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

I expect to read this many books in 2022

  • Total voters
    54
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
39/52 - Joanna Cannon - A Tidy Ending
40/52 - Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street

41/52 - Lisa McInerney - The Rules of Revelation
 
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
25/45 Philip K. Dick - Ubik
26/45 Joan Didion - Salvador
27/45 Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
28/45 Hermann Hess - Siddhartha
29/45 Var eds. - The Ukrainian Review, II 1984
30/45 Gordon DeMarco - Frisco Blues
 
1/75. The Story of England - Michael Wood .
2/75 Broken Rails : How Privitisation Wrecked Britain's Railways - Christian Wolmar .
3/75 Black and British : A Forgotten History - David Olusoga.
4/75 Shackleton: A Biography - Ranulph Fiennes
5/75 The Secret Barrister: Stories of the law and how its broken - The Secret Barrister
6/75 The Nanny State Made Me : The Story of Britain & How to Save it. - Stuart Maconie
7/75 Conquistadors - Michael Wood.
8/75 Shadows Reel - CJ Box
9/75 Hope & Glory - Stuart Maconie
10/75 Killing Floor - Lee Child
11/75 Die Trying - Lee Child
12/75 Tripwire - Lee Child
13/75 The Visitor - Lee Child
14/75 Echo Burning - Lee Child
15/75 Without Fail - Lee Child
16/75 Persuader - Lee Child
17/75 The Enemy - Lee Child
18/75 One Shot - Lee Child
19/75 The Hard Way - Lee Child
20/75 Sing Backwards and Weep - Mark Lanegan
21/75 Bad Luck and Trouble - Lee Child
22/75 Nothing to Lose - Lee Child
23/75 Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child
24/75 61 Hours - Lee Child
25/75 Worth Dying For - Lee Child
26/75 The Affair - Lee Child
27/75 The Plantagenets : The Kings Who Made England - Dan Jones
28/75 A Wanted Man - Lee Child
29/75 Never Go Back - Lee Child
30/75 Look Here : On The Pleasures of Observing The City - Ana Kinsella.
31/75 Personal - Lee Child
32/75 The Vietnam War : An Initmate History - Geoffrey C Ward & Ken Burns.
33/75 Make Me - Lee Child
34/75 Night School - Lee Child
35/75 The Midnight Line - Lee Child
36/75 Past Tense - Lee Child.
37/75 Blue Moon - Lee Child
38/75 Raven : Blood Eye - Giles Kristian
 
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
25/45 Philip K. Dick - Ubik
26/45 Joan Didion - Salvador
27/45 Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
28/45 Hermann Hess - Siddhartha
29/45 Var eds. - The Ukrainian Review, II 1984
30/45 Gordon DeMarco - Frisco Blues

31/45 Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary

Really enjoyed this one. It really is speculative fiction, as all the worlds governments work together to deal with a existential threat. Plus alien jazz hands.
 
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" - Harriet Tyce
19. "Thirteen Storeys - Jonathan Sims
20. "The Twyford Code" - Janice Hallett

21. "The Stranger Diaries" - very accomplished and interesting thriller that I was inspired to read by these podcasts

www.bbc.co.uk

Shedunnit - The Tichborne Claimant - BBC Sounds

Detective fiction is obsessed with identity. This Victorian legal case is the reason why.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
 
16/29 Marion Coutts - The Iceberg: A Memoir

The author is an artist who was previously the singer for the excellent Dog Faced Hermans. This is a beautiful and depressing account of the slow decline and death of her partner, the art critic Tom Lubbock, of a brain tumour. It has some incredible raw, frustrated and funny passages with some lovely descriptions of mundane and terrible days.
 
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
29/45 Richard Atkinson - Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract: the story of a tangled inheritance
30/45 Amos Tutuola - The Palm-Wine Drinkard
31/45 E R Braithwaite - To Sir, With Love
32/45 Joan Lindsay - Picnic at Hanging Rock
33/45 Ian Serraillier - The Silver Sword

34/45 Gerald Durrell - Birds, Beasts and Relatives
 
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
31/30 Raymond Williams - Keywords
32/30 Tyneside Anarchist Archive - Anarchism in North East England 1882-1992

33/30 Lauren Oyler - Fake Accounts

Mixed feelings about this one, I really liked it at first but found it a bit dragging as it went on - there's a section of the book entitled "Middle (nothing happens)" and she's not lying. Could perhaps have done with editing that one down a bit. I suppose that when your book deals with ennui, banality, culturealienationboredomanddespair etc, it can be hard to draw the line between a bad book and one that captures its subject matter quite well? Came out at about the same time as Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This (which is a better book, but then Lockwood is a very high bar to live up to) and there were a lot of comparisons at the time, but I think it perhaps reminded me more of something like Taipei by Tao Lin?
Now starting:

34/30 Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (two books collected in one volume)
Cheery, uplifting stuff, obv.
 
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
12/29 Why Believe? - John Cottingham
13/29 Hapax- AE Stallings

14/29 Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman

Literate smut.
 
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
29/45 Richard Atkinson - Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract: the story of a tangled inheritance
30/45 Amos Tutuola - The Palm-Wine Drinkard
31/45 E R Braithwaite - To Sir, With Love
32/45 Joan Lindsay - Picnic at Hanging Rock
33/45 Ian Serraillier - The Silver Sword
34/45 Gerald Durrell - Birds, Beasts and Relatives

35/45 Sam Selvon - The Lonely Londoners
 
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
8. Laini Taylor - Daughter of Smoke and Bone
9. Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister, the Serial Killer
10. Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre
11. Belinda Bauer - Snap
12. Joe R Lansdale - Honky Tonk Samurai

13. Coogan and co - Alan Partridge: Nomad. Entertaining enough.
 
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
39/52 - Joanna Cannon - A Tidy Ending
40/52 - Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street
41/52 - Lisa McInerney - The Rules of Revelation

42/52 - Val McDermid - 1979
 
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" - Harriet Tyce
19. "Thirteen Storeys - Jonathan Sims
20. "The Twyford Code" - Janice Hallett
21. "The Stranger Diaries" - Elly Griffiths

22. "People Like Her" - Ellery Lloyd. Well written, well crafted but rather depressing thriller
 
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
31/30 Raymond Williams - Keywords
32/30 Tyneside Anarchist Archive - Anarchism in North East England 1882-1992
33/30 Lauren Oyler - Fake Accounts
34/30 Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (two books collected in one volume)

Very Lovecraft-y. Masks, puppets, clowns, festivals, dreams, etc. Cosmic horror is a very ambitious genre, so it's easy for it to feel a bit silly, but when it works it can achieve stuff that no-one else is even trying, I suppose?

Next up, starting:
35/30 Jean-Patrick Manchette - Three to Kill. French noir, which I suppose would just make it black?
 
1/9 - Phantom by Jo Nesbo
2/9 - Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
3/9 - Cold Killing by Luke Delaney
4/9 - A Time for Mercy by John Grisham
 
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
18/26 - Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others

19/26 - Kevin Barry - There are Little Kingdoms
 
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
39/52 - Joanna Cannon - A Tidy Ending
40/52 - Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street
41/52 - Lisa McInerney - The Rules of Revelation
42/52 - Val McDermid - 1979

43/52 - Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train
 
39 The Glass Rainbow James Lee Burke
40 The Long Way Bernard Moitessier
41 Left for Dead Nick Ward
42 The Black Echo Michael Connelly
43 Blood & Sugar Laura Shepherd-Robinson
44 Halfway to Hollywood Michael Palin
45 Speaks the Nightbird Robert R. McCammon
46 Suttree Cormac McCarthy (reread)
 
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
8. Laini Taylor - Daughter of Smoke and Bone
9. Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister, the Serial Killer
10. Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre
11. Belinda Bauer - Snap
12. Joe R Lansdale - Honky Tonk Samurai
13. Coogan and co - Alan Partridge: Nomad

14. Ann Patchett - Commonwealth. A classy and involving family saga. I enjoyed it very much, will read more of her work.
 
yield said:
1/10 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
2/10. The God is Not Willing (Witness, #1) by Steven Erikson
3/10. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
4/10. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
5/10. Strumpet City by James Plunkett.
Click to expand...
6/10 The Shadow of the Torturer The Book of the New Sun Volume 1 by Gene Wolfe

7/10 The Claw of the Conciliator The Book of the New Sun Volume 2 by Gene Wolfe

Genre defining fantasy/sci-fi with moments of sublime genius, set in the far future as our sun fades.

On the other hand Severian is a Gary Sue and the female characters are 2d. But you can see the influence it had on other better writers. Warhammer 40k borrowed loads of ideas.
 
1/75. The Story of England - Michael Wood .
2/75 Broken Rails : How Privitisation Wrecked Britain's Railways - Christian Wolmar .
3/75 Black and British : A Forgotten History - David Olusoga.
4/75 Shackleton: A Biography - Ranulph Fiennes
5/75 The Secret Barrister: Stories of the law and how its broken - The Secret Barrister
6/75 The Nanny State Made Me : The Story of Britain & How to Save it. - Stuart Maconie
7/75 Conquistadors - Michael Wood.
8/75 Shadows Reel - CJ Box
9/75 Hope & Glory - Stuart Maconie
10/75 Killing Floor - Lee Child
11/75 Die Trying - Lee Child
12/75 Tripwire - Lee Child
13/75 The Visitor - Lee Child
14/75 Echo Burning - Lee Child
15/75 Without Fail - Lee Child
16/75 Persuader - Lee Child
17/75 The Enemy - Lee Child
18/75 One Shot - Lee Child
19/75 The Hard Way - Lee Child
20/75 Sing Backwards and Weep - Mark Lanegan
21/75 Bad Luck and Trouble - Lee Child
22/75 Nothing to Lose - Lee Child
23/75 Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child
24/75 61 Hours - Lee Child
25/75 Worth Dying For - Lee Child
26/75 The Affair - Lee Child
27/75 The Plantagenets : The Kings Who Made England - Dan Jones
28/75 A Wanted Man - Lee Child
29/75 Never Go Back - Lee Child
30/75 Look Here : On The Pleasures of Observing The City - Ana Kinsella.
31/75 Personal - Lee Child
32/75 The Vietnam War : An Initmate History - Geoffrey C Ward & Ken Burns.
33/75 Make Me - Lee Child
34/75 Night School - Lee Child
35/75 The Midnight Line - Lee Child
36/75 Past Tense - Lee Child.
37/75 Blue Moon - Lee Child
38/75 Raven : Blood Eye - Giles Kristian
39/75 The Sentinel - Lee Child & Andrew Child
 
1/24 - Hope Not Fear - Hassan Akkad
2/24 - Revenge - Yoko Ogawa
3/24 - Men Who Hate Women - Laura Bates
4/24 - The Mad Women's Ball - Victoria Mas
5/24 - Open Water - Caleb Azumah Nelson
6/24 - The Shortest History of Germany - James Hawes
7/24 - Panenka - Rónán Hession
8/24 - What We’re Told Not to Talk About - Nimko Ali
 
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
31/30 Raymond Williams - Keywords
32/30 Tyneside Anarchist Archive - Anarchism in North East England 1882-1992
33/30 Lauren Oyler - Fake Accounts
34/30 Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (two books collected in one volume)

35/30 Jean-Patrick Manchette - Three to Kill

Interesting little book. There are bits of it that are like parodies of what you would imagine a pro-situ French noir novel to be like, i.e. men going into each other's offices and pouring glasses of whisky and lighting gitanes and then talking about May '68. Definitely the first time I've read a thriller that namedrops Castoriadis. Quite witty in places, and clever enough that I'm assuming the crap writing about female characters is because he's deliberately satirising noir fiction that has crap writing about female characters rather than just doing it, but I could be wrong. Entertaining enough if you're in the mood for a French Marxist thriller, I don't know if I could say Ioved it though?

Next up, starting:

36/30 Yassin al-Haj Saleh - The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy
 
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
8. Laini Taylor - Daughter of Smoke and Bone
9. Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister, the Serial Killer
10. Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre
11. Belinda Bauer - Snap
12. Joe R Lansdale - Honky Tonk Samurai
13. Coogan and co - Alan Partridge: Nomad
14. Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

15. Stephen Graham Jones - My Heart is a Chainsaw. Fantastic, bonkers horror of the 'small town misfit coming of age amid the murders' type.
 
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
39/52 - Joanna Cannon - A Tidy Ending
40/52 - Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street
41/52 - Lisa McInerney - The Rules of Revelation
42/52 - Val McDermid - 1979
43/52 - Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

44/52 - Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
 
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

13. How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia - Thomas Lahusen

14. Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia - Loren Graham
 
hmm, I said a minimum of 26 before, I fear that will be well beyond me now. My third and fourth books are both excellent and fascinating if you're into that sort of thing, but had a fuckload of unfamiliar acronyms and eastern european words that just made them both very slow going. I think I've missed one out between 2 & 3 too, I'm sure I borrowed one off mrsb when I'd finished my books on holiday, but buggared if I can remember what it was now. Anyways....

1 Jo Banks Hawkwind: Days of the Underground. Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia
2 Lesley Chow You're History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music
3 Yuliya Yurchenko Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict
4 Lara Douds Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State
5 Samantha Owens Pimped: The Shocking True Story of the Girl Sold for Sex by Her Best Friend
6 Kathryn Harkup Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts
7 Lisa McInerney The Glorious Heresies
8 Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse
9 Houzan Mahmoud (editor) Kurdish Women's Stories
10 Virginie Despentes Vernon Subutex: Volume 2
 
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