the strictly come reading 2023 reading challenge thread

[Fozzie Bear]

12/29 Nadja Miller-Larsen - Up Against The Real: Black Mask from art to action

An interesting history of Black Mask/Up Against The Wall Motherfucker, a New York "street gang with analysis" from the late sixities and early seventies. Some especially good chapters on their occupation of the Fillmore East Theatre and relationship with Valerie Solanas (and other women, the feminist movement etc). Also a fairly niche chapter on the early work of group members in the art world as Group Center. Well resesarched. Academic but not terrible. Overuse of the word "imbricate" but generally readable.

 

[BoatieBird]

1/52 - Ruth Rendell - Tigerlilly's Orchids (re-read)
2/52 - Shehan Karunatilaka - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
3/52 - Val McDermid - 1989
4/52 - Anthony Doerr - Cloud Cuckoo Land
5/52 - Ann Patchett - Commonwealth
6/52 - Peter James - Picture You Dead
7/52 - Donal Ryan - From a Low and Quiet Sea
8/52 - Patricia Highsmith - Deep Water
9/52 - Ian McEwan - Lessons
10/52 - Robert Galbraith - The Ink Back Heart
11/52 - Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds (re-read)
12/52 - Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and The Dead
13/52 - Clare Chambers - Small Pleasures
14/52 - Liu Cixin - The Three-Body Problem
15/52 - Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin
16/52 - Delia Owens - Where the Crawdads Sing
17/52 - Paula Hawkins - Into the Water
18/52 - William Boyd - The Romantic
19/52 - Doris Lessing - The Fifth Child
20/52 - Katy Hays - The Cloisters
21/52 - Doris Lessing - The Good Terrorist
22/52 - Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne (re-read)
23/52 - Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
24/52 - Barbara Vine - King Solomon's Carpet
25/52 - Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety
26/52 - Denise Mina - Rizzio
27/52 - Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
28/52 - Elly Griffiths - The House at Sea's End
29/52 - Stephen King - Nightmares and Dreamscapes
30/52 - Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
31/52 - Clare Chambers - Learning to Swim
32/52 - Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses
33/52 - Candice Carty-Williams - People Person
34/52 - Donal Ryan - The Queen of Dirt Island
35/52 - Ann Patchett - Bel Canto
36/52 - Ann Cleeves - The Heron's Cry

37/52 - Claire Keegan - Foster
38/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Fever Tree and other stories

 

[QueenOfGoths]

1. 'The Death of Mrs. Westaway" - Ruth Ware
2. "The Paris Apartment" - Lucy Foley
3. "Force of Nature" - Jane Harper
4. "Eight Ghosts: The English Herirage Book of New Ghost Stories"
5. "The Decagon House Murders" - Yukito Ayatsuji.
6. "The Four Legendary Kingdoms" - Matthew Reilly
7. "Girl A" - Abigail Dean
8. "What Lies Between Us" - John Marrs
9 "The Three Secret Cities" - Matthew Reilly
10. "Quantam Radio" - A.J. Riddle
11. "All That Lives" - James Oswald
12. "A Heart Full of Headstones" - Ian Rankin
13. "Keep It In The Family" - John Marrs
14. "The Last Passenger" - Will Dean
15. "Dark Matter" - Blake Crouch
16. "The Perfect Wife" - J.P. Delaney
17. "Cold People" - Tom Rob Smith

18. "Daggers Drawn" ed. by Maxim Jakubowski - compilation of short stories by various crime writers. Mostly interesting, some better than others but worth a read
19. "A Litter of Bones" - JD Kirk. Needed something cheap and easy on my kindle for a plane journey so choose this and really enjoyed it. A bit derivative but easy to read, strong characters and serves it's purpose well.

 

[Signal 11]

11/10 - A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story - Leo Zeilig

 

[yield]

I'm way off.

1. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Epic grand scale belboid started a thread. I agree with lbj "I like the idea that the origin of the concept of property lies in ideas of the sacred."

2. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Starts off in London during the V-2 bombings

One long dick joke about rockets, interspersed with chunks of aeronautical engineering, applied mathematics & colonial history. Long, would recommend.

3. Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. nogojones read it, thought it looking interesting.

Decent ecological feminist sci-fi, social commentary on sexuality & gender. The virus made me think of the pandemic.

4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. First part in a triology, space opera with interesting world building. Good escapism.

 

[Winot]

1/29 The London Problem - Jack Brown
2/29 Ephemeron - Fiona Benson
3/29 NW - Zadie Smith
4/29 Spring - Ali Smith
5/29 A History of the Bible - John Barton
6/29 Falconer - John Cheever
7/29 Diary of an MP’s Wife - Sasha Swire
8/29 Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban (reread)
9/29 Purity and Danger - Mary Douglas
10/29 Einstein’s Monsters - Martin Amis
11/29 Greenvoe - George Mackay Brown
12/29 Material World - Ed Conway
13/29 Journey by Moonlight - Antal Szerb
14/29 Reginald McKenna: Statesman among Financiers, 1916-1943 - Martin Farr

15/29 The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph - Albert O. Hirschman

Economic history account of 17th/18th idea that individual interests (which arguably went on to be the bedrock of capitalism) were a necessary counterbalance to ‘out of control’ passions. Not as gripping as I’d been led to believe.

 

[Biddlybee]

1/15 - We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
2/15 - The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yōko Ogawa
3/15 - Slug - Hollie McNish
4/15 - Someday, Maybe - Onyi Nwabineli
5/15 - Tyger - SF Said
6/15 - Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood
7/15 - The Things I Would Tell You - ed. Sabrina Mahfouz
8/15 - The World's Wife - Carol Ann Duffy
9/15 - A Night Divided - Jennifer A Nielsen
10/15 - Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
11/15 - Lyrics Alley - Leila Aboulela
12/15 - Strange Flowers - Donal Ryan
13/15 - Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
14/15 - The Truce - Primo Levi
15/15 - Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
16/15 - River Spirit - Leila Abulela
17/15 - Strong Female Character - Fern Brady
18/15 - Kindred - Octavia Butler
19/15 - The Lost Girls of Ireland - Susanne O'Leary
20/15 - The Guilty Feminist - Deborah Frances-White
21/15 - Factfulness - Hans Rosling
22/15 - 1979 - Val McDermid
23/15 - The Furthest Station - Ben Aaronovitch
24/15 - The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin
25/15 - The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak
26/15 - Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
27/15 - Soul Tourists - Bernadine Evaristo

 

[Fozzie Bear]

11/29 The Invisible Committee - The coming insurrection

I was in a bit of a “be French and join an insurrectionary commune” mood. So I read this instead of doing any of that.

13/29 The Invisible Committee - To Our Friends

The 2015 follow up to the above, which covers the period when "everything was kicking off" - the movement of the squares, occupy, Egypt, Libya etc. Plus more stuff on communes and the history of governance and revolt.

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a King
2/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half the World
3/45 - George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
4/45 Jack London - The Call of the Wild
5/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a War
6/45 Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
7/45 Mark Cooper - Later... with Jools Holland: 30 years of music, magic and mayhem
8/45 Michael Molcher - I Am the Law: how Judge Dredd predicted our future
9/45 Sarah J Maas - A Court of Thorns and Roses
10/45 David Graeber - The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
11/45 Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
12/45 Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot #1)
13/45 Mark Galeotti - A Short History of Russia: how the world's largest country invented itself, from the pagans to Putin
14/45 Anne Applebaum - Twilight of Democracy: the seductive lure of authoritarianism
15/45 Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
16/45 Daniel Gordis - Israel: a concise history of a nation reborn
17/45 Alan Garner - The Stone Book Quartet
18/45 E M Forster - Where Angels Fear to Tread
19/45 Kate DiCamillo - The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
20/45 Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times
21/45 A A Milne - Winnie-the-Pooh
22/45 Marcus Baram - Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man
23/45 F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
24/45 Gil Scott-Heron - The Vulture
25/45 Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dogs of War
26/45 Andy Beckett - When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
27/45 J G Ballard - High-Rise
28/45 Randall Munroe (xkcd comics) - What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
29/45 Antoine de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince
30/45 H C McNeile ("Sapper") - Bulldog Drummond
31/45 - Miki Berenyi - Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success
32/45 Karen Lloyd - The Gathering Tide: a Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay
33/45 Malcolm Bradbury - The History Man
34/45 Alex Garland - The Beach
35/45 Sarah Tolmie - All the Horses of Iceland

36/45 J G Ballard - The Drowned World

 

[Biddlybee]

1/15 - We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
2/15 - The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yōko Ogawa
3/15 - Slug - Hollie McNish
4/15 - Someday, Maybe - Onyi Nwabineli
5/15 - Tyger - SF Said
6/15 - Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood
7/15 - The Things I Would Tell You - ed. Sabrina Mahfouz
8/15 - The World's Wife - Carol Ann Duffy
9/15 - A Night Divided - Jennifer A Nielsen
10/15 - Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
11/15 - Lyrics Alley - Leila Aboulela
12/15 - Strange Flowers - Donal Ryan
13/15 - Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
14/15 - The Truce - Primo Levi
15/15 - Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
16/15 - River Spirit - Leila Abulela
17/15 - Strong Female Character - Fern Brady
18/15 - Kindred - Octavia Butler
19/15 - The Lost Girls of Ireland - Susanne O'Leary
20/15 - The Guilty Feminist - Deborah Frances-White
21/15 - Factfulness - Hans Rosling
22/15 - 1979 - Val McDermid
23/15 - The Furthest Station - Ben Aaronovitch
24/15 - The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin
25/15 - The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak
26/15 - Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
27/15 - Soul Tourists - Bernadine Evaristo
28/15 - Foster - Claire Keegan

 

[hitmouse]

27/35 Carol by Patricia Highsmith
Based on absolutely nothing and without reading a word she'd written I'd decided ages ago I wouldn't like Highsmith's novels and stuck to that principle for years but I really liked the film of Carol from a little while back and when I saw this for cheap second hand I thought maybe I should give it a go, and turns out I do like at least one of her novels. This was excellent, I suppose the themes of the surveillance thriller come naturally to the reality of a lesbian relationship in the 1950s and Highsmith makes very effective use of it. The ending is perfectly judged, and the whole novel never really hits a wrong note, a nice surprise that shouldn't have been surprising.

She's great, although I've not read that one - if there are no murders in it, and possibly people even being nice to each other, it's perhaps a bit of a break from her usual style.

 

[hitmouse]

1/45 - Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (re-read)
2/45 - Martin Lux - Anti-Fascist (re-read)
3/45 - Hannah Kent - Burial Rites
4/45 - Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride (re-read)
5/45 EP Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
6/45 Henry James - The Princess Casamassima
7/45 Nigel Flanagan - Our Trade Unions: What comes next after the summer of 2022?
8/45 Katy Hays - The Cloisters
9/45 John Darnielle - Devil House
10/45 JoAnn Wypijewski - What We Don't Talk About: Sex and the Mess of Life
11/45 Jen Calleja - Vehicle
12/45 Cedric Robinson - Black Marxism
13/45 John Darnielle - Universal Harvester (re-read)
14/45 Simon Reynolds - Rip It Up and Start Again (re-read)
15/45 Anonymous - Appel/Call plus a critique
16/45 Emily St. John Mandel - Sea of Tranquility
17/45 DD Johnston - Disnaeland
18/45 Milan Kundera - Laughable Loves (re-read)
19/45 WEB DuBois - Darkwater
20/45 George Saunders - Liberation Day
21/45 Sheila Rowbotham - Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties

22/45 Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller - Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

Does what it says on the tin really. Interesting book, if you like the podcast and/or thinking about the history of sexuality you may well like this one.

23/45 Ralph Edney - The Adventures of Lazarus Lamb

Very 80s absurdist comic, discussed a bit on this thread, set in a bit of 80s London that may or may not be Islington. Another re-read.

24/45 Ralph Edney - Lazarus Lamb and the Riddle of the Sphincter

Sequel to the above, couldn't remember reading this one before though.

25/45 Anonymous - Total Liberation

Interesting contemporary insurrectionary anarchist style text, as often with this sort of thing some bits are annoying and some were very well-written, but would mostly recommend for the last two chapters and especially the last one, trying to offer a realistic look at what's possible given that we're not likely to do either a successful global revolution, or a successful reformism that stops capitalism being dependent on ever-greater extraction of natural resources, before climate change gets a lot worse. ZAD and Rojava, would be the short answer.

Now reading adrienne maree brown - We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. As the title suggests, musings on transformative justice, abolitionism and so on.

 

[nogojones]

1/45 Ken MacLeod - The Human Front
2/45 Edward Bunker - Death Row Breakout
3/45 Ian Bone - Bash the Rich
4/45 Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking
5/45 Julia Nicholls - Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871-1885
6/45 Sarah Jaffe - Work Won't Love You Back
7/45 Ann Leckie - Ancillary Sword
8/45 David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything
9/45 Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
10/45 Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary
11/45 Ann Leckie - Ancillary Mercy
12/45 David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
13/45 Russell Hoban -Riddley Walker
14/45 The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection
15/45 Assata Shakur - Assata: An Autobiography
16/45 Dan Evans - A Nation of Shopkeepers
17/45 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
18/45 Nicola Griffith - Ammonite
19/45 Kim Stanley Robinson - New York 2140
20/45 Ali Smith - Autumn
21/45 David Harvey - A Brief History of Neoliberalism
22/45 Homer (Trans E.V. Rieu) - The Odyssey
23/45 Maxim Gorky - Creatures That Once Were Men
24/45 Jasmin Herstov - Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism
25/45 Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
26/45 Guy Debord - Society of the Spectacle
27/45 Anne Fine - Diary of a Killer Cat
28/45 Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
29/45 A. M. Gittlitz - I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism
30/45 Sheila Rowbotham & Jeffrey Weeks - Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis
31/45 Ann Leckie - Provenance
32/45 Vicky Osterweil - In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action
33/45 Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean
34/45 Rachel Ingalls - Mrs Caliban

35/45 Voltaire - Selected works of [Thinkers Library -1935]

I've long had a big soft spot for Voltaire and would always pick up any old collection of his writings. This one was good as I'd mostly not read them before and it was him generally casting shade on organised religion with his own style of wit.

 

[shifting gears]

1/30 - Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
2/30 - Philip K. Dick - A Maze of Death
3/30 - William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin - The Dark Remains
4/30 - David Keenan - For the Good Times
5/30 - George Orwell - Animal Farm
6/30 - Michael Smith - The Giro Playboy
7/30 - Cosey Fanni Tutti - Re-Sisters
8/30 - Andrew Holleran - Dancer from the Dance
9/30 - Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
10/30 - Trevor Horn - Adventures in Modern Recording
11/30 - David Keenan - This is Memorial Device (audiobook)
12/30 - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
13/30 - Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
14/30 - William Gibson - Neuromancer

15/30 - John Steinbeck - The Moon is Down
16/30 - James Joyce - Dubliners

 

[inva]

She's great, although I've not read that one - if there are no murders in it, and possibly people even being nice to each other, it's perhaps a bit of a break from her usual style.

According to the intro to my copy by Val McDermid it's 'typically Highsmith', I wouldn't know but if you've seen the film that definitely smooths some of the sharper edges of the book. Anyway I'll have to try another one some time and see how they compare.

 

[hitmouse]

According to the intro to my copy by Val McDermid it's 'typically Highsmith', I wouldn't know but if you've seen the film that definitely smooths some of the sharper edges of the book. Anyway I'll have to try another one some time and see how they compare.

I was going to say "Oh, I think I'm getting it mixed up with the Price of Salt" but apparently they're the same book.

 

[BoatieBird]

1/52 - Ruth Rendell - Tigerlilly's Orchids (re-read)
2/52 - Shehan Karunatilaka - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
3/52 - Val McDermid - 1989
4/52 - Anthony Doerr - Cloud Cuckoo Land
5/52 - Ann Patchett - Commonwealth
6/52 - Peter James - Picture You Dead
7/52 - Donal Ryan - From a Low and Quiet Sea
8/52 - Patricia Highsmith - Deep Water
9/52 - Ian McEwan - Lessons
10/52 - Robert Galbraith - The Ink Back Heart
11/52 - Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds (re-read)
12/52 - Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and The Dead
13/52 - Clare Chambers - Small Pleasures
14/52 - Liu Cixin - The Three-Body Problem
15/52 - Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin
16/52 - Delia Owens - Where the Crawdads Sing
17/52 - Paula Hawkins - Into the Water
18/52 - William Boyd - The Romantic
19/52 - Doris Lessing - The Fifth Child
20/52 - Katy Hays - The Cloisters
21/52 - Doris Lessing - The Good Terrorist
22/52 - Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne (re-read)
23/52 - Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
24/52 - Barbara Vine - King Solomon's Carpet
25/52 - Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety
26/52 - Denise Mina - Rizzio
27/52 - Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
28/52 - Elly Griffiths - The House at Sea's End
29/52 - Stephen King - Nightmares and Dreamscapes
30/52 - Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
31/52 - Clare Chambers - Learning to Swim
32/52 - Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses
33/52 - Candice Carty-Williams - People Person
34/52 - Donal Ryan - The Queen of Dirt Island
35/52 - Ann Patchett - Bel Canto
36/52 - Ann Cleeves - The Heron's Cry
37/52 - Claire Keegan - Foster
38/52 - Ruth Rendell - The Fever Tree and other stories

39/52 - Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

 

[hitmouse]

1/45 - Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (re-read)
2/45 - Martin Lux - Anti-Fascist (re-read)
3/45 - Hannah Kent - Burial Rites
4/45 - Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride (re-read)
5/45 EP Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
6/45 Henry James - The Princess Casamassima
7/45 Nigel Flanagan - Our Trade Unions: What comes next after the summer of 2022?
8/45 Katy Hays - The Cloisters
9/45 John Darnielle - Devil House
10/45 JoAnn Wypijewski - What We Don't Talk About: Sex and the Mess of Life
11/45 Jen Calleja - Vehicle
12/45 Cedric Robinson - Black Marxism
13/45 John Darnielle - Universal Harvester (re-read)
14/45 Simon Reynolds - Rip It Up and Start Again (re-read)
15/45 Anonymous - Appel/Call plus a critique
16/45 Emily St. John Mandel - Sea of Tranquility
17/45 DD Johnston - Disnaeland
18/45 Milan Kundera - Laughable Loves (re-read)
19/45 WEB DuBois - Darkwater
20/45 George Saunders - Liberation Day
21/45 Sheila Rowbotham - Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties
22/45 Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller - Bad Gays: A Homosexual History
23/45 Ralph Edney - The Adventures of Lazarus Lamb
24/45 Ralph Edney - Lazarus Lamb and the Riddle of the Sphincter
25/45 Anonymous - Total Liberation

26/45 adrienne maree brown - We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

Good book, short and thoughtful. Next up, probably going to start David Peace - Tokyo Year Zero. I Can't Believe It's Not James Ellroy, etc.

 

[May Kasahara]

1. Melissa Harrison - All Among The Barley.
2. Armand Marie Leroi - Mutants.
3. Karen Joy Fowler - We are all completely beside ourselves.
4. Jing-Jing Lee - How We Disappeared.
5. Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety.
6. Anita Shreve - A Wedding in December.
7. Sophie Anderson - The Thief who Sang Storms.
8. Ann Patchett - The Dutch House.
9. My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New fiction from Afghan women.
10. Sarah Allen - What stars are made of.
11. Sarah Sands - The interior silence.
12. Steve Silberman - Neurotribes.
13. Joe R Lansdale - Rusty Puppy.
14. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Velvet was the Night.

15. Tim Moore - Vuelta Skelter.

BoatieBird Bel Canto is next on my list!

 

[nogojones]

1/45 Ken MacLeod - The Human Front
2/45 Edward Bunker - Death Row Breakout
3/45 Ian Bone - Bash the Rich
4/45 Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking
5/45 Julia Nicholls - Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871-1885
6/45 Sarah Jaffe - Work Won't Love You Back
7/45 Ann Leckie - Ancillary Sword
8/45 David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything
9/45 Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
10/45 Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary
11/45 Ann Leckie - Ancillary Mercy
12/45 David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
13/45 Russell Hoban -Riddley Walker
14/45 The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection
15/45 Assata Shakur - Assata: An Autobiography
16/45 Dan Evans - A Nation of Shopkeepers
17/45 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
18/45 Nicola Griffith - Ammonite
19/45 Kim Stanley Robinson - New York 2140
20/45 Ali Smith - Autumn
21/45 David Harvey - A Brief History of Neoliberalism
22/45 Homer (Trans E.V. Rieu) - The Odyssey
23/45 Maxim Gorky - Creatures That Once Were Men
24/45 Jasmin Herstov - Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism
25/45 Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
26/45 Guy Debord - Society of the Spectacle
27/45 Anne Fine - Diary of a Killer Cat
28/45 Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
29/45 A. M. Gittlitz - I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism
30/45 Sheila Rowbotham & Jeffrey Weeks - Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis
31/45 Ann Leckie - Provenance
32/45 Vicky Osterweil - In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action
33/45 Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean
34/45 Rachel Ingalls - Mrs Caliban
35/45 Voltaire - Selected works of [Thinkers Library -1935]

36/45 Catherine Nixey - The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a King
2/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half the World
3/45 - George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
4/45 Jack London - The Call of the Wild
5/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a War
6/45 Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
7/45 Mark Cooper - Later... with Jools Holland: 30 years of music, magic and mayhem
8/45 Michael Molcher - I Am the Law: how Judge Dredd predicted our future
9/45 Sarah J Maas - A Court of Thorns and Roses
10/45 David Graeber - The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
11/45 Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
12/45 Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot #1)
13/45 Mark Galeotti - A Short History of Russia: how the world's largest country invented itself, from the pagans to Putin
14/45 Anne Applebaum - Twilight of Democracy: the seductive lure of authoritarianism
15/45 Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
16/45 Daniel Gordis - Israel: a concise history of a nation reborn
17/45 Alan Garner - The Stone Book Quartet
18/45 E M Forster - Where Angels Fear to Tread
19/45 Kate DiCamillo - The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
20/45 Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times
21/45 A A Milne - Winnie-the-Pooh
22/45 Marcus Baram - Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man
23/45 F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
24/45 Gil Scott-Heron - The Vulture
25/45 Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dogs of War
26/45 Andy Beckett - When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
27/45 J G Ballard - High-Rise
28/45 Randall Munroe (xkcd comics) - What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
29/45 Antoine de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince
30/45 H C McNeile ("Sapper") - Bulldog Drummond
31/45 - Miki Berenyi - Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success
32/45 Karen Lloyd - The Gathering Tide: a Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay
33/45 Malcolm Bradbury - The History Man
34/45 Alex Garland - The Beach
35/45 Sarah Tolmie - All the Horses of Iceland
36/45 J G Ballard - The Drowned World

37/45 Terry Pratchett - Feet of Clay

 

[hitmouse]

1/45 - Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (re-read)
2/45 - Martin Lux - Anti-Fascist (re-read)
3/45 - Hannah Kent - Burial Rites
4/45 - Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride (re-read)
5/45 EP Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
6/45 Henry James - The Princess Casamassima
7/45 Nigel Flanagan - Our Trade Unions: What comes next after the summer of 2022?
8/45 Katy Hays - The Cloisters
9/45 John Darnielle - Devil House
10/45 JoAnn Wypijewski - What We Don't Talk About: Sex and the Mess of Life
11/45 Jen Calleja - Vehicle
12/45 Cedric Robinson - Black Marxism
13/45 John Darnielle - Universal Harvester (re-read)
14/45 Simon Reynolds - Rip It Up and Start Again (re-read)
15/45 Anonymous - Appel/Call plus a critique
16/45 Emily St. John Mandel - Sea of Tranquility
17/45 DD Johnston - Disnaeland
18/45 Milan Kundera - Laughable Loves (re-read)
19/45 WEB DuBois - Darkwater
20/45 George Saunders - Liberation Day
21/45 Sheila Rowbotham - Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties
22/45 Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller - Bad Gays: A Homosexual History
23/45 Ralph Edney - The Adventures of Lazarus Lamb
24/45 Ralph Edney - Lazarus Lamb and the Riddle of the Sphincter
25/45 Anonymous - Total Liberation
26/45 adrienne maree brown - We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

27/45 David Peace - Tokyo Year Zero

I am reading a David Peace book. It's a bit like James Ellroy. I am reading a David Peace book. I think Ellroy's a bit better overall though. I am reading a David Peace book. No one in this book has ever smiled even once in their lives. I am reading a David Peace book. Also made me think of Hotline Miami and especially the sequel a bit, but that might've just been due to having played them relatively recently. I am reading a David Peace book. It is very easy to make fun of David Peace's writing style. I am reading a David Peace book. The cumulative effect does build up and start to get quite powerful over time though.

Think I'll read Jamie Stewart - Anything That Moves next.

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a King
2/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half the World
3/45 - George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
4/45 Jack London - The Call of the Wild
5/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a War
6/45 Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
7/45 Mark Cooper - Later... with Jools Holland: 30 years of music, magic and mayhem
8/45 Michael Molcher - I Am the Law: how Judge Dredd predicted our future
9/45 Sarah J Maas - A Court of Thorns and Roses
10/45 David Graeber - The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
11/45 Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
12/45 Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot #1)
13/45 Mark Galeotti - A Short History of Russia: how the world's largest country invented itself, from the pagans to Putin
14/45 Anne Applebaum - Twilight of Democracy: the seductive lure of authoritarianism
15/45 Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
16/45 Daniel Gordis - Israel: a concise history of a nation reborn
17/45 Alan Garner - The Stone Book Quartet
18/45 E M Forster - Where Angels Fear to Tread
19/45 Kate DiCamillo - The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
20/45 Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times
21/45 A A Milne - Winnie-the-Pooh
22/45 Marcus Baram - Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man
23/45 F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
24/45 Gil Scott-Heron - The Vulture
25/45 Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dogs of War
26/45 Andy Beckett - When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
27/45 J G Ballard - High-Rise
28/45 Randall Munroe (xkcd comics) - What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
29/45 Antoine de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince
30/45 H C McNeile ("Sapper") - Bulldog Drummond
31/45 - Miki Berenyi - Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success
32/45 Karen Lloyd - The Gathering Tide: a Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay
33/45 Malcolm Bradbury - The History Man
34/45 Alex Garland - The Beach
35/45 Sarah Tolmie - All the Horses of Iceland
36/45 J G Ballard - The Drowned World
37/45 Terry Pratchett - Feet of Clay

38/45 Larry McMurtry - Sin Killer

 

[Signal 11]

12/10 - Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties - Sheila Rowbotham

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

1. Beyond the burn line - Paul McAuley
2. Project hail Mary - Andy Weir
2.1 Randomize - Andy Weir
3. Artemis - Andy Weir
4.The Greek World - Robert Garland (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
5. I Robot - Isaac Asimov
6. The mystery of the blue train (Poirot 6)- Agatha Christie
7. Food: A cultural culinary history - Ken Alaba (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
8. Black Coffee (Poirot 7)-Agatha Christie
9. Ancient Civilisations of North America - Edwin Barnheart (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
10. Ancient Mesopotamia - Professor Amanda H Podany (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
11. Luka and the fire of life - Salman Rushdie
12. Life on Earth - David Attenborough (audio book)
13. the long way to a small angry planet - Becky Chambers (reread)
14. A closed and common orbit - Becky Chambers (reread)
15. All systems red (Murderbot 1) - Martha Wells (reread)
16. Artificial condition (Murderbot 2) - Martha Wells (reread)
17. Rouge protocol (Murderbot 3) - Martha Wells (reread)
18. The Iliad of Homer - Elizabeth Vandiver (The Great Courses) audio book lectures (Relisten)
19. Jack Four - Neal Asher (Polity)
20. The Odyssey of Homer - Elizabeth Vandiver (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
21. Witch King - Martha Wells
22. Ancient writing and the history of the alphabet - John McWhorter (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
23. Early Humans: Ice, Stone, and Survival - Suzanne Pilaar Birch (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
24. 1066: The Year That Changed Everything - Jennifer Paxton (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
25. Charlemagne: Father of Europe - Philip Daileader (The Great Courses) audio book lectures
26. Exit strategy (Murderbot 4) - Martha Wells (reread)
27. Network Effect (Murderbot 5) - Martha Wells (reread)
28. Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot 6) - Martha Wells (reread)

29. Classical Mythology - Elizabeth Vandiver

Some nice new information and context for classic myth.

Was back on the manga for a while hence the slow progress.

 

[PursuedByBears]

1/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a King
2/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half the World
3/45 - George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
4/45 Jack London - The Call of the Wild
5/45 Joe Abercrombie - Half a War
6/45 Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
7/45 Mark Cooper - Later... with Jools Holland: 30 years of music, magic and mayhem
8/45 Michael Molcher - I Am the Law: how Judge Dredd predicted our future
9/45 Sarah J Maas - A Court of Thorns and Roses
10/45 David Graeber - The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
11/45 Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
12/45 Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot #1)
13/45 Mark Galeotti - A Short History of Russia: how the world's largest country invented itself, from the pagans to Putin
14/45 Anne Applebaum - Twilight of Democracy: the seductive lure of authoritarianism
15/45 Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
16/45 Daniel Gordis - Israel: a concise history of a nation reborn
17/45 Alan Garner - The Stone Book Quartet
18/45 E M Forster - Where Angels Fear to Tread
19/45 Kate DiCamillo - The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
20/45 Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times
21/45 A A Milne - Winnie-the-Pooh
22/45 Marcus Baram - Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man
23/45 F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
24/45 Gil Scott-Heron - The Vulture
25/45 Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dogs of War
26/45 Andy Beckett - When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
27/45 J G Ballard - High-Rise
28/45 Randall Munroe (xkcd comics) - What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
29/45 Antoine de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince
30/45 H C McNeile ("Sapper") - Bulldog Drummond
31/45 - Miki Berenyi - Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success
32/45 Karen Lloyd - The Gathering Tide: a Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay
33/45 Malcolm Bradbury - The History Man
34/45 Alex Garland - The Beach
35/45 Sarah Tolmie - All the Horses of Iceland
36/45 J G Ballard - The Drowned World
37/45 Terry Pratchett - Feet of Clay
38/45 Larry McMurtry - Sin Killer

39/45 Ariel Anderssen - Playing to Lose: How A Jehovah's Witness Became a Submissive BDSM Model

 

[Biddlybee]

1/15 - We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
2/15 - The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yōko Ogawa
3/15 - Slug - Hollie McNish
4/15 - Someday, Maybe - Onyi Nwabineli
5/15 - Tyger - SF Said
6/15 - Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood
7/15 - The Things I Would Tell You - ed. Sabrina Mahfouz
8/15 - The World's Wife - Carol Ann Duffy
9/15 - A Night Divided - Jennifer A Nielsen
10/15 - Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
11/15 - Lyrics Alley - Leila Aboulela
12/15 - Strange Flowers - Donal Ryan
13/15 - Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
14/15 - The Truce - Primo Levi
15/15 - Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
16/15 - River Spirit - Leila Abulela
17/15 - Strong Female Character - Fern Brady
18/15 - Kindred - Octavia Butler
19/15 - The Lost Girls of Ireland - Susanne O'Leary
20/15 - The Guilty Feminist - Deborah Frances-White
21/15 - Factfulness - Hans Rosling
22/15 - 1979 - Val McDermid
23/15 - The Furthest Station - Ben Aaronovitch
24/15 - The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin
25/15 - The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak
26/15 - Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
27/15 - Soul Tourists - Bernadine Evaristo
28/15 - Foster - Claire Keegan
29/15 - Buried - Alice Roberts

 

[Winot]

1/29 The London Problem - Jack Brown
2/29 Ephemeron - Fiona Benson
3/29 NW - Zadie Smith
4/29 Spring - Ali Smith
5/29 A History of the Bible - John Barton
6/29 Falconer - John Cheever
7/29 Diary of an MP’s Wife - Sasha Swire
8/29 Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban (reread)
9/29 Purity and Danger - Mary Douglas
10/29 Einstein’s Monsters - Martin Amis
11/29 Greenvoe - George Mackay Brown
12/29 Material World - Ed Conway
13/29 Journey by Moonlight - Antal Szerb
14/29 Reginald McKenna: Statesman among Financiers, 1916-1943 - Martin Farr
15/29 The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph - Albert O. Hirschman
16/29 Milkman - Anna Burns

Hyperreal narrator-driven novel about young woman living in Belfast in the 1970s. Won the 2018 Booker Prize. Unique voice; funny and tragic.

 

[Chilli.s]

45 The Silk Tree : Julian Stockwin
46 My Friend the Mercenary : James Brabazon (disturbing violence)
47 Philosophy of Sailing : Christian Williams
48 Sea Fever : Sam Jefferson
49 And the Sea Will Tell : Bugliosi/Henderson
50 Lost on Purpose : Patrick Taylor

 

[inva]

1/35 Middlemarch by George Eliot
2/35 Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Prism of Value by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts
3/35 The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue
4/35 The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction edited by Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks & Masashi Matsuie
5/35 Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money by George Caffentzis
6/35 Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze
7/35 Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
8/35 Civilizing Money: Hume, his Monetary Project and the Scottish Enlightenment by George Caffentzis
9/35 An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans
10/35 Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata
11/35 Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
12/35 Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard
13/35 Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England edited by Sabina Freitag
14/35 The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P by Rieko Matsuura
15/35 A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance by Claudio Pavone
16/35 Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
17/35 Dracula by Bram Stoker
18/35 The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda
19/35 Lady Susan by Jane Austen
20/35 Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi
21/35 This Should be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle
22/35 The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard
23/35 The Invention of Art: A Cultural History by Larry Shiner
24/35 Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder
25/35 The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
26/35 Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo
27/35 Carol by Patricia Highsmith
28/35 Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson
Some good essays, claims to span the whole Victorian period but overwhelmingly focuses on the later years, particularly on how women novelists engaged with the issues coalescing towards a more concrete and militant political movement. Made a few notes of other things to read as a result. Some repeated claims that conservative/anti feminist women have been excluded from the literary canon for that reason which seemed a little dubious to me.
29/35 Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political by James Kelman
Another one of the many books I picked up a long time ago and then ignored for ages. If I'd known anything about it beforehand I probably wouldn't have got it in the first place as the attacks of the title are not at all recent now and largely about things that I didn't know anything about/didn't find relevant. Couple of interesting bits.
30/35 Mem by Bethany C. Morrow
Science fiction novel set in 1920s Montreal the gimmick being some process discovered that allows for memories to be extracted from people and turned into corporeal humanoid form for some reason. I liked this mostly, quite low key and melancholy and nicely written. I did think the setting wasn't very well realised though. There's a note at the end where Morrow says she chose 1920s Montreal because she likes the art deco buildings there, fair enough, and she explains that she deliberately sidestepped the racist, sexist prejudice and social, economic barriers that would've most likely prevented her characters living and acting as they do, also fair enough. Trouble is, I found it just doesn't end up evoking much of anything setting wise, which seems a shame. Otherwise pretty good though.