eyes down for a full house reading challenge thread 2021

[Smokeandsteam]

1/35 Wayne Hussey - Salad Daze
2/35 Steven Morris - Fast Forward: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: Volume 2
3/35 Paul Gilroy - There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation
4/35 Beatrix Campbell - Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places
5/35 Ralph Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour
6/35 Adolf Reed Jr - Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
7/35 Adolf Reed Jr - Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-segregation Era
8/35 Adolf Reed Jr - Nothing Left: The Long Slow Surrender of American Liberals
9/35 Jack Holland & Henry McDonald - INLA: Deadly Divisions
10/35: Cedric Johnson (Ed): The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans
11/35: Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb - The Hidden Injuries of Class
12/35: John Cruddas: The Dignity of Labour
13/35: Huw Benyon: Working For Ford
14/35: Gavin Mueller: Breaking Things at Work
15/35: Paul Romano & Ria Stone: The American Worker
16/35: Geoff Eley: Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe 1850-2000
17/35 Huw Benyon: The Shadow of the Mine
18/35 Deborah Price & Natalie Butts-Thompson: How Black Were Our Valleys
19/35 David Edgerton: The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History
20/35 Cynthia Cruz: The Melancholia of Class - A Manifesto for the Working Class
21/35 Quinn Slobodian: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
22/35 Pat Nevin: The Accidental Footballer
23/35 Gabriel Winant: The Next Shift, The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt America

 

[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

35/52 - Belinda Bauer - Exit
36/52 - Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis

 

[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

38/69 Kerry Hudson - Lowborn
39/69 Rick Zednik - A Country Lost, Then Found: Discovering My Father's Slovakia
40/69 Kevin Barry - That Old Country Music

 

[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

26/35 I Love Me (Who Do You Love?) by Gordon Legge (ReRead)

 

[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

15/25 - The Secret DJ - The Secret DJ
16/25 - William McIlvanney - The Big Man

 

[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
29/30 Peter Cole - Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia

Like with any old wobbly stuff or similar, this is simultaneously really inspiring and saddening/frustrating to read from the perspective of the modern-day union movement, full of stuff like "Fletcher went over to Baltimore and quickly convinced another seven ships to come out on sympathy strikes" and the like. Nice and readable for an academic-type book.

30/30 John Berger - And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

John Berger being John Berger. Time, space, love, separation, migration, poetry, rail stations, language. I really liked it, I did think that perhaps being squashed up against the window of a late-running National Express coach wasn't the best situation for me to really appreciate Berger's musings but perhaps it sort of was in a way. Now starting Jill Sexsmith - Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You.

 

[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

47/45 David Bishop & Karl Stock - Thrill-Power Overload: 2000AD - The First Forty Years

 

[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

19/29 The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - Andy Miller

 

[colbhoy]

1/9 - A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman
2/9 - Taken by Robert Crais
3/9 - Benediction by Kent Haruf
4/9 - Perfect Prey by Helen Fields
5/9 - The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
6/9 - The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

 

[Fozzie Bear]

17/30 Judy and Fred Vermorel - Fandemonium! The book of fan cults and dance crazes

From 1988. Nice “scrapbook” on fan hysteria that starts with the tango and outpourings of grief at the death of Rudolph Valentino and takes in obsession, lust and psychopathy via Elvis, the Bay City Rollers, Goldie Hawn and a cast of thousands. “These days it takes more talent to be a fan than a celebrity”.

 

[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
18/25 - Oh! To be in England by H.E. Bates

 

[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
29/30 Peter Cole - Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia
30/30 John Berger - And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
31/30 Jill Sexsmith - Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You

The blurb had a quote comparing it to Miranda July, which is always a mistake cos inviting readers to compare your book to a really good author is setting it up to fail a bit. In particular, Miranda July has a knack of doing stuff that is easy to write off on first appearance as self-indulgent twee whimsy but then turns out to be really intelligent and powerful, whereas some of Sexsmith's magical realism stuff seemed to not really make that jump and just seemed like cutesy whimsy to me. But having said that, a bit more than half way through there was a story about a piano-playing child prodigy and a stock market crash that was really properly great, and I liked everything I read after that a bit more, I dunno if the stuff toward the end of the collection actually was better or if I just had a higher opinion of her writing after the piano prodigy story. Next up, starting Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey (and Bhanu Kapil and Alice Spawls) - Unknown Language.

 

[billy_bob]

Thanks for that appraisal hitmouse. I agree that July seems able to pull off a level of quirkiness that would be utterly infuriating in less skilled hands, and I might have bought Sexsmith's book on the basis of the comparison. Maybe not now (although I wonder how much the comparison was prompted by the title of the collection - definite ring of 'No one Belongs Here More Than You' to it ...)

 

[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

*****

25/70 Aftershock - Adam Hamdy

 

[hitmouse]

Thanks for that appraisal hitmouse. I agree that July seems able to pull off a level of quirkiness that would be utterly infuriating in less skilled hands, and I might have bought Sexsmith's book on the basis of the comparison. Maybe not now (although I wonder how much the comparison was prompted by the title of the collection - definite ring of 'No one Belongs Here More Than You' to it ...)

I'd still say it's worth a read, just go into it with your expectations adjusted accordingly.

 

[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
35/52 - Belinda Bauer - Exit
36/52 - Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis

37/52 - Ruth Rendell - A Judgement in Stone (re-read)

 

[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
15/25 - The Secret DJ - The Secret DJ
16/25 - William McIlvanney - The Big Man

17/25 - Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

 

[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
26/35 I Love Me (Who Do You Love?) by Gordon Legge (ReRead)

27/35 The Glass Cage by Georges Simenon (Reading Challenge)

 

[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
7/30 - 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

13/30 - Ignacio Iglesias - The Final Weeks of the Spanish Republic
14/30 - Amia Srinivasan - The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century
15/30 - Ben Teitelbaum - War for Eternity: inside Bannon’s Far Right Circle of Power Brokers

 

[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

27. "The Nameless Ones" - John Connolley. Not his best novel though I still enjoy his characters and he remains one of my favourite novelists

 

[hitmouse]

13/30 - Ignacio Iglesias - The Final Weeks of the Spanish Republic
14/30 - Amia Srinivasan - The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century
15/30 - Ben Teitelbaum - War for Eternity: inside Bannon’s Far Right Circle of Power Brokers

What do you make of the Srinivasan? She seems pretty impressive from what I've read of her. And is the Iglesias related to the thread on here or just a coincidence?
Anyway:

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
29/30 Peter Cole - Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia
30/30 John Berger - And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
31/30 Jill Sexsmith - Somewhere a Long and Happy Life Probably Awaits You
32/30 Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey (and Bhanu Kapil and Alice Spawls) - Unknown Language

A very odd book. Perhaps I'd appreciate it more if I knew more about Hildegard of Bingen going in, although fellow Hildegard of Bingen noobs can be reassured that the Alice Spawls section at the end is a sort of biography of her. Anyway, I would 100% play a video game based on Huw Lemmey's interpretation of Hildegard of Bingen's life and visions. Unfortunate that one of the most dramatic and intense sections of the book involves a character slicing her leg open on a metal spike while climbing, which Lemmey must surely have realised would make contemporary readers think of "Lyn! I've pierced my foot on a spike!"
Now starting Richard Seymour - The Twittering Machine. Really good so far.

 

[belboid]

What do you make of the Srinivasan? She seems pretty impressive from what I've read of her. And is the Iglesias related to the thread on here or just a coincidence?

The Iglesias is available for £2 on kubo, so i picked it up. An interesting read, i keep meaning to go back to the thread and comment on/from it.

The Srinivasan is absolutely brilliant, easily the book of the year for me so far. It's sharp, witty, doesn't patronise the reader and takes on the strongest arguments on the relevant topics. Even where I disagree with her (a rarity) she ays out really clearly the rationale behind her points so it is easy to really narrow down the specificity of the disagreement, iyswim. It expresses many of the key issues around what some might call identity politics and shows how best, albeit messily, we can deal with them. I will be buying several more copies to give to people.

 

[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
26/35 I Love Me (Who Do You Love?) by Gordon Legge (ReRead)
27/35 The Glass Cage by Georges Simenon (Reading Challenge)

28/35 The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally (Reading Challenge)

 

[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)

17/30 Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire - Tim Harper

 

[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
26/35 I Love Me (Who Do You Love?) by Gordon Legge (ReRead)
27/35 The Glass Cage by Georges Simenon (Reading Challenge)
28/35 The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally (Reading Challenge)

29/35 The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

 

[shifting gears]

29/35 The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

What was this like? I’ve just recently started dipping into McIlvanney and been enjoying his stuff so far

 

[Fozzie Bear]

18/30 Fred Vermorel - Queen Victoria’s Lovers: Erotomania & Fantasy.

Stalkers rather than lovers, would be fairer. A mad short book documenting a bunch of characters who were unhealthily obsessed with the Queen. Really entertaining. Sort of a prequel to Vermorel’s 80s books about sexual fixation on pop stars.

 

[imposs1904]

What was this like? I’ve just recently started dipping into McIlvanney and been enjoying his stuff so far

I enjoyed it, and it's worth a read, but it does read more like a Rankin novel than it does a McIlvanney novel. And I'm sure Rankin would be the first to admit that he doesn't have McIlvanney's prose style.

 

[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
26/35 I Love Me (Who Do You Love?) by Gordon Legge (ReRead)
27/35 The Glass Cage by Georges Simenon (Reading Challenge)
28/35 The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally (Reading Challenge)
29/35 The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

30/35 Smoothies by Richard Allen (Reading Challenge)

 

[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

34/45 Chester Himes - All Shot Up
35/45 Merlin Sheldrake - Entangled Life