eyes down for a full house reading challenge thread 2021

[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
5/70 Surviving The Evacuation: Book 18 : Rebuilt in One Day - Frank Tayell
6/70 Outback Outbreak - Frank Tayell
7/70 Big Sky - C J Box
8/70 Hungry - Grace Dent
9/70 The Grey Goose of Arnhem- Leo Heaps
10/70 Edge of Collapse - Kyla Stone
11/70 Edge of Madness - Kyla Stone
12/70 Edge of Anarchy - Kyla Stone
13/70 Empireland - Sathnam Sanghera
14/70 Phantom Prey - John Sandford
15/70 Anti-Social : The Secret Diary of An Anti-Social Behaviour Officer - Nick Pettigrew
16/70 Red Wolves - Adam Hamdy
17/70 Wicked Prey - John Sandford
18/70 Operation Chaos - The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought The CIA,The Brainwashers, And Themselves- Matthew Sweet
19/70 Dispatches - Michael Herr
20/70 Ramble Book : Musings on Childhood, Friendship,Family and 80s Pop Culture - Adam Buxton
21/70 This Other London : Adventures In The Overlooked City - John Rogers
22/70 A Song For The Dark Times - Ian Rankin
23/70 Pendulum - Adam Hamdy


****

24/70 Freefall - Adam Hamdy

 

[May Kasahara]

1. Lidia Yuknavitch - The Misfit's Manifesto.
2. Abi Daré - The Girl with the Louding Voice.
3. Caroline Bird - The Air Year.
4. Alice Walker - The Complete Stories
5. Kate Elizabeth Russell - My Dark Vanessa
6. We Are Wolves - horror anthology
7. Mhairi McFarlane - Last Night
8. Sarah Jane Blakemore - Inventing Ourselves
9. Carmen Maria Machado - Her Body and Other Parties

10. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Mexican Gothic. Very readable gothic horror with great Vandermeer/Lovecraft touches about it. Genuinely horrible in many places, but for the right reasons, if that makes sense. Will be reading more of her work.

 

[Biddlybee]

1/20 - Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch
2/20 - The Tiger in the Well - Philip Pullman
3/20 - Love and Obstacles - Aleksandar Hemon
4/20 - The Bees - Laline Paull
5/20 - The Radium Girls - Kate Moore (A)
6/20 - Hood Feminism - Mikki Kendall
7/20 - Many Different Kinds of Love - Michael Rosen (A)
8/20 - Full Tilt - Dervla Murphy (A)
9/20 - Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State - Bhattacharyya, Elliott-Cooper, Balani, Nişancıoğlu, Koram, Gebrial, El-Enany, De Noronha
10/20 - The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
11/20 - A Little Devil in America - Hanif Abdurraqib (A)
12/20 - Waiting for Anya - Michael Morpurgo
13/20 - The Ungrateful Refugee - Dina Nayeri (A)
14/20 - The Social Instinct - Nichola Raihani (A)
15/20 - The Book of Trespass - Nick Hayes
16/20 - Acid for the Children - Flea (A)
17/20 - Grimm Tales - Philip Pullman
18/20 - Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (A)
19/20 - Superior: The Return of Race Science - Angela Saini
20/20 - Everyday Sexism - Laura Bates (A)

should come with a trigger warning.

 

[hitmouse]

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
5/30 DD Johnston - Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs
6/30 Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
7/30 Bertolt Brecht - Threepenny Novel
8/30 Doris Lessing - A Proper Marriage
9/30 Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other
10/30 Ruth Kinna & Clifford Harper - Great Anarchists
11/30 Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
12/30 Doris Lessing - A Ripple from the Storm
13/30 Notes From Below - From the Workplace
14/30 Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan - Postcolonial Banter
15/30 EM Forster - Collected Short Stories
16/30 Doris Lessing - Landlocked
17/30 Sarah Schulman - Conflict Is Not Abuse
18/30 Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
19/30 Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain - Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists
20/30 Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City
21/30 Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi - The First Woman
22/30 Anne Boyer - A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
23/30 Sam McPheeters - Mutations: The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk
24/30 Maggie Nelson - Argonauts
25/30 David Wojnarowicz - Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

This is one of those I had to read twice in a row to properly appreciate, since the writing is so intense and energetic I got through it really quickly but also wanted to take my time letting it sink in a bit. Some really stunning writing in there.

26/30 Joey Comeau - Overqualifieder

A sort of sequel to Overqualified, if that means anything to anyone? Funny fake cover letters for job applications, anyway.

27/30 James Baldwin - Dark Days

Barely even counts as a book, it's a tiny wee collection of three essays/articles. Perhaps not Baldwin's best but still, he was pretty much always great. Now starting Willa Cather - Death Comes for the Archbishop. Which is... very Catholic, I dunno what I was expecting really.

 

[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
8/45 Peter F. Hamilton - Saints of Salvation
9/45 Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
10/45 Londa Schiebinger - Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
11/45 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
12/45 Ali Land - Good Me, Bad Me
13/45 Kate Tempest - Brand New Ancients
14/45 Salam Pax - The Baghad Blog
15/45 Silvia Federici - Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
16/45 Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - A Cat, A Man and Two Women
17/45 Philip K. Dick - Valis
18/45 Voltaire - Everyman Selected Writings
19/45 Anne Leckie - Ancillary Justice
20/45 Edward Lucie-Smith - Movements In Art Since 1945
21/45 Jim Thompson - Croppers Cabin
22/45 Willemien Otten and Nienke Vos. Eds. - Demons and the Devil in Ancient and Medieval Christianity
23/45 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
24/45 Philip K. Dick - Eye in the Sky
25/45 Doug Werner - Backpackers Start-Up
26/45 James Joyce - Dubliners
27/45 Raymond Williams - Communications
28/45 Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality Vol.1
29/45 Philip K. Dick - The Broken Bubble
30/45 N.K. Jemisin - The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
31/45 Tricia Jenkins - The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television

32/45 Ukrainian National Association (ed.) - Ukraine's Claim to Freedom (1915)
33/45 Philip K. Dick - The Divine Invasion

 

[Threshers_Flail]

1. Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
2. Eric Hobsbawm - Primitive Rebels
3. Jackie Wang - Carceral Capitalism
4. Ishay Landa - Fascism and the Masses
5. Virginie Despentes - Vernon Subutex
6. Catherine Liu - Virtue Hoarders
7. Olivia Laing - Funny Weather
8. Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
9. Emma Dabiri - What White People Can Do Next
10. Ben Lerner - The Topeka School
11. Bessel Van Der Kolk- The Body Keeps The Score
12. Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
13. Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
14. Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

15. Matt Anniss - Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music
16. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - The Mushroom at the End of the World

 

[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
9/35 A Season in Sinji by J. L. Carr
10/35 A Fatal Glass of Beer by Stuart M. Kaminsky
11/35 The Accidental Footballer by Pat Nevin
12/35 Bloody January by Alan Parks
13/35 February's Son by Alan Parks
14/35 In the All-Night Café: A Memoir of Belle and Sebastian's Formative Year by Stuart David
15/35 Great Days at Grange Hill by Jan Needle
16/35 Bobby March Will Live Forever by Alan Parks
17/35 Ten Men Won The League by Stephen Murray
18/35 Slim Jim Baxter: The Definitive Biography by Ken Gallacher
19/35 Who Are Ya?: 92 Football Clubs – and Why You Shouldn’t Support Them by Kevin Day
20/35 The April Dead by Alan Parks
21/35 Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop by Dave Rimmer
22/35 The Unrepentant Marxist by Harvey Pekar and Louis Proyect (Graphic Novel)
23/35 The Slab Boys Trilogy by John Byrne
24/35 Stones for Bread by Eva Torf Judd

25/35 The Crafty Cockney : the autobiography by Eric Bristow

It appears that 2021 is my year for reading the autobiographies of Darts players. That's three now. If only Jocky Wilson had penned his memoir.

 

[petee]

late start, eh

1: leigh fermor, a time to keep silent
2: haider, mistaken identity (3rd try, am getting through it this time)

 

[May Kasahara]

1. Lidia Yuknavitch - The Misfit's Manifesto.
2. Abi Daré - The Girl with the Louding Voice.
3. Caroline Bird - The Air Year.
4. Alice Walker - The Complete Stories
5. Kate Elizabeth Russell - My Dark Vanessa
6. We Are Wolves - horror anthology
7. Mhairi McFarlane - Last Night
8. Sarah Jane Blakemore - Inventing Ourselves
9. Carmen Maria Machado - Her Body and Other Parties
10. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Mexican Gothic

11. Lex Croucher - Reputation. Enjoyable costume drama trash that I read in a day.

 

[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
6/30 - Sudhir Hazareesingh - Black Spartacus: the Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
7/3- - Carolyn Fick - The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below

8/30 - Willie Vlautin - The Night Always Comes
9/30 - Pat Nevin - The Accidental Footballer
10/30 - Stephen Morris - Fast Forward: Confessions Of A Post-Punk Percussionist – Volume II
11/30 - Edouard Louis - Who Killed My Father?
12/30 - David Mitchell - Utopia Avenue

 

[little_legs]

11/30 - Edouard Louis - Who Killed My Father?

Did you like it? Would you recommend it?

 

[Threshers_Flail]

1. Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
2. Eric Hobsbawm - Primitive Rebels
3. Jackie Wang - Carceral Capitalism
4. Ishay Landa - Fascism and the Masses
5. Virginie Despentes - Vernon Subutex
6. Catherine Liu - Virtue Hoarders
7. Olivia Laing - Funny Weather
8. Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
9. Emma Dabiri - What White People Can Do Next
10. Ben Lerner - The Topeka School
11. Bessel Van Der Kolk- The Body Keeps The Score
12. Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
13. Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
14. Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

15. Matt Anniss - Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music
16. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - The Mushroom at the End of the World
17. Torrey Peters - Detransition Baby

 

[shifting gears]

1/25 - Kevin Barry - Night Boat to Tangier
2/25 - James Rebanks - English Pastoral: An Inheritance
3/25 - Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia
4/25 - Isaac Asimov - Foundation
5/25 - Mick Jackson - The Underground Man
6/25 - Jim Dodge - Not Fade Away
7/25 - Kurt Vonnegut - Cat’s Cradle
8/25 - Richard Wright - Black Boy (the restored text)
9/25 - Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
10/25 - Hans Fallada - Alone in Berlin
11/25 - David Keenan - This is Memorial Device
12/25 - J.G. Ballard - Cocaine Nights
13/25 - William McIlvanney - A Gift from Nessus

14/25 - Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle

 

[billy_bob]

1/69 Seishi Yokomizo - The Inugami Curse
2/69 Valeria Luiseldi - Lost Children Archive
3/69 William Faulker - Light in August
4/69 Nancy Jennings - Bats
5/69 Mark Forsyth - The Elements of Eloquence
6/69 Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman
7/69 Sholem Aleichem - Motl the Cantor's Son
8/69 Clive Upton, Stewart Sanderson and John Widdowson - Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England
9/69 Shaun Bythell - Seven Kinds of People you Find in Bookshops
10/69 Mignon Fogarty - The Grammar Devotional
11/69 Danny Dorling - The Equality Effect
12/69 ZZ Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
13/69 Deborah Eisenburg - Your Duck Is My Duck
14/69 Michael Rosen - So They Call You Pisher!
15/69 Alison Moore - Missing
16/69 Colum McCann - Zoli
17/69 Felix Weinberg - Boy 30529: A Memoir
18/69 Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
19/69 Colson Whitehead - The Nickel Boys
20/69 Atul Gawande - The Checklist Manifesto
21/69 Jeremy Hardy - Jeremy Hardy Speaks Volumes
22/69 David Szalay - All That Man Is
23/69 Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness
24/69 Robert Macfarlane - The Wild Places
25/69 Judith Hermann - Alice
26/69 Alice Gregory - Nodding Off: The Science of Sleep from Cradle to Grave
27/69 Deborah Levy - Swimming Home
28/69 Robert Macfarlane - Landmarks
29/69 Steve Hanley - The Big Midweek: Life Inside the Fall
30/69 Kevin Barry - Beatlebone
31/69 Susie Dent - Word Perfect
32/69 Irenosen Okojie - Nudibranch
33/69 Pamela Hurle - Bygone Malvern
34/69 Colum McCann - Apeirogon
35/69 Travis Elborough - Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World's Most Unusual Corners

36/69 Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River
37/69 Kit de Waal - Supporting Cast

 

[belboid]

Did you like it? Would you recommend it?

It’s well worth putting a couple of hours aside for. It’s a short read but a powerful one, how he moves from a ‘hatred’ for his father to a hatred of the bastards that killed him is both moving and infuriating.

 

[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
8/45 Andrew Chaikin - A Man on the Moon: the Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
9/45 Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals
10/45 Katherine Rundell - Rooftoppers
11/45 Carrie Gibson - Empire's Crossroads: a History of the Carribbean from Columbus to the Present Day
12/45 Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated
13/45 Robert Jordan - A Crown of Swords
14/45 Albert Camus - The Stranger
15/45 Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club
16/45 Andre Gide - The Vatican Cellars
17/45 Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
18/45 Robert Jordan - The Path of Daggers
19/45 A N Wilson - After the Victorians: the Decline of Britain in the World
20/45 Ian Thomson - The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica
21/45 Bram Stoker - Dracula
22/45 Neil Gaiman - Fortunately, the Milk
23/45 Laura Spinney - Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
24/45 Carlos Moore - Fela: This Bitch of a Life
25/45 Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
26/45 Robin Hobb - Assassin's Apprentice
27/45 L Frank Baum - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
28/45 L Frank Baum - The Marvelous Land of Oz
29/45 L Frank Baum - Ozma of Oz
30/45 Lisa Jewell - The Family Upstairs
31/45 Linda Woodhead - Christianity: a Very Short Introduction
32/45 Alastair Reynolds - Aurora Rising
33/45 Joe Abercrombie - A Little Hatred
34/45 Don Letts - There and Black Again
35/45 Sathnam Sanghera - Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain
36/45 Mike Berners-Lee - There is no Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
37/45 L Frank Baum - Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
38/45 L Frank Baum - The Road to Oz
39/45 L Frank Baum - The Emerald City of Oz
40/45 James Rebanks - English Pastoral: An Inheritance
41/45 Stephen Fry - Troy
42/45 William Wordsworth - A Guide Through the District of the Lakes in the North of England
43/45 Steve Jones - Lonely Boy
44/45 Robert Jordan - Winter's Heart

45/45 Nick Hayes - The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Really enjoyed that one.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

15/30 Jennifer Lucy Allan - The Foghorn’s Lament: The disappearing music of the coast.

A lovely social history of foghorns and the interesting obsessives and eccentrics the author encounters on her quest to find out about their sounds.


Here is a photo of my cat Zip asleep on the book also.

 

[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
3/29 Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture - Douglas Coupland
4/29 London's Pall Mall Clubs - David Palfreyman
5/29 The Century of Revolution - Christopher Hill
6/29 Outline - Rachel Cusk
7/29 Universities and Colleges A Very Short Introduction - Palfreyman and Temple
8/29 Moonraker - Ian Fleming
9/29 Chemistry in 17th-Century New England - Gary Patterson
10/29 A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr
11/29 Fake Accounts - Lauren Oyler
12/29 The Lion and the Unicorn - George Orwell
13/29 The Lesser Bohemians - Eimear McBride
14/29 The Oxford Tutorial - ed. David Palfreyman
15/29 The Investor's Guide to Understanding Accounts - Robert Leach
16/29 A Dream of Wessex - Christopher Priest

17/29 The Invested Investor - Peter Cowley
18/29 The Glade and other stories - Paul Bassett Davies

 

[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

3/30 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot

4/30 Failed Fuhrers: A History of Britain's Extreme Right - Graham Macklin

5/30 The Spectre of Babeuf - Ian Birchall

6/30 To Do Something Beautiful - Rohini Hensman

7/30 Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism - John Callaghan

8/30 The East was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World - Vijay Prasad (editor)

9/30 The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde - Owen Hatherley

10/30 Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream - Francis Spufford

11/30 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - Dee Brown

12/30 Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard - Russell Miller

13/30 Stalin's Economic Advisors: The Varga Institute and the Making of Soviet Foreign Policy - Kyung Deok Roh

14/30 Random Acts of Senseless Violence - Jack Womack

15/30 India's Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi - Mala Sen

16/30 The Vernaculars of Communism: Language, Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - Petre Petrov and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (editors)

 

[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
7/52 - Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch (re-read)
8/52 - Val McDermid - Still Life
9/52 - Patricia Highsmith - Carol
10/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Lake of Darkness
11/52 - Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad
12/52 - Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club
13/52 - Stephen King - Later
14/52 - Yazuo Ishiguro - When We Were Orphans
15/52 - Stephen King - 'Salem's Lot
16/52 - Robert Galbraith - Troubled Blood
17/52 - Ian McEwan - Nutshell
18/52 - Joe Hill - Full Throttle
19/52 - Barbara Vine - A Dark-Adapted Eye
20/52 - Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon
21/52 - Minette Walters - Chickenfeed
22/52 - Patricia Highsmith - People Who Knock on Doors
23/52 - Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather
24/52 - Hilary Mantel - The Mirror and the Light
25/52 - Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveller's Wife
26/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Crocodile Bird (re-read)
27/52 - Michael Farris Smith - Blackwood
28/52 - Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse
29/52 - Peter James - Left You Dead
30/52 - Robert Webb - How Not To Be a Boy
31/52 - David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (re-read)
32/52 - Ann Cleeves - The Long Call
33/52 - Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find

34/52 - Audrey Niffenegger - Her Fearful Symmetry

 

[hitmouse]

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
5/30 DD Johnston - Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs
6/30 Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
7/30 Bertolt Brecht - Threepenny Novel
8/30 Doris Lessing - A Proper Marriage
9/30 Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other
10/30 Ruth Kinna & Clifford Harper - Great Anarchists
11/30 Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
12/30 Doris Lessing - A Ripple from the Storm
13/30 Notes From Below - From the Workplace
14/30 Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan - Postcolonial Banter
15/30 EM Forster - Collected Short Stories
16/30 Doris Lessing - Landlocked
17/30 Sarah Schulman - Conflict Is Not Abuse
18/30 Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
19/30 Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain - Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists
20/30 Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City
21/30 Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi - The First Woman
22/30 Anne Boyer - A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
23/30 Sam McPheeters - Mutations: The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk
24/30 Maggie Nelson - Argonauts
25/30 David Wojnarowicz - Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
26/30 Joey Comeau - Overqualifieder
27/30 James Baldwin - Dark Days
28/30 Willa Cather - Death Comes for the Archbishop

I can't really say I loved this one. The setting being Catholic priests on the frontier during the 19th-century colonisation of the southwest US means that it's not the easiest book for a contemporary reader to sympathise with, and then the plot and characters didn't really engage me enough to make up for it. But if anyone played Red Dead Redemption 2 and thought "I really like this setting, but I wish that instead of cowboys doing cowboy things it was just Catholic priests doing Catholic stuff instead", then I would 100% recommend it to them. Also, incredibly funny of Willa Cather to call it Death Comes for the Archbishop, as if it was an exciting murder mystery or something, when a) the plot of the book is that the guy lives a long and successful life and then dies of old age on the last page, and b) he spends most of his life as a bishop, gets promoted to archbishop on page 179, and then retires on page 186. And pages 183-184 just consist of a chapter header and then a page left blank following the chapter header, just to make it clear how little of this book involves this guy being an archbishop. Anyway, starting Peter Cole - Wobblies on the Waterfront next. Which will probably have less bishops in?

 

[D'wards]

1/24 - The Terror by Dan Simmons
2/24 - London's Fields: An Intimate History of London Football Fandom by Mark Waldon (aka Cerberus )
3/24 - Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4/24 - Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
5/24 - Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
6/24 - 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
7/24 - Ramble Book by Adam Buxton
8/24 - Volcano Adventure by Willard Price
9/24 - Creepshow by Stephen King
10/24 - Jaws by Peter Benchley (reread)
11/24 - What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe
12/24 - The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey
13/24 - Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix
14/24 - Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
15/24 - Limitless: The Autobiography by Tim Peake
16/24 - World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (reread)
17/24 - The Trials of Koli by M.R. Carey

 

[Signal 11]

7/10 - The Obelisk Gate - N. K. Jemisin

 

[Biddlybee]

1/20 - Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch
2/20 - The Tiger in the Well - Philip Pullman
3/20 - Love and Obstacles - Aleksandar Hemon
4/20 - The Bees - Laline Paull
5/20 - The Radium Girls - Kate Moore (A)
6/20 - Hood Feminism - Mikki Kendall
7/20 - Many Different Kinds of Love - Michael Rosen (A)
8/20 - Full Tilt - Dervla Murphy (A)
9/20 - Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State - Bhattacharyya, Elliott-Cooper, Balani, Nişancıoğlu, Koram, Gebrial, El-Enany, De Noronha
10/20 - The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
11/20 - A Little Devil in America - Hanif Abdurraqib (A)
12/20 - Waiting for Anya - Michael Morpurgo
13/20 - The Ungrateful Refugee - Dina Nayeri (A)
14/20 - The Social Instinct - Nichola Raihani (A)
15/20 - The Book of Trespass - Nick Hayes
16/20 - Acid for the Children - Flea (A)
17/20 - Grimm Tales - Philip Pullman
18/20 - Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (A)
19/20 - Superior: The Return of Race Science - Angela Saini
20/20 - Everyday Sexism - Laura Bates (A)
21/20 - So They Call You Pisher! - Michael Rosen (A)

 

[QueenOfGoths]

1. Exile" - James Swallow
2. "Rules For Perfect Murders" - Peter Swanson
3."False Values" -Ben Aaronovitch
4. "The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" - Stuart Turton
5. "The Kind Worth Killing For" Peter Swanson
6. "Fellside" - M. R. Carey
7. "The Devil and the Dark Water" - Stuart Turton
8. "In the Dark, Dark Wood" - Ruth Ware
9."Cry Baby" - Mark Billingham
10. "Little Disasters" - Sarah Vaughan
11. "A Song for the Dark Times" - Ian Rankin
12. "The Last Thing to Burn" - Will Dean
13. "The Sanatorium" - Sarah Pearse.
14. "Blood Orange" - Harriet Tyce
15: "Recursion" - Blake Crouch
16. "The Woman in Cabin 10"- Ruth Ware.
18. "The Turn of the Key" - Ruth Ware
19. The Passengers" - John Marrs
20. "Anatomy of a Scandal" - Sarah Vaughan
21 ."The Six" - Luca Veste
22. "The Sentence is Death" - Anthony Horowitz
23. "The Silent Patient" - Alex Michaelides
24: Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty
25: "Out of the Dark" - Gregg Hurwitz

26. "The Coffinmaker's Garden" - Stuart MacBride. Not as good as his Logan Macrae books. Going for gritty but comes across as trying too hard.

 

[imposs1904]

1. Exile" - James Swallow
2. "Rules For Perfect Murders" - Peter Swanson
3."False Values" -Ben Aaronovitch
4. "The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" - Stuart Turton
5. "The Kind Worth Killing For" Peter Swanson
6. "Fellside" - M. R. Carey
7. "The Devil and the Dark Water" - Stuart Turton
8. "In the Dark, Dark Wood" - Ruth Ware
9."Cry Baby" - Mark Billingham
10. "Little Disasters" - Sarah Vaughan
11. "A Song for the Dark Times" - Ian Rankin
12. "The Last Thing to Burn" - Will Dean
13. "The Sanatorium" - Sarah Pearse.
14. "Blood Orange" - Harriet Tyce
15: "Recursion" - Blake Crouch
16. "The Woman in Cabin 10"- Ruth Ware.
18. "The Turn of the Key" - Ruth Ware
19. The Passengers" - John Marrs
20. "Anatomy of a Scandal" - Sarah Vaughan
21 ."The Six" - Luca Veste
22. "The Sentence is Death" - Anthony Horowitz
23. "The Silent Patient" - Alex Michaelides
24: Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty
25: "Out of the Dark" - Gregg Hurwitz

26. "The Coffinmaker's Garden" - Stuart MacBride. Not as good as his Logan Macrae books. Going for gritty but comes across as trying too hard.

I see you have a couple of 'cough' Tartan Noir books in your list. I'd recommend Alan Parks if you haven't already read him.

 

[QueenOfGoths]

I see you have a couple of 'cough' Tartan Noir books in your list. I'd recommend Alan Parks if you haven't already read him.

Thanks, I'll look him up Always on the lookout for some more crime fiction.

Ian Rankin was on BBC6 this morning talking about finishing a novel started by William Mcllvaney, who I've never read, and that sounded rather interesting.

 

[BoatieBird]

Alan Parks has also been added to my list, thanks imposs1904

 

[Fozzie Bear]

16/30 Philip Larkin - All That Jazz: A Record Diary

An anthology of record reviews the man did for the Daily Telegraph, no less, between 1961 and 1971. Probably best read in bursts.

It's interesting because Larkin obviously loves jazz, but hates the modern jazz being made throughout the 1960s. It end up being a textbook in conservatism, with him grudgingly admitting in the introduction to the book that he now quite likes Charlie Parker (as opposed to his reviews in the book), because it sounds better than the music which followed.

Obvs Larkin is a decent wordsmith and it is very amusing to read his thoughts on records and musicians I like:



There are a lot of postive reviews of older material, blues stuff, trad things etc too.

Well worth the £2 I paid for it from Oxfam Books in Islington.

 

[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
8/45 Andrew Chaikin - A Man on the Moon: the Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
9/45 Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals
10/45 Katherine Rundell - Rooftoppers
11/45 Carrie Gibson - Empire's Crossroads: a History of the Carribbean from Columbus to the Present Day
12/45 Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated
13/45 Robert Jordan - A Crown of Swords
14/45 Albert Camus - The Stranger
15/45 Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club
16/45 Andre Gide - The Vatican Cellars
17/45 Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
18/45 Robert Jordan - The Path of Daggers
19/45 A N Wilson - After the Victorians: the Decline of Britain in the World
20/45 Ian Thomson - The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica
21/45 Bram Stoker - Dracula
22/45 Neil Gaiman - Fortunately, the Milk
23/45 Laura Spinney - Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
24/45 Carlos Moore - Fela: This Bitch of a Life
25/45 Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
26/45 Robin Hobb - Assassin's Apprentice
27/45 L Frank Baum - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
28/45 L Frank Baum - The Marvelous Land of Oz
29/45 L Frank Baum - Ozma of Oz
30/45 Lisa Jewell - The Family Upstairs
31/45 Linda Woodhead - Christianity: a Very Short Introduction
32/45 Alastair Reynolds - Aurora Rising
33/45 Joe Abercrombie - A Little Hatred
34/45 Don Letts - There and Black Again
35/45 Sathnam Sanghera - Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain
36/45 Mike Berners-Lee - There is no Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
37/45 L Frank Baum - Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
38/45 L Frank Baum - The Road to Oz
39/45 L Frank Baum - The Emerald City of Oz
40/45 James Rebanks - English Pastoral: An Inheritance
41/45 Stephen Fry - Troy
42/45 William Wordsworth - A Guide Through the District of the Lakes in the North of England
43/45 Steve Jones - Lonely Boy
44/45 Robert Jordan - Winter's Heart
45/45 Nick Hayes - The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

46/45 Anonymous - The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken