Never mind the virus here's the 2022 reading challenge thread

[imposs1904]

1/52 In and Out by Mat Coward
2/52 And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
3/52 In the Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan
4/52 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
5/52 My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
6/52 One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie
7/52 May God Forgive by Alan Parks
8/52 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
9/52 Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
10/52 Scully by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
11/52 Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen
12/52 The Pressures of Life: Four Television Plays edited by Michael Marland

13/52 A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (ReRead)

Just watched the 1949 film adaptation starring Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone, so I thought I'd give the novel a revisit.

 

[petee]

no Chaucer thread, acc. to the search function.

Geoffrey Chaucer is named chief clerk by Richard II

King Richard II appoints Geoffrey Chaucer to the position of chief clerk of the king’s works in Westminster on July 12, 1389. Chaucer, the middle-class son of a

www.history.com

In 1372, Chaucer traveled to Italy on diplomatic missions, where he may have been exposed to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

 

[seventh bullet]

1. A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism - Victoria Smolkin

2. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History - Monica Kim

3. Target: The World; Communist Propaganda Activities in 1955 - Evron Maurice Kirkpatrick (Ed.)

4. Red Blueprint for the Conquest of America - Joseph H. Wherry

5. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It - J. Edgar Hoover

6. The Coming Defeat of Communism - James Burnham

7. A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society - Matthew W. Dunne

8. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space - Evgeny Dobrenko & Eric Naiman

9. Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938 - Lynn Mally

10. Mao's Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China's Rural Revolution - Brian James DeMare

11. Communism in India: Events, Processes and Ideologies - Bidyut Chakrabarty

12. Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics - Evgeny Dobrenko

 

[nogojones]

1/45 Maya Angelou - Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
2/45 Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch
3/45 Julia Buxton - The Political Economy of Narcotics
4/45 Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You
5/45 Becky Chambers - Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
6/45 Cindy Milstein - Taking Sides
7/45 Phillip K. Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
8/45 Jim Thompson - Recoil
9/45 Joseph Conrad - The Secret Agent
10/45 Ellen Meisksins Wood - Empire of Capital
11/45 Bernard Schweizer - Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism
12/45 Donna Tartt - The Little Friend
13/45 Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire
14/45 Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem
15/45 Tayyib Salih - Season of Migration to the North
16/45 Arkady Martine - A Desolation Called Peace
17/45 Stacey M. Floyd (Ed.) - Liberation Theologies in the United States
18/45 Hew Lemmey - Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell
19/45 Roldolfo Walsh - Operation Massacre
20/45 Joan Didion - The White Album
21/45 Brian Manning - Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640-1660
22/45 Noel Ignatiev - Acceptable Men
23/45 Toni Morrison - Home

24/45 Yuliya Yurchenko - Ukraine and the Empire of Capital

Pretty reasonable post soviet history of Ukraine up to about 2015

 

[imposs1904]

1/52 In and Out by Mat Coward
2/52 And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
3/52 In the Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan
4/52 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
5/52 My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
6/52 One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie
7/52 May God Forgive by Alan Parks
8/52 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
9/52 Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
10/52 Scully by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
11/52 Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen
12/52 The Pressures of Life: Four Television Plays edited by Michael Marland
13/52 A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (ReRead)

14/52 Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)

 

[Winot]

1/29 Bright Travellers - Fiona Benson
2/29 The Emigrants - WG Sebald
3/29 Inside Story - Martin Amis
4/29 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour - an Introduction - JD Salinger (reread)
5/29 Art Can Help - Robert Adams
6/29 The Right to Sex - Amia Srinivasan
7/29 Boyle: Between God and Science - Michael Hunter
8/29 Autumn - Ali Smith
9/29 The Latecomers - Anita Brookner

10/29 Manhattan 45 - Jan Morris
11/29 Olives - AE Stallings

Bit of a run of female authors/poets. Manhattan 45 is JM's reimagining of the island in 1945 (she first visited there in 1953, as a he). Fun and readable but not quite as monumental as her Hong Kong. Olives is a book of poetry by the American AE Stallings, who I heard recently give a reading. She lives in Greece and is influenced by the classical world. Her poetry is often classed as 'New Formalism' and has clever formalistic and linguistic tricks whilst also being strong on metre and conversational in tone.

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 David Katz - People Funny Boy: the genius of Lee Scratch Perry
2/45 Onjali Q Rauf - The Star Outside My Window
3/45 Joe Abercrombie - The Trouble with Peace
4/45 P G Wodehouse - Something New
5/45 Thomas Harding - White Debt: the Demerara Uprising and Britain's legacy of slavery
6/45 Terry Pratchett - Men At Arms
7/45 Art Spiegelman - Maus
8/45 Andrea Levy - Small Island
9/45 Bex Hogan - Viper
10/45 Robert Jordan - Crossroads of Twilight
11/45 Katherine Applegate -The One and Only Ivan
12/45 Andrew Marr - A History of Modern Britain
13/45 Alan Moore & David Lloyd - V for Vendetta
14/45 Evan Ross Katz - Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: how Buffy staked our hearts
15/45 Pete Brown - Man Walks into a Pub: a sociable history of beer
16/45 Brian Groom - Northerners: a history, from the ice age to the present day
17/45 Ellis Peters - A Morbid Taste for Bones (Cadfael #1)
18/45 Joe Abercrombie - The Wisdom of Crowds
19/45 Laurie Lee - Cider with Rosie
20/45 Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
21/45 Laurie Lee - A Moment of War
22/45 Laurie Lee - A Rose for Winter
23/45 Mark Lawrence - Prince of Thorns
24/45 Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns
25/45 T C Eglington & Simon Davis - Thistlebone

26/45 JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit

Now read to child #2 as well.

 

[May Kasahara]

1. Glen Duncan - I, Lucifer
2. Bolu Babalola - Love In Colour
3. ed. Dan Coxon - Tales from the Shadow Booth vol.4.
4. Kerry Hadley-Pryce - The Black Country
5. S. A. Cosby - Blacktop Wasteland

6. Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street. A very good read indeed, of the intelligent, cunning, fully rounded thriller variety.

 

[shifting gears]

1/26 - Michael Moorcock - The Whispering Swarm
2/26 - Albert Camus - The Outsider
3/26 - Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain
4/26 - Edna O’Brien - Girl
5/26 - The Secret DJ - Book Two
6/26 - David Keenan - Xstabeth
7/26 - Wendy Erskine - Sweet Home
8/26 - Walter Greenwood - Love on the Dole
9/26 - Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama
10/26 - Edna O’Brien - Saints and Sinners
11/26 - William McIlvanney - The Papers of Tony Veitch
12/26 - Wendy Erskine - Dance Move
13/26 - Kevin Barry - Beatlebone
14/26 - DBC Pierre - Breakfast with the Borgias
15/26 - William McIlvanney - Strange Loyalties
16/26 - Edna O’Brien - The Little Red Chairs

17/26 - Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly

 

[hitmouse]

1/30 Taylor Jenkins Reid - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
2/30 Joan Didion - The White Album (re-read)
3/30 Saidiya Hartman - Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
4/30 Joan Didion - After Henry (another re-read, first published in UK as Sentimental Journeys)
5/30 Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It Away
6/30 Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays (re-read)
7/30 Iris Murdoch - Under the Net (re-read)
8/30 Joan Didion - South and West
9/30 Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing
10/30 Koshka Duff (ed) - Abolishing the Police
11/30 Jane Holgate - Arise
12/30 F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (re-read)
13/30 12 Rules for What/Sam Moore and Alex Roberts - Post-Internet Far Right
14/30 Brad Logan & John Gentile - Architects of Self-Destruction: The Oral History of Leftover Crack
15/30 Emily Nagoski - Come As You Are
16/30 Barney Farmer - Park by the River
17/30 Nina Power - What Do Men Want?
18/30 Jean-Paul Sartre - Intimacy (re-read)
19/30 Agustín Guillamón - Insurrection: The Bloody Events of May 1937
20/30 Shirley Jackson - The Bird's Nest
21/30 James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
22/30 Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
23/30 HP Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories (re-read)
24/30 Chris Whitaker - Tall Oaks
25/30 Jen Calleja - I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For
26/30 Hanif Abdurraqib - They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
27/30 Joe Burns - Class Struggle Unionism
28/30 Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides The Hurt

29/30 Sheila Rowbotham - Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s

I really liked this. Probably better if you already like at least some of Sheila Rowbotham's other books, but perhaps it would be good anyway? I dunno, if you think you might be open to reading a memoir about 1970s socialist feminism then you'd probably like this. A nicely optimistic ending, considering that 1979 wasn't exactly the start of a glorious historical moment.

Probably going to start Adam Zmith - Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures next. Which looks like a fun read, and an all-too-rare example of authors whose surnames rhyme with their books.

 

[nogojones]

Probably going to start Adam Zmith - Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures next. Which looks like a fun read, and an all-too-rare example of authors whose surnames rhyme with their books.

I heard an interview with the author on This is Hell and it seemed like it could be fun. I don't think poppers are quite as revolutionary as he thinks though.

 

[imposs1904]

1/52 In and Out by Mat Coward
2/52 And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
3/52 In the Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan
4/52 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
5/52 My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
6/52 One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie
7/52 May God Forgive by Alan Parks
8/52 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
9/52 Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
10/52 Scully by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
11/52 Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen
12/52 The Pressures of Life: Four Television Plays edited by Michael Marland
13/52 A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (ReRead)
14/52 Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)

15/52 Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon

 

[inva]

1/20 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
2/20 Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis
3/20 The Colonel's Wife by Rosa Liksom
4/20 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
5/20 Socialism and the Intelligentsia 1880-1914 edited by Carl Levy
6/20 Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
7/20 Rizzio by Denise Mina
8/20 Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky
9/20 Marx on Money by Suzanne de Brunhoff
10/20 Real World by Natsuo Kirino
11/20 For Another Europe: A Class Analysis of European Economic Integration by Guglielmo Carchedi
12/20 The Attempt by Magdaléna Platzová
13/20 Theories of Surplus Value Part 1 by Karl Marx (reread)
14/20 The Blue Lenses and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
One or two good stories and the rest ranging from ok to bad. Not sure the short story format suits Du Maurier very well.

 

[smmudge]

1/9 Pain & Prejudice, Gabrielle Jackson
2/9 A brief history of humankind, Harari
3/9 Pride & Prejudice
4/9 Destiny disrupted - a history of the world through Islamic eyes, Tamsin Ansary
5/9 Robinson Crusoe
6/9 Putin's People, Catherine Belton

7/9 Paradise Lost

 

[Threshers_Flail]

Any good?

It's great! I know next to nothing about anthropology but enjoyed how they gleefully ripped up contemporary orthodoxies and offered an alternative, less hierarchical history of human development.

I've read a few reviews since that have slated it for ripping up such orthodoxies and by all accounts they made a few reaches that are stray a bit too far from what's considered plausible but it's still definitely worth a read.

Thanks to the two David's I also learnt what 'schismogenesis' means!

 

[Threshers_Flail]

1. David Graeber and David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything
2. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker - The Many Headed Hydra
3. Cedric Robinson - Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
4. Donna Tartt - The Little Friend
5. Gabor Mate - In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
6. Olga Tokarczuc - Books of Jacob (check me out )
7 . Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee - Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism
8. Olufemi Taiwo - Elite Capture: How the Elite Took Over Identity Politics
9. Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
10. David Andress - The Terror

 

[Threshers_Flail]

1. David Graeber and David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything
2. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker - The Many Headed Hydra
3. Cedric Robinson - Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
4. Donna Tartt - The Little Friend
5. Gabor Mate - In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
6. Olga Tokarczuc - Books of Jacob (check me out )
7 . Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee - Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism
8. Olufemi Taiwo - Elite Capture: How the Elite Took Over Identity Politics
9. Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
10. David Andress - The Terror

I've basically unscrambled my password to tell a bunch of strangers that I finished the Books of Jacob.

 

[imposs1904]

1/52 In and Out by Mat Coward
2/52 And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
3/52 In the Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan
4/52 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
5/52 My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
6/52 One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie
7/52 May God Forgive by Alan Parks
8/52 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
9/52 Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
10/52 Scully by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
11/52 Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen
12/52 The Pressures of Life: Four Television Plays edited by Michael Marland
13/52 A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (ReRead)
14/52 Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
15/52 Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon

16/52 Turbulent Priests by Colin Bateman

 

[seventh bullet]

1. David Graeber and David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything
2. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker - The Many Headed Hydra
3. Cedric Robinson - Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
4. Donna Tartt - The Little Friend
5. Gabor Mate - In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
6. Olga Tokarczuc - Books of Jacob (check me out )
7 . Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee - Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism
8. Olufemi Taiwo - Elite Capture: How the Elite Took Over Identity Politics
9. Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
10. David Andress - The Terror

Andress is great on the French Revolution. On the same subject but a different author there's The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals by Laura Mason, published this year and worth checking out.

 

[QueenOfGoths]

1. "The Thursday Murder Club" - Richard Osman.
2. "The Woman in the Window" - A. J. Finn.
3. "Snow" by John Banville
4. "The Lies You Told" - Harriet Tyce
5. "A Gift for the Dying" - MJ Arlidge
6. "One by One" - Ruth Ware
7. "The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways" - a British Library publication edited by Mike Ashley.
8. "The House of Ashes" - Stuart Neville
9. "Lies" - TM Logan.
10. "The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill" - C. S. Robertson.
11. "I See You" - Clare Mackintosh
12. "The Seance" - John Harwood
13. "The Couple Next Door" - Shari Lapena
14. "American Dirt" -Jeanine Cummins
15. "Their Little Secret" - Mark Billingham
16. "The Murder List" - Jackie Kabler
17. "Twelve Secrets" - Robert Gold

18. "It Ends at Midnight" - so, so thriller with sadly dislikeable characters

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 David Katz - People Funny Boy: the genius of Lee Scratch Perry
2/45 Onjali Q Rauf - The Star Outside My Window
3/45 Joe Abercrombie - The Trouble with Peace
4/45 P G Wodehouse - Something New
5/45 Thomas Harding - White Debt: the Demerara Uprising and Britain's legacy of slavery
6/45 Terry Pratchett - Men At Arms
7/45 Art Spiegelman - Maus
8/45 Andrea Levy - Small Island
9/45 Bex Hogan - Viper
10/45 Robert Jordan - Crossroads of Twilight
11/45 Katherine Applegate -The One and Only Ivan
12/45 Andrew Marr - A History of Modern Britain
13/45 Alan Moore & David Lloyd - V for Vendetta
14/45 Evan Ross Katz - Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: how Buffy staked our hearts
15/45 Pete Brown - Man Walks into a Pub: a sociable history of beer
16/45 Brian Groom - Northerners: a history, from the ice age to the present day
17/45 Ellis Peters - A Morbid Taste for Bones (Cadfael #1)
18/45 Joe Abercrombie - The Wisdom of Crowds
19/45 Laurie Lee - Cider with Rosie
20/45 Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
21/45 Laurie Lee - A Moment of War
22/45 Laurie Lee - A Rose for Winter
23/45 Mark Lawrence - Prince of Thorns
24/45 Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns
25/45 T C Eglington & Simon Davis - Thistlebone
26/45 JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit

27/45 Andrew Marr - A History of the World

 

[May Kasahara]

1. Glen Duncan - I, Lucifer
2. Bolu Babalola - Love In Colour
3. ed. Dan Coxon - Tales from the Shadow Booth vol.4.
4. Kerry Hadley-Pryce - The Black Country
5. S. A. Cosby - Blacktop Wasteland
6. Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street

7. Peter Godfrey-Smith - Other Minds. Recommended for any fellow octopus fans, a fascinating delve into cephalopod intelligence.

 

[imposs1904]

1/52 In and Out by Mat Coward
2/52 And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
3/52 In the Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan
4/52 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
5/52 My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
6/52 One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie
7/52 May God Forgive by Alan Parks
8/52 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
9/52 Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
10/52 Scully by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
11/52 Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen
12/52 The Pressures of Life: Four Television Plays edited by Michael Marland
13/52 A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (ReRead)
14/52 Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
15/52 Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon
16/52 Turbulent Priests by Colin Bateman

17/52 Shooting Sean by Colin Bateman

 

[Signal 11]

9/10 - Real Differences - S. L. Lim
10/10 - Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral

 

[hitmouse]

7. Peter Godfrey-Smith - Other Minds. Recommended for any fellow octopus fans, a fascinating delve into cephalopod intelligence.

I was going to ask if you've read that Srinivasan article, on looking it up it turns out that it's partly a review of Other Minds. She reviews it alongside Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus, if you're desperate for more cephalopod intelligence reading?

Anyway,
1/30 Taylor Jenkins Reid - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
2/30 Joan Didion - The White Album (re-read)
3/30 Saidiya Hartman - Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
4/30 Joan Didion - After Henry (another re-read, first published in UK as Sentimental Journeys)
5/30 Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It Away
6/30 Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays (re-read)
7/30 Iris Murdoch - Under the Net (re-read)
8/30 Joan Didion - South and West
9/30 Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing
10/30 Koshka Duff (ed) - Abolishing the Police
11/30 Jane Holgate - Arise
12/30 F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (re-read)
13/30 12 Rules for What/Sam Moore and Alex Roberts - Post-Internet Far Right
14/30 Brad Logan & John Gentile - Architects of Self-Destruction: The Oral History of Leftover Crack
15/30 Emily Nagoski - Come As You Are
16/30 Barney Farmer - Park by the River
17/30 Nina Power - What Do Men Want?
18/30 Jean-Paul Sartre - Intimacy (re-read)
19/30 Agustín Guillamón - Insurrection: The Bloody Events of May 1937
20/30 Shirley Jackson - The Bird's Nest
21/30 James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
22/30 Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
23/30 HP Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories (re-read)
24/30 Chris Whitaker - Tall Oaks
25/30 Jen Calleja - I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For
26/30 Hanif Abdurraqib - They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
27/30 Joe Burns - Class Struggle Unionism
28/30 Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides The Hurt
29/30 Sheila Rowbotham - Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s

30/30 Adam Zmith - Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures

It's a truth universally acknowledged that most books are boring because they don't have enough poppers in, and that's not a criticism you could reasonably make here. Nice quick fun read, I really enjoyed this one, some great lines like "A better future is like a poppered-up body's bumhole: open". One big criticism is that the author made a playlist for the book - which is great - and then either the author or the publisher made the demonic decision to only include it in the form of a QR code at the back of the book that you can scan to be taken to a Spotify playlist, because just printing words in a book is so old hat now??? Anyway, I don't think I've read many books by people from Grimsby, and I also haven't read many books where I've learnt that much detail about the author's wanking habits, so that's broadened my perspective in at least two ways. Recommended for Star Trek fans, although probably not as much as I'd recommend it to poppers fans.

Next up, starting Raymond Williams - Keywords. Which I think must be at least partially an urban-inspired read?

 

[BoatieBird]

1/52 - Sarah Waters - Fingersmith
2/52 - Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These
3/52 - Richard Osman - The Man Who Died Twice
4/52 - Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
5/52 - Matt Haig - The Midnight Library
6/52 - Patricia Highsmith - A Dog's Ransom
7/52 - Claire Douglas - The Couple at No. 9
8/52 - Daniel Mason - The Piano Tuner
9/52 - Zadie Smith - On Beauty
10/52 - Stephen King & Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Button Box (reread)
11/52 - Minette Walters - The Cellar
12/52 - Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (reread)
13/52 - Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman
14/52 - Peter Swanson - Rules for Perfect Murders
15/52 - Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This
16/52 - Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You?
17/52 - Toni Morrison - Beloved
18/52 - Denise Mina - The Less Dead
19/52 - Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Magic Feather
20/52 - Sarah Waters - The Night Watch
21/52 - Chibundu Onuzo - Sankofa
22/52 - Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Final Task
23/52 - A A Milne - The Red House Mystery
24/52 - A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven
25/52 - Andrew Michael Hurley - Devil's Day
26/52 - Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons
27/52 - Stephen King - Skeleton Crew
28/52 - Ruth Rendell - Portobello (reread)
29/52 - Willy Valutin - The Night Always Comes
30/52 - Stephen King - The Langoliers (reread)
31/52 - Elly Griffiths - The Crossing Places
32/53 - Stephen King - Secret Window, Secret Garden
33/52 - Elizabeth Strout - Oh William!
34/52 - Annie Proulx - Wyoming Stories (reread)
35/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley (reread)
36/52 - Peter Swanson - Nine Lives

37/52 - Johnathan Franzen - Crossroads

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 David Katz - People Funny Boy: the genius of Lee Scratch Perry
2/45 Onjali Q Rauf - The Star Outside My Window
3/45 Joe Abercrombie - The Trouble with Peace
4/45 P G Wodehouse - Something New
5/45 Thomas Harding - White Debt: the Demerara Uprising and Britain's legacy of slavery
6/45 Terry Pratchett - Men At Arms
7/45 Art Spiegelman - Maus
8/45 Andrea Levy - Small Island
9/45 Bex Hogan - Viper
10/45 Robert Jordan - Crossroads of Twilight
11/45 Katherine Applegate -The One and Only Ivan
12/45 Andrew Marr - A History of Modern Britain
13/45 Alan Moore & David Lloyd - V for Vendetta
14/45 Evan Ross Katz - Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: how Buffy staked our hearts
15/45 Pete Brown - Man Walks into a Pub: a sociable history of beer
16/45 Brian Groom - Northerners: a history, from the ice age to the present day
17/45 Ellis Peters - A Morbid Taste for Bones (Cadfael #1)
18/45 Joe Abercrombie - The Wisdom of Crowds
19/45 Laurie Lee - Cider with Rosie
20/45 Laurie Lee - As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
21/45 Laurie Lee - A Moment of War
22/45 Laurie Lee - A Rose for Winter
23/45 Mark Lawrence - Prince of Thorns
24/45 Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns
25/45 T C Eglington & Simon Davis - Thistlebone
26/45 JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit
27/45 Andrew Marr - A History of the World

28/45 Edgar Mittelholzer - My Bones and My Flute

 

[Fozzie Bear]

14/29 Lauren Elkin - No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute

A small book of observations written in the notes app of an iPhone on buses in 2015. A year bookended by two tragedies in Paris and those on top of a tragedy to author faced herself. I liked it, she's a good observer. She makes the point that she only conceived of it as a book during the lockdown when commuting to work was much less of a thing for many of us. So there is an odd nostalgia attached to it now.

 

[imposs1904]

1/52 In and Out by Mat Coward
2/52 And Away . . . by Bob Mortimer
3/52 In the Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan
4/52 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile by Adelle Stripe
5/52 My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
6/52 One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie
7/52 May God Forgive by Alan Parks
8/52 1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
9/52 Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
10/52 Scully by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
11/52 Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen
12/52 The Pressures of Life: Four Television Plays edited by Michael Marland
13/52 A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon (ReRead)
14/52 Scully and Mooey by Alan Bleasdale (ReRead)
15/52 Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon
16/52 Turbulent Priests by Colin Bateman
17/52 Shooting Sean by Colin Bateman

18/52 The Horse with My Name by Colin Bateman

 

[BoatieBird]

1/52 - Sarah Waters - Fingersmith
2/52 - Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These
3/52 - Richard Osman - The Man Who Died Twice
4/52 - Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
5/52 - Matt Haig - The Midnight Library
6/52 - Patricia Highsmith - A Dog's Ransom
7/52 - Claire Douglas - The Couple at No. 9
8/52 - Daniel Mason - The Piano Tuner
9/52 - Zadie Smith - On Beauty
10/52 - Stephen King & Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Button Box (reread)
11/52 - Minette Walters - The Cellar
12/52 - Barbara Vine - The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (reread)
13/52 - Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman
14/52 - Peter Swanson - Rules for Perfect Murders
15/52 - Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This
16/52 - Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You?
17/52 - Toni Morrison - Beloved
18/52 - Denise Mina - The Less Dead
19/52 - Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Magic Feather
20/52 - Sarah Waters - The Night Watch
21/52 - Chibundu Onuzo - Sankofa
22/52 - Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Final Task
23/52 - A A Milne - The Red House Mystery
24/52 - A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven
25/52 - Andrew Michael Hurley - Devil's Day
26/52 - Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons
27/52 - Stephen King - Skeleton Crew
28/52 - Ruth Rendell - Portobello (reread)
29/52 - Willy Valutin - The Night Always Comes
30/52 - Stephen King - The Langoliers (reread)
31/52 - Elly Griffiths - The Crossing Places
32/53 - Stephen King - Secret Window, Secret Garden
33/52 - Elizabeth Strout - Oh William!
34/52 - Annie Proulx - Wyoming Stories (reread)
35/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley (reread)
36/52 - Peter Swanson - Nine Lives
37/52 - Johnathan Franzen - Crossroads

38/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid