eyes down for a full house reading challenge thread 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
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
48/45 John Lydon - Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored
49/45 Richard Osman - The Man Who Died Twice
50/45 Alistair Reynolds - Elysium Fire
51/45 Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
52/45 Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century
53/45 Anthony Berkeley - The Wintringham Mystery: Cecily Disappears
54/45 Robin Stevens - Arsenic for Tea
55/45 James Felton - 52 Times Britain was a Bellend

56/45 Ursula K Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea

I think that's my last one for 2021 as I've just started a long biography of Lee Scratch Perry. See you on the 2022 thread

 

[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
18/24 - Oh! To be in England by H.E. Bates
19/24 - The Fall of Koli by M.R. Carey
20/24 - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
21/24 - And Away by Bob Mortimer
22/24 - Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
23/24 - The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
24/24 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Ultimate Visual History by Michael Klastorin
25/24 - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (reread)
26/24 - Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
27/24 - Chaos: The Truth behind the Manson Murders by Tom O'Neil with Dan Piepenbring

 

[BoatieBird]

What did you think of it? I'm a rabid Lockwood fan and will recommend it to people till I'm blue in the face, I appreciate not everyone shares my tastes in this matter though.

I've added it to my list, thanks hitmouse

 

[Fozzie Bear]

22/30 Shon Faye - The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice

A useful extension and background to some of the more vituperative discussions on here.

25/30 Kathleen Stock - Material Girls

I didn’t read this with much enthusiasm and disagreed with a lot of it. The men on here who enjoy the cut and thrust of pedantic legalistic arguments about What Is A Woman will be delighted about the chapter on that.

There is also a quite hard to read chapter explaining the authors’ take on various concepts of gender. Broadly these are all inadequate. Which is fine, because in my view the theories will need to catch up with the lived experiences described in Shon Faye’s book and not the other way round.

This book seems to attempt to be even handed but isn’t really. Wide ranging testimony about children wishing to transition is dismissed briefly as anecdotal, whereas wide ranging testimony about people being hounded by trans activists is taken at face value. The author has no medical qualifications but dismisses trans advocates who are similarly unqualified.

She does distance herself from some of the more didactic radical feminists and tries to argue for compromise. One example of this is a third set of toilets for people who do not “feel or look” like their biological sex. This strikes me as bonkers and unworkable and something that would exclude more cis people from bogs who do not meet the idealised forms of wo/manhood.

There is some good stuff about embracing the non-binary and intersectional (in its original sense though).

Overall it was thought provoking, but maybe not in the way that was intended.

 

[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
32/30 Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey (and Bhanu Kapil and Alice Spawls) - Unknown Language
33/30 Richard Seymour - The Twittering Machine
34/30 Joel Golby - Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
35/30 Jane McAlevey - No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
36/30 Michelle Good - Five Little Indians
37/30 Kim Moody - On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War
38/30 Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium
39/30 Cindy Milstein (ed) - There Is Nothing So Whole As A Broken Heart
40/30 Patricia Highsmith - Little Tales of Misogyny
41/30 Mike Davis and Jon Wiener - Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Possibly the last book I'll finish this year? In contrast to the previous one, this was not a quick read, apparently I could read Little Tales of Misogyny about 180-odd times in a year but I could only read this one twelve times. Although I don't think either would be a great way to spend a year. Good book though, it's funny how LA and California in general is so pop-culture mythologised that if the authors mention an event happening at any given location then it probably feels familiar from music or film or something, which is not the case with most street names?
Also read a few zines in the course of making it through the giant LA book: Fuck the Police Means We Don't Act Like Cops to Each Other by Clementine Morrigan, Academics Against Networking #3 (great even if you're not an academic, I'd say the collage made of cut-up University of Manchester publicity gibberish with the line "Brian Cox around every corner" is worth the price of entry alone), and issue 5 of a proper old-school crust zine called You Are Fucker.

Starting Taylor Jenkins Reid - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo next.

 

[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
18. W.G. Sebald - Rings of Saturn
19. Amelia Horgan - Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism
20. Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You
21. Olga Ravn - The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
22. Silvia Federici - Caliban and the Witch
23. Vigdis Hjorth - Long Live the Post Horn!
24. Elena Ferrante - The Lying Life of Adults
25. Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium

 

[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)
31/35 Dog Day Afternoon by Patrick Mann (Reading Challenge)
32/35 Planet Darts; Booze and Bull's-eyes: Life on the Professional Darts Circuit by Niall Edworthy
33/35 Brothers Keepers by Donald E. Westlake (Reading Challenge)
34/35 The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris
35/35 Do That Again Son, and I'll Break Your Legs: football's hard men by Phil Thompson
36/35 This Much is True by Miriam Margolyes
37/35 No Wonder I Take a Drink by Laura Marney
38/35 Freak Out the Squares: Life in a band called Pulp by Russell Senior
39/35 The Clearance by Joan Lingard
40/35 Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell
41/35 The Crafty Cockney by Deryk Brown
42/35 Darts Greatest Games: Fifty Finest Matches from the World of Darts by Matt Bozeat
43/35 A Few Minutes Past Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky
44/35 Hard Crackers Tribute to Noel Ignatiev
45/35 To Catch a Spy by Stuart M. Kaminsky
46/35 Mildred Pierced by Stuart M. Kaminsky
47/35 Now You See It by Stuart M. Kaminsky
48/35 Report for Murder by Val McDermid
49/35 Slinging Arrows by Wayne Mardle

50/35 Common Murder by Val McDermid

 

[Biddlybee]

Happy Bookmas!

 

[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
20/29 Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney
21/29 The Lonely City - Olivia Laing
22/29 Austerlitz - WG Sebald
23/29 Vertigo & Ghost - Fiona Benson
24/29 The Islanders - Christopher Priest
25/29 Four Quartets - TS Eliot
26/29 The English Reformation - Alec Ryrie
27/29 Franny & Zooey - JD Salinger
28/29 The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again - M. John Harrison

29/29 Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

 

[krtek a houby]

1/19 The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie
2/19 Before They Are Hanged - Joe Abercrombie
3/19 Last Argument of Kings - Joe Abercrombie
4/19 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
5/19 Kokoro. Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life - Lafcadio Hearn
6/19 The Algebraist - Iain M Banks
7/19 Escobar - Roberto Escobar
8/19 Rounding the Mark - Andrea Camilleri
9/19 Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland - Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh (re-read)
10/19 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressel
11//19 Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom - Philip Hinchcliffe (reread)
12/19 The Silver Locusts - Ray Bradbury
13/19 A Woman Is No Man - Etaf Rum
14/19 August Heat - Andrea Camilleri
15/19 To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip José Farmer (reread)
16/19 The Fabulous Riverboat - Philip José Farmer
17/19 Buddy Does Seattle - Peter Bagge (reread)
18/19 Buddy Does Jersey - Peter Bagge (reread)
19/19 The Heroes - Joe Abercrombie
20/19 The Dark Design - Philip José Farmer

21/19 Past Tense - Lee Child

 

[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)
22/20 - Speaking in Tongues - Laura Taylor
23/20 - Valkyrie - Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir
24/20 - Serpentine - Philip Pullman
25/20 - Written in Bone - Sue Black (A)
26/20 - Beasts of No Nation - Uzodinma Iweala
27/20 - Stalin Ate My Homework - Alexei Sayle (A)
28/20 - Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters
29/20 - Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo
30/20 - Preparing for the Perimenopause and Menopause - Louise Newson

 

[Signal 11]

1/10 - Cat Sense - John Bradshaw
2/10 - As Black As Resistance - Zoé Samudzi & William C. Anderson
3/10 - Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation - Silvia Federici
4/10 - Workers and Capital - Mario Tronti
5/10 - Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy - ed. Cindy Milstein
6/10 - Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis - Out Of The Woods Collective
7/10 - The Obelisk Gate - N. K. Jemisin
8/10 - Country Joe & Me - Ron Cabral
9/10 - Mikhail Botvinnik: 6th World Chess Champion - Isaak & Vladimir Linder

10/10 - The Great French Revolution 1789-1793 - Peter Kropotkin
11/10 - The Black Jacobins - C. L. R. James

 

[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
32/30 Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey (and Bhanu Kapil and Alice Spawls) - Unknown Language
33/30 Richard Seymour - The Twittering Machine
34/30 Joel Golby - Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
35/30 Jane McAlevey - No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
36/30 Michelle Good - Five Little Indians
37/30 Kim Moody - On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War
38/30 Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium
39/30 Cindy Milstein (ed) - There Is Nothing So Whole As A Broken Heart
40/30 Patricia Highsmith - Little Tales of Misogyny
41/30 Mike Davis and Jon Wiener - Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties
42/30 Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

A memorial re-read. Makes an interesting contrast with the Mike Davis, which is a very different book about 1960s California. There are probably a few writers who've made more of an impression on me, who've left more of their sentences scratched into my soul, but there aren't many. Had been thinking about just re-reading the title section from the White Album as well, but reckon I'll leave it a bit and then re-read the whole thing.

 

[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
28. "The Other Mother" - Michel Bussi
29. "Eight Detectives" - Alex Pavesi
30. "The Appeal" - Janice Hallett
31. "Five Minds" - Guy Morpuss
32. "The Cold, Cold Ground" - Adrian McKinty
33. " I Hear the Sirens in the Street" - Adrian McKinty

34. "Box 88" - Charles Cumming. A bit long but ultimately satisfying spy thriller

 

[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)
38/52 - Robert Webb - Come Again
39/52 - Stephen King - Billy Summers
40/52 - Émile Zola - Thérèse Raquin
41/52 - Iain Banks - Whit (re-read)
42/52 - Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
43/52 - Minette Walters - The Chameleon's Shadow
44/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Water's Lovely (re-read)
45/52 - Louise Newson - Preparing for the perimenopause and menopause
46/52 - William Boyd - Trio
47/52 - Stephen King - Night Shift (re-read)
48/52 - Roddy Doyle - Love
49/52 - Minette Walters - A Dreadful Murder
50/52 - Celeste Ng - Little Fires Everywhere
51/52 - Bob Mortimer - And Away
52/52 - Stephen King - Different Seasons (re-read)

53/52 - Barbara Vine - A Fatal Inversion

 

[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
12. Jesse Sutanto - Dial A for Aunties

13. Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo. A satisfying end to the reading year, finishing the weighty lit-fic I've been ploughing through for months.

 

[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
16/30 - Shaun Bythell - Confessions of a Bookseller
17/30 - Daniel Levitin - This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession
18/30 - Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth
19/30 - Nicolas Blincoe - More Noble Than War: the Story of Football in Palestine and Israel
20/30 - F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
21/30 - Graeme Macrae Burnet - Case Histories
22/30 - David Renton - The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Far Right
23/30 - Giovannino Guareschi - The Little World of Don Camillo

24/30 - Angela Carter - The Magic Toyshop
25/30 - Grace Blakely - Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
26/30 - Robert Irwin - Exquisite Corpse

27/30 - Virginia Woolf - Orlando
28/30 - Colson Whitehead - Harlem Shuffle

Didn’t quite make the thirty, but more than one a fortnight was my minimum target so that’s well exceeded.

And, blimey, those last two are bloody brilliant.

 

[pennimania]

1. Monsieur -Laurence Durrell
2. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism - Michelle Goldberg
3. Black Narcissus - Rumer Golden (reread)
4. Elizabeth: Captive Princess - Margaret Irwin
5. Young Bess- " "
6. Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain - " "
7. Handbuilt Ceramics - Jo Taylor
8. Invasion - M P McDonald
9. My Life and Times (first Octave) - Compton Mac Kenzie
10. Flowers on Main - Sherryl Woods (don't ask)
11. Brief Gaudy Hour - Margaret Campbell Barnes
12. The War for the Seas - Evan Mawdsley
13. The Dark Rose - Cynthia Harrod Eagles
14. The Child Catchers: rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption - Kathryn Joyce
15. The Founding - Cynthia Harrod eagles
16. Escape - Carolyn Jessop
17. Easy Freedom - Liz Berry
18. Easy Connections - " "
17. Love and War in the Appenines -Eric Newby
18. The Spiral Staircase - Karen Armstrong
19. Once There was a Nun - Ruth Montgomery
20. My Beloved - Mother Catherine Thomas
21. The Archers: Ambridge at War - Catherine Miller
22. Ben Hur - Lew Wallace
23. The Naked Mind - Annie Grace
24. Luke - Noel Streatfeild
25. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
26. Devoted - Jennifer Mathieu
27. The In Between Years - Mary Zenchoff
28. The Winter is Past - Noel Streatfeild
29. Humbridge - ANthi=ony Parkin
30. AS I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
31. WIld Strawberries - Angela Thirkell (reread)
32. Miss Bunting - " " "
33. Growing Up- " " '
34. Private Enterprise - " " "
35. August Folly. " " "
36. High Rising. " " "
37. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (reread)
38. Unorthodox - Deborah Feldman
39. Orange is the New Black - Piper Kerman
40. The Stand - Stephen King (reread)
41. Alas Babylon - Pat Frank (reread)
42. One Second After - William R Fortschen
43. One Year After - " " " (reread)
44. The Final Day - " " "
45. The Little House in the Deep Woods - Laura Ingalls WIlder
46. Farmer Boy - " " "
47. The House on Plum Creek
48. The Little House on the Prairie
49. The Little Town on the Prairie
50. These Happy Golden Years
51. The First Four Years - all by L I Wilder, just been listening to these. AN eye opener, had no idea what gruelling weather and other incredibly harsh setbacks they endured. Made me think slightly differently about mid west Americans.

 

[xenon]

Found it quite hard to concentrate on reading last year. So not so many.

01/20: Blood, Metal and Dust: How victory turned to defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq - Brigadier Ben Barry
02/20: Dead Lies Dreaming - Charlie Stross
03/20: Dissidence - Ken MacLeod
04/20: The Sharp Ends - Joe Abercrombie
05/20 Red Rising - Pierce Brown
06/20: Golden Son - Pierce Brown
07/20: Morning Star - Pierce Brown
08/20: Iron Gold - Pierce Brown
09/20: Dark Age - Pierce Brown
10/20: The Stranger - Albert Kamus
11/20 Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green - Johnny Rico
12/20 The Wisdom of Crowds - Joe Abercrombie
13/20 Culture Warlords - Talia Lavin
14/20 The New Climate War - Michael E Mann
15/20 Station 11 - Emily St John Mandel
16/20 A memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine

 

[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
41/69 Richard Herring - The Problem with Men
42/69 Edward Brooke-Hitching - The Madman's Library
43/69 Angela Saini - Superior
44/69 Terri Givens - Radical Empathy
45/69 Antonio Iturbe - The Librarian of Auschwitz
46/69 Kurt Vonnegut - Welcome to the Monkey House
47/69 Jon McGregor - Lean Fall Stand
48/69 Nathan Filer - The Shock of the Fall
49/69 Elizabeth Hay - Alone in the Classroom
50/69 Kurt Vonnegut - Palm Sunday
51/69 Dr Boule Whytelaw III - Think Like a White Man: A Satirical Guide to Conquering the World While Black
52/69 Sarah-Jayne Blakemore - Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain
53/69 Heather Augustyn - Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World's Greatest Trombonist
54/69 Nic Compton - Off the Deep End: A History of Madness at Sea
55/69 Colum McCann - Everything in This Country Must
56/69 Iain Forbes - Whar a Candel Will Not Burn
57/69 Alice Munro - The View from Castle Rock
58/69 Daniel Wakelin - Revolting Remedies from the Middle Ages
59/69 Markus Torgeby - The Runner
60/69 Alan Garner - The Owl Service
61/69 Kevin Barry - Night Boat to Tangier
62/69 Tiffany Francis-Baker - Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night

So, I didn't finish another one, never mind seven, between my last posting on 15 December and the end of the year. I think it's the first year on these threads that I've read less than I hoped I would. I haven't yet been smote by the book gods or had a stern PM from Pickman's model, so I guess I've got away with it.

 

[Pickman's model]

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
41/69 Richard Herring - The Problem with Men
42/69 Edward Brooke-Hitching - The Madman's Library
43/69 Angela Saini - Superior
44/69 Terri Givens - Radical Empathy
45/69 Antonio Iturbe - The Librarian of Auschwitz
46/69 Kurt Vonnegut - Welcome to the Monkey House
47/69 Jon McGregor - Lean Fall Stand
48/69 Nathan Filer - The Shock of the Fall
49/69 Elizabeth Hay - Alone in the Classroom
50/69 Kurt Vonnegut - Palm Sunday
51/69 Dr Boule Whytelaw III - Think Like a White Man: A Satirical Guide to Conquering the World While Black
52/69 Sarah-Jayne Blakemore - Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain
53/69 Heather Augustyn - Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World's Greatest Trombonist
54/69 Nic Compton - Off the Deep End: A History of Madness at Sea (very good; not a record of the popular ska band attempting to enter the Cowes Regatta)
55/69 Colum McCann - Everything in This Country Must
56/69 Iain Forbes - Whar a Candel Will Not Burn
57/69 Alice Munro - The View from Castle Rock
58/69 Daniel Wakelin - Revolting Remedies from the Middle Ages
59/69 Markus Torgeby - The Runner
60/69 Alan Garner - The Owl Service
61/69 Kevin Barry - Night Boat to Tangier
62/69 Tiffany Francis-Baker - Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night

So, I didn't finish another one, never mind seven, between my last posting on 15 December and the end of the year. I think it's the first year on these threads that I've read less than I hoped I would. I haven't yet been smote by the book gods or had a stern PM from Pickman's model, so I guess I've got away with it.

I'd not previously thought of chiding those who miss their targets or praising the stakhanovite over-readers

 

[billy_bob]

I'd not previously thought of chiding those who miss their targets or praising the stakhanovite over-readers

Could be fun...

 

[Pickman's model]

Could be fun...

I'll keep a closer eye on this year's thread and maybe encourage people going through a barren patch

 

[StanleyBlack]

Playing catch up, as ever!

1/20? Mittelholzer, Edgar (1955) My bones and my flute: a ghost story in the old-fashioned manner. Caribbean Modern Classics paperback edition published 2015. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. (9781845232955) Finshed May/June 2021

2/20? Beatty, Paul (2016) The sellout. Paperback edition published 2017. London: Oneworld Publications. (9781786071460) Finished 13 June 2021

3/20? Bloom, Jo (2014) Ridley road. Paperback edition published in 2015. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (9781780228242) Finished June 2021

4/20? Golding, William (1954) The lord of the flies. Paperback edition published 1987. London: Faber & Faber. (0571084834) Finished August 2021

5/20? Lee, Stewart (2010) How I escaped my certain fate: the life and deaths of a stand-up comedian. Paperback edition published 2011. London: Faber & Faber. (9780571254811) Finished November 2021

6/20? Gissing, George (1884) The unclassed. Hardback of revised 1895 edition published in 1976 as Vol. 26 in the series, Society and the Victorians. Hassocks, nr. Brighton: The Harvester Press Limited. (0855270543) Finished 2 December 2021

Six doubles last year's efforts but is still way off my 'target'. Lockdown ennui still hasn't left me, perhaps it never will. Anyway, onwards and upwards!

 

[past caring]

Cohn was quite openly a reactionary - he hatred all that and feared it was happening again.

Agreed. A much better take - though it's not really about milleniarism as such - is Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces.