins

5/30 - Antonio Damasio - Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

A not entirely convincing book claiming emotion as a key factor in human logic and rationality. As the old saying goes. its interesting and new, but where its interesting it isn't new and where its new it is, well, deeply unconvincing.

 

[StoneRoad]

16) Mauritius Command by P O'Brian (underway 2/2/2021) completed 6/2/21

17) Desolation Island by P O'Brian (underway 6/2/21 & postponed until no 18 read)
18) Cuthbert's Way by LJ Ross (underway 6/2/2021)

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 Roger Steffens - So Much Things To Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley
2/45 Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind
3/45 Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
4/45 Liz Braswell - Unbirthday
5/45 Michael Wood - In Search of the Dark Ages
6/45 Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

7/45 Nizrana Farook - The Girl Who Stole an Elephant

 

[hitmouse]

1. "Exile" - James Swallow
2. "Rules For Perfect Murders" - Peter Swanson

3."False Values" -Ben Aaronovitch

4. "The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" - unusual, interesting and at times scary thriller. I really enjoyed it.

Oh, I'd just finished reading Turton's second book. Not having read Seven Deaths, I spent a good hundred or so pages trying to work out if it was a sequel before eventually realising it wasn't.

1/30 Jackie Wang - Carceral Capitalism
2/30 Jerold J Kreisman & Hal Straub - I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality
3/30 Stuart Turton - The Devil & The Dark Water
4/30 Doris Lessing - Martha Quest

I've decided to finally make 2021 the year I justify owning so many Doris Lessing books. For some reason I'd got the impression that the Children of Violence books were like a bit sci-fi or something, it turns out that this one definitely isn't, but maybe that changes as the series goes on. Also, for the past however many months of lockdown, whenever I've encountered a fictional or historical depiction of a party there's been at least a part of me that sort of responded with "ah, I wish I was there." Since a good deal of Martha Quest consists of parties made up of horrible racist 1930s South African rugby lads, I felt a good bit more conflicted about that than usual while reading.

 

[Winot]

1/29 Illness as Metaphor & Aids and its Metaphors - Susan Sontag
2/29 From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism - Paul Turner

Interesting though somewhat repetitive study of how the US military research establishments coming out of WWII and the New Communalist counterculture of the 1960s influenced the early days of computing and what became the internet. Illustrates how, in political terms, the focus on 'the self' of hippies fed through into libertarianism of the 1980s.

 

[BoatieBird]

1/52 - Susan Hill - The Vows of Silence
2/52 - Kiley Reid - Such a Fun Age
3/52 - Susan Hill - The Shadows in The Street
4/52 - Lisa McInerney - The Blood Miracles
5/52 - Patrick Gale - Take Nothing With You

6/52 - Susan Hill - The Betrayal of Trust

 

[nogojones]

1/45 Ippolita - In the Facebook Aquarium: The Resistible Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism
2/45 Peter F. Hamilton - Salvation Lost
3/45 Alfred Jarry - The Ubu Plays: Ubu Rex; Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu Unchained
4/45 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
5/45 Phillip Neel - Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict

6/45 Christopher Hill - A Nation of Change and Novelty
7/45 Plato - The Last Days of Scorates

 

[StoneRoad]

17) Desolation Island by P O'Brian (underway 6/2/21 & postponed until no 18 read)
18) Cuthbert's Way by LJ Ross (underway 6/2/2021) completed 8/2/21

tbh I wasn't very impressed with several of the DCI Ryan series, it had a very good start but two or three of the more recent books were a little below that standard. However, this last one and the immediate predecessor were much more engaging and as good as the first ones.

So, back to the horrible old Leopard ...

 

[seventh bullet]

1/30 The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) - Katie Mack

2/30 Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression - Wendy Z. Goldman

 

[Fozzie Bear]

4/30 Evie Nagy - Freedom of Choice

one of them little 33 1/3 books about albums. This one on Devo. Pretty cool but basically an extended magazine article as I guess they all are...

 

[hitmouse]

4/30 Evie Nagy - Freedom of Choice

one of them little 33 1/3 books about albums. This one on Devo. Pretty cool but basically an extended magazine article as I guess they all are...

The John Darnielle Master of Reality one is more like a short novel, which I liked but on the other hand Master of Reality is quite a silly album. Is it at least a good extended article?