|
I'm in for 40 and the booklord's challenge.
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2015 19:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:26 |
|
|
Someone wildcard me. Make it good!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2015 14:18
|
|
|
January is over so here's some books I read. January - 4: The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) The Establishment is a really good, succinct summary of the current political and social climate of Britain and how it allows a wealthy elite to dominate the national discourse in a way which serves their own interests. Owen Jones can be a controversial figure on the left but I appreciate his evenhandedness in criticising both the major UK political parties because they've both been complicit in allowing this situation to develop. Interesting and informative even if I knew a lot of it already. Mussolini and Fascist Italy is a very short pamphlet (86 pages or so) covering the history of Hitler and the... no it's pretty much what it says on the tin. It's an area of European history which is interesting but often gets sidelined by Nazi Germany and one I didn't know enough about. The length means that it doesn't go into tons of depth but as a nice introductory work on the subject it served its purpose. Love in the Time of Cholera is my second Gabo and I don't think I liked it as much as One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read that in two days compared to like three weeks (admittedly I have a new relationship and a ton of work-related travel to deal with now instead of being unemployed like I was when I read One Hundred Years). LitoC is a bit like a rich, heavy chocolate cake - it's wonderful but you can't have too much at once. I had to have a break in the middle to read Mussolini instead so that I could have a bit of a change. All You Need is Kill was the total opposite - a fun, pacey sci-fi novel. It roars along merrily. A really enjoyable read. I've ticked off 3, 5 and 11 (non-white author, history, hate or love) on the booklord's challenge this month. My nominated wildcard was Concrete by Thomas Bernhard which I'm looking forward to getting around to. Year to Date: 4 1. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 2. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 3. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 4. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) Booklord categories: 3, 5, 11.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2015 16:42
|
|
|
Ok I read another 4 books in February here they are: 5. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 6. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 7. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 8. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) Theft I really enjoyed and raced through, it was fun and exciting and the two main characters had strong individual voices. The Hugh chapters could have been awful but were actually sweet and funny and added a lot to the story, and seeing the contrasting viewpoints of the two Boones on different events was interesting. It's a doggie dog world out there. Stalin is a good pared-down biography of, uh, Stalin. McDermott has a strong thesis which he sticks to throughout without relying on repeating it a million times over. Some nice history reading. Heart of Darkness is Heart of Darkness. I liked it. Revenge is a collection of 11 short stories. They're all connected to each other, some quite loosely, some very closely. They're dark, funny and weird. I read the whole thing in a day and I'd love to read more Yoko Ogawa now. Everything apart from Theft was quite short this month. I did read 150 pages of The Good Soldier Svejk was well, which I'm very slowly continuing to work through. It's one of those books where I get it and enjoy it, but chugging through all 750 pages of Czech interwar black comedy is a bit of a mission. I have some other stuff I'm looking forward to after I finish it so I'll try and crack on and break the back of it this week. I've ticked off short stories and biography from the booklord's challenge this month (18 and 21). Year to Date: 8 1. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 2. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 3. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 4. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 5. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 6. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 7. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 8. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) Booklord categories: 3, 5, 11, 18, 21.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2015 20:29
|
|
|
bokes March - 5: The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) after the quake (Haruki Murakami) The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) Helpfully I wrote a load of things and managed to delete them like a twat so here are thoughts in short: The Good Soldier Svejk - good, long. Pointless and stops halfway through a scene, thanks for dying Hasek. Enjoyed. The Buried Giant - slow starter, gets better about a hundred pages in. Not Ishiguro's best work by a long shot but not bad either. after the quake - Murakami Murakami'ing about Kobe. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic - I'm re-reading Discworld in publication order (and hitting a few I've missed over the years) since Pratchett went and died. TCoM is weird and super different to what follows. Even a book later in Light Fantastic there's a significant tonal and stylistic shift that's much closer to everything else. Next I'm reading The Girls of Room 28 about girls in a concentration camp. Intriguingly until Pratchett I hadn't read anything by an English/North American author since the Stalin biography and before that Mussolini, and at number 12 The Colour of Magic is the first novel written by an Englishman I've read all year since the other three books were non-fiction (depending on how you feel about the Englishness of Ishiguro and Conrad ymmv). This is a pretty big contrast from a couple of years ago although it does help that I'm picking a bunch of stuff off my girlfriend's shelves. This month I also ticked off something dealing with the unreal (#13, Colour of Magic) and something published in the past year or three months (#16, The Buried Giant). I'm also going to claim after the quake for "short stories" and use Yoko Ogawa as the female author to claim #2. Year to Date: 13 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) Booklord categories: 2, 3, 5, 11, 13, 16 18, 21.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2015 15:23
|
|
|
thehomemaster posted:Question though: did Heller ever write anything else at least close to as good as Catch-22? Has anyone?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 09:28
|
|
|
April - 5: 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) I liked all of my books this month. I read Invisible Cities as my postmodern book (incidentally it was really cool and weird and I wish I'd read it ages ago) like every single other person in this thread and since "the Red Army" appears as a phrase about a hundred million times in Iron Curtain I'm crossing off that one too. I read Notes from Underground too but it's in a book with The Double and I figure since they're both really short I'll just count them together. I'll count it as my absurdist book - I'm not sure it neatly fits in but the boundary between existentialism and absurdism is pretty grey and it definitely felt pretty absurd. 40 is looking like a pretty lax goal but I'm sure things are going to get super tough relatively soon at work so I figure I won't stretch it yet. Year to Date: 18 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) Booklord categories: 2, 3, 5, 8, 9 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21. Living Image fucked around with this message at 09:36 on May 25, 2015 |
|
#
¿
May 3, 2015 21:33
|
|
|
I only managed 3 books this month - finishing off the Notes from Underground/The Double double book, First Novel, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I also read 513 pages of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which only leaves me 640ish pages to go  I'm well on course for 40 books this year and might up to 52 if I'm doing good at mid year still.I liked The Double less than Notes from Underground. For some reason I didn't really get it until right near the end. First Novel on the other hand I raced through; a pacey, exciting mystery (ticking this one off!) which is either about dogging or double murder, maybe. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I similarly tore through pretty quickly - I think I read half of it one night and the rest the next. It's a combination history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, the immigrant experience of the Dominican diaspora, and a love letter to 80s nerd things. The language is fast-paced and witty and full of the dialect of the people it's about. I also read an essay, Fascinating Fascism (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/). I'm not counting it on the list because why would I, but I'll count it for the booklord thing. Year to Date: 21 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) Booklord categories: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2015 16:35
|
|
|
Four this month: 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) Mort was part of my ongoing full Discworld reread. It's the first one that feels like what the I think of when I think of the series and it's the first Death book which is nice. Schlump I came across in a bookshop in Wimborne while I was away for work. It's an anti-war novel from the interwar period, the only one the author ever wrote, about how much being a German soldier in WW1 sucked. It was published anonymously and no-one knew who wrote it until 2013, which didn't stop the Nazis from banning it and burning it during the 30s. It reminded me a of the Good Soldier Svejk which had similar themes. It's a very funny book in places, and Schlump approaches everything in a way which is basically positive, which juxtaposes nicely with the relatively brief time he ends up in the nightmare of the trenches. Concrete was my wildcard. It's 156 continuous pages (no chapters, no paragraphs) of ranting by the author, a Viennese musicologist, about how much he hates his sister, his house, Austria, and his neighbours, and how much he wants to start writing a book on Mendelssohn. It's a fascinating look at a deeply weird individual. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was an amazingly indepth look at how the Third Reich came about. It's very centred around Hitler - the other key figures in the Nazi Party are brought up and covered in depth where necessary but it's very much Hitler's story. Somehow at 1143 pages it still feels like it didn't touch on everything as deeply as it could have, but it's such a huge period to cover that that's inevitable and as a general history of Nazi Germany it's great. It's a little limited by its age - it was published in 1960 so, for example, there's a footnote about Eichmann's abduction from Argentina saying "this happened right as we went to press" and it doesn't cover a couple of things like Enigma which only came to light later on and, for some reason, Mengele is completely excluded despite there being a quite long section on all the weird medical experiments the Nazis did. It's also super homophobic when discussing Roehm and the early Nazi party. Still, it deserves attention for its sheer scope and ambition in covering an enormous area. Year to Date: 25 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) Booklord categories: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2015 11:44
|
|
|
Read Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. The Red Army is mentioned about every other page and that was good enough for me.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2015 22:00
|
|
|
A human heart posted:Don't read books by right wing propagandists. Or do and just be aware of the bias? It's not like she's David Irving.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2015 07:35
|
|
|
July - 7: 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) The three Bernard Cornwells are part of the Saxon Stories thing he's been doing lately, about the Danish invasion of Britain and King Alfred's Wessex. I haven't read a ton of Cornwell before (Azincourt and his Arthur series) but I picked up some of these for 99p out of a charity shop and the rest my sister bought me so whatever. They delivered basically what I expected, which is fun macho early-Mediaeval adventure stories. Low on brains, high on Germanic dudes chopping the poo poo out of each other, which was a welcome intellectual break after 1100 pages of der Fuehrer. One thing though - holy poo poo does he love rape. I can't remember if this was the case with the other stuff of his I read, but these are absolutely chock full of rape. Sure, it's appropriate to the times and a fair reflection of what Dark Ages raiding and conquest would have been like, but it manages to be both constant and also treated amazingly lightly (the second book is the worst, where the main character finds a whore he knows in a tavern being gang raped and chases the Danes off, and she just sits up and goes "Oh I'm so sore!" then it's never mentioned again). It's a bit of a weird note in what are otherwise pretty standard heroic historical fiction books. After all that Beauty and Sadness was much deeper. I'd never heard of Kawabata until my girlfriend spotted this on an Amazon related search thing, so apparently targeted advertising does work because I loved it. One of those slim books where I figured I'd pace myself and savour it then read the whole thing in about two hours because I didn't want to put it down. I followed that up with The Blind Owl for the challenge. I think the best thing I can say about it is that I can't forget it and I find myself thinking about it even though it's been weeks since I read it now. I was really into the repeated imagery and the dreamlike feel of it all - it reminded me of Narcopolis which I read last year, which is similarly about opium addiction among people who are or feel they are outcast from society, and has that same kind of circular narrative. I would never have read it without the challenge so cheers Stravinsky I guess! Sophie's World was another one that I read for the booklord thing for the philosophy component. It's YA as all hell but it's very interesting and was actually pretty good as a philosophy 101 (which is after all the point). I probably wouldn't read it again, but I'd give it to my future kid when they're old enough to get something out of it. The meta-narrative was surprisingly fun too and not at all what I expected it to be. The Hundred Year Old Man was a book I bought for my girlfriend when we started going out which she loved so I read it too. It's very funny and sweet and the main character's uncritical and open-minded approach to the world is refreshing to read about. It did also make me want to drop everything and travel the world but sadly I don't think I'd end up running into and befriending a bunch of world leaders who can coincidentally bail me out of whatever bullshit I'd fallen into, so it wouldn't work out so well. 7 books this month was pretty good going after not really motoring through it previously this year. I ticked off two more for the challenge and got to read a few things I was really looking forward to, so that all worked out well. Next up some poetry I think (probably the bit of this I want to do the least). Year to Date: 32 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) Booklord categories: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2015 09:07
|
|
|
High Warlord Zog posted:14. Wildcard (I need one!) Read The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2015 10:24
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Things are back to normal. Read Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2015 20:45
|
|
No new challenges completed this month, but lots of books.
|
August - 5: 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) I read some Poe-try because the booklord challenge required it and my girlfriend had this collection lying around. What I learned is that I still don't have any interest in poetry. The Bookseller of Kabul was really interesting. Seierstad does a good job of distancing herself from the family she's writing about, and it's interesting to see the clash of attitudes and ideas in this Afghan family. The patriarch Sultan is outwardly educated, liberal and progressive (in the context of, y'know, Afghanistan) and yet his family is run on strict traditional lines and in his personal life he's a tiny autocrat. Long Walk to Freedom I doubt I can say much about that hasn't been said a hundred times before. I found it fascinating and it's interesting to see how much the South African Communist Party features in the narrative since that's sort of forgotten about when people talk about Mandela and the ANC these days (or maybe I just haven't ever heard much about him, which is also possible). We I really enjoyed. You can see the obvious influence it had on Brave New World and 1984. It's weak in some ways (the characters are pretty thin and the society as described doesn't seem to fit with the society as is revealed in the narrative) but it was interesting to think about and very prescient of how then-future totalitarian states functioned. The Bell Jar I read because my girlfriend loved. I don't think I liked it as much as she did, but it was still interesting and Plath draws out the descent into madness very well. It's interesting to see that Plath herself thought of it as being amateurish given how it's ended up being regarded in some circles. I've posted a little late in September and in that time I've read like 3 other books but I'll save them for next time. Year to Date: 32 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) Booklord categories: 2 - 11, 13 - 15, 18 - 22.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2015 20:59
|
|
|
September - 8: The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) American Rust (Philipp Meyer) I did good this month. I neaaarly finished a book about Tamerlane as well but didn't quite manage it in September. Oh well. The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam are the second and third books in the MaddAddam trilogy. I read Oryx & Crake about this time last year and then never got around to following it up, but I bought both recently and dived right in. I really liked Year of the Flood, which did really well at telling the other side of the story in Oryx & Crake and the non-Compound part of the world. MaddAddam a friend once described to me as "sort of unnecessary" and I can absolutely see her point, since the story told in O&C/Flood gets wrapped up in those two books and MaddAddam doesn't really advance it very much. It was fun and put a nice cap on the whole thing, though. Sourcery and Wyrd Sisters were Discworld Novels and that's about all that needs to be said about them. I don't really like Sourcery that much but I want to read in order at least once in my life, so there you go. I don't think I'd read Wyrd Sisters before, or if I did it was so long ago I don't remember doing it. I liked it and it's firming up the style that Pratchett was known for. The House of the Spirits was great. It reminded me a lot of Love in the Time of Cholera in terms of the richness of its style and the level of magical realism involved. The arc through Chilean politics of the late nineteenth century through to Pinochet is well described by the actions and views of the characters. I think the thing it does best is the way the story of the family is strongly character-driven, with individuals acting based on their own motivations, but at the same time those actions are swallowed up by forces beyond their control i.e. the larger narrative of the social and political change taking place in the country. After reading Spirits A Personal Matter was a very different animal. Instead of the sweeping multi-generational saga, it's short and spare and very tightly focused on maybe three truly important characters, that is Bird, his mistress and his wife, with the spectre of the "monster baby" a constant, oppressive background force. It's my first encounter with Oe and if it's all as good as this I'm going to be seeking out a lot more. 3 Novels I picked up in a bookshop as the only remotely appealling thing on the shelf (seriously everything else looked terrible apart from some classics I wasn't really in the mood for). The three in question are Ghosts, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, and The Literary Conference. Of the three I liked "An Episode" best; frankly I don't think I really got either Ghosts or The Literary Conference. Maybe if I knew more about Argentina or the specific ideas Aira was trying to get across I would have understood them better, but as it stands but they both left me a little cold. American Rust was a stunning book. Meyer is absolutely amazing at communicating a sense of a time and a place, and like with House of the Spirits the characters really drive things forwards instead of "plot happens, characters respond as necessary to advance to next set piece." The portrayal of the Valley as a place left to die by interests more powerful than the people who live there, and the same people's inability to escape the trap closing around them, is deeply poignant. I'm long past the 40 I declared as a goal. I'm not going to add to it; instead I'm just going to carry on and see how far I get by the end of the year (and in any case I still have some of the booklord categories to finish - I've been trying to work up to reading some Shakespeare for the play, but I'm very tempted to read something classical instead). Year to Date: 45 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 38. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) 39. MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) 40. Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) 41. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) 42. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) 43. Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 44. 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) 45. American Rust (Philipp Meyer) Booklord categories: 1 - 11, 13 - 15, 18 - 22.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2015 10:54
|
|
|
October - 5: Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi) Union Man (Jack Jones) The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind) Lord of the Flies (William Golding) Pyramids (Terry Pratchett) Some good stuff this month. Tamerlane was absolutely fascinating to read. Marozzi has clearly spent a lot of time on it and done some pretty extensive travelling to support the book research, and he tells the story in a compelling fashion. It's crazy to think how little traction Tamerlane gets in the West compared to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, but there you go. One thing that's done really well is to balance the clear admiration for his achievements (which are pretty incredible) with the absolutely horrifying human cost of that kind of grand conquest. Union Man was ok I guess. I learned a lot about the history of 20th century trade unionism, since Jack Jones was part of most of it up until the mid 70s, but there's a fair part of the book which is laying out union politics and this and that negotiation in mind-numbing detail. Despite being business journalism, The Smartest Guys in the Room was fascinating and pretty pacey. McLean & Elkind manage to make the various players in the Enron scandal great characters in and of themselves, and they're merciless in setting out exactly how the scam operated and the increasingly desperate lengths to which Enron senior management went to create the fiction of profit even as they haemoragged actual cash at an astonishing rate. The way this enormous company unravelled practically overnight is chilling, even moreso when you think that it was only another seven years before the whole thing happened again on an even grander scale. Lord of the Flies is a book I really should have read but never got around to. Golding was a teacher at my school ffs. I'm glad I did though. It's obviously dated now (I don't know that you'd have Piggy screaming about the kids being "painted up niggers" nowadays unless it was meant to be a character trait!) but the core is still effective. Golding is strong on showing, not telling, how the social dynamics at play are operating and telling the story of the loss of civilisation, and the way it all ties together at the end (and the sudden shift in viewpoint to see the whole thing through adult eyes, reducing the kids from these wild savages back to being naughty little boys) is done really well. Pyramids is another Pratchett. It doesn't have the best reputation among Discworld books but I've always rather liked it. It probably suffers from being early on and not taking place in Ankh Morpork (much) which is what most people seem to find interesting about the setting, but I enjoy the skewed look at ancient Egypt. 7 down now, only 34 (!) to go. I failed to booklord this month, but the next two I have lined up take care of all the categories except the play, which I really need to get on with. Year to Date: 50 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 38. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) 39. MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) 40. Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) 41. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) 42. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) 43. Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 44. 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) 45. American Rust (Philipp Meyer) 46. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi) 47. Union Man (Jack Jones) 48. The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind) 49. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) 50. Pyramids (Terry Pratchett) Booklord categories: 1 - 11, 13 - 15, 18 - 22.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2015 19:27
|
|
|
I liked the challenge. Even if some of my selections weren't super clever it got me to stretch a bit in what I was reading which was cool.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2015 08:26
|
|
|
November - 6: The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) Medea and Other Plays (Euripides) Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates) Ringworld (Larry Niven) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) Saturday's Shadows (Ayesha Haruna Attah) The Alchemist sure was a book huh. It was nice in the way a soft pillow is nice - it's pleasant and warm and makes you feel good but ultimately there's not much to it. I read Medea in school and I think we were supposed to study Electra as well but I never bothered because I was a really lazy student. I picked this up partly with the challenge in mind but also because I wanted to read the play again and explore the other ones in this collection (Medea, Hecabe, Electra and Heracles). It was cool to revisit something I really liked and remember how good ancient Greek theatre can be. Between the World and Me was loving incredible. I had it on my desk and thought I'd read a few pages to see how it went; ten minutes later I'd moved downstairs and onto the sofa so I could read it all in one go. It's lucid, intelligent and deeply, deeply angry. I liked Ringworld but I have absolutely no desire to read the follow-up series. The Ringworld is a cool idea, and I liked that Niven committed to the aliens being genuinely alien. I felt like the whole "breeding for luck" thing got kind of stupid pretty quickly though, and from reading the Wiki summaries of the follow-ups it seems like all the cool unexplained stuff which gives this book an air of mystery has been merrily filled in in excruciating detail which would ruin it. Capital is a big fucker. It's about as readable as it can be for what is a long piece of barely-pop economics. The ideas it suggests pose a pretty negative situation for the future and I only hope things don't work out as Piketty predicts, but I also can't see why they wouldn't. One thing which bugged me with the translation was that whatever the French was, hundreds of sentences started with "To be sure" which made it all weirdly Irish in tone. This was also my "sat on the shelf for a long time" book - I bought it when it came out, and it's taken me until now to finally convince myself to read it. Saturday's Shadows was alright. I feel like the best adjective for it is "competent" - there's a story told, the various pieces are moved around in a way which hangs together properly, and the various pieces intersect at the end. The book sketches out its barely-disguised Ghana effectively and builds a good feel for the place it's describing. Despite that it doesn't really manage to connect with anything; it all feels a bit light weight. A fine debut novel, but I'd hope Attah gets better. With the last two categories out of the way my booklord challenge is complete. Happy days. I'll probably hit 60 books for the year and may even top that, too. Year to Date: 56 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 38. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) 39. MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) 40. Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) 41. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) 42. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) 43. Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 44. 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) 45. American Rust (Philipp Meyer) 46. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi) 47. Union Man (Jack Jones) 48. The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind) 49. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) 50. Pyramids (Terry Pratchett) 51. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) 52. Medea and Other Plays (Euripides) 53. Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates) 54. Ringworld (Larry Niven) 55. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) 56. Saturday's Shadows (Ayesha Haruna Attah) Booklord categories: 1 - 22
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2015 17:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:26 |
|
|
December - 6: John Dies at the End (David Wong) Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James) Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson) The Diving Pool (Yoko Ogawa) We Should All Be Feminists (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) I might finish one more before the technical year end but whatever, 62 or 63 is no difference. John Dies at the End I read on a couple of flights while I was away in Italy and Germany. It was good fun and had some cool ideas, but I feel like it could have done with being 100 pages shorter and the dialogue being thoroughly decheesed in some places. IIRC it started life as a web serial thing and you can definitely tell that. The twist at the end was pretty cool and done effectively, but yeah, see previous point - it seemed to go on past the point where Wong had a clear idea of how to end it and then fizzled out. Half of a Yellow Sun was great. I picked it up in a charity shop knowing nothing except that I'd seen a couple of Adichie's talks on Youtube. This is a fantastic book and it makes good use of the alternating early 60s/late 60s sections to build the drama. It captures the desperation of being on the losing side of a civil war, and the effect on these characters' lives. I thought the ending with the bait and switch of Ugwu's apparent death and subsequent return, followed by Kainene's real disappearance, communicated really effectively that kind of sense of things being just barely ok and then changing instantly. A Brief History of Seven Killings I doubt I can say anything about that wasn't said by the long list of prizes and nominations and a million reviews. I loving loved it and I'm keen to read more Marlon James. Aurora was a Secret Santa present. I really like KSR and I'll defend the Mars trilogy to the death, but I feel like this was 6/7ths of a great sci-fi novel which fails to stick the landing at the end. Much like I said about John Dies above, it feels like KSR wrote all this cool stuff about space colonisation and holding the ship together against the forces of entropy which come with hundreds of years of space travel, then realised he had to actually end the thing and didn't really know how. The Diving Pool is a collection of 3 Ogawa novellas, those being the titular Diving Pool, Pregnancy Diary and Dormitory. I really liked this. Ogawa's prose is amazing (allowing for the translation, which is done well) and she manages to create that horror-like tension without relying on staple monsters and magic stuff. We Should All Be Feminists at 45 pages barely counts but gently caress it it's a physical book on my shelf. An essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with the obvious subject, adapted from a TED talk she gave. The content wasn't surprising to me, but it was refreshing to read the argument put succinctly by someone who can really write. A half-hour read at best, but worth the time. That wraps me up for 2015 barring the possibility of one more book this week - The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-Mi Hwang. Given my original goal was 40, I've surpassed it by a mile (this is the most books I've ever read in a single year). e: finished it, so that's 63 this year. I've reached it without stress, too, and a few days ahead of time. I've read some amazing stuff this year - picking out a few, Revenge, American Rust, A Brief History, Between the World and Me and Theft were all fantastic - and nothing that I've really felt like was a slog or genuinely poor. I have 170+ books on my shelves I haven't read so I think my main aim next year is going to be to read through some of what I already have instead of reading at slightly less than replacement rate. Here's to 2016! Ee: read another so 64 total. Year to Date: 64 01. The Establishment: And how they get away with it (Owen Jones) 02. Mussolini and Fascist Italy (Martin Blinkhorn) 03. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) 04. All You Need is Kill (Hiroshi Sakurazaka) 05. Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey) 06. Stalin (Kevin McDermott) 07. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 08. Revenge (Yoko Ogawa) 09. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the Great War (Jaroslav Hasek) 10. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) 11. after the quake (Haruki Murakami) 12. The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett) 13. The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett) 14. The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt (Hannelore Brenner) 15. Equal Rites (Terry Pratchett) 16. Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) 17. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Anne Applebaum) 18. Running with the Kenyans (Adharanand Finn) 19. Notes from Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 20. First Novel (Nicholas Royle) 21. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) 22. Mort (Terry Pratchett) 23. Schlump (Hans Herbert Grimm) 24. Concrete (Thomas Bernhard) 25. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer) 26. The Last Kingdom (Bernard Cornwell) 27. The Pale Horseman (Bernard Cornwell) 28. Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata) 29. The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat) 30. The Lords of the North (Bernard Cornwell) 31. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) 32. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson) 33. Selected Poems (Edgar Allen Poe) 34. The Bookseller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) 35. Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela) 36. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) 37. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) 38. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) 39. MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood) 40. Sourcery (Terry Pratchett) 41. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) 42. A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) 43. Wyrd Sisters (Terry Pratchett) 44. 3 Novels (Cesar Aira) 45. American Rust (Philipp Meyer) 46. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Justin Marozzi) 47. Union Man (Jack Jones) 48. The Smartest Guys in the Room (Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind) 49. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) 50. Pyramids (Terry Pratchett) 51. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) 52. Medea and Other Plays (Euripides) 53. Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates) 54. Ringworld (Larry Niven) 55. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) 56. Saturday's Shadows (Ayesha Haruna Attah) 57. John Dies at the End (David Wong) 58. Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) 59. A Brief History of Seven Killings (Marlon James) 60. Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson) 61. The Diving Pool (Yoko Ogawa) 62. We Should All Be Feminists (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) 63. The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly (Sun-Mi Hwang) 64. Random Acts of Senseless Violence (Jack Womack) Booklord categories: 1 - 22 Living Image fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Dec 31, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2015 22:31
|
|