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First time doing this, I'm in for 52 books and the booklord challenge too.
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Jan 2, 2018 13:28
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Hit me with a wildcard, please! Nothing too gigantic.
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Jan 12, 2018 19:28
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Franchescanado posted:The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster Thank you! Never heard of that before, a quick google and it sounds interesting.
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Jan 12, 2018 20:09
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One month down and only 6 books read (of a 52 for the year), because ofGuy A. Person posted:7. Get a recommendation from a friend or loved one. I'm determined to do as many of the bonuses as I can, and unfortunately for me this one was triggered by my half-asleep husband mumbling "You're gonna read Gai-jin, right?" Which is, of course, a half-million word doorstop of a novel. 1 - Agents of Dreamland - Caitlín R. Kiernan [+1 woman +1 LGBT] Cosmic horror blended with hardboiled spy-thriller. All of Kiernan's usual powerful prose but it felt a bit short. Probably going to read a ton of Kiernan's work this year, I've been putting her off for too long because she's so good I can only handle her in short doses. 2 - To Walk the Night - William Sloane Cosmic horror from the 1930s and much to my relief free from the stogy prose and terrible cut-out characters which plague the genre from that period, instead written with real professionalism and characterisation. Set among upper-crust New Yorkers, also a complete departure from the genre. Sadly it suffers from a lot of low-level unexamined misogyny and what I can only assume was an attempt to use autism as a horror trope, both completely undermining the effect for a modern reader. 3 - Black Wings IV - ed. S. T. Joshi Rock bottom awful. Very disappointing after the first three collections. Only a single story was no-doubt good and barely one other just scraped over the average bar. Rest were trash. 4 - A History of England: Volume One, Foundation - Peter Ackroyd From 900,000 BC to Henry the VII, and not a dull moment. Ackroyd alternates between chapters which advance the historical narrative and chapters about particular aspects of life or technology, religion or medicine, which stops any one section from getting too monolithic to handle all at once. Very grisly and full of human detail. 5 - Gai-Jin - James Clavell Massive making GBS threads bastard of a book, but no less fun than Clavell's more famous novel, Shogun. This one is set in the 1860s just before the Meiji Restoration and mainly concerns itself with the trading port of Yokohama and the fallout from a fictionalized version of a real event in which several samurai killed a British trader. Intrigue, sex, murder, sex, racism, sex, political backstabbing, sex. Did I mention sex? It's kept realistically uncomfortable for Victorian attitudes of the time, but it did make me wonder about Clavell's motives. Unfortunately he also tries to replicate the style of ending from Shogun but fails miserably and just sort of trails off. Completed challenges: 4. Read at least one book by an LGBT author. 7. Get a recommendation from a friend or loved one. — bonus: Read literally the first in-person book recommendation you get in 2018 (solicited or not) 8. Read something written before you were born. 13. Read a collection of short stories. 15. Read something involving history.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:32
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February's done, a few more books down. 6. Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 - Rodric Braithwaite. (bonus: Read something about a (nonfictional) war that didn't involve the U.S.) This was very in-depth and very readable, and contains a lot of absolutely fascinating details, those little quirks of history which seem to throw askew our comfortable well-categorized image of the world. Should be required reading for anybody to talk about the graveyard of empires. 7. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe. Been meaning to read this for about a decade now (since the first time I read Heart of Darkness at university) but it's just one of those things I never got around to. Very odd experience, like a modernist novel but about colonial Nigeria. It tells the life story of an important and ambitious man in a relatively powerful tribe, who is completely unaware of the nature or power of the European colonial forces which are going to destroy his way of life. Ending is very powerful. 8. Schoolgirl - Osamu Dazai. (Read something translated from another language.) Very short and extremely Japanese. A single day in the life of a schoolgirl in 1930s Japan, told as a stream of consciousness. I feel like I didn't really "get" it, but perhaps there was nothing to get. 9. North American Lake Monsters - Nathan Ballingrud. One of the best single-author horror short story collections I've ever read. The style and tone of these came like a breath of fresh air. Often the horror elements are subtle and unexplained, or a single violent encounter which changes a character's internal life forever. Perfectly balanced stories. 10. This Book is Full of Spiders - David Wong. The sequel to the more infamous first book, John Dies at the End, this was ... not as good. JDatE is one of my favourite horror novels because it manages to rise above and perfect its own satire and has enough genuine emotion to become something very real. This was, eh, fun and amusing but doesn't really follow on from the first book. Instead it's an attempt to apply the same style of satire to the (then-popular) zombie fiction craze. I'm probably being too harsh on it. It was fun, it just had big boots to fill. 11. A History of England: Volume Two, The Tudors - Peter Ackroyd. From Henry the 8th to the death of Good Queen Bess, this is a lot rougher read than the first volume because it's not broken up with those lovely little inserted chapters about the historical context. Instead it's a forced march through monarchical history, which is still written in a very consumable and interesting way, just chewier.
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Mar 1, 2018 11:09
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Guy A. Person posted:The third of David Wong's John and David series continues its downward trend, but it still had some fun sequences and ideas. Gah, that's disappointing to hear. I was really hoping he'd somehow picked back up again in the third book. I'm almost tempted to just reread the first rather than bother with the next one.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:03
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apophenium posted:Probably everyone knows this already, but please read Ursula Le Guin. I just finished The Word for World is Forest. Certainly a very different kind of science fiction.
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Mar 9, 2018 19:39
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Fewer books read in March than I was expecting, due to an unexpectedly stressful month, but still on track. 12. Revelation Space - Alistair Reynolds. Technically a reread, but the first time I read this I was like 13 years old so I recalled almost nothing. A very strong hard-SF space opera, with some incredible imagery, despite some first-novel issues with pacing and characterisation. 13. The Word for World is Forest - Ursula Le Guin. The second Le Guin novel I've read, and I didn't enjoy it as much as I did The Left Hand of Darkness, but it was still powerful stuff. My brother had been pestering me to read this for years. 14. Chasm City - Alistair Reynolds. A major step up in pure quality from his first book. Cleverer techniques with multiple protagonists than the first book as well, even if the 'twist' is obvious from miles away. 15. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers - Renni Brown & Dave King. I reread this once every year or so to keep myself in good habits. Still as useful as it was a decade ago. 16. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster. 6. Ask another poster to issue you a wildcard, then read it. Well, I gotta admit this was a painful slog and I would not have finished it if it wasn't my wildcard. I used to be really into experimental and postmodern literature and when I read what this series was all about (metafictional detective fiction about detective fiction) I was pretty excited, but 3/4 through the first story, City of Glass, disappointment began to set in. The prose itself is like wading through cold tar and none of what the book was getting at made any sense to me. I lack either the cultural context, literary background, or intellectual framework to appreciate this.
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Apr 1, 2018 11:56
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Robot Mil posted:I missed the March play challenge but it inspired me to check my kindle and I apparently already have these Shakespeare plays: Othello if you're in the mood for a pretty strong tragedy. Twelfth Night is crazy genderbending love triangles and probably one of the best of Shakespeare's comedies. As You Like It is ... eh. Some people like it more than me, I guess? I would not recommend attempting to read Titus Andronicus. Depending on your view it's either aged really badly or it's the greatest work of slapstick violence trolling in literary history. Either way, kinda difficult.
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Apr 2, 2018 12:18
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April was hell, I only had time to finish two books, though I'm partway through a couple of others. 17 - John Dies at the End - David Wong. A reread, because I'm trying to figure out why I liked this book so much. 18 - The Last Kingdom - Bernard Cornwell. Despite being rather into historical fiction, I've never read any Cornwell before and this was a blast. Miles better than the TV adaptation. Felt like it didn't pull any punches, didn't try to soften things for a modern reader.
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Apr 30, 2018 21:56
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May went okay. 19 - Meditations - Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays. I've wanted to read this for years, but it was an awful lot more repetitious than I'd anticipated, but that's only to be expected from some notes a Roman emperor left to himself. Fascinating to see one of the 'great men' of history struggling internally with the same petty interpersonal issues and self-control and pain that all humans do. 20 - A Briefer History of Time - Stephen Hawking. Another one I've wanted to read for years. The first 3/4 of the book felt like stuff I've read before, and then the last parts were almost completely beyond my understanding. 21 - The Paleblood Hunt - Redgrave. I'm counting this because it's long enough to be a book. 107-page, thesis-length analysis of the videogame Bloodborne, which I read alongside my husband over the course of a couple of days. 22 - A History of England: Volume Three, Revolution - Peter Ackroyd. The reason I started reading this doorstop of a series! And ... disappointing. Ackroyd tries to cram too much detail into too small a space here, giving only thumbnail sketches of the stuff I was most interested in, glossing over the progress and conduct of the English Civil War, and also has a weirdly unexamined and unqualified adoration towards Cromwell. After that last one I called my brother and hit him up for some recommendations, so now I'm a quarter of the way through The People's War, which is much better.
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Jun 2, 2018 10:43
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 05:14 |
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Oh dear, I am slipping rather behind on the number of books I need to read to meet my goal of 52. 23 - The English Civil War: A People's History by Diane Purkiss - Another giant doorstop of a book, and very, very good. Covers everything from the build-up to the war to the execution of King Charles, but told with a great deal more granularity than any other book on the same subject, by focusing on individual experiences, letters, cultural impact, and what life was actually like. The author includes a foreword in which she says a lot of her fellow historians will dislike the book for the attempt to focus on ordinary people and to tell history as a series of tales of personality, but as a reader it's infinitely more compelling. 24 - Trollslayer by William King - Halfway through what was turning into a stressful and busy June, I decided I needed something intellectually unchallenging and easy. So, enter a stack of Warhammer novels. It was either that or the lesbian romance books. Anyway, this is the first in a Warhammer hack-and-slash series that I read - and enjoyed - as a young teenager, and I was curious to see how well it holds up now, and to my surprise it's actually not bad. It's not as good as I remember it being, but it certainly gets the job done. The story is a series of short connected adventures starring a pair of traveling mercenaries, one of whom is a dwarf out to seek glorious death in battle to atone for some terrible past crime. It doesn't really go anywhere and it's incredibly violent, but if you want dark blood-and-guts fantasy, well, it's good at what it's trying to be. 25 - Skavenslayer by William King - The second book in the series, and much better than the first in some ways, worse in others. An actual full-length plot this time, as the protagonists are desperately in need of money so stop wandering around and get jobs as sewer watchmen and then bouncers, and foil a secret invasion plot by giant ratmen. The evil ratmen get about half the book to their own perspectives and they are downright hilarious and carry most of the story. The prose gets way too gummed up in a few places, I think to pad out the narrative. 26 - Daemonslayer by William King - Oh dear, I'm three books deep and these things are so short I can just read them in an afternoon without stopping. In for a penny in for a pound. Anyway, this one is very good once it gets to the actual meat of the plot, but it takes about half the book to get there, and the rather thin characterisation for the protagonists does start to tell. Plot is about dwarfs sailing a giant airship into demon-invested wasteland to investigate the ruins of an ancient dwarfhold, and as soon as this part of the plot gets underway it's metal as gently caress and pure popcorn satisfaction, despite again the clunky prose in places. I feel like I should be reading something more intellectual, but that might have to wait until August or September when life gets less stressful.
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Jul 4, 2018 12:17
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