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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
1/45 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
41/45 Molly Caldwell Crosby - Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic
42/45 Iain Banks - Complicity
43/45 Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
44/45 Rachel Sussman - The Oldest Living Things in the Planet
45/45 Christopher Ruocchio - Empire of Silence
46/45 Abdul Salam Zaeef - My Life with the Taliban

47/45 Joshua Dubler - Break Every Yoke

A US-centric book on the (liberation) theology of prison abolition. Morally on the right side, but seemingly further away than ever

 
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
28/45 Don DeLillo - White Noise
29/45 Colson Whitehead - Zone One
30/45 Dickhead Bidge - Bakunin Brand Vodka: Anarchism in Early Punk, 1976-1980
31/45 Thomas M Disch - Camp Concentration
32/45 RF Kuang - Babel
33/45 Jen Calleja - Goblinhood
34/45 Albert Meltzer - I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels

35/45 Nell Osborne - Thank You For Everything

Another fantastic one this, if we are counting it as a book then it's definitely one of my books of the year. I suppose it's sort of just expressing being sad and horny in a mostly funny way, but that doesn't remotely do it justice, the writing's just fireworks-display great pretty much all the time. "writing is for staying insufferable" is the line I've seen quoted in reviews but it's full of brilliance. "do I use the exclamatory language of my peers? yes certainly! suppose that I am thriving!" Less than 30 pages though, it's not long.
Next going to start reading Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project. I lent someone my copy of Devil House by John Darnielle, and they lent me this when returning it, so it's presumably a book that you would like if you enjoy Devil House?
 
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 - Clare Chambers - The Editor's Wife
38/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer
39/52 - Peter James - They Thought I Was Dead
40/52 - Jacqueline O'Mahony - Sing, Wild Bird, Sing (BC)
41/52 - Elly Griffiths - The Outcast Dead
42/52 - Charles Dickens - David Copperfield (BC)
43/52 - Iain Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale (re-read)
44/52 - Elly Griffiths - The Ghost Fields
45/52 - James M Cain - The Embezzler
46/52 - Clare Chambers - Shy Creatures
47/52 - Stephen King - Everything's Eventual
48/52 - Doug Johnstone - Living is a Problem

49/52 - Irvine Welsh - Resolution
50/52 - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - That Thing Around Your Neck
 
1/30 - Lexie Conyngham - Tomb for an Eagle
2/30 - Michael Eaton - B*llocks -A Word on Trial
3/30 - Paul Simpson - Revolutionary Spirit
4/30 - Joe Thomas - Red Menace
5/30 - Daniel Clowes - Monica
6/30 - Will Sergeant - Echoes
7/30 - Wu Ming - 54
8/30 - Kathleen Hanna - Rebel Girl, my life as a feminist punk
9/30 - Aldous Huxley - The Devils of Loudon
10/30 - Volodomyr Ishchenko - Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War
11/30 - Dan Kavanagh - Duffy
12/30 - Samantha Schweblin - Little Eyes
13/30 - Tabitha Stanmore - Cunning Folk: Life in the Age of Practical Magic
14/30 - Nathalie Olah - Bad Taste
15/30 - Luke Haines - Freaks Out! Weirdos, Misfits & Deviants - The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock 'n' Roll
16/30 - Willy Vlautin - The Horse
17/30 - Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Silver Nitrate
18/30 - Geoff Nicholson - The Surburbanist
19/30 - Jacqueline Pearce - From Byfleet to the Bush
20/30 - Sharon Bennett Connolly - Women of the Anarchy
21/30 - Mark E Smith & Graham Duff - The Otherwise
22/30 - Benjamin Myers - Rare Singles
23/30 - Marilyn Robinson - Gilead
24/30 - Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
25/30 - Aldous Huxley - Grey Eminence
26/30 - Werner Herzog - Every Man for Himself and God Against All

27/30 - Hunter S Thompson - Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, interviews with HST

A compilation of, as the title suggests, interviews with the great man, from the sixties to his death. Too many later interviews, but they're all still interesting, showing his contradictions and irascibility as well as his sharp insight and bitter, sometimes brilliant, assaults on US journalism and politics.

28/30 - Jeffrey Lewis - Leonard Cohen

A novel, neither by nor about the musicians of those names. Altho the coincidence of the titular characters name is rather important. JL wrote lots of Hill Street Blues episodes. Young man goes on holiday to a Greek island, meets a gorgeous woman, never stops thinking about her. A novel about the possibilities we have encountered and not taken. Very sweet and one you can easily get wrapped up in and consume in a day.
 
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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
15/15 - The Official Highway Code by DVSA
16/15 - Autumn Chills by Agatha Christie
17/15 - Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

18/15 - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. One for my fellow special snowflakes. It's a book about an older lady in a remote Polish village, and members of the local hunting club getting murdered one by one. She says, the animals did it. My favourite books are the ones that feed my sense of self and make my life feel richer than the sum of its parts. This is one of them, and I intend to reread it whenever I need to drink at that fountain.

19/15 - Granta 168: Significant Other. It has its own ISBN, it counts. I bought this because I heard journalist James Pogue recommend it, and I have since bought the Autumn edition too. The writing is variable in quality, but for someone who gravitates towards old books, it's invigorating to tap into some new stuff. It can be stuffy in parts, but I can handle some pomposity if it's a wrapping for something of value. I mean, it's been key to my relationship, after all.
 
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
41/45 Molly Caldwell Crosby - Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic
42/45 Iain Banks - Complicity
43/45 Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
44/45 Rachel Sussman - The Oldest Living Things in the Planet
45/45 Christopher Ruocchio - Empire of Silence
46/45 Abdul Salam Zaeef - My Life with the Taliban
47/45 Joshua Dubler - Break Every Yoke

48/45 Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Really enjoyed this one, even made me a bit weepy here and there.
 
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
61. Torsten Bell - Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back [audiobook]
62. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
63. P G Wodehouse - School Stories
64. Michael Fleisher, Steve Dillon - The New Harlem Heroes vol 1
65. David Barnett - Withered Hill
66. John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra - Strontium Dog: the Starlord Years
67. Stuart Maconie - The Pie at Night: In Search of the North at Play
68. Michael Fleischer, Ron Smith - Rogue Trooper: Friday vol 1
69. HP Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
70. Varaidzo - Manny and the Baby
71. Dan Abnett, Richard Elson - Feral and Foe
72. Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything [audiobook]
73. Terry Pratchett - The Fifth Elephant
74. Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith - A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
75. Pat Mills - M.A.C.H.-1 vol 1
76. Natalie Whittle - Crunch: an Ode to Crisps

77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]

Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
 
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77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]

Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
nothing wrong with books where fuck all happens! Altho as I am currently reading a Virginia Woolf, I am almost obliged to say that.
 
19/24: Ultra-Red - A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry – Vol. 1 – Naming the Moment

I mean this is basically a book. Ultra-Red are activists and also formerly techno producers, with a lot of tracks including field recordings from their activism. One of them is a mate who is also involved with Southwark Notes who do really good work on and against gentrification. There is a lot of focus in this on listening, rather than music/sound etc. Which is a good angle I think. Unfortunately the first half of the book is a lot of conversations between people heavily influenced by "conjunctural analysis" and the Paulo Freire pedagogy of the oppressed stuff and how they have used various tools. This wasn't really for me, although I liked the international focus in these bits.

I enjoyed the second half of the book a lot more, with its series of articles about how all this stuff has been used in practice - especially in housing struggles Southwark and Los Angeles - and in a prison in the south of the USA. The concluding article links the Italian workers inquiry stuff with Ultra-Red's work and basically raises questions around - what is the point of asking the proletariat if you do not listen to what it is saying?
 
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 - Clare Chambers - The Editor's Wife
38/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer
39/52 - Peter James - They Thought I Was Dead
40/52 - Jacqueline O'Mahony - Sing, Wild Bird, Sing (BC)
41/52 - Elly Griffiths - The Outcast Dead
42/52 - Charles Dickens - David Copperfield (BC)
43/52 - Iain Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale (re-read)
44/52 - Elly Griffiths - The Ghost Fields
45/52 - James M Cain - The Embezzler
46/52 - Clare Chambers - Shy Creatures
47/52 - Stephen King - Everything's Eventual
48/52 - Doug Johnstone - Living is a Problem
49/52 - Irvine Welsh - Resolution
50/52 - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - That Thing Around Your Neck

51/52 - Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye
 
1/30 The Damned Utd by David Peace
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
37/30 I, Partridge: We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge (again). I read the book and/or listen to the audiobook a couple of times a year
38/30 History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
39/30 Jeeves and the feudal spirit by PG Wodehouse
40/30 On The Road Bike: The Search For A Nation’s Cycling Soul by Ned Boulting
41/30 The Crow Road by Iain Banks
42/30 The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
43/30 The last days of Mussolini by FW Deakin
44/30 Travels with my aunt by Graham Greene
45/30 Promise me by Harlan Coben
46/30 Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell

47/30 Snowblind by Robert Sabbag. Tedious true account of the career of a notorious American cocaine smuggler. There's a foreword by Howard Marks that I couldn't be bothered to read
 
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
61. Torsten Bell - Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back [audiobook]
62. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
63. P G Wodehouse - School Stories
64. Michael Fleisher, Steve Dillon - The New Harlem Heroes vol 1
65. David Barnett - Withered Hill
66. John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra - Strontium Dog: the Starlord Years
67. Stuart Maconie - The Pie at Night: In Search of the North at Play
68. Michael Fleischer, Ron Smith - Rogue Trooper: Friday vol 1
69. HP Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
70. Varaidzo - Manny and the Baby
71. Dan Abnett, Richard Elson - Feral and Foe
72. Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything [audiobook]
73. Terry Pratchett - The Fifth Elephant
74. Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith - A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
75. Pat Mills - M.A.C.H.-1 vol 1
76. Natalie Whittle - Crunch: an Ode to Crisps
77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]

78. Mark Millar, Chris Weston - Canon Fodder
 
1/30 The Damned Utd by David Peace
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
37/30 I, Partridge: We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge (again). I read the book and/or listen to the audiobook a couple of times a year
38/30 History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
39/30 Jeeves and the feudal spirit by PG Wodehouse
40/30 On The Road Bike: The Search For A Nation’s Cycling Soul by Ned Boulting
41/30 The Crow Road by Iain Banks
42/30 The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
43/30 The last days of Mussolini by FW Deakin
44/30 Travels with my aunt by Graham Greene
45/30 Promise me by Harlan Coben
46/30 Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell

47/30 Snowblind by Robert Sabbag. Tedious true account of the career of a notorious American cocaine smuggler. There's a foreword by Howard Marks that I couldn't be bothered to read
This will count as book 46.95 in a tie break situation...
 
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
41/45 Molly Caldwell Crosby - Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic
42/45 Iain Banks - Complicity
43/45 Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
44/45 Rachel Sussman - The Oldest Living Things in the Planet
45/45 Christopher Ruocchio - Empire of Silence
46/45 Abdul Salam Zaeef - My Life with the Taliban
47/45 Joshua Dubler - Break Every Yoke
48/45 Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

49/45 Paul Lynch - Prophet Song

Not a feelgood book
 
1/30 - Lexie Conyngham - Tomb for an Eagle
2/30 - Michael Eaton - B*llocks -A Word on Trial
3/30 - Paul Simpson - Revolutionary Spirit
4/30 - Joe Thomas - Red Menace
5/30 - Daniel Clowes - Monica
6/30 - Will Sergeant - Echoes
7/30 - Wu Ming - 54
8/30 - Kathleen Hanna - Rebel Girl, my life as a feminist punk
9/30 - Aldous Huxley - The Devils of Loudon
10/30 - Volodomyr Ishchenko - Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War
11/30 - Dan Kavanagh - Duffy
12/30 - Samantha Schweblin - Little Eyes
13/30 - Tabitha Stanmore - Cunning Folk: Life in the Age of Practical Magic
14/30 - Nathalie Olah - Bad Taste
15/30 - Luke Haines - Freaks Out! Weirdos, Misfits & Deviants - The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock 'n' Roll
16/30 - Willy Vlautin - The Horse
17/30 - Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Silver Nitrate
18/30 - Geoff Nicholson - The Surburbanist
19/30 - Jacqueline Pearce - From Byfleet to the Bush
20/30 - Sharon Bennett Connolly - Women of the Anarchy
21/30 - Mark E Smith & Graham Duff - The Otherwise
22/30 - Benjamin Myers - Rare Singles
23/30 - Marilyn Robinson - Gilead
24/30 - Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
25/30 - Aldous Huxley - Grey Eminence
26/30 - Werner Herzog - Every Man for Himself and God Against All
27/30 - Hunter S Thompson - Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, interviews with HST
28/30 - Jeffrey Lewis - Leonard Cohen

29/30 - Virginia Woolf - The Years

The last novel published in her lifetime and despite bring the best seller of her career at that point, it is one of the least loved now. Officially that is mostly down to it not meeting the plans VW had for it (to incorporate it with one of best known long essays, Three Guineas), but I suspect that it is rather more to do with the racism. The characters' racism obviously, not the sainted Virginia. Excluding the, relatively few but still far too many, such references, it starts very like a Virginia Woolf book, some of the stream of consciousness stuff really is a stream, she make sit flow so much better than other writers. Stuff actually happens! Although always just off the page..... Quite interesting for a most of it, but that last chapter was way too long and I wanted it to be over.


So, 29 out of 30, one book to go. A quick calculation indicates I've had an even split between fiction and non-fiction (the Eaton is a bit of both), 19-10 male v female, tho its 8-7 considering the books I actually chose for myself. I've read my annual Virginia (tho I'll hopefully choose more wisely next time) and the Huxley's count as classics, so that's that ticked off as well. I think I should read another book by a woman, but should it be the worthy one (biography of Hannah Arendt) or a more fun pice of fiction? I really must do Pride & Prejudice or Tenant of Wildfell Hall at some point as well.
 
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
28/45 Don DeLillo - White Noise
29/45 Colson Whitehead - Zone One
30/45 Dickhead Bidge - Bakunin Brand Vodka: Anarchism in Early Punk, 1976-1980
31/45 Thomas M Disch - Camp Concentration

32/45 RF Kuang - Babel

Harry Potter and the Wretched of the Earth.
Extremely mixed feelings about this one. Tempting to say it's a good book about language and a bad book about empire. She really needs an editor who would ruthlessly trim out a lot of the footnotes and it totally fails as a historical novel because all the goodies just seem to have acceptable 21st century lefty opinions and even the baddies often sound like they've been reading contemporary literary criticism. But a lot of the language and translation stuff is really good and once it hits its stride in the last 150 pages or so it's hard not to get a bit drawn in to the attempt to imagine a revolution in England. There is a lot to consider about the relationship between Kuang and her protagonist as well, like what does it mean if you go to Oxford, graduate and then go on to write a novel about how the only ethical thing an Oxford student can do is to drop out and dedicate themselves to violent insurrection?
Now starting (and halfway though) Jen Calleja - Goblinhood. Not much in the way of mixed feelings about this one, it's just a bonkers delight.
I read Camp Concentration when I was 13 or 14. I was lent it by an anarchist member of staff at the boarding school I attended.
 
1/30 The Damned Utd by David Peace
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
37/30 I, Partridge: We need to talk about Alan by Alan Partridge (again). I read the book and/or listen to the audiobook a couple of times a year
38/30 History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
39/30 Jeeves and the feudal spirit by PG Wodehouse
40/30 On The Road Bike: The Search For A Nation’s Cycling Soul by Ned Boulting
41/30 The Crow Road by Iain Banks
42/30 The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
43/30 The last days of Mussolini by FW Deakin
44/30 Travels with my aunt by Graham Greene
45/30 Promise me by Harlan Coben
46/30 Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell
47/30 Snowblind by Robert Sabbag

48/30 They Will Have to Die Now – Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate by James Verini. The trashy title hides an insightful and interesting book . In reality it's more about the rise of Isis rather than than its fall, and explains why many non-headbanger Iraqis initially supported them and were glad when they came to town. The book also tries to tie Isis into the line of brutal rulers of the region starting with the Assyrian empire

 
Last edited:
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
61. Torsten Bell - Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back [audiobook]
62. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
63. P G Wodehouse - School Stories
64. Michael Fleisher, Steve Dillon - The New Harlem Heroes vol 1
65. David Barnett - Withered Hill
66. John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra - Strontium Dog: the Starlord Years
67. Stuart Maconie - The Pie at Night: In Search of the North at Play
68. Michael Fleischer, Ron Smith - Rogue Trooper: Friday vol 1
69. HP Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
70. Varaidzo - Manny and the Baby
71. Dan Abnett, Richard Elson - Feral and Foe
72. Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything [audiobook]
73. Terry Pratchett - The Fifth Elephant
74. Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith - A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
75. Pat Mills - M.A.C.H.-1 vol 1
76. Natalie Whittle - Crunch: an Ode to Crisps

77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]

Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
No- it was reasonably enjoyable, but nothing special.
 
1/30 - Lexie Conyngham - Tomb for an Eagle
2/30 - Michael Eaton - B*llocks -A Word on Trial
3/30 - Paul Simpson - Revolutionary Spirit
4/30 - Joe Thomas - Red Menace
5/30 - Daniel Clowes - Monica
6/30 - Will Sergeant - Echoes
7/30 - Wu Ming - 54
8/30 - Kathleen Hanna - Rebel Girl, my life as a feminist punk
9/30 - Aldous Huxley - The Devils of Loudon
10/30 - Volodomyr Ishchenko - Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War
11/30 - Dan Kavanagh - Duffy
12/30 - Samantha Schweblin - Little Eyes
13/30 - Tabitha Stanmore - Cunning Folk: Life in the Age of Practical Magic
14/30 - Nathalie Olah - Bad Taste
15/30 - Luke Haines - Freaks Out! Weirdos, Misfits & Deviants - The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock 'n' Roll
16/30 - Willy Vlautin - The Horse
17/30 - Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Silver Nitrate
18/30 - Geoff Nicholson - The Surburbanist
19/30 - Jacqueline Pearce - From Byfleet to the Bush
20/30 - Sharon Bennett Connolly - Women of the Anarchy
21/30 - Mark E Smith & Graham Duff - The Otherwise
22/30 - Benjamin Myers - Rare Singles
23/30 - Marilyn Robinson - Gilead
24/30 - Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
25/30 - Aldous Huxley - Grey Eminence
26/30 - Werner Herzog - Every Man for Himself and God Against All
27/30 - Hunter S Thompson - Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, interviews with HST
28/30 - Jeffrey Lewis - Leonard Cohen

29/30 - Virginia Woolf - The Years

The last novel published in her lifetime and despite bring the best seller of her career at that point, it is one of the least loved now. Officially that is mostly down to it not meeting the plans VW had for it (to incorporate it with one of best known long essays, Three Guineas), but I suspect that it is rather more to do with the racism. The characters' racism obviously, not the sainted Virginia. Excluding the, relatively few but still far too many, such references, it starts very like a Virginia Woolf book, some of the stream of consciousness stuff really is a stream, she make sit flow so much better than other writers. Stuff actually happens! Although always just off the page..... Quite interesting for a most of it, but that last chapter was way too long and I wanted it to be over.


So, 29 out of 30, one book to go. A quick calculation indicates I've had an even split between fiction and non-fiction (the Eaton is a bit of both), 19-10 male v female, tho its 8-7 considering the books I actually chose for myself. I've read my annual Virginia (tho I'll hopefully choose more wisely next time) and the Huxley's count as classics, so that's that ticked off as well. I think I should read another book by a woman, but should it be the worthy one (biography of Hannah Arendt) or a more fun pice of fiction? I really must do Pride & Prejudice or Tenant of Wildfell Hall at some point as well.
I'm approaching the end of A visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford. It's a travelogue to Mexico in the '40s. She has an interesting story..I heartily recommend
 
OK, finished it now

31/29 A Visit to Don Otavio - A Mexican Odyssey – Sybille Bedford

great book

30/29 Grow Where They Fall – Michael Donkor
29/29 A Song Flung up to Heaven – Maya Angelou
28/29 Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver
27/29 The Housing Lark – Sam Selvon
26/29 Boys Alive - Pier Paolo Pasolini
25/29 Stubborn Archivist – Yara Rodrigues Fowler
24/29 Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse – Brontez Purnell
23/29 The Festival of Insignificance – Milan Kundera
22/29 Ways of Sunlight – Sam Selvon
21/29 Blessings - Chukwuebuka Ibeh
20/29 All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes – Maya Angelou
19/29 Leading Man – Justin Myers
18/29 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus – Mary Shelley
17/29 100 Boyfriends - Brontez Purnell
16/29 Helena – Evelyn Waugh
15/29 Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari
14/29 My Father and Myself – J. R. Ackerley
13/29 Family Meal – Bryan Washington
12/29 Mona of the Manor – Armistead Maupin
11/29 The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon (reread)
10/29 Hard Rain Falling – Don Carpenter
9/29 Possession – AS Byatt
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
 
20/24 Jaime Semprun - A Gallery of Recuperation: On the merits of slandering charlatans, swindlers and frauds

Essentially a Frenchman slagging off other French men. Semprun was a mate of Guy Debord's and set up the post-situationist "Encyclopaedia of Nusiances". This is a short book originally published in the 1970s. A long preface by an academic has been added to explain who some of the people being slagged off are - as they have since faded into obscurity. But Deleuze, Guattari, Attali and Vaneigem are all present and correct. And Cornelius Castoriadis who was Greek, come to think of it. Anyway this is basically ultra-left trivia for boomers who get excited by people slagging off intellectuals. (Where is the no-holds barred critique of Semprun from these people though?). It feels a bit quaint in the era of social media. The chapter on Foucault concludes with him saying that he has never read one of his books except to leaf through it in a bookshop. It is occasionally entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. I am glad I didn't spend any money on it. I read it because Dave Wise (King Mob, Revolt Against Plenty, etc) wrote a thing on it, which I enjoyed a lot more. Strange Meetings - David Wise
 
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
15/15 - The Official Highway Code by DVSA
16/15 - Autumn Chills by Agatha Christie
17/15 - Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
18/15 - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
19/15 - Granta 168: Significant Other

20/15 - Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. "A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human"
The author is clearly widely read and I'm impressed with their erudition, but who was the wimp who edited it? I am waiting for the one non-reference book that can show me it's worth 900 pages, but it might not exist. In this novel, the writing is strong and some of it is quite touching and funny, although a lot of the humour is frame-by-frame slapstick, like reading a comic book. There were some really gross, graphic sex scenes involving children which read as intended titillation and can't ever have been ok.

I think I should read another book by a woman, but should it be the worthy one (biography of Hannah Arendt) or a more fun pice of fiction?

Perhaps after Virginia Woolf you would enjoy a bit of a breather! I do like her but it's dense stuff.
 
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
6/30 - Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
7/30 - Slow Horses - Mick Herron
8/30 - Lily - Rose Tremain
9/30 - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
10/30 - The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
11/30 - In Memoriam - Alice Winn
12/30 - So Late in the Day - Claire Keegan
13/30 - The Memory Police - Yōko Ogawa
14/30 - Antarctica - Claire Keegan
15/30 - My Name Is Why - Lemn Sissay
 
77. Samantha Harvey - Orbital [audiobook]

Not sure what I thought about that. Parts of it were quite lyrical and beautiful but on the whole it's a fictional account of a single day on the ISS where literally nothing happens. Should this really have won the Booker prize this year?
Ah, my book group nearly just voted to read that, but ended up going with Our Wives Under the Sea instead.
20/15 - Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. "A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human"
The author is clearly widely read and I'm impressed with their erudition, but who was the wimp who edited it? I am waiting for the one non-reference book that can show me it's worth 900 pages, but it might not exist. In this novel, the writing is strong and some of it is quite touching and funny, although a lot of the humour is frame-by-frame slapstick, like reading a comic book.
Huh, I did just have a conversation with my little sister about Pynchon this week, I've never read him and asked if he's funny at least, she said yes but it's a bit like a 900-page version of Looney Tunes.
 
Huh, I did just have a conversation with my little sister about Pynchon this week, I've never read him and asked if he's funny at least, she said yes but it's a bit like a 900-page version of Looney Tunes.

"at least" :D But she's right. I might have a contender for a novel that length that's worth the time - Infinite Jest might be it. I haven't read it yet but I've got high hopes!
 
"at least" :D But she's right. I might have a contender for a novel that length that's worth the time - Infinite Jest might be it. I haven't read it yet but I've got high hopes!
Oh yeah, my sister is a DFW fan, I've not read that one myself though, and don't have any particular intention to. How much do you care about tennis?
 
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