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the strictly come reading 2023 reading challenge thread

i expect to read this many books in 2023

  • Total voters
    48
1/59 The Rooster Bar - John Grisham
2/59 The White Album - Joan Didion
3/59 Storm Watch - CJ Box
4/59 Oath of Loyalty - Kyle Mills
5/59 SAS : Rogue Heroes - Ben Macintyre
6/59 The Odin Mission - James Holland
7/59 Darkest Hour - James Holland
8/59 Blood of Honour - James Holland
9/59 Hellfire - James Holland
10/59 English Journey - J.B. Priestley
11/59 Outbreak - Frank Gardner
12/59 Desert Star - Michael Connelly
13/59 On The Run - Kerry J Donovan
14/59 Righteous Prey - John Sandford
15/59 Extreme Prey - John Sandford
16/59 Field of Prey - John Sandford
17/59 Invisible Prey- John Sandford
18/59 The Devil's Pact - James Holland
19/59 Slow Horses - Mich Herron
20/60 Nicholas Nickelby - Charles Dickens
21/60 Get Carter - Ted Lewis
22/60 Essex Dogs - Dan Jones
23/60 The Full English - Stuart Maconie
24/60 The Secret - Lee Child & Andrew Child
25/60 On The Rocks - Kerry J Donovan
26/60 Welcome to New London : Journeys and Encounters in the Post Olympic City - John Rogers
27/60 Vanished City : London's Lost Neighbourhoods - Tom Bolton
28/60 The Cauldron - Zeno
29/60 Burma '44 - James Holland
 
1/36 Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go by George P. Pelecanos
2/36 Substance: Inside New Order by Peter Hook
3/36 How To Rob An Armored Car by Iain Levison (ReRead)
4/36 The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club by Peter Hook
5/36 The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by Leonard Gribble
6/36 No. 17 by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon
7/36 My Rock 'n' Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn
8/36 The Man Who Came Uptown by George P. Pelecanos
9/36 Good Behavior by Donald E. Westlake
10/36 The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake
11/36 Drowned Hopes by Donald E. Westlake
12/36 Quick Change by Jay Cronley
13/36 The Greatest Show on Earth: The Inside Story of the Legendary 1970 World Cup by Andrew Downie
14/36 Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr
15/36 Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle
16/36 Fletch by Gregory McDonald
17/36 Fletch Won by Gregory McDonald
18/36 120, rue de la Gare by Léo Malet
19/36 Bellies and Bullseyes: The Outrageous True Story of Darts by Sid Waddell (ReRead)
20/36 Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz
21/36 For the Love of Willie by Agnes Owens
22/36 Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa (Reread)
23/36 Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
24/36 Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party by Michael Cragg
25/36 Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
26/36 Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon
27/36 One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters
28/36 Can't Stand Up For Falling Down: Rock'n'Roll War Stories by Allan Jones
29/36 A Prefect's Uncle by P. G. Wodehouse
30/36 Raymond Carver : an oral biography by Sam Halpert
31/36 Never Stop: How Ange Postecoglou Brought the Fire Back to Celtic by Hamish Carton
32/36 Psychocandy by Paula Mejia
33/36 Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver
34/36 Unhappy-Go-Lucky by Ian Pattison
35/36 The Shoe by Gordon Legge (Reread)
36/36 The Storytellers One by Roger Mansfield
37/36 Norwood by Charles Portis
38/36 Born to struggle by May Hobbs
39/36 Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal
40/36 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Reread)
41/36 To Die in June by Alan Parks
42/36 Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
43/36 Bloody January by Alan Parks (Audiobook)
44/36 Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa: Script (and Scrapped) by Steve Coogan, Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons, Armando Iannucci, Peter Baynham
45/36 The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Audiobook)
46/36 Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Audiobook)
47/36 1-2-3-4: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown
48/36 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend (Reread)
49/36 The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend (Reread)
50/36 The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend by Sue Townsend (Reread)
51/36 Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians by Sue Townsend
52/36 Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years by Sue Townsend (Reread)
53/36 Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosley

54/36 Remainders of the Day: More Diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown by Shaun Bythell (Audiobook)
 
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
29/35 Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political by James Kelman
30/35 Mem by Bethany C. Morrow
31/35 Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin by Boris Kagarlitsky
32/35 Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
33/35 The History of the British Film 1918-1929 by Rachael Low
34/35 The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System by Henryk Grossman
35/35 Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory
36/35 White by Marie Darrieussecq
37/35 Dream Houses by Genevieve Valentine
38/35 The Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard
39/35 Maigret Takes a Room by Georges Simenon
40/35 The Lodger, That Summer by Levi Huxton
There’s a pretty good though never fully realised coming of age story somewhere in here about a young gay man in Australia learning how to live and express his sexuality and the contact and conflict of his fears and desires with those of the men around him. This more thoughtful story sits uneasily alongside the story of a mysterious and nebulously horny lodger who turns everyone gay and the combination just doesn't really work.
41/35 Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner
Younger woman hooks up with older woman at a bar - silly and fairly entertaining romcom farce results. As familiar as it might all be Wilsner handles it quite well.
42/35 Grundrisse by Karl Marx
Probably the most difficult Marx I’ve read but then it’s not really a proper book in the first place. Some pretty big chunks of this I found really hard to follow and at times it seemed like every other word was ‘posit’ and then just when you feel like you’re banging your head against a wall you get a passage of amazing insight and clarity. The sections on pre-capitalist forms, machinery/fixed capital and some of the stuff about money stood out particularly. I was hoping to read the chapter on money with a bit of a critical eye after the two George Caffentzis books I read earlier in the year, didn’t really succeed too much though. Should re-read Capital vol 1 some time.
 
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
28/45 Jamie Stewart - Anything That Moves
29/45 Pear Nuallak - Pearls From Their Mouth
30/45 Emma Warren - Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor
31/45 Katherine Angel - Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
32/45 Hao Ren, Zhongjin Li, and Eli Friedman (eds) - China on Strike
33/45 Kai Cheng Thom - I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World
34/45 Richard Fariña - Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
35/45 Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford - Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South
36/45 Amor Towles - Rules of Civility (re-read)
37/45 Rosa Luxemburg - The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions
38/45 Milan Kundera - Life is Elswhere (re-read)
39/45 Colson Whitehead - Sag Harbor

40/45 Claudio Lonmitz - The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon

Well, I now know a lot more about Ricardo Flores Magon than I did before. Quite a strange book in places, a somewhat idiosyncratic approach and it's not the book that I'd have written, but then I've never written even a small book about Ricardo Flores Magon let alone a giant one like this. Very much not a hagiography, really captures RFM's capacity for having bitter fallings-out with pretty much everyone he knew, and the Baja California campaign that was probably the high point of the PLM's influence comes across as a right mess in Lonmitz's telling. Good way to learn about the complexities and contradictions of a man who had two funerals in two countries, with the second signalling his return from exile and the beginning of his secular canonisation by a state he'd fought against his whole life. And lots and lots of amazing insults from the constant squabbling as well.
Now starting Lisa Robertson - The Baudelaire Fractal. The story of a woman who wakes up to find she's written the complete works of Baudelaire. Only read a tiny bit of it so far but the bits I have read have a pretty amazing style. Never read any Baudelaire myself so suspect some parts of it may go over my head. Also just glanced at the acknowledgements and unexpectedly seen a few people I know in there, which is nice.
 
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
30/15 - Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
31/15 - The Dance Tree - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
32/15 - Critical - Matt Morgan
33/15 - Space Dogs - Martin Parr
34/15 - 1989 - Val McDermid
35/15 - The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
36/15 - The Queen of Dirt Island - Donal Ryan
37/15 - I am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes
 
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
17/30 - Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
18/30 - Michael Moorcock - Behold the Man
19/30 - Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake
20/30 - Louise Kennedy - Trespasses
21/30 - Lewis Carroll - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
22/30 - William Gibson - Virtual Light
23/30 - Michael Bracewell - Unfinished Business
24/30 - Harper Lee - Go Set a Watchman
25/30 - Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl

26/30 - Jim Carroll - The Basketball Diaries
 
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
40/45 Terry Pratchett - Maskerade
41/45 J B Priestley - An Inspector Calls
42/45 Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
43/45 P G Wodehouse - Psmith in the City
44/45 Carlie Sorosiak - My Life as a Cat
45/45 Neil Carter - Cycling and the British: a Modern History
46/45 Paterson Joseph - The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
47/45 Francis La Flesche - The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe
48/45 James O'Brien - How They Broke Britain
49/45 Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

50/45 Victor LaValle - The Ballad of Black Tom

HP Lovecraft was a racist piece of shit but he gave us a universe full of Elder Gods where there's plenty of room for e.g. Black voices to give a counter story. Nice little novella.
 
BoatieBird said:
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
40/52 - Clare Chambers - A Dry Spell
41/52 - Dennis Lehane - Small Mercies
42/52 - Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests
43/52 - Celeste Ng - Our Missing Hearts
44/52 - Sebastian Barry - Old God's Time
45/52 - Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders
46/52 - Margaret Atwood - My Evil Mother
47/52 - Barbara Vine - No Night is Too Long (re-read)
48/52 - Bob Mortimer - The Satsuma Complex
49/52 - Stephen King - Holly
50/52 - Tim Spector - The Diet Myth
51/52 - Minette Walters - The Swift and the Harrier
52/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of The Owl
53/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead

54/52 - Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die
Click to expand...
Always good to have a recommendation, and I've read stuff by that author that I like before. Thanks!
 
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
40/52 - Clare Chambers - A Dry Spell
41/52 - Dennis Lehane - Small Mercies
42/52 - Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests
43/52 - Celeste Ng - Our Missing Hearts
44/52 - Sebastian Barry - Old God's Time
45/52 - Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders
46/52 - Margaret Atwood - My Evil Mother
47/52 - Barbara Vine - No Night is Too Long (re-read)
48/52 - Bob Mortimer - The Satsuma Complex
49/52 - Stephen King - Holly
50/52 - Tim Spector - The Diet Myth
51/52 - Minette Walters - The Swift and the Harrier
52/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of The Owl
53/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead
54/52 - Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die

55/52 - Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged (re-read)
 
Last edited:
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
37/45 John Fante - Ask the Dust
38/45 K.J. Parker - Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
39/45 Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
40/45 Margaret Atwood - The Testaments
41/45 Joan Didion - Blue Nights
42/45 Tom O'Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
43/45 Gywn A. Williams - When was Wales
44/45 Maureen F. McHugh - China Mountain Zhang
45/45 Kim Stanley Robinson - Ministry for the Future
46/45 Margaret Atwood - In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

47/45 Hilaire Belloc - The French Revolution
 
hc - hard copy
dl - dens library
k - kindle
g - google

1/50 Saturday, Ian McEwan - hc
2/50 East of Eden, John Steinbeck - dl
3/50 Sweet Sorrow, David Nicholls - k
4/50 Game of Thrones, George RR Martin - k
5/50 The Black Kids, Christina Hammonds Reed - k
6/50 A Clash of Kings, George RR Martin - g
7/50 My Wife's Secrets, Wendy Owens - k
8/50 Wahala, Nikki May - k
9/50 A Storm of Swords part 1, George RR Martin - k
10/50 Girl in Trouble, Stacey Claflin - k
11/50 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
12/50 A Storm of Swords part 2, George RR Martin - k
13/50 This Book Belongs To, Nick Levy - k
14/50 Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney - dl
15/50 Valentine, Elizabeth Wetmore - dl
16/50 Alone, Robert J Crane - k
17/50 To Speak for the , Paul Levine - k
18/50 Good Girl Bad, S A McEwan- k
19/50 In Every Mirror She's Black, Lola Alinmade Akerstrom - k
20/50 What Happens in New York, Kristin Adams - k
21/50 Other Parents, Sarah Stovell - k
22/50 Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin - dl
23/50 Throne of Deceit, Richard Fierce and pdmac - k
24/50 Under the Dome, Stephen King - hc
25/50 The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates - dl
26/50 Holly, Stephen King - g
27/50 The Truth About Her, Annie Taylor - k
28/50 How I Magically Messed Up my Life in Four Freaking Days, Megan O'Russell - g
29/50 Dig Two Graves, Keith Nixon - k
30/50 The Hellbound Heart, Clive Barker - dl
31/50 The Amazing Grace Adams, Fran Littlewood - dl
31/50 Game Over, Adele Parks - hc
32/50 Junk, Melvin Burgess- dl
32/50 Time of my Life, Mary Frame - k
33/50The Serial Killer's Wife, Alice Hunter - k
34/50 The Pisces, Melissa Broder - dl
35/50 The Couple Upstairs, Anne Girdharry - k
36/50 All Among The Barley, Melissa Harrison - dl
37/50 Someday, Maybe, Onyi Nwabineli - dl


38/50 Tomorrow and Tomorrow And Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin - dl
This is brilliant.

Not going to make my 50 target for this year. I blame 4 GoT books.
 
27/27 The Late Americans – Brandon Taylor

This guy is a very good writer.

Taylor was born in Prattville, Alabama, and grew up in a small community outside Montgomery. Part of Taylor's upbringing was spent in a very religious, conservative Baptist setting. Taylor's family is mostly illiterate, and he was often made to read his parents' medical bills and government forms. He taught himself how to read using his brother's textbooks, and grew up reading a combination of romance novels, his aunt's nursing-home manuals, and the Bible.
Taylor attended Auburn University Montgomery for his undergraduate studies, and then joined a graduate biochemistry program, and after leaving in 2016 began a career in creative writing. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
 
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
40/52 - Clare Chambers - A Dry Spell
41/52 - Dennis Lehane - Small Mercies
42/52 - Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests
43/52 - Celeste Ng - Our Missing Hearts
44/52 - Sebastian Barry - Old God's Time
45/52 - Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders
46/52 - Margaret Atwood - My Evil Mother
47/52 - Barbara Vine - No Night is Too Long (re-read)
48/52 - Bob Mortimer - The Satsuma Complex
49/52 - Stephen King - Holly
50/52 - Tim Spector - The Diet Myth
51/52 - Minette Walters - The Swift and the Harrier
52/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of The Owl
53/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead
54/52 - Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die
55/52 - Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged (re-read)

56/52 - Grace Dent - Hungry
 
1 - Noviolet Bulawayo - Glory
2 - Alan Garner - Treacle Walker
3 - Joe Thomas - White Riot (Book 1 of the United Kingdom trilogy)
4 - Robert Edric - My Own Worst Enemy
5 - Cynthia Cruz - The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class
6 - David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
7 - Joe Thomas - Bent
8 - Harry Harrison - Dreaming in Yellow the story of the DiY sound system
9 - Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policeman's Union
10 - Bob Dylan - The Philosophy of Modern Song
11 - Gary Younge - Who Are We? How identity politics took over the world.
12 - Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
13 - Virginia Woolf - A Rooms of One's Own
14 - Iain Reid - We Spread
15 - Pat Nevin - Football and How to Survive It
16 - Peter Frankopan - The Silk Roads: a New History of the World
17 - Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
18 - Hamid Ismailov - The Devil's Dance
19 - Karin Smirnoff - The Girl in the Eagle’s Talon
20 - Gary Younge - Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter
21 - Christopher Marlowe - Tamburlaine the Great, parts I & II
22 - Muriel Spark - The Public Image
23 - James Morrison - The Left Behind
24 - Virginia Woolf - Death of the Moth & other essays
25 - Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan
26 - Nick Cave - Stranger Than Kindness
27 - Yara Rodrigues Fowler - There Are More Things
28 - Pamela Hutchinson - The Red Shoes
29 - Nathalie Morris & Claire Smith (Eds) - The Cinema of Powell & Pressburger

30/30 - Sue Dymoke - What To Do Next

The fourth and final volume of poetry from Sue, with lots of gardening, old Nottinghamshire, gardening, holidays and more gardening, all told with a sly wit and charm. RIP.


INSTRUCTIONS FOR A FRIEND

Take stock
leave clocks to their own ticking
unlock your door to new daylight.

Seek rest
don't test yourself every second
save your best moments for dreaming.
 
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
37/45 John Fante - Ask the Dust
38/45 K.J. Parker - Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
39/45 Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
40/45 Margaret Atwood - The Testaments
41/45 Joan Didion - Blue Nights
42/45 Tom O'Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
43/45 Gywn A. Williams - When was Wales
44/45 Maureen F. McHugh - China Mountain Zhang
45/45 Kim Stanley Robinson - Ministry for the Future
46/45 Margaret Atwood - In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
47/45 Hilaire Belloc - The French Revolution

48/45 Geoff Manaughn - The Burglar's Guide to the City

A bit of a meander around the intersection of burglary, the built environment and architecture. Not as interesting as it sounds.
 
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
40/45 Terry Pratchett - Maskerade
41/45 J B Priestley - An Inspector Calls
42/45 Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
43/45 P G Wodehouse - Psmith in the City
44/45 Carlie Sorosiak - My Life as a Cat
45/45 Neil Carter - Cycling and the British: a Modern History
46/45 Paterson Joseph - The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
47/45 Francis La Flesche - The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe
48/45 James O'Brien - How They Broke Britain
49/45 Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
50/45 Victor LaValle - The Ballad of Black Tom

51/45 H G Wells - The Wheels of Chance: a Bicycling Idyll
 
1/5 Cixin Liu - Hold Up the Sky
2/5 N. K. Jemisin - The Killing Moon
3/5 Youngman: Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (ed. Ellis Martin & Zach Ozma)
4/5 Pat Cadigan - Synners
5/5 Joseph Jenkins - The Humanure Handbook
6/5 Rosamund Young - The Secret Life of Cows
7/5 N. K. Jemisin - The City We Became
8/5 The Orkneyinga Saga (forgot to add this when I read it months ago)
9/5 Andrea Stewart - The Bone Shard Daughter
10/5 Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea (re-read)
11/5 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Tombs of Atuan
12/5 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Farthest Shore
13/5 RHS - The Fruit Garden Displayed (re-read but the first time I've been procrastinating enough to actually sit and read the entire thing cover-to-cover in one go)
 
iona said:
I also get myself confused with inva, tbf :D

My memory doesn't really work in a way that makes it possible to review books once I've finished reading them but it was good.
Click to expand...
Jesus, I am clearly not the expert on memory or reading here.
 
1/59 The Rooster Bar - John Grisham
2/59 The White Album - Joan Didion
3/59 Storm Watch - CJ Box
4/59 Oath of Loyalty - Kyle Mills
5/59 SAS : Rogue Heroes - Ben Macintyre
6/59 The Odin Mission - James Holland
7/59 Darkest Hour - James Holland
8/59 Blood of Honour - James Holland
9/59 Hellfire - James Holland
10/59 English Journey - J.B. Priestley
11/59 Outbreak - Frank Gardner
12/59 Desert Star - Michael Connelly
13/59 On The Run - Kerry J Donovan
14/59 Righteous Prey - John Sandford
15/59 Extreme Prey - John Sandford
16/59 Field of Prey - John Sandford
17/59 Invisible Prey- John Sandford
18/59 The Devil's Pact - James Holland
19/59 Slow Horses - Mich Herron
20/60 Nicholas Nickelby - Charles Dickens
21/60 Get Carter - Ted Lewis
22/60 Essex Dogs - Dan Jones
23/60 The Full English - Stuart Maconie
24/60 The Secret - Lee Child & Andrew Child
25/60 On The Rocks - Kerry J Donovan
26/60 Welcome to New London : Journeys and Encounters in the Post Olympic City - John Rogers
27/60 Vanished City : London's Lost Neighbourhoods - Tom Bolton
28/60 The Cauldron - Zeno
29/60 Burma '44 - James Holland
30/60 The Investigator - John Sandford
 
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
40/52 - Clare Chambers - A Dry Spell
41/52 - Dennis Lehane - Small Mercies
42/52 - Sarah Waters - The Paying Guests
43/52 - Celeste Ng - Our Missing Hearts
44/52 - Sebastian Barry - Old God's Time
45/52 - Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders
46/52 - Margaret Atwood - My Evil Mother
47/52 - Barbara Vine - No Night is Too Long (re-read)
48/52 - Bob Mortimer - The Satsuma Complex
49/52 - Stephen King - Holly
50/52 - Tim Spector - The Diet Myth
51/52 - Minette Walters - The Swift and the Harrier
52/52 - Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of The Owl
53/52 - Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead
54/52 - Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die
55/52 - Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged (re-read)
56/52 - Grace Dent - Hungry

57/52 - Elizabeth Strout - Lucy by the Sea
58/52 - Peter Swanson - The Christmas Guest
 
#franklyfurious about my total this year tbh - should get another couple in before last orders but this must be the lowest number of books I've read in a 12 month period, since I could read ffs. I just couldn't get into it this year I guess. Next year will be different!
 
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
28/45 Jamie Stewart - Anything That Moves
29/45 Pear Nuallak - Pearls From Their Mouth
30/45 Emma Warren - Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor
31/45 Katherine Angel - Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
32/45 Hao Ren, Zhongjin Li, and Eli Friedman (eds) - China on Strike
33/45 Kai Cheng Thom - I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World
34/45 Richard Fariña - Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
35/45 Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford - Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South
36/45 Amor Towles - Rules of Civility (re-read)
37/45 Rosa Luxemburg - The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions
38/45 Milan Kundera - Life is Elswhere (re-read)
39/45 Colson Whitehead - Sag Harbor
40/45 Claudio Lonmitz - The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon

41/45 Lisa Robertson - The Baudelaire Fractal

Fucking mental book. Would recommend, probably, depending on what your tastes are like. I was trying to think how I'd describe it and I think the most confident thing I can say about it is that this book definitely has a lot of sentences in it. Also if you've actually read Baudelaire it may well be possible to get more out of it than I did. I absolutely do not understand everything she's saying, but there were a lot, really a lot, of places that made me go "fuck, that's good". One of the themes is sort of about the experience of being a girl (and that's not the word I'd normally use, but it is a word Robertson uses a lot throughout) encountering a literary canon that is very much not designed for you and is often hostile, but then it's about lots of other things as well, clothes and kissing and sentences and things. Quite funny in a lot of places, I think she knows she's being funny but it's hard to be sure. There are loads of bits I noted down, here's a random selection of a few:
"I ought to have been more curious, but after kissing a girlish boy in the bathroom while teasing them with my vintage rhinestones, there was nothing left for me to do there."
"Sentences had surfaces; I wanted them to begin to undo themselves, to careen into the impossible."
"In the rooms filled with rarity and the dullness of familial hatred and jealousy, in the now-forgotten password spoken to the armed soldiers at the school, in the prying glance of the concierge, in the horrible statues of shoeshine boys, all of these things functions of varying scales of imposed and policed positionings of superiority, I thought I could intuit the whole sadistic spectrum of the political world."
"Against this odious assessment, I began the slow accumulation of the documents of the incommensurable procedures, procedures for which I was not a sign, but an untrained actor, a bad actor, a hack of a sentence writer, an anonymous fuck."
"I want to claim the word free for myself and I intend to use it wrongly very often."
That sort of thing.

Now starting Mario Tronti - Workers and Capital. Which I tried reading a few years back when the English translation first came out and then swiftly gave up as 2brainy4me, will see if I do better this time round. I almost certainly won't finish before Dec 31st so I think that makes the Robertson my last completed book of the year.
 
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
37/45 John Fante - Ask the Dust
38/45 K.J. Parker - Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
39/45 Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
40/45 Margaret Atwood - The Testaments
41/45 Joan Didion - Blue Nights
42/45 Tom O'Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
43/45 Gywn A. Williams - When was Wales
44/45 Maureen F. McHugh - China Mountain Zhang
45/45 Kim Stanley Robinson - Ministry for the Future
46/45 Margaret Atwood - In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
47/45 Hilaire Belloc - The French Revolution
48/45 Geoff Manaughn - The Burglar's Guide to the City

49/45 Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Absolutely, by a huge margin, the worst book I have ever read.
 
Probably the last ones for the year.

1/10 - Kindred - Octavia E. Butler
2/10 - Felicette: The Space Cat - Stuart Atkinson
3/10 - The Idea - Nick Heath
4/10 - The Last Stargazers - Emily Levesque
5/10 - Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick - Gary Roth
6/10 - Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World - Noel Ignatiev
7/10 - Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity - Noel Ignatiev
8/10 - Bridge to Elsewhere - (ed) Alana Joli Abbott & Julia Rios
9/10 - Chess Queens - Jennifer Shahade
10/10 - The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View - Ellen Meiksins Wood
11/10 - A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story - Leo Zeilig
12/10 - Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties - Sheila Rowbotham
13/10 - The Milky Way: An Autobiography of our Galaxy - Moiya McTier
14/10 - An Introduction to Astrobiology - (ed) Rothery, Gilmour & Sephton

15/10 - Modern Politics - C. L. R. James
16/10 - Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s - Sheila Rowbotham
 
Pickman's model said:
Usual rules apply - this thread for books read (that is, completed) between 0000 on 1 Jan 2023 and 2359 on 31 Dec 2023. Books completed before midnight on 31/12/22 should go in the 2022 thread. By read I mean read in print or electronic form, read to you, read by you to someone else, listened to as an audiobook - consumed in any way apart from actually eaten
Click to expand...
Does this thread have an official stance on serialised media. For the last few months I've been back on the Web novels. I've read countless pages of material but I'm not sure how I would log it.

Maybe next year I'll at least note done a series name and chapter count.
 
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
17/30 - Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
18/30 - Michael Moorcock - Behold the Man
19/30 - Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake
20/30 - Louise Kennedy - Trespasses
21/30 - Lewis Carroll - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
22/30 - William Gibson - Virtual Light
23/30 - Michael Bracewell - Unfinished Business
24/30 - Harper Lee - Go Set a Watchman
25/30 - Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl
26/30 - Jim Carroll - The Basketball Diaries

27/30 - Tony Pike with Matt Trollope - Mr Pikes: The Story Behind the Ibiza Legend
 
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