Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Once more unto the book dear friends: 2024 reading challenge thread

How many books do you anticipate reading in 2024?

  • Total voters
    66
1/30 David Peace - The Damned Utd
2/30 I, Partridge We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge
3/30 No Way Down by Graham Bowley.
4/30 Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming
5/30 Every second counts by Lance Armstrong
6/30 The Dead House by Harry Bingham
7/30 Underground Airline by Ben Winters
8/30 Who they was by Gabriel Krause

9/30 The Last - Hanna Jameson
Slightly underwhelming post-apocalyptic tale. It's not sure what it want to be. I liked the fact that the protagonist was an arse but didn't know it

10/30 The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman. It starts well but turns into a fairly bog standard thriller.
 
1/19 The Dream of the Celt - Mario Vargas Llosa
2/19 The War of the Worlds - HG Wells
3/19 Celtic Gold, A Voyage Around Ireland - Peter Marshall
4/19 The Great Game (Nikolai Dante) - Robbie Morrison
5/19 Snow - Orhan Pamuk
 
Annoyingly over the last month or so my mobile browser has closed my tab with all my half read Manga in it. As I can have loads of tabs open and the mobile version doesn't have restore tabs I've seriously lost track of where i'm at in terms of series. That being said a lot of those open tabs only had a few chapters read so don't count hugly to my overall chapter count.

It happened again today so I thought I'd put in an update to give a rough estimate of where I am. At a guess it's missing maybe up to 50 series but probabl only about 100 to 200 chapters.

Oh man I can no longer post the list as it breaks the post count limit. I'll attach it as a PDF

The current count is 134 Series - 4587 chapters
 

Attachments

  • Manga List - Sheet1.pdf
    56.2 KB · Views: 2
1/30 - 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World - Elif Shafak
2/30 - Leonard and Hungry Paul - Rónán Hession
3/30 - The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
4/30 - Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
 
1/9 - Ring Around the Bases: The Complete Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner by Ring Lardner
2/9 - The Fear Index by Robert Harris
3/9 - Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
 
1. "Wrong Place Wrong Time" - Gillian McAllister.
2. "The Scarlet Papers" - Matthew Richardson
3. "The Year of the Locust" - Terry Hayes
4. "Kill for Me: Kill for You" - Steve Cavanagh
5"The One" - John Marrs
6. "Her Last Move" - John Marrs
7. "Rock, Paper, Scissors" -Alice Fenney

8. "Anna O" - interesting and very readable thriller though maybe a little over hyped
 
1/52 - Liz Nugent - Strange Sally Diamond
2/52 - Zadie Smith - NW
3/52 - Val McDermid - Past Lying
4/52 - S.A. Cosby - Blacktop Wasteland
5/52 - Doris Lessing - Martha Quest
6/52 - Elly Griffiths - A Room Full of Bones
7/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
8/52 - Jeanine Cummins - American Dirt (BC)
9/52 - Graham Norton - Holding
10/52 - Taylor Jenkins Reid - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
11/52 - Jeanette Winterson - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
12/52 - Ann Patchett - Tom Lake

13/52 - Elly Griffiths - A Dying Fall
 
9/29 Possession – AS Byatt

That was a struggle. I can see why it won the Booker…she wrote pages and pages of fake, turgid, Victorian poetry. It reached its denouement fairly quickly, so I guess she was getting bored of writing it.

8/29 User - Bruce Benderson
7/29 Crush – Richard Siken
6/29 And Then He Sang a Lullaby – Ani Kayode Somtochukwu
5/29 Iracema – José de Alencar
4/29 The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
3/29 Where I Was From – Joan Didion
2/29 The Whale Tattoo – Jon Ransom
1/29 There Are More Things – Yara Rodrigues Fowler
 
1/45 Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2/45 John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3/45 Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4/45 Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5/45 Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6/45 Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7/45 Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8/45 Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9/45 Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10/45 Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11/45 Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12/45 Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13/45 Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14/45 David Lodge - Changing Places
15/45 Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16/45 CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17/45 David Lodge - Small World
18/45 David Lodge - Nice Work
19/45 Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20/45 Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21/45 Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls

22/45 Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism
 
1/36 Diaries 1980–1988: Halfway to Hollywood – The Film Years by Michael Palin
2/36 The Bingo Hall Detectives by Jonathan Whitelaw
3/36 Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars by David Hepworth (Audiobook)
4/36 Heart of Dart-ness: Bullseyes, Boozers and Modern Britain by Ned Boulting

5/36 Pulp’s This is Hardcore by Jane Savidge
 
1/50 The State of Capitalism by Costas Lapavitsas and the EReNSEP Writing Collective
2/50 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
3/50 The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
4/50 Army of Lovers by K.M. Soehnlein
5/50 Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü
6/50 Sanditon by Jane Austen
7/50 Delilah Green Doesn't Care by Ashley Herring Blake
8/50 Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman
9/50 A Long Time Dead by Samara Berger
10/50 Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century by George Katsiaficas
11/50 Maigret at Picratt’s by Georges Simenon
12/50 Matrix by Lauren Groff
Very vivid and poetic imagining of the life of Marie de France as an abbess. I really liked this for the most part although in places I thought it was a bit rushed and some of the later character ended up blurring together, I could've done with a longer novel that was more leisurely paced - not a major flaw though. I did read an interesting and highly critical review by a historian and their criticisms seemed reasonable but a) I wasn’t aware of any of the problems on reading the novel (except for some of the references to witchcraft which based on what I remember from Caliban and the Witch were anachronistic) and b) even thinking about it now I think Groff gets away with some inauthenticity through the sort of mystical quality of the story. Anyway, historically accurate or not it was good.
 
1/3 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (First Hypotheses)
1/45 John Fowles - The Collector
2/3 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (Marx, Labour-Power, Working Class)
2/45 Claire Dederer - Monsters
3/3-3/45 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (Postscript and Appendix)
4/45 Josh Davidson and Eric King (eds) - Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners
5/45 Charlie Squire - Slouching: A Field Guide to Art and (Un-) Belonging in Europe
6/45 Alasdair Gray - 1982, Janine

7/45 Isaac Rose - The Rentier City

Decent book. Pretty accessible and readable for a book about the circulation of capital, tracing out an argument about the role of the state and the Labour Party in the neoliberal transformation of housing in Manchester over the past few decades and putting it into a wider historical context, and always from a standpoint that's interested in working-class resistance to the above, not just analysing capital for the sake of it. Now starting:

8/45 Gemma Fairclough - Bear Season

Another first book from a Manchester writer. Keep on being slightly tempted to think of it as We're Going On A Bear Hunt. Novel about a woman disappearing in Alaska, think the author's into stuff like fairytales and Angela Carter. Looks like it should be good, nicely designed front cover although I think you're not meant to judge books by those?
 
1/45 Connie Willis - The Best of...
2/45 Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman
3/45 Tony Horwitz - Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
4/45 Abbie Hoffman - Steal This Urine Test
5/45 Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
6/45 K.J. Parker - How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It
7/45 Naomi Klein - Doppelganger
8/45 John Williams (Ed.) - Wales Half Welsh
9/45 Issac Asimov - Nightfall and Other Stories
10/45 Norman Wybron - The Chartists of Blaenau Gwent
11/45 Deborah Madison - Vegetable Literacy
12/45 Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
13/45 Devon Price - Laziness Does Not Exist
14/45 Alice Walker - The Colour Purple
15/45 Emma Goldman - Anarchism and Other Essays
16/45 Octavia E. Butler - Parable of the Sower

17/45 Andy Greenberg - Sandworm
 
hc - hard copy
dl - dens library
k - kindle
g - google

1/50 Face, Benjamin Zephaniah- hc
2/50 My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Otessa Moshfegh - dl
3/50 Tin Toys Trilogy, Ursula Holden - g
4/50 Famished, Meghan O'Flynn - g
5/50 Mystery Girl, Kenneth Rosenberg - k
6/50 The Last Single Girl, Bria Quinlan - k
7/50 White Fang, Jack London - dl
8/50 One Last Step, Sarah Sutton- k


9/50 The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
10/50 The Humans, Matt Haig - dl
11/50 Luckiest Girl Alive, Jessica Knoll- dl

These last three are all good books.

The last one has a lot of trauma in it as a warning though.
 
rich! said:
31. Ken MacLeod, Beyond the Hallowed Sky. Book one of a trilogy. About 50 pages in I ordered the other two.
Click to expand...
32. Ken MacLeod, Beyond the Reach of Earth. Book 2, great setup for Book 3 :)
33. Ada Hoffmann, The Outside (accidental reread) - cosmic horror without the racism, and space opera, and an autistic lead character. Once I realised it was a reread I carried on anyway because it was good.
 
Aiming for 31.

So far finished:

1/31 Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks
2/31 Ten Myths About Israel - Ilan Pappé
3/31 Buying Time - Wolfgang Streeck
4/31 Too Late to Awaken - Slavoj Zizek
5/31 Use of Weapons - Iain M. Banks
6/31 2023 A Trilogy - The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
7/31 The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon

I'm coming to the end of 8/31 which is The Long '68 by Richard Vinen.



I will read a couple of books in Spanish - I thought I could try Isabel Allende as an experiement and try and read a book from cover to cover in Portuguese, which I've never done.

Books will be about teaching, linguistics, sci-fi, biography, history and contemporary fiction mainly - but could be anything because i'm reading for breadth not depth.
 
1/45 Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2/45 John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3/45 Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4/45 Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5/45 Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6/45 Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7/45 Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8/45 Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9/45 Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10/45 Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11/45 Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12/45 Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13/45 Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14/45 David Lodge - Changing Places
15/45 Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16/45 CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17/45 David Lodge - Small World
18/45 David Lodge - Nice Work
19/45 Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20/45 Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21/45 Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
22/45 Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism

23/45 Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [Haile Selassie I]
 
1/52 - Liz Nugent - Strange Sally Diamond
2/52 - Zadie Smith - NW
3/52 - Val McDermid - Past Lying
4/52 - S.A. Cosby - Blacktop Wasteland
5/52 - Doris Lessing - Martha Quest
6/52 - Elly Griffiths - A Room Full of Bones
7/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
8/52 - Jeanine Cummins - American Dirt (BC)
9/52 - Graham Norton - Holding
10/52 - Taylor Jenkins Reid - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
11/52 - Jeanette Winterson - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
12/52 - Ann Patchett - Tom Lake
13/52 - Elly Griffiths - A Dying Fall

14/52 - Iain Banks - Stonemouth (re-read)
 
rich! said:
32. Ken MacLeod, Beyond the Reach of Earth. Book 2, great setup for Book 3 :)
33. Ada Hoffmann, The Outside (accidental reread) - cosmic horror without the racism, and space opera, and an autistic lead character. Once I realised it was a reread I carried on anyway because it was good.
Click to expand...
34. Zilla Novikov et al, The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die - lots of simple recipes for when it's too hard to do anything about food, and it's funny as well.
 
1/60 Silent Prey - John Sandford.
2/60 Sudden Prey - John Sandford
3/60 Easy Prey - John Sandford
4/60 Wolves of Winter - Dan Jones
5/60 Normandy '44 : D-Day And The Battle For France - James Holland
6/60 Bad Actors - Mick Herron
 
1/36 Diaries 1980–1988: Halfway to Hollywood – The Film Years by Michael Palin
2/36 The Bingo Hall Detectives by Jonathan Whitelaw
3/36 Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars by David Hepworth (Audiobook)
4/36 Heart of Dart-ness: Bullseyes, Boozers and Modern Britain by Ned Boulting
5/36 Pulp’s This is Hardcore by Jane Savidge

6/36 Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

Excellent novel about the working poor getting by in small town America.
 
1/3 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (First Hypotheses)
1/45 John Fowles - The Collector
2/3 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (Marx, Labour-Power, Working Class)
2/45 Claire Dederer - Monsters
3/3-3/45 Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital (Postscript and Appendix)
4/45 Josh Davidson and Eric King (eds) - Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners
5/45 Charlie Squire - Slouching: A Field Guide to Art and (Un-) Belonging in Europe
6/45 Alasdair Gray - 1982, Janine
7/45 Isaac Rose - The Rentier City

8/45 Gemma Fairclough - Bear Season

I read the book about getting ate off a bear pretty fast, but saying I devoured it is a bit too obvious and heavy-handed a pun, so I won't. There's a bit of background setting with animal rights/eco activist types that doesn't ring quite true, but tbf you don't read a book like this for the minor characters in the background, you read it for the bits where it gets weird, and the bits where it gets weird work pretty well imo.
Probably going to read Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead next. I think that's based on a Charles Dickens book that I've not read, I vaguely understand that the book it's based on is not actually about a magician but who knows?
 
Favelado said:
7/31 The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon


I will read a couple of books in Spanish - I thought I could try Isabel Allende as an experiement and try and read a book from cover to cover in Portuguese, which I've never done.
Click to expand...
The Lonely Londoners is next on my list to re-read. A review of a play based on it spurred me into buying it on the kindle

My ambitions about reading the classics in Portuguese are more modest..I read O Pequeno Príncipe…there’s an English/portuguese version
 
1/45 Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2/45 John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3/45 Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4/45 Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5/45 Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6/45 Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7/45 Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8/45 Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9/45 Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10/45 Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11/45 Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12/45 Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13/45 Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14/45 David Lodge - Changing Places
15/45 Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16/45 CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17/45 David Lodge - Small World
18/45 David Lodge - Nice Work
19/45 Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20/45 Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21/45 Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
22/45 Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism
23/45 Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [Haile Selassie I]

24/45 Alec Worsley, Ben Willsher - Durham Red: Born Bad
 
1/30 - 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World - Elif Shafak
2/30 - Leonard and Hungry Paul - Rónán Hession
3/30 - The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
4/30 - Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5/30 - A Kind of Spark - Ellie McNicoll
 
1/30 David Peace - The Damned Utd
2/30 I, Partridge We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge
3/30 No Way Down by Graham Bowley.
4/30 Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming
5/30 Every second counts by Lance Armstrong
6/30 The Dead House by Harry Bingham
7/30 Underground Airline by Ben Winters
8/30 Who they was by Gabriel Krause
9/30 The Last - Hanna Jameson
10/30 The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman.

11/30 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead The characters didn't develop much but overall I liked the book. I can't do better than quote part of this review on GoodReads Mutta jollain tapaa tämä oli kuitenkin kirjoitettu niin puuduttavalla tavalla, etten parhaimmillaankaan jaksanut juurikaan tähän edes keskittyä.

Quote Reply
Report
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Mrs Miggins
MAFSUK 2024
14 15 16 17 18
Replies
529
Views
10K
Saffy
Saffy
P
Celeb Masterchef 2024
Replies
17
Views
475
Numbers
Numbers
ska invita
They've broken YouTube (2024 edition)
Replies
22
Views
495
Saul Goodman
Saul Goodman
two sheds
Janey Godley dies November 2 2024 :(
Replies
24
Views
518
Happy Tree
Happy Tree
Me76
Strictly Come Dancing 2024
8 9 10 11 12
Replies
352
Views
8K
MrsArcanum
MrsArcanum
Back
Top Bottom