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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
10/30 The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman.
11/30 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
12/30 The Unfolding by AM Homes
13/30 Clothes, music, boys by Viv Albertine
14/30 Misery by Stephen King
15/30 The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
16/30 Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
17/30 Down River by John Hart
18/30 Magic Seeds by VS Naipaul
19/30 In our mad and furious city by Guy Gunaratne
20/30 The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
21/30 The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 by Frank Dikötter
22/30 The Devil's Playground by Stav Sherez
23/30 The Ticket Collector from Belarus by Mike Anderson & Neil Hanson
24/30 Countdown City by Ben Winters
25/30 The Seventh Victim by Michael Wood
26/30 A death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger
27/30 Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel
28/30 Spies by Michael Frayn.
29/30 All quiet on the Western front by Erich Maria Remarque
30/30 When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
31/30 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (and other stories) by Alan Sillitoe
32/30 Alone on the Ice by David Robert
33/30 The only story by Julian Barnes
34/30 An experiment in love by Hilary Mantel

35/30 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Is it an epic or does it just need a hard editing? Pasternak was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, largely as a result of this book, but the Soviet authorities made him renounce it.

I haven't seen the Omar Sharif film but will now to see how sympathetically Dr Zhivago is played. Different times of course, but he wasn't a good family man
 
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
13/50 Persuasion by Jane Austen
14/50 The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger
15/50 Hôtel Splendid by Marie Redonnet
16/50 Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata
17/50 The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
18/50 Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight by Aliette de Bodard
19/50 The Cracked Looking Glass by Katherine Anne Porter
20/50 Film Making in 1930s Britain by Rachael Low
21/50 Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
22/50 After the New Economy by Doug Henwood
23/50 The Teachers’ Room by Lydia Stryk
24/50 The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin
25/50 Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami
26/50 In the Long Run We Are All Dead by Geoff Mann
27/50 Madame de by Louise de Vilmorin
28/50 Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form by Anna Kornbluh
29/50 We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
30/50 Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison
31/50 BFFs by Anahit Behrooz
32/50 My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen
33/50 Go Back at Once by Robert Aickman
34/50 The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
35/50 The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
36/50 All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami
37/50 Chuǎng 1: Dead Generations by Chuǎng
38/50 Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
39/50 The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill
40/50 The Covert Captain by Jeanelle M. Ferreria
41/50 Orbital by Samantha Harvey
42/50 The Scandalous Letters of V and J by Felicia Davin
43/50 Child of Fortune by Yūko Tsushima
Character study of a woman and her fraught relationships with her daughter, sister and exes which all get ratcheted up when she learns she is pregnant. Seems like there is a rich vein of these kind of novels by Japanese writers and this was a good one too.
 
1/30 - Philip K. Dick - Valis
2/30 - Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
3/30 - Franz Kafka - The Trial
4/30 - Dan Charnas - Dilla Time
The Life and Afterlife of the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm
5/30 - Douglas Adams - The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
6/30 - Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars
7/30 - William S. Burroughs - Junky
8/30 - Louise Welsh - The Cutting Room
9/30 - J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
10/30 - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
11/30 - Percival Everett - James
12/30 - Frank Herbert - Dune
13/30 - Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory
14/30 - Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah
15/30 - William Gibson - Count Zero
16/30 - James Kelman - How Late It Was, How Late
17/30 - Laurie Gunst - Born Fi’ Dead
18/30 - John Niven - O Brother

19/30 - Mel Cheren - My Life and the Paradise Garage
 
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
18/45 Octavia E. Butler - Parable of the Talents
19/45 Joanna Nadin - The Queen of Bloody Everything
20/45 Lucy Inglis - Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium
21/45 Frank Kitson - Low Intensity Operations
22/45 Douglas Adams - Mostly Harmless
23/45 Detlef Singer - Garden Birds of Britain & Europe
24/45 Charles C. Mann - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
25/45 Elizabeth Nelson - The British Counter-culture 1966-73: A Study of the Underground Press
26/45 Chester Himes - A Rage in Harlem
27/45 Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground
28/45 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Word for World Is Forest
29/45 Harsha Walia - Border and Rule
30/45 Elif Shafak - The Island of Missing Trees
31/45 Rosa Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
32/45 Lauren Berlant - On the Inconvenience of Other People
33/45 Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
34/45 Viktor Haynes & Olga Semyonova Ed. - Workers Against the Gulag
35/45 Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose
36/45 Rachel Pollack - Unquenchable Fire
37/45 Andy Greenberg - Tracers in the Dark
38/45 Pyotr Kropotkin - The State: It's Historic Role

39/45 Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead
40/45 Lorraine Harrison - Latin for Gardeners
 
1. Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2. John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3. Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4. Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5. Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6. Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7. Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9. Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10. Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11. Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12. Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13. Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14. David Lodge - Changing Places
15. Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16. CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17. David Lodge - Small World
18. David Lodge - Nice Work
19. Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20. Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21. Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
22. Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism
23. Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [Haile Selassie I]
24. Alec Worsley, Ben Willsher - Durham Red: Born Bad
25. Edwin A Abbott - Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions
26. Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
27. Ian Mortimer - Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter
28. John Tomlinson, Simon Jacob - Armoured Gideon
29. Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer - The Wicker Man
30. Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram - Head North: a Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain
31. Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones & the Six
32. Dan Abnett, Phil Winslade - Lawless: Breaking Badrock
33. Terry Pratchett - Jingo
34. Huey Morgan - Rebel Heroes: The Renegades of Music and Why We Still Need Them (audiobook)
35. Andrew White - Lancaster: a history
36. Ian Edgington, D'Israeli - Scarlet Traces vol 2
37. Mark Millar, Richard Eldon, Al Ewing, Chris Weston - The Best of Tharg's Terror Tales
38. Katja Hoyer - Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990
39. Randall Munro [xkcd comics] - What If? 2: Additional Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
40. Alan Grant, Emma Beeby, Maura McHugh - Anderson, Psi-Division: NWO
41. Guy Adams, Jimmy Broxton - Hope
42. Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
43. Robert Morrison - The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World
44. John Wagner, David Hine, Nick Percival - Dominion
45. David Mitchell - Unruly: a History of England's Kings and Queens [audiobook]
46. David Hine, Nick Percival - The Dark Judges: Deliverance
47. Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent
48. Bernard Cornwell - The Winter King
49. Pat Mills, Patrick Goddard - Savage: The Marze Murderer
50. Arthur Wyatt, Jake Lynch - Judge Dredd: The Red Queen Saga
51. Tom Tully, Vanyo - The Mind of Wolfie Smith
52. Maurice LeBlanc - The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
53. Everett True - Hey Ho Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones
54. Stuart Maconie - The Full English: a Journey in Search of a Country and its People [audiobook]
55. Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley Day, Dave Gibbons - Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years - vol 2
56. H G Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
57. Dan Abnett, Mark Harrison - The Out

58. Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum
 
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
9/45 PG Wodehouse - Carry On, Jeeves
10/45 Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead
11/45 Willa Cather - My Antonia
12/45 Anne Boyer - Garments Against Women
13/45 Richard Wright - Native Son
14/45 Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift
15/45 John Berger and Jean Mohr - Another Way of Telling
16/45 Tao Lin - Leave Society
17/45 Miranda July - All Fours
18/45 Meg Mason - Sorrow and Bliss
19/45 Hilary White - Holes
20/45 Jane Bowles - Two Serious Ladies
21/45 Jane Huffman - Public Abstract
22/45 Alexander Billet - Shake the City
23/45 Patricia Lockwood - Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
24/45 George Katsiaficas - The Subversion of Politics
25/45 Torrey Peters - Detransition, Baby
26/45 Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean

27/45 James Ellroy - Perfidia

A really fast read considering how giant it is. For those not familiar with the Ellroyverse, he's written a quartet of novels set in LA from the late 40s-50s, then a trilogy set across the USA from the 60s-early 70s, and now Perfidia is the start of a new quartet set in LA featuring a range of characters from the previous/subsequent 7 books, all of which are pretty large in their own right. Have checked, and since Perfidia came out he's written a second book in the new quartet, as well as two more where I'm not completely sure if they count as part of the series or not.
Anyway, really liked it, I'm tempted to say that he's improved as a writer but then again the fact that I've read 7 of his books already suggests that I did quite like his writing in the first place. I think the book works well in its own right, but not sure how well it works as part of the series. Prequels are tricky like that, they can be good for expanding on minor characters, and it's an interesting decision to make someone who only appears as a villain in the other books be a protagonist in this one, but the difficulty is that if you let the characters from your earlier/later books have significant interactions then you can end up with a situation where character A has an affair with character B, forms a scheme with character C to give Japanese people plastic surgery to make them look more Chinese, and gets stabbed by character D, and also sees visions of wolves, and then none of this ever gets mentioned in the chronologically-subsequent novels featuring A, B, C, and D.
Definitely enjoyed it overall though!
 
1. Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2. John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3. Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4. Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5. Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6. Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7. Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9. Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10. Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11. Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12. Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13. Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14. David Lodge - Changing Places
15. Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16. CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17. David Lodge - Small World
18. David Lodge - Nice Work
19. Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20. Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21. Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
22. Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism
23. Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [Haile Selassie I]
24. Alec Worsley, Ben Willsher - Durham Red: Born Bad
25. Edwin A Abbott - Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions
26. Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
27. Ian Mortimer - Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter
28. John Tomlinson, Simon Jacob - Armoured Gideon
29. Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer - The Wicker Man
30. Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram - Head North: a Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain
31. Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones & the Six
32. Dan Abnett, Phil Winslade - Lawless: Breaking Badrock
33. Terry Pratchett - Jingo
34. Huey Morgan - Rebel Heroes: The Renegades of Music and Why We Still Need Them (audiobook)
35. Andrew White - Lancaster: a history
36. Ian Edgington, D'Israeli - Scarlet Traces vol 2
37. Mark Millar, Richard Eldon, Al Ewing, Chris Weston - The Best of Tharg's Terror Tales
38. Katja Hoyer - Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990
39. Randall Munro [xkcd comics] - What If? 2: Additional Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
40. Alan Grant, Emma Beeby, Maura McHugh - Anderson, Psi-Division: NWO
41. Guy Adams, Jimmy Broxton - Hope
42. Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
43. Robert Morrison - The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World
44. John Wagner, David Hine, Nick Percival - Dominion
45. David Mitchell - Unruly: a History of England's Kings and Queens [audiobook]
46. David Hine, Nick Percival - The Dark Judges: Deliverance
47. Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent
48. Bernard Cornwell - The Winter King
49. Pat Mills, Patrick Goddard - Savage: The Marze Murderer
50. Arthur Wyatt, Jake Lynch - Judge Dredd: The Red Queen Saga
51. Tom Tully, Vanyo - The Mind of Wolfie Smith
52. Maurice LeBlanc - The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
53. Everett True - Hey Ho Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones
54. Stuart Maconie - The Full English: a Journey in Search of a Country and its People [audiobook]
55. Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley Day, Dave Gibbons - Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years - vol 2
56. H G Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
57. Dan Abnett, Mark Harrison - The Out
58. Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum

59. T C Eglington, Simon Davis - Thistlebone

Another brilliant new 2000AD story. Folk horror in beautifully detailed painted art.
 
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
7/36 Keeffe Plays: 1: Gimme Shelter (Gem, Gotcha, Getaway), Barbarians (Killing Time, Abide with Me, in the City) by Barrie Keefe
8/36 Steak . . . Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody by David McVay (ReRead)

9/36 Murder on the Darts Board by Justin Irwin
 
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
7/60 The Wings of Pegasus - The Story of The Glider Pilot Regiment - George Chatterton (audio book)
8/60 This is Memorial Device - David Keenan
9/60 Sicily '43 : The First Assault on Fortress Europe - James Holland.
10/60 Salt Lane - William Shaw
11/60 Deadland - William Shaw
12/60 Under Occupation - Alan Furst
13/60 A Hero in France - Alan Furst
14/60 Grave's End - William Shaw
15/60 The Trawlerman - William Shaw
16/60 To War With The Walkers : One Family's Extraordinary Story of the Second World War - Annabel Venning
17/60 The Wild Swimmers - William Shaw
18/60 Beyond the Wall :East Germany 1949-1990 - Katia Hoyer
19/60 Empireworld - Sathnam Sanghera
20/60 Anything For Her - Jack Jordan
21/60 One Man's Window - Denis Barnham (audio book)
22/60 Dixie City Jam - James Lee Burke
 
1/30 - Philip K. Dick - Valis
2/30 - Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
3/30 - Franz Kafka - The Trial
4/30 - Dan Charnas - Dilla Time
The Life and Afterlife of the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm
5/30 - Douglas Adams - The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
6/30 - Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars
7/30 - William S. Burroughs - Junky
8/30 - Louise Welsh - The Cutting Room
9/30 - J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
10/30 - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
11/30 - Percival Everett - James
12/30 - Frank Herbert - Dune
13/30 - Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory
14/30 - Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah
15/30 - William Gibson - Count Zero
16/30 - James Kelman - How Late It Was, How Late
17/30 - Laurie Gunst - Born Fi’ Dead
18/30 - John Niven - O Brother
19/30 - Mel Cheren - My Life and the Paradise Garage

20/30 - William S. Burroughs - Queer
 
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
7/36 Keeffe Plays: 1: Gimme Shelter (Gem, Gotcha, Getaway), Barbarians (Killing Time, Abide with Me, in the City) by Barrie Keefe
8/36 Steak . . . Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody by David McVay (ReRead)
9/36 Murder on the Darts Board by Justin Irwin

10/36 Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale
 
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
12/50 See Jane Run, Joy Fielding - dl
13/50 Panic, Jeff Abbot - hc
14/50 Anatomy of a Soldier, Harry Parker - g
15/50 Serena, Ron Rash - dl
16/50 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid - dl
17/50 See Her Run, Rylie Dark - k
18/50 Brick Lane, Monica Ali - k
19/50 You Like It Darker, Stephen King - g
20/50 Damaged, Martina Cole - g
21/50 The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue - g
22/50 Chocolat, Joanne Harris - hc
23/50 The Silence Project, Carole Hailey - dl
24/50 The Cows, Dawn O'Porter - g
25/50 Blood Relatives, Stevan, Alcock - g
26/50 The Innocents, Francesca Segal - g
27/50 Once Upon a Crime, Nolon King - k
28/50 The Escape Room, L D Smithson - g


29/50 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World, Elif Shafak - g
30/50 Stag Party, Ben Rehder - k
31/50 Water, John Boyne - g

These last three are all great. All very different but I would recommend them all.
 
Where do we stand on literary magazines as entries?
1. High Rise - JG Ballard
2. Notes to Self - Emilie Pine
3. Things can only get bitter: the lost generation of 1992 - Alwyn Turner.
4. The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill - JM Keynes.

As I'm in the middle of an enormously long book on Churchill, I'm going to count the 32 page pamphlet by Keynes - a) becauase it was fucking difficult and b) because I can't believe I read it and c) because i now need to tell everyone about it..
 
1. Karl Stock - Comic Book Punks: How a Generation of Brits Reinvented Pop Culture
2. John Wagner, Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files vol 07
3. Terry Pratchett - The Carpet People
4. Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (reread)
5. Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby - Survival Geeks
6. Paul Baker - Fabulousa!: the Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language
7. Rachel Joyce - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
8. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
9. Neil Gaiman - Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
10. Pat Mills, Gerry Finley-Day - Dan Dare: the 2000AD Years - vol 1
11. Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12. Ian Edginton, Leigh Gallagher - Kingmaker
13. Iain Banks - Walking on Glass
14. David Lodge - Changing Places
15. Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Davis - Harry 20 on the High Rock
16. CLR James, Nik Watts, Sakina Karimjee - Toussaint Louverture: the Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History
17. David Lodge - Small World
18. David Lodge - Nice Work
19. Jah Wobble - Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer, the expanded edition
20. Alan McKenzie, John Ridgway - The Journal of Luke Kirby
21. Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
22. Helene Lee - The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism
23. Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [Haile Selassie I]
24. Alec Worsley, Ben Willsher - Durham Red: Born Bad
25. Edwin A Abbott - Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions
26. Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
27. Ian Mortimer - Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter
28. John Tomlinson, Simon Jacob - Armoured Gideon
29. Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer - The Wicker Man
30. Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram - Head North: a Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain
31. Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones & the Six
32. Dan Abnett, Phil Winslade - Lawless: Breaking Badrock
33. Terry Pratchett - Jingo
34. Huey Morgan - Rebel Heroes: The Renegades of Music and Why We Still Need Them (audiobook)
35. Andrew White - Lancaster: a history
36. Ian Edgington, D'Israeli - Scarlet Traces vol 2
37. Mark Millar, Richard Eldon, Al Ewing, Chris Weston - The Best of Tharg's Terror Tales
38. Katja Hoyer - Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990
39. Randall Munro [xkcd comics] - What If? 2: Additional Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
40. Alan Grant, Emma Beeby, Maura McHugh - Anderson, Psi-Division: NWO
41. Guy Adams, Jimmy Broxton - Hope
42. Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
43. Robert Morrison - The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World
44. John Wagner, David Hine, Nick Percival - Dominion
45. David Mitchell - Unruly: a History of England's Kings and Queens [audiobook]
46. David Hine, Nick Percival - The Dark Judges: Deliverance
47. Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent
48. Bernard Cornwell - The Winter King
49. Pat Mills, Patrick Goddard - Savage: The Marze Murderer
50. Arthur Wyatt, Jake Lynch - Judge Dredd: The Red Queen Saga
51. Tom Tully, Vanyo - The Mind of Wolfie Smith
52. Maurice LeBlanc - The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
53. Everett True - Hey Ho Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones
54. Stuart Maconie - The Full English: a Journey in Search of a Country and its People [audiobook]
55. Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley Day, Dave Gibbons - Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years - vol 2
56. H G Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
57. Dan Abnett, Mark Harrison - The Out
58. Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum
59. T C Eglington, Simon Davis - Thistlebone

60. David Katz - Solid Foundation: an Oral History of Reggae

Bit disappointing; I was looking forward to this as I really enjoyed the author's biog of Lee Scratch Perry but this was a bit of a slog.
 
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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
12/30 The Unfolding by AM Homes
13/30 Clothes, music, boys by Viv Albertine
14/30 Misery by Stephen King
15/30 The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
16/30 Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
17/30 Down River by John Hart
18/30 Magic Seeds by VS Naipaul
19/30 In our mad and furious city by Guy Gunaratne
20/30 The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
21/30 The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 by Frank Dikötter
22/30 The Devil's Playground by Stav Sherez
23/30 The Ticket Collector from Belarus by Mike Anderson & Neil Hanson
24/30 Countdown City by Ben Winters
25/30 The Seventh Victim by Michael Wood
26/30 A death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger
27/30 Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel
28/30 Spies by Michael Frayn.
29/30 All quiet on the Western front by Erich Maria Remarque
30/30 When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
31/30 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (and other stories) by Alan Sillitoe
32/30 Alone on the Ice by David Robert
33/30 The only story by Julian Barnes
34/30 An experiment in love by Hilary Mantel
35/30 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

36/30 Exit by Belinda Bauer She's an uneven writer. Her first book Blacklands is a superb psychological thriller. I've read another by her which was terrible. Exit was good and actually quite funny. I had it as an audiobook read by Lord Percy Percy and he really added to it, bringing the old bey Devonshire accents to life.
 
just finished The Railway Viaduct by Edward Marston. Now on The Hidden by Melanie Golding. Psychological thriller involving Selkies (or so were led to believe). One of the best books I've read this year
 
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" - Matthew Blake
9. 'My Name Is Nobody" - Matthew Richardson
10. "The Drift" - CJ Tudor
11. "The Other People" - C.J. Tudor
12. "The Marriage Act" - John Marrs
13. "Strung" - Per Jacobson
14. "Conviction" - Jack Jordan
15. "No One Saw A Thing" - Andrea Marr
16. "Before the Fall" - Noah Hawley
17. "Extinction" - Douglas Preston
18. "A Lesson in Cruelty" - Harriet Tyce
19. "All Her Fault" - Andrea Marr
20. "The Kaiju Preservation Society" - John Scalzi
21. "Three Assassins" - Kotato Isaka
22. "The Chamber" - Will Dean

23. The Hiding Place - Simon Lelic. Okay but a bit slow and a bit dull
 
1/15 - The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
2/15 - Uprooted by Naomi Novik
3/15 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
4/15 - Circe by Madeline Miller
5/15 - The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (reread)
6/15 - The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben
7/15 - The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
8/15 - Complete Land Law: Text, Cases, and Materials by Roger Sexton, Barbara Bogusz
9/15 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
10/15 - Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
11/15 - Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
12/15 - Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna. Three Short Stories by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė
13/15 - Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval by Gaia Vince

14/15 - The Official DVSA Theory Test for Car Drivers by DVSA

Riveting read, many unexpected turns and complex, flawed characters. Felt a little deflated on finishing it but looking forward to other books in this series.

As I'm in the middle of an enormously long book on Churchill, I'm going to count the 32 page pamphlet by Keynes - a) becauase it was fucking difficult and b) because I can't believe I read it and c) because i now need to tell everyone about it..

Your suffering is appreciated. For every person who reads a pamphlet by Keynes, 50 people are allowed a Jo Nesbo novel.
 
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)
15/52 - Doris Lessing - A Perfect Marriage (Martha Quest 2)
16/52 - Clare Chambers - In a Good Light
17/52 - Stephen King - Hearts in Atlantis (re-read)
18/52 - Doug Johnstone - A Dark Matter
19/52 - Stephen King - Insomnia
20/52 - Doug Johnstone - The Big Chill
21/52 - Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride
22/52 - Peter James - Stop Them Dead
23/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Secret House of Death
24/52 - Ann Patchett - The Dutch House
25/52 - Richard Chizmar - The Long Way Home
26/52 - Doug Johnstone - The Great Silence
27/52 - Maggie Shipstead - Great Circle
28/52 - Ann Cleeves - The Raging Storm
29/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Tremor of Forgery
30/52 - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
31/52 - Doug Johnstone - Black Hearts
32/52 - Zadie Smith - The Fraud
33/52 - Claire Keegan - So Late in the Day
34/52 - Bonnie Garmus - Lessons in Chemistry
35/52 - John Irving - The Last Chairlift
36/52 - Doug Johnstone - The Opposite of Lonely
37/52 - Claire Chamber - The Editor's Wife

38/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer
39/52 - Peter James - They Thought I Was Dead
 
1/19 Yanis Varoufakis - Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism?
2/19 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
3/19 Gary Russell - Doctor Who: The Star Beast
4/19 Maz Evans - Oh Maya God's.
5/19 Storm Dunlop and Will Tirion - Night Sky Almanac: A stargazers guide to 2024
6/19 Thomas S Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
7/19 Isaac Asimov - Foundation
8/19 Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissinger
9/19 Tristan Gooley - How to read water.
10/19 Sybille Steinbacher - Auschwitz: A history
11/19 Hannah Arendt- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil
12/19 George Mann - Doctor Who: Engines of War
13/19 David Graeber - Pirate Enlightenment, or the real Libertalia
14/19 Dale Smith - Doctor Who: The Many Hands
15/19 Chris van Tulleken - Ultra Processsed People: Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food... and why can't we stop?
16/19 Paul Cornell - Doctor Who: Goth Opera

Another one I've been reading to my daughter. My gran bought me this for Christmas when I was about my daughter's age and I read it then and a few times more over the next couple of years. The first chapter starts off with two vampires discussing what to have to eat Chinese? Indian? Leukemia victim? As it goes on people burst into flames, there are gothic halls full of half eaten corpses, a sex abusing evangelist, and one companion gets to catch what she thinks is a scared little boys teddy bear that is actually a recently turned vampires mothers' head. My daughter enjoyed it though the gore and brutality seem to go over her head a little as it did mine 30 odd years ago. Plot wise a Time Lord pal of the Doctor tries to raise an army of the undead on earth to conquer and in her opinion save Gallifrey. A fun read.
 
1/19 Yanis Varoufakis - Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism?
2/19 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
3/19 Gary Russell - Doctor Who: The Star Beast
4/19 Maz Evans - Oh Maya God's.
5/19 Storm Dunlop and Will Tirion - Night Sky Almanac: A stargazers guide to 2024
6/19 Thomas S Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
7/19 Isaac Asimov - Foundation
8/19 Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissinger
9/19 Tristan Gooley - How to read water.
10/19 Sybille Steinbacher - Auschwitz: A history
11/19 Hannah Arendt- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil
12/19 George Mann - Doctor Who: Engines of War
13/19 David Graeber - Pirate Enlightenment, or the real Libertalia
14/19 Dale Smith - Doctor Who: The Many Hands
15/19 Chris van Tulleken - Ultra Processsed People: Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food... and why can't we stop?
16/19 Paul Cornell - Doctor Who: Goth Opera
17/19 Jon Shonk - Introducing Meterology: A guide to weather

All about different types of weather as well as how to measure and predict the weather.
 
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
7/36 Keeffe Plays: 1: Gimme Shelter (Gem, Gotcha, Getaway), Barbarians (Killing Time, Abide with Me, in the City) by Barrie Keefe
8/36 Steak . . . Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody by David McVay (ReRead)
9/36 Murder on the Darts Board by Justin Irwin
10/36 Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale

11/36 Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale
 
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
13/50 Persuasion by Jane Austen
14/50 The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger
15/50 Hôtel Splendid by Marie Redonnet
16/50 Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata
17/50 The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
18/50 Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight by Aliette de Bodard
19/50 The Cracked Looking Glass by Katherine Anne Porter
20/50 Film Making in 1930s Britain by Rachael Low
21/50 Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
22/50 After the New Economy by Doug Henwood
23/50 The Teachers’ Room by Lydia Stryk
24/50 The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin
25/50 Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami
26/50 In the Long Run We Are All Dead by Geoff Mann
27/50 Madame de by Louise de Vilmorin
28/50 Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form by Anna Kornbluh
29/50 We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian
30/50 Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison
31/50 BFFs by Anahit Behrooz
32/50 My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen
33/50 Go Back at Once by Robert Aickman
34/50 The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
35/50 The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
36/50 All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami
37/50 Chuǎng 1: Dead Generations by Chuǎng
38/50 Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
39/50 The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill
40/50 The Covert Captain by Jeanelle M. Ferreria
41/50 Orbital by Samantha Harvey
42/50 The Scandalous Letters of V and J by Felicia Davin
43/50 Child of Fortune by Yūko Tsushima
44/50 Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach
Intensely morbid gothic-adjacent short novel verging on horror, in which a widower living in a sort of museum of grief targets a woman he believes to be the image of his dead wife with a possessive and fantastical obsession. This was mostly good but I really felt the short passage from the point of view of the woman who was the object of the obsession was a mistake as the up to that point clearly delusional judgement of the widower is practically endorsed through a two-dimensional and sexist portrait of her. Where it was strongest was the brilliantly vivid and overpowering atmosphere of Bruges it conjures.
 
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
6/19 Blaming the Victims - Said & Hitchens
7/19 The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
8/19 God Emperor of Dune - Frank Herbert

9/19 Drood - Dan Simmons
10/19 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - Kate Wilhelm... Sci-fi classic on the end of the world eco disaster survival thing
11/19 - That Neutral Island - Clair Wills... incredible and eye opener on Ireland during WW2, imperialists, spies, migrants, secret service, fear, fash, loathing and defiance
12/19 Don't Fall off the Mountain - Shirley MacLaine ... fascinating memoir of the 50s and 60s
13/19 You Can Get There from Here - Shirley MacLaine... almost as good as the previous book, especially when she goes to China
14/19 The Searcher - Tana French... the usual page turner you'd expect from French. Not overly enamoured with it being written in the present tense, though
 
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