The Book Thread

I could have sworn we already had one of these for the new board, unless we have and I'm just a thick twat who can't user the search function/ type.

Anyway, I'm reading Memories of Ice, the third Malazan book, and it's bloody brilliant. Unless something like Game of Thrones is about as fantasy-ish as you want to get you'd be a fool not to read it. I'm only halfway through the third of ten books but thus far I'm happily putting Erikson as my favourite fantasy author behind Pratchett (not that the two are comparable in style, really, but I imagine they count as the same genre.)

What are you chaps reading?

The Crying of Lot 49. I don't know if I like it or not. It's just weird.

I'm halfway through Deadhouse Gates (the second Malazan book) but I haven't picked it up in about two months..

I just read The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer for school. It was pretty good, very good in places. Next up is Italo Calvino, which I'm excited about.

Currently reading Michael Jackson's Dangerous (33 1/3) by Susan Fast. Great critique of one of my favourite albums.

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Originally Posted by Spoonsky

I just read The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer for school. It was pretty good, very good in places. Next up is Italo Calvino, which I'm excited about.

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Which Calvino?

Still reading ASOIAF, only get to read a chapter or 2 each night usually, so I'm still only on Book 3, though it's nearly done. I've found it to be comfortably the best so far. I loved Game of Thrones and Clash of Kings but it's like he's somehow managed to raise the series to a new level. Unfortunately, anyone I speak to seems to say this is the high point and the others aren't quite as good, but we'll see.

I was looking for this thread earlier and decided I couldn't be arsed starting it when I realised it wasn't here.

I started reading Clive Woodward's autobiography last week but I can't get past thinking he's a massive wanker so I've knocked it on the head. I've started on Bill Bryson's 'The Road to Little Dribbling' today. It's a sequel to 'Notes from a Small Island' and a couple of chapters in I'm pissing myself already. Such a shame he has spent so many years away from the travel genre.

After this I'll finish off Halldor Laxness' 'Independent People' which I stopped reading for no good reason given I was really enjoying it. I think it might be that summer got in the way. It's a bleak book set in a dreary Iceland and I struggled to stay in the mood for it. Now the seasons are turning I fancy it again.

Halldor Laxness has a decent book about Mormonism, I think one of my parents read it.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

Which Calvino?

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The Nonexistant Knight.

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Originally Posted by Lee

I started reading Clive Woodward's autobiography last week but I can't get past thinking he's a massive wanker so I've knocked it on the head.

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Please tell me somebody bought you that because they thought it might be good for work.

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Originally Posted by Lee

I've started on Bill Bryson's 'The Road to Little Dribbling' today. It's a sequel to 'Notes from a Small Island' and a couple of chapters in I'm pissing myself already. Such a shame he has spent so many years away from the travel genre.

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Want that. His non-travel books are belting too, though.

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Originally Posted by Lewis

Please tell me somebody bought you that because they thought it might be good for work.

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Nah, I've had it for ages and never bothered with it. I just got interested when the rugby world cup started. One of the reasons he comes across as a wanker is because he obviously sees himself as some kind of management guru and regularly dishes out advice such as "don't be a cunt to people" and "don't be shit at your job".

I don't read anything because it might be "good for work" anyway. I couldn't think of a shitter way to spend my time.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

The Crying of Lot 49. I don't know if I like it or not. It's just weird.

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I liked it, but you get what you pay for with Pynchon. It's brilliant, beautifully written stuff, but he's off-the-wall bonkers.

I'm currently reading The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver (the guy behind FiveThirtyEight) - it's about our inability, as a society, to make reasonable forecasts and how we can go about improving.

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Originally Posted by Luca

I'm currently reading The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver (the guy behind FiveThirtyEight) - it's about our inability, as a society, to make reasonable forecasts and how we can go about improving.

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I really enjoyed that book, although I did start to flag towards the end.

Rude Kids: The Story of Viz - Decent read so far.

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Originally Posted by Ian

I could have sworn we already had one of these for the new board, unless we have and I'm just a thick twat who can't user the search function/ type.

Anyway, I'm reading Memories of Ice, the third Malazan book, and it's bloody brilliant. Unless something like Game of Thrones is about as fantasy-ish as you want to get you'd be a fool not to read it. I'm only halfway through the third of ten books but thus far I'm happily putting Erikson as my favourite fantasy author behind Pratchett (not that the two are comparable in style, really, but I imagine they count as the same genre.)

What are you chaps reading?

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Ah, I'd like to hear more about that series. I came in here intending to post about the Kingkiller Chronicles byt Patrick Rothfuss, that I read the first two books of this past summer (third, and supposedly final, one isn't out yet).

Those were so, SO, SO good. So good I'd definitely choose them above ASoFaI series. I just love a fantasy book that has that personal angle, it just follows one character. I read an old trilogy of Robin Hobb ages ago that was a bit like that, but the Kingkiller books were better I think.

Anyway, I'm looking for a new fantasy series to read and the Malazan ones is what's been mostly catching my eye.
Convince me, please.

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Originally Posted by ItalAussie

I really enjoyed that book, although I did start to flag towards the end.

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His insight into the Financial Crisis (MK '08) is more or less bang-on. It's refreshing to see someone write about it from an educated, dispassionate perspective, instead of the usual BUT THE EVIL BANKERS drivel. He appropriates blame evenly and precisely where it's due.

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Originally Posted by Mazuuurk

Ah, I'd like to hear more about that series. I came in here intending to post about the Kingkiller Chronicles byt Patrick Rothfuss, that I read the first two books of this past summer (third, and supposedly final, one isn't out yet).

Those were so, SO, SO good. So good I'd definitely choose them above ASoFaI series. I just love a fantasy book that has that personal angle, it just follows one character. I read an old trilogy of Robin Hobb ages ago that was a bit like that, but the Kingkiller books were better I think.

Anyway, I'm looking for a new fantasy series to read and the Malazan ones is what's been mostly catching my eye.
Convince me, please.

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The Malazan books don't follow one individual character, they're very different on that front. I don't know if this is going to continue throughout the whole series but the first one had one set of characters and then the second one had a different set. There were a few mentioned and it's all part of the same overall story which ties in together and happens at the same time, or close enough, to the events of the third book. And now the third one is back to the same characters as the first one. He handles it really well though and he doesn't come across as as much of a weird old perv as George R R Martin does which is a bonus as well.

What makes you think GRR Martin is an old perv? The sex? Because I quite appreciate the addition of the crudeness around that, I don't care to much for the sort of very american kind of embellishing of anything sexual happening (even, almost, when they are depicting some negative sexual experience as well).

Anyway, that does sound quite a lot like GRR Martin in a way. Or is it more like how the Tolkien books are structured?

The series is finished, right? I'm definitely not starting another unfinished fantasy series, as I'm already waiting on the Kingkiller Crhonicle book 3 and Winds of Winter from ASoFaI

I just find the sex-related stuff he writes a bit weird is all.

The structure is similar to ASOIAF, I'd say. It doesn't dedicate entire chapters to following a specific character, or at least not rigidly. You might jump between characters in one location to characters elsewhere or you might have a few pages of one character and then another related character, etc. It's a bit more fluid like that I guess.

And yes, the series is complete. Ten books in ten or eleven years, job done. There is a second series by the guy who co-created the setting with Erikson but I've no idea if those are meant to be any good.

Just finished the third Malazan book, Memories of Ice. Properly raced through the last hundred pages or so because there was so much going on and it had properly big changes involving major characters. Crikey.

Next up will be The Long Mars, which I will be interested to see if it has a proper story after the second book sort of ambled along.

Just finished this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...4,203,200_.jpg

Some info about it here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven

Won the Arthur C. Clarke award this year.

It's so fucking good. If you like dystopian futures or post-apocalyptic settings, get it get it get it.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

What does an author do after finding both a bizarre WW II State Department plan to create a Jewish refuge in Alaska and a thoroughly unusable Yiddish travel phrasebook in a bookstore with phrases like "I'd like to book a flight."? Apparently the answer is to create a fake Jewish homeland in Sitka Alaska with a Dan Brown style murder mystery. Funny book about identity that never forgets it needs to be a good murder mystery, but Chabon's made up Sitka Alaska with Hasidic gangsters and jewish / Indian land disputes is the real star. Pleasantly surprising.

I've recently started reading a book written by 4 survivors of the Titanic.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Titani...anic+survivors

It's gripping stuff. Would recommend it.

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Originally Posted by mikem

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

What does an author do after finding both a bizarre WW II State Department plan to create a Jewish refuge in Alaska and a thoroughly unusable Yiddish travel phrasebook in a bookstore with phrases like "I'd like to book a flight."? Apparently the answer is to create a fake Jewish homeland in Sitka Alaska with a Dan Brown style murder mystery. Funny book about identity that never forgets it needs to be a good murder mystery, but Chabon's made up Sitka Alaska with Hasidic gangsters and jewish / Indian land disputes is the real star. Pleasantly surprising.

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I've just started this.

I'm still plodding through Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and Stephen King's Different Seasons. Both are long, so I fear I bit off more than I could chew at once. Still, nearly there.

Anyone read Trotsky before? Boydy?

The Long Mars is following a very similar pattern to the previous two books. It still feels like an extended what-if as much as a novel and like they had more ideas than they had room for. Very readable and things are coming together again for the ending but a bit strange.

I read a collection of Trotsky's military writings before. They were a bit crap.

'There's only one way to win a campaign; shout, shout and shout again!'

I'm onto SuperFreakonomics after spending far too long on the first one. They're great reads and perfect anecdote material.

Malazan Book Of The Fallen is a great read currently on book five (Midnight Tides) and can not recommend it highly enough.

You finding that the quality has stayed consistent to the point you're are, @Andrew? I'm keen to get stuck into the fourth soon.

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Originally Posted by Henry

I'm still plodding through Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and Stephen King's Different Seasons. Both are long, so I fear I bit off more than I could chew at once. Still, nearly there.

Anyone read Trotsky before? Boydy?

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Nope.

@Ian half way through the fifth book now mate, still as gripped reading this now as I was reading the first.

My old man went through all 10 books in a matter of weeks and reckons it's the best set of books he has ever read.

Lofty and Towns (have either of them made it here, yet?) had both read ASOIAF, Wheel of Time, etc. and were both adamant Malazan was the best so I'm pleased to hear further confirmation.

The Nonexistent Knight is good. Very enjoyable and short, perfect school reading.

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Originally Posted by Ian

I could have sworn we already had one of these for the new board, unless we have and I'm just a thick twat who can't user the search function/ type.

Anyway, I'm reading Memories of Ice, the third Malazan book, and it's bloody brilliant. Unless something like Game of Thrones is about as fantasy-ish as you want to get you'd be a fool not to read it. I'm only halfway through the third of ten books but thus far I'm happily putting Erikson as my favourite fantasy author behind Pratchett (not that the two are comparable in style, really, but I imagine they count as the same genre.)

What are you chaps reading?

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I got the first 3 Malazan books for Christmas years ago and I've not started them yet.

I've just finished The Wheel of Time series (14 fucking novels and a prequel) which was a massive drag in parts (pretty much all of books 5-10) but overall pretty decent. Might get started on Malazan next.

Yeah, WoT dragged in the middle quite a bit as Jordan spent too much time building up a not-especially-interesting fantasy world and not enough spending time with Rand, Perrin and Mat. And what time was spent with Rand he inevitably moping and complaining about all the beautiful women who were gagging to engage in some bedtop wrestling with him, the poor mite.

Sanderson did an unbelievable job of the last three books, and the ending to his first (Gathering Storm) in particular, when Rand finally got to stop being miserable a fantastic moment.

Get stuck into Malazan, I don't think you'll regret it.

Some of the characters you come across in the Malazan books are great.

Karsa "No fucks given" Orlong
Kruppe
Pust

What's your favourites so far?

Kruppe is good. Quite liked Heboric as well.

Blankets. Just finished it. A graphic novel it is.

Holy shit.

Did someone say they were reading it a while back?

Different Seasons by Stephen King

This is a collection of (non-horror) short stories from King's early career. Three of them have since been made into movies, of which I'd seen two.

• The Shawshank Redemption: The prison story, a little different here - the characters are a little rougher and the prison staff aren't as well defined. Familiarity probably robs it of some impact.
• Apt Pupil: A young boy gets mixed up with a Nazi war criminal. Dark, intriguing stuff that keeps you guessing.
• The Body: A group of twelve year olds go on an adventure along the railways lines to find a dead body. (Stand by Me is the movie.) I found it a bit long-winded.
• The Breathing Method: A man joins a gentlemans club at which odd tales are told. The shortest and probably the best of the four. Quite unsettling - there's something just under the surface that isn't explained.

In general, I remain of the view that King is better writing about the real world than the supernatural (those have always been the least interesting parts of his writing to me) but also that he has a tendency to ramble such that some of his writing could do with more editing.

I know they are 'kids' books, but the Edge Chronicles really are great.

I've just finished the second book of the most recent saga and am genuinely looking forward to the next one coming out. Just realised I've been reading them since Primary School :cab:

The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky

I've always been fascinated by Russian history, and how tragic it is. The revolution and the subsequent civil war are perhaps the most tragic episodes. As a key player in these events, Trotsky has a unique perspective writing as a historian 15 years later.
Trotksy is an impressive figure who deserves to be taken seriously, in spite of my thorough ideological disagreement. This is a long, well-written and exacting work which appears to possess factual reliability even as it dispenses with any veneer or objectivity. Its high level of detail is at times absorbing and at times ponderous, and while the overbearing tone and bias in favour of the Bolsheviks grows wearing, it also provides a useful perspective.
The narrative begins with the February Revolution and ends with the October Revolution (or coup?) taking in all intermediate episodes including the April Days, July Days and the Kornilov Revolt. Throughout, the position of the Bolsheviks with the Russian people improves, from a minor fringe grouping to one capable of seizing power. It does appear however that Trotsky continually overstates the popularity of the Bolsheviks. Their eminent position among the industrial workers and soldiers by October was decisive, but it was hardly as unchallenged as presented here, and in an all-Russian context was still a small minority, the population being comprised mostly of peasants. Trotsky (following Lenin) excuses this by appointing the Bolsheviks as the "vanguard" of the revolution, but the inevitable (and real) end-point of that is one-party rule.
Unexamined, in fact, is Trotsky's own opposition to this principle pre-1917 (he didn't join the Bolshviks until that year), describing it as "Bonapartism". Here his fanatical enthusiasm for the idea, and for the principles of dialectic materialism (also extremely questionable) lead to all sorts of historical conclusions that I find indefensible.
Unexamined also are the extent to which Lenin's own positions taken in 1917 are a divergence from those expressed both before and after, not to mention his actions in power, which expose him in my view as an opportunist.
Yes, power to the soviets in 1917 was probably a noble aim, if something that was going to prove difficult in the heat of wartime. The problem with the Bolsheviks is that they identified soviet power with their own power, and with it would very quickly move to build the first totalitarian state and to rebuild the Tsarist machinery of repression in a much more severe form (see the Cheka, Red Terror, war communism, the closure of the Constituent Assembly, the progressive outlawing of opposition parties, the subjugation of the soviets to the party...)
All said, these are criticisms of the Leninist doctrines found in the book, but it's an intriguing read for all that.

Got this cheap on Amazon.

Toggle Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/T8t3x7Zl.jpg

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Originally Posted by Hammer

Blankets. Just finished it. A graphic novel it is.

Holy shit.

Did someone say they were reading it a while back?

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I've read it.

The childhood stories of him and Phil were epic, but the actual story and all the Jesus tripe really put me off.

Honestly wouldn't have finished it if I wasn't on holiday and the only other book available was something called NYPD Red.

'Where My Heart Used To Beat' by Sebastian Faulks.

I hit about one novel a year, so tend to make it a heavy one and this definitely is that. Old Seb likes a bit of psychiatry and mental illness - there's a lot of that, but there's also a vivid and brilliant few passages of war experience fighting in Italy which alone make the book worth reading. The rest of it veers between intriguing and occasionally wittering on a bit, but all in all I'm very glad I read it and would recommend to anyone with an interest in 20th century history. There was also an absolutely laughable little piece of fourth wall levity at the end in what is otherwise a deadly serious book, which was bizarre and probably out of place but I liked it.

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Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd

I hit about one novel a year

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Don't I remember you being one of those who had read a very high proportion of the Top 100 list?

Nah. I can't remember but I've probably done 20-30 tops, many of them some time ago.

I'd like to read more fiction really but I'm quite closed-minded about it, so often need to be dragged in by the synopsis.

You might like W.G. Sebald, Jimmy. A bizarre mix of fiction, memoir and history that somehow works perfectly. Nausea in particularly is actually my favorite book but they all seem to fit my description pretty well.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

I've been curious for some time about the phenomenon of psychopaths, particularly the difference between those who commit crimes and those who function more normally. Here, Jon Ronson (of The Men Who Star at Goats) explores the issue in its various forms, chatting with patients in mental institutes, CEO's who exhibit the traits, psychiatrists, conspiracy theorists and Scientologists. It's a fairly easy read in a conversational style. Unfortunately the issue is explored in little depth and ends up trivialising the whole thing, with the take-away message that there are "degrees" of madness and that psychiatry isn't a particularly developed or reliable discipline are hardly world-shaking. I'll probably look elsewhere for something better on the subject before long.

I've just bought 'Trusted Mole' for £2 delivered. I wanted a book on the Yugoslavian war but there was some quite intense reading. Not sure if I'd have the stomach for it. So I bought this instead, which seems more exciting than thousands of pages of political stuff.

TA Today

You'd like this one, Magic. It's about Psychotherapy and shit.

Finished the Seymour I was reading (it was typically pretty good) and am now onto Half the World by Joe Abercrombie. It's easy reading (aimed at young adults, I believe) but it's off to a great start. I'll definitely be trying some of his other stuff once I'm done with this trilogy.

Currently slogging through Tell it To The World, which is about the Serbs covering up their genocide during Kosovo. It's really interesting, but the problem is it's from the view of one of the lawyers during the trials, and there's a lot of lawyer talk which is a little dull and quite hard to read. The accounts from the testifying survivors are fucking horrific though.

Nice to read some Malazan love in this thread. They are for me the best books I've read. I'd describe the scope and scale of the Malazan world to ASOIAF as ASOIAF is to the hungry caterpillar.

I'm interested in how you get on with Half a world Ian. I've read and like Abercrombie's other books but was put off by the young adult tag.

Half a King was a bit lightweight overall but very enjoyable and you'll whizz through it in no time so I'd say get a cheapo paperback version, give it a bash and then decide from there if you want to go on to Half a World and Half a War.

Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain.

This is a very short book that was published posthumously by Twain's daughter, never released during his lifetime because of its controversial contents. It consists of a series of satirical letters by an angel exiled on earth, describing his opinions on the Christian religion. The biblical tales are related, along with an astonished and angry commentary at their inconsistent, illogical nature and the depravity of the "God" that they describe. It's amusing, if nothing particularly new in to an age where Dawkins and Hitchens are widely read.

The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven

The sequel to The Mote in Gods Eye, which I read a couple of months back. The story picks up about 30 years later and again concerns the relationship between The Empire of Man and the Motie civilisation. A couple of the more minor characters are fleshed out and prove to be really interesting. Overall it's serviceable but it lacks the plot twists and the suspense of the first in the series.

I think Half the World feels more like Abercrombie was trying to shoehorn YOUNG ADULT stuff in than the previous one, but it's still a good read.

I've got another of his up next but it's the first of his The First Law books. Be interesting to see how different it is. Then that'll see me through 'til Christmas.

Really enjoying Kane and Abel thus far, I have to say. Any Jeffrey Archer fans here?

Well that was unexpected.

What? That I would read something written by a former Tory MP?

The trailer for the BFG and my niece starting on Matilda, her first Dahl book, has had me thinking about what my favourites of his are.

I reckon it'd be two obvious ones of the childrens ones, Matilda along with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Some of the short story collections are also really good though (Skin, The Landlady, Dip in the Pool, Man from the South, Taste and The Umbrella Man being a handful I can remember the names of) and I like both Boy and Going Solo too, if only as a (probably skewed) view into a different time.

Currently reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's decent but it doesn't seem as great as it's cracked up to be.

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Originally Posted by Ian

The trailer for the BFG and my niece starting on Matilda, her first Dahl book, has had me thinking about what my favourites of his are.

I reckon it'd be two obvious ones of the childrens ones, Matilda along with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Some of the short story collections are also really good though (Skin, The Landlady, Dip in the Pool, Man from the South, Taste and The Umbrella Man being a handful I can remember the names of) and I like both Boy and Going Solo too, if only as a (probably skewed) view into a different time.

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We've just started on James and the Giant Peach. I didn't really like that one. I distinctly remember Fantastic Mr Fox being my favourite as a child.

Dahl's children's books are works of utter genius. They'll still be read in 100 years' time.

I read Boy for the first time as an adult, and thought it was awesome.

I think it was on the old board where I said I was reading all of his to my daughter. Matilda was a little disappointing as not a lot happened and from memory I think the film added a lot more.

The film was great as well, unlike the Fantastic Mr Fox film which I reckon should genuinely be censored so as not to ruin the book's good name.

Although more I think about it the book was still genuinely brilliant for a children's book, I guess it just surprised me that a lot of stuff wasn't there.

Fantastic Mr Fox and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were both great too. James and the Giant Peach seemed to go on too long but I was reading it at a time when my daughter wouldn't last through more than a few pages each night.

James and the Giant Peach wasnt ever one I was keen on.

Its probably the most suitable for a three year old I reckon.

The only one I can remember reading was Danny the Champion of the World. It was good.

History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. He's been shitting on Plato since page one, it's pretty funny.

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution & Future of Islam by Reza Aslan

Islam is the source of much discussion these days but I find that few of us actually know much about it. Reza Aslan is a moderate Muslim of Iranian descent living in America, and this is his effort to represent the religion and its history to western readers in a positive way. As such, this presumes little knowledge and emphasises the progressive aspects of Islam, including egalitarianism, pluralism and pacifism whilst decrying the extremists who he believes have perverted it, explaining the historical evolution and the the contingencies that have led to the present situation. I'm sure that a lot of this could be disputed but it at the very least presents an alternative view that one can counterpose to the overwhelming negativity that one tends to find in western media.
One point that I must take issue with is that while the historical narrative presented appears to be fairly reliable, Aslan's own personal belief stated in his opening (paraphrased) that religious "truth" intersects with but is not identical to historical truth sounds like relativist mumbo-jumbo to me. Still, you can't have everything, and if that kind of cognitive dissonance is how he reconciles his religious practice with his scholarly work, then so be it - there is limited impact on the latter.

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Originally Posted by Magic

I've just bought 'Trusted Mole' for £2 delivered. I wanted a book on the Yugoslavian war but there was some quite intense reading. Not sure if I'd have the stomach for it. So I bought this instead, which seems more exciting than thousands of pages of political stuff.

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This was absolutely fucking excellent, by the way. Well worth a read.

Also, lads:

http://i67.tinypic.com/20axulu.jpg

:drool:

I might have to order that set, just because.

<3

Getting proper nostalgic for the Danny Champion of the World audiobook I listened to over and over again as a little kid.

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Originally Posted by Magic

This was absolutely fucking excellent, by the way. Well worth a read.

Also, lads:

http://i67.tinypic.com/20axulu.jpg

:drool:

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Those for the kid? Or just for you? She's what, three now? Do you buy her loads of dolls and shit 'for girls' or give her more 'gender neutral' toys? I ask because I was visiting my three year old cousin last week and everything is just fucking dolls, dolls, dolls. So much girly shit. She's going to grow up and just be another twat 'princess' in this shitty town.

I bet the princess will be happy, unlike every single person who has ever bought/campaigned for gender-neutral toys.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

Those for the kid? Or just for you? She's what, three now? Do you buy her loads of dolls and shit 'for girls' or give her more 'gender neutral' toys? I ask because I was visiting my three year old cousin last week and everything is just fucking dolls, dolls, dolls. So much girly shit. She's going to grow up and just be another twat 'princess' in this shitty town.

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I'm treating her on the basis that she'll turn out to be one of those gender swapping cunts so either way I can't go wrong.

They are for her, we're nearly done with the Giant Peach so I reckon it might be the BFG next.

She does have girly dolls and shit, we got her a doll's house for Christmas, she loves putting on make up (like her Mum not for real) but at the same time she loves artistry, playing the drums, going on her bike, puzzles, board games etc.

Alright. :(

What are you reading at the minute, Lewis?

Nothing.

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Originally Posted by Magic

I'm treating her on the basis that she'll turn out to be one of those gender swapping cunts so either way I can't go wrong.

They are for her, we're nearly done with the Giant Peach so I reckon it might be the BFG next.

She does have girly dolls and shit, we got her a doll's house for Christmas, she loves putting on make up (like her Mum not for real) but at the same time she loves artistry, playing the drums, going on her bike, puzzles, board games etc.

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That sounds like a pretty healthy balance. I'm not totally against gendered toys, it's just that they seem to be all my cousin has. Her parents aren't the brightest though so that's probably not a surprise. The other creative and educational stuff doesn't seem to get encouraged.

How do I find 'similar to' in terms of books? Like on IMDB?

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Originally Posted by Lewis

Nothing.

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Liar.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

That sounds like a pretty healthy balance. I'm not totally against gendered toys, it's just that they seem to be all my cousin has. Her parents aren't the brightest though so that's probably not a surprise. The other creative and educational stuff doesn't seem to get encouraged.

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I know I boast a lot but my one is actually a genius. She can write her name legibly and can point out simple words, spell them and then tell us what it says.

Just the old, you know, I'm reading about wars that maybe never happened and generals that would shit on my face if i ever actually spoke to them in real life.

Oh man, i was like 6 posts late to that one

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Originally Posted by mokbull

Just the old, you know, I'm reading about wars that maybe never happened and generals that would shit on my face if i ever actually spoke to them in real life.

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Wars that maybe never happened?

Just forget it man, some things aren't meant to be.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

Liar.

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I'm using my saddo time to re-write things I've already done the reading for, so I've got On War on the kitchen table and a load of shit articles.

Use it to do your WDYTOE.

Lewis what are some good historical war books? Not boring, plodding ones but exciting ones.

Speaking of On War, I'm about to read that book for the FOURTH FUCKING TIME this coming quarter. I've enjoyed it less and less every successive read, so i might dip into negative utility this time around.

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Originally Posted by Magic

Lewis what are some good historical war books? Not boring, plodding ones but exciting ones.

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You need to be a bit more specific.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mokbull

Speaking of On War, I'm about to read that book for the FOURTH FUCKING TIME this coming quarter. I've enjoyed it less and less every successive read, so i might dip into negative utility this time around.

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It really is the best thing. Have you read much similar stuff?

That Joe Abercrombie book was excellent. Enjoyed it very much and will be getting onto the rest of the trilogy.

Bryson's new one up next. :drool:

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Originally Posted by Lewis

It really is the best thing. Have you read much similar stuff?

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I've read purely philosophical works and purely historical ones, but nothing that was the melange that Clausewitz was. I'm sure I will in the class i'm taking though (International and Global Security). I was made to read Sun Tzu but that shit don't count.

Do you have a copy of your reading list? I've always been led to believe that the Americans like to think that the world starts with Alfred Thayer Mahan and ends with Bernard Brodie (maybe Quincy Wright in between).

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Originally Posted by Lewis

You need to be a bit more specific.

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I don't know. I really enjoyed Trusted Mole so something of that ilk. That was more about a man's experiences through a war from a neutral point of view, rather than an in-depth analysis of political decisions, military overviews etc. I'd also like if it was as true to the truth as possible and not biased in any way. I realise history is written by the winner, though.

Fuck it I've just bought this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...gotten_Soldier

I haven't read many books like that. Dave might have.

Are yours more historical fact? I'm afraid to go down that route in case I get one that's exceptionally dry and boring (because I have a short attention span). I'm nearly finished TM which is some achievement given my desolate motivation. I've really enjoyed it. I've not finished my American Politics book and I don't think I will. It's one where you have to take notes.

Read Birdsong, if you can handle a bit of arty farting about. He writes war scenes better than anyone I've come across.

Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer is well-known as a disgraced former-politician who has spent some time in jail, however he is also reputed as an excellent and prolific writer. This was an early work and seems to be among his best known. It concerns the fortunes of two contrasting figures, an American banking heir and a Polish immigrant throughout the twentieth century and the rivalry that develops between them. I liked Archers writing style, and the first portion of the book in particular is very well done and evocative. Unfortunately I did feel that as things developed, the plot contained far too many contrivances, success came far too easily for the main characters and their behaviour towards each other increasingly petty. Still, I felt it worthwhile and enjoyed the historical panorama despite the flaws.

I like the good Jeffrey Archer books. I enjoy their scope.

First Among Equals is also enjoyable. Although there are two versions, with a major character removed from one of them, and his plot beats given to the other characters as appropriate. This led to one very confusing conversation between myself and a friend, as her favourite character wasn't in my version of the book.

The new Bryson book is entertaining, as I expected/hoped. There's a bit more Grumpy Old Man-ing in there and so far he's done a bit more waffling about historical stuff related to the relatively few places he's been rather than going to as many places as my memory has him going to in Notes from a Small Island but I'm enjoying it a lot all the same.

Finished Dubliners last night, for school. On the surface it's quite boring, dig a bit deeper and some of the stories are absolutely brilliant (some are still just boring). The ending of The Dead naturally transcends the rest of it.

I'm up to Act IV in Macbeth. Shakespeare is fucking stunning, isn't he? There's no one else really comes close.

I've never met a more intellectual 9-year old. Props Stillinger

I'm reading the Horus Heresy series which is set in the Warhammer 30k universe. Those of you that don't know what that means, well in, you have a social life no doubt.

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Originally Posted by mokbull

I've never met a more intellectual 9-year old. Props Stillinger

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Macbeth is for school too, for the record. That said, I did forget another book I just finished, A Woman in Arabia, about Gertrude Bell (whom more people should know of). I wasn't a huge fan of the style - it tells the story of her life interspersed with excerpts from her letters - but they pulled it off really nicely and the finale, the creation of modern Iraq, was surprisingly emotional for me. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in the events of Lawrence of Arabia, or just of the Middle East in general.

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Originally Posted by Chrissy

I'm reading the Horus Heresy series which is set in the Warhammer 30k universe. Those of you that don't know what that means, well in, you have a social life no doubt.

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Warhammer. :cool:

Never played it IRL but the PC games were fucking incredible.

The Art of Stillness by Pico Llyer is a great one sitting read.

Arousal: The Logic of Sexual Fantasies

Interesting shit. The dude that reckons that sexuality cannot really be expressed when the individual holds feelings of shame and guilt, and that sexual fantasies are ways in which the person circumvents any of those things is able to express their sexuality without any of those feelings. So, for example, someone who has submissive fantasies might on some level feel a bit guilty about how powerful they are in day to day life, or they might feel ashamed of sexuality and general and only feel comfortable about it when they're being 'forced' into it. On the other hand, dominant fantasies can relate to feelings of powerlessness in day to day life or, on the other hand, guilt about hurting people - being able to 'hurt' or overpower someone in a safe environment in which they other person enjoys it can enable that person to let go and stop worrying about doing it.

He boils a lot of it down to childhood and upbringing in the development of 'pathogenic' beliefs about oneself which can lead to certain fantasies developing to circumvent the guilt/shame associated with them. All that is pretty standard psychodynamic stuff. He talks a fair bit about standard BDSM but also fantasies like transvestism, being raped, being pissed on and fetishes for inanimate objects and stuff like that. Really interesting. The main thing to bear in mind though is that any one fantasy can arise for any number of different reasons, and the particular reason depends entirely on the person in question. He sets out a decent toolkit for figuring it out though, and figuring out why people fantasise about what they fantasise about.

Casino by Nicholas Pileggi

This is the book that led to Scorsese's movie of the same name. Being quite familiar with the latter and having previously enjoyed Wiseguys which has a similar relationship with Goodfellas, I thought that reading the true story of events might be interesting. It is, in case you don't know, the story of Frank Rosenthal and Anthony Spilotro, both figures connected to the Chicago Mafia, who ran casinos and organised crime in Las Vegas for a number of years.
It does give a lot more info than the movie, which changed all of the names and quite a few of the events in order to make for better storytelling. The result is something more brutal and less glamorous than what we seen onscreen. Unfortunately however there are drawbacks - narration is minimal and the stories are told by interweaving interviews with several of the participants. As a result it can be difficult to keep track of all of the names, to tell who is speaking, and worse, who is being honest (these are criminals and conmen after all). So - worthwhile but only because it was fairly short.

I finished The Book of Strange New Things last week. It's about a Christian minister who goes as a missionary to a new planet where a corporation has set up a base to minister to the aliens there. It's really good.

I've started David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks now. I loved Cloud Atlas but this one might be a little too fantasy-ish for my liking based on what I've read so far.

Just ordered Bridge On The River Drina. My obsession with the Balkans continues. That Sarajevo meet is definitely on, @Spoonsky. :cool:

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, by Jeff Chang

It starts back in the 50's and 60's to give a proper sense of social context to it all. It's discussed the social history of the Bronx and Kingston so far. Only three chapters in but it's a cracking read.

With all the downtime at work I'm starting a rampage through classic fiction. First up, Tender is the Night. Gah. I hate Americans, especially Americans poncing about in Europe between the wars.

You're reading in work? Do they not see you? Won't they go mental?

Not a physical book, obviously. I achieve remarkable amounts, including all my daytime posts on here, just glancing at my phone (and they can't really see what I'm doing at my desk anyway).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

The new Bryson book is entertaining, as I expected/hoped. There's a bit more Grumpy Old Man-ing in there and so far he's done a bit more waffling about historical stuff related to the relatively few places he's been rather than going to as many places as my memory has him going to in Notes from a Small Island but I'm enjoying it a lot all the same.

---

This about sums up my thoughts on it as a whole. It's not his best book by any means but I love a bit of Bryson so it was still damn good.

I'm now onto House of Chains of the Malazan series. It's off to a good start though so far it has mostly appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with any of the other three books. I know that'll come from the blurb on the back and there have in the last page or so been a few nods towards existing characters and events but not much so far.

I was really disappointed by the new Bryson effort. He has become too miserable about anything which he perceives to be modern. I found it a bit boring and, by the end, even began to dislike him a bit. I wish I'd left it alone.

I thought he was a right tit throughout the original one, but still brilliantly funny and right. I started this one but put it down after about ten pages.

My step-dad has the new one. It was an utterly painful first chapter, what an old moaning cunt.

I'd definitely say that his recent books before this have been better served by him writing about something he's interested in because in Little Dribbling he clearly still loves the UK but spends too much time mooching about the South complaining about things ways in which Britain has changed that he doesn't approve of rather than visiting new places he didn't go to in Small Island and talking about those. And some of the things he's moaning about just aren't things we haven't heard a zillion times. We're well aware that Katie Price is an idiot, Bill.

I liked it but it's probably his worst book when compared to his previous high standards. His old travel books are still his best stuff but I've really enjoyed everything of his, really. One Summer: America 1927 was brilliant.

To be fair I was reading previously about an 18 year old young man describing the horrors of the Eastern Front so you can understand why I found it annoying and pathetic.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh

Another of my periodic visits to the precariat of Edinburgh with Irvine Welsh. This one is partially on familiar ground, the protagonist being an unlikeable and vindicative alcoholic, but also somewhat surreal as it centres around a supernatural plot device linking him to another character.
It's genuinely hilarious in places, and despite the premise being a little unusual for Welsh, the characters are real fleshed-out human beings. As always the scathing yet sympathetic portrayal of modern society in its alienation and depravity is quite enriching. I must remember to return more often.

Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt against Rome, AD66 by Neil Faulkner

Ancient history can often be a very dry read, a consequence of both scholarly uncertainty about the events and the remove at which they exist from the reader. This account of the Jewish uprising of the first century by Neil Faulkner makes amends for this by applying a Marxist perspective to the tale, casting the Romans and their Hellenised client elite (including the temple authorities) as the oppressing classes, and the mostly rural peasantry over which they rule as the oppressed. It's an interesting and very worthwhile approach - while it obviously has it's limitations, it lends an immediacy to the story and empathy towards its participants.
The uprising, the subsequent sacking of Jersusalem, and destruction of the temple were among the central events influencing the formation of Christianity and in the formation of what we now know as Judaism. Faulkner covers this, the prior history of the region, Roman politics, military strategy and much else besides, covering an impressive amount of ground in less than 300 pages.

The sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple are key events when one considers Israeli actions in 1967 as well.

Lads, if anyone is interested thebookpeople.co.uk are doing some quite excellent box set deals e.g. there's a Max Hastings set of books (Bomber Command, Das Reich, Battle for the Falklands) for a fiver (circa £30+ on Amazon for all three separately), a Hemingway set for £9 (including his major works) and others which may appeal.

Inferno by Dan Brown.

After the last one I had decided not to read Dan Brown any more, however having been in Venice recently and hearing that this was partly set there, I decided to give it a go. The plot concerns an attempt to release a bioweapon by a terrorist concerned with overpopulation. He's obsessed with Dante, bases much of his plan around Dante's Inferno and leaves clues to the location of the weapon also based on Inferno for Professor Langdon and other characters to find.
Of course this is as silly as it sounds. It is more of the same - obviously nonsense in a lot of the detail (no, IQ's don't go up to 202) and with a convoluted plot that has so many rug-pulls that you're left with very little firm ground on which to stand. The dialogue and writing generally is clunky and unsubtle. And yet as a travel guide it has some merit - I did learn more about the things I'd seen in Venice, I learned enough about Florence to want to see it, and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul has now become something I will make it my business to go to at some stage.

Getting through Bridge on the Drina. The author so vividly described a bloke being tortured then eventually impaled on a stake for maximum keep alive/humiliation that I felt a bit queasy afterwards and still cannot escape the images my brain has created.

Finally finished all of ASOIAF a couple of nights ago. Limiting myself to 1 chapter a night before bed meant it took forever, but it was worth it. I actually didn't think it declined at all after book 3 which is what I was warned of. Obviously book 3 had all the big events, but I enjoyed the slower paced focus on smaller characters just as much. God knows how some people have coped waiting 4 years for the next one.... but come 2020 I'll know their pain when it still isn't published.

Moved onto the Prequel which is really a collection of shorter stories, but am really enjoying that too.

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Originally Posted by Magic

Getting through Bridge on the Drina. The author so vividly described a bloke being tortured then eventually impaled on a stake for maximum keep alive/humiliation that I felt a bit queasy afterwards and still cannot escape the images my brain has created.

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Yeah, but have you wanked over it yet?

Finished the fourth Malazan book. So good. If it turns out Eriksson can keep up this quality over all ten, and having done so in the course of about twelve years, Martin might as well top himself and let somebody else finish the job for him.

Moving onto Shakespeare's Local. a book about The George Inn in Southwark and that I bought because the author, Pete Brown, was described as "Bill Bryson for beer lovers." He doesn't quite have the style of Bryson's that has me enjoying basically anything he writes but it's been interesting enough so far.

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Originally Posted by Browning

Finally finished all of ASOIAF a couple of nights ago. Limiting myself to 1 chapter a night before bed meant it took forever, but it was worth it. I actually didn't think it declined at all after book 3 which is what I was warned of. Obviously book 3 had all the big events, but I enjoyed the slower paced focus on smaller characters just as much. God knows how some people have coped waiting 4 years for the next one.... but come 2020 I'll know their pain when it still isn't published.

Moved onto the Prequel which is really a collection of shorter stories, but am really enjoying that too.

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A Feast For Crows is the weakest because it focuses on the 'less interesting' characters, but A Dance With Dragons is great. Book six might never see the light of the day at the rate we're going.

On balance, I preferred the one with Brienne slugging her way through bogs and Davos sitting in pubs to the one with dragontits being terminally dull.

I didn't think either of you two would be into that stuff.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

I didn't think either of you two would be into that stuff.

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Have you read them? They're basically history books at this point.

That Malazan stuff sounds great, just very daunting.

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Originally Posted by phonics

Have you read them? They're basically history books at this point.

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No and I'm not sure what that means.

Fiction being history? This is Joe trying to be clever again. We all know what happens when he does that.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

No and I'm not sure what that means.

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They read like history books but from a first person perspective. The whole story is basically a rip-off of the War of the Roses with Dragons. It's why I like them, I only read non-fiction generally but they read so well it could just as well be.

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Originally Posted by phonics

They read like history books but from a first person perspective. The whole story is basically a rip-off of the War of the Roses with Dragons. It's why I like them, I only read non-fiction generally but they read so well it could just as well be.

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I don't get that. Pretty sure Lewis is the same. It's such an odd view to take.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

I don't get that. Pretty sure Lewis is the same. It's such an odd view to take.

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I don't read enough to justify reading something not real. Game of Thrones I just wanted to know the plot as people on reddit were shit posting spoilers.

That doesn't make it less weird.

I got about an hour into Atlas Shrugged at university, but apart from that I probably haven't read a fiction book since sixth form.

I thought that when I was about 17, but quickly realised it was a fucking stupid position to adopt.

Yeah I can't usually be arsed with fiction either, apart from the odd sci-fi book. Feels like self-indulgent shite a lot of the time and I don't feel like I get much out of it.

They're better than ASOIAF, AD, though the shifting focus does cause the various story threads to get a touch muddled at times.

If ASOIAF could be described as "the Wars of the Roses crossed with Imperial Rome", how would you describe Malazan? I've been interested in buying the first book for some time.

Bought the first Malazan book the other day, only £6 on Amazon.

I haven't a clue. They don't kill characters off for a shortage of other ideas, it is more overtly fantasy/magic (not to the point of people walking about lobbing fireballs, mind) and there is no Dragonbore.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which of those are good, bad or meh things. Oh, and he's fucking FINISHED them so you're not relying on George thinking his way out of the hole I imagine he's written himself into.

The strangest thing about it is that he'll do books with an entirely different set of characters and the one I've just read had a new character who was good reading but only made sense about 150 pages in.

If you like ASOIAF then it's worth your while at least trying the first one.

So is it LOTR with wizards etc. set during, say, the Middle Ages?

Well it's not LOTR because it doesn't have 16 pages of hairy-footed midget signalongs either.

I dunno that it has a particular obvious time period because the factions/races in it are a bit more diverse than that once you're a few books deep. Erikson is better than Martin, it's just whether you prefer the characters/setting of one over the other. I don't think the Malazan books have a character to match Tyrion, say, but there's no doubt in my mind which is the better series.

Debunking Economics by Steve Keen

One of a small number of economists both who predicated the great recession and who had a model describing why it happened, this is Professor Steve Keen's take-down of his own profession, accusing a large majority of economists (neoclassicists mainly) as ideologically-driven and obsessed with abstract models which are contradictory and fail to reflect reality.
It's very involved and technical to the point of becoming tedious in large parts, but while it may overstate its case in some instances, it's quite convincing and it's quite astonishing that there's so much hokum in mainstream circulation.

I'm really tempted to get a Kindle so I can read in bed lying on my side and without needing both hands. It's been prompted by reading Stephen King's 11.22.63 which a guy in work lent me which is a 700 or so page hardback monster. But the pretentious wanker inside me likes having proper books on shelves too much and dreams of having a proper library room one day.

20% off right now, Boyd.

I've gone through about 5 kindles now.

The voyage is a bit of a beast.

I can send people some (i.e. many thousands) of e-books if they wish to find justification for having a Kindle.

Shakespeare's Local was an interesting read if you're a suitably tedious beer bore like me. Though not enough that I'm sure I'll rush to read more of his stuff.

Now onto Half a War, the third in that trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Keen to read the second of his The First Law trilogy too. He's really good.

Nearly finished Bridge on the Drina. What a journey.

Next I'm interested in European history, mainly the empires etc before WW1 that ultimately culminated in WW1.

Any recommendations?

I've just finished Max Hastings' 1914 which is a very good account of the run-up to the outbreak with some very interesting background material. Beyond this, Montefiore's The Romanovs is meant to be very good for the Russian Imperial house.

Looks like a big wedge that.

Ever read The Three Nations trilogy by Christoph Fischer?

I haven't read either of those, but Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers used to be regarded as probably the best book about the start of it.

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Originally Posted by Mahow

20% off right now, Boyd.

I've gone through about 5 kindles now.

The voyage is a bit of a beast.

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How've you got through so many?

Reading 'All Out' by Albert Ellis at the moment. He's the creator of REBT which in large part is what is now CBT. I didn't get on with CBT as I didn't appreciate some daft bint telling me how to think, but reading about the ideas in a book is great as I can take it on its own terms. This is basically about CBT except it's all grounded in his own experiences and the shit he's been through. Recommended.

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Originally Posted by Lewis

I haven't read either of those, but Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers used to be regarded as probably the best book about the start of it.

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Cheers just bought it.

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Originally Posted by Lewis

I haven't read either of those, but Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers used to be regarded as probably the best book about the start of it.

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Jesus Christ it's a monster.

Almost finished Les Miserables. It's fucking huge. Last door-stopper for a while.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

I try to read one or two very long books per year and this had been on my list for some time. There was no competition from TV or internet in the 19th century and as such, works like this were more likely to succeed without the extensive editing that they'd get today. That's both for good and ill, I believe.
This is an engrossing, all-encompassing novel that attempts to give you a full representation of the time and place in which it's set, and a full exploration of the characters about whom it concerns. Hugo's prose (even upon translation) is majestic and his humanity is moving. On the one hand I have a greater understanding of Paris and French history than I did before, and one cannot fail to be gratified at having been through the ringer with Jean Valjean, the ex-convict turned saint who attempts to evade the law and ameliorate some of the misery around him. On the other, while it adds to the aforementioned epic experience, I can't help but wonder if the author needed several chapters dedicated to an aside on the Battle of Waterloo, and others on the history of the Parisian sewage system!
It's all probably better known to most people from the musical these days, and I had a passing familiarity with the plot going in. But there's so much more here that even if you do know how things develop, and you have the time, it's worthwhile.

The point of the 'digression' sections is that they establish the location and character of a scene before the characters themselves are placed therein. The reason why he, presumably, undertakes a history of the sewage system is so that you have a sense of where Valjean and Marius are lost - rather than it just being some generic shithole in the ground. It's the same when he provides a background for the type of location where Valjean and Cosette hide after Javert starts chasing them. He does the same thing in Notre Dame de Paris with Paris itself.

The digressions in War and Peace appear to have far less to do with establishing the scene or aspects of the plot.

Yes, I know that. As I said, they give a fuller sense of time and place - but they do drag somewhat. See also the digressions on slang and religious orders.

Tomorrow I will be starting Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Looking forward to it.

I need some summer reading, fellas. I've just started A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and it's really good but also set in Chechnya and perhaps doesn't suit my mood at the beginning of summer.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Tomorrow I will be starting Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Looking forward to it.

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It's difficult, so my advice is to persevere...

My only difficulty so far, and it was the same with The Road, is understanding McCarthyism grammatical peculiarities. Doesn't take long to settle in but I don't get the point.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

I often read a lighter book while tackling something heavy to give me a break when I feel like it. This was the one I used during Les Miserables. Travel writer Bill Bryson runs through the major science subjects (including physics, cosmology, evolution, geology and so forth) giving a brief run-through of their histories and of their major discoveries. It's all a bit facile with no real depth - he declines to say anything about quantum physics on the ground that it would get too complicated for example. So while I didn't really learn much, it was an entertaining and well-written jaunt, and certainly would make a good introductory book for someone starting to read some popular science.

Found a glorious place to read my book today on the way home. It was utterly deserted and so peaceful. Always enhances my reading if I'm:

a) outside
b) in peace
c) with a great view

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http://s33.postimg.org/7stn9yg27/201...8_17_58_07.jpg

The Optimistic Child, by Martin Seligman

He basically outlines how to bring up your kid in such a way that they are much less likely to become severely depressed. All very cognitive, simple and practical. Very well researched too and written in an easy style.

Making Movies by Sydney Lumet

Only just started this but it's a lovely little book by the bloke that did 12 Angry Men and Network.

Why did you read TOC?

It's very activity based, I stopped reading it as it didn't really apply to under 5s.

Just general curiosity. I want to be a children's counsellor eventually.

I don't get what you mean about under 5s. How doesn't it apply?

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Originally Posted by Hammer

Just general curiosity. I want to be a children's counsellor eventually.

I don't get what you mean about under 5s. How doesn't it apply?

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The activities in it.

Oh aye, they're focused more on teenagers aren't they. I guess the principles still apply in how you talk to her and stuff though? :sorry: I thought some of the examples were really good, like dealing with when kids are putting themselves down or how to make any criticism local and specific rather than in general. His criticisms of the self-esteem movement was really interesting too.

Not really, it's more for when a child develops self-awareness, fully understands consequences, develops a small bit of inhibition, critical thinking and empathy.

At the moment it's just Naive, Selfish and Fair.

I mean it's still relevant in terms of how you talk to her and stuff :p

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Originally Posted by Hammer

Making Movies by Sydney Lumet

Only just started this but it's a lovely little book by the bloke that did 12 Angry Men and Network.

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That's funny, my dad's just bought that the other week.

I had a go at Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

It wasn't much of a go really, as I barely understood a thing. I persevered through the narrative switching about twenty times between a horde of characters with comedy names, got through the frequent discussion of penises (quite enjoyed those, actually) and even managed to keep going past the scene where some deeply stereotyped black chaps come across a fella bent over the bog, decide to bum him, only for him to escape down the u-bend with no real explanation and then spend the next six or seven pages describing the various turds he finds while he's down there.

Considering I gave it another 50 pages or so after that (and I'm still about 10% of the way through), I feel I can say I gave it a good go and admit I'm not smart or, rather unexpectedly, pervert enough for it.

Definitely a new leader for the hardest to read book I've ever attempted.

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Originally Posted by Spoonsky

That's funny, my dad's just bought that the other week.

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:lol:

You're right, that is funny!

:D

Needs moar Hammer trolling.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cord

I had a go at Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

It wasn't much of a go really, as I barely understood a thing. I persevered through the narrative switching about twenty times between a horde of characters with comedy names, got through the frequent discussion of penises (quite enjoyed those, actually) and even managed to keep going past the scene where some deeply stereotyped black chaps come across a fella bent over the bog, decide to bum him, only for him to escape down the u-bend with no real explanation and then spend the next six or seven pages describing the various turds he finds while he's down there.

Considering I gave it another 50 pages or so after that (and I'm still about 10% of the way through), I feel I can say I gave it a good go and admit I'm not smart or, rather unexpectedly, pervert enough for it.

Definitely a new leader for the hardest to read book I've ever attempted.

---

:D

I don't think I made it that far past the shit bit.

Pretty good synopsis.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cord

I had a go at Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

It wasn't much of a go really, as I barely understood a thing. I persevered through the narrative switching about twenty times between a horde of characters with comedy names, got through the frequent discussion of penises (quite enjoyed those, actually) and even managed to keep going past the scene where some deeply stereotyped black chaps come across a fella bent over the bog, decide to bum him, only for him to escape down the u-bend with no real explanation and then spend the next six or seven pages describing the various turds he finds while he's down there.

Considering I gave it another 50 pages or so after that (and I'm still about 10% of the way through), I feel I can say I gave it a good go and admit I'm not smart or, rather unexpectedly, pervert enough for it.

Definitely a new leader for the hardest to read book I've ever attempted.

---

Sounds ace. :D I only read while sunbathing; and I'm not so sure if it would be a good honeymoon read.

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Originally Posted by Hammer

:lol:

You're right, that is funny!

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I'll need some of your mong therapy if you keep up with that.

The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man by Robert M Price

Next up another one searching for the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity. Robert M Price is a prominent advocate of the Christ-myth theory, holding that there never was a historical Jesus and that he is entirely a literary and mythological creation.
Here he deconstructs the New Testament stories, stripping away the layers of embellishment, plagiarism and sectarianism. It's an impressive feat, ending with the conclusion that none of the material is historical, and that if there is a historical figure at the root, nothing about him has been preserved.
I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced - some of Price's conclusions arrived at using his "criteria of dissmilarity" don't seem to follow - just because the gospel writers use texts that exist elsewhere or because the beliefs of proto-Christians overlap with those of cynics, stoics and so forth, don't seem to me to preclude them being historical in essence. That said, some of his arguments concerning for example, the nativity and the resurrection entirely debunk orthodox doctrines and provide a fascinating explanation for how and why they came into being in the decades following the origins of Christianity.
Overall Price has convinced me that this is an intriguing possibility, and I've learned a great deal about the whole area which I hope to continue with.

King's Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) quickly managed to go from fairly interesting to downright insultingly bad. The first has a solid premise and flows along nicely before his usual shitty rushed ending. The second is rather dull, with no real concern for any fucker in it, but I managed to get to the end. The third is just hideous, no twists, surprises, everything is known, and the premise sounds like another book entirely which he's just banged Bill Hodges in because he couldn't think of fuck all else to finish the trilogy with. Its laughably bad, give it a go. Feels like a teenage English college assignment kinda work.

So hit and miss in recent years, probably due to age and boredom. 11/22/63 is superb though, to be fair. Still has a face like a surgically treated burns victim, the cunt.

I've only read a handful of King, but they're the sort of book I turn to when I want something that doesn't require a huge deal of engagement.

Yeah I use his books for similar, came off the biography of Chris Morris into the third installment, but the writing is so, so bad.

King was always very hit or miss, I find. I re-read The Dark Tower series a year or two ago, though, and still fucking loved it. Curious to see Elba as Roland.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AD

Just finished the second Malazan book (Deadhouse Gates).

A really, really good book. His style of writing, i.e. drip-feeding you what you need to know, is quite captivating at times. It means he can do a number of plot twists without it seeming forced, and also gets you really interested in the lore. He's also great at describing battles and making them appear unique. Slightly related to that is his ability to create harrowing atmospheres; characters really do go through shit and you feel for them.

Two characters got to me in particular:

Toggle Spoiler

Icarium and Mappo. Fucking hell. I hope we get to see them again - I'm sure they'll come up at some point - but their story was so sad.

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I've read.... four of them I think. The amazing thing is that he keeps chopping and changing characters (the most recent I've read in particular) and yet he keeps it all tied together. It's a seriously good series of books.

I'm still chugging through Blood Meridian but it's so boring I'm finding myself reading other stuff during my commute so it's taking me an age to get through it.

The Great Gatsby is the most overrated novel of all time. I think. Read both that and Tender Is The Night a few months back and the latter shat on it.

Ah, cool that you all enjoy the Malazan books so much, that makes me want to read them.

I've been looking for something to read while waiting for Doors of Stone by Rothfuss (taking aaaages) and Winds of Winter by Martin (also aaaages), both of which have made me swear to never start a series of books that isn't already concluded ever again (but I will).

Blood Meridian is astonishingly dull. Can't remember when I was last so pleased to have finished a book.

The Great Gatsby was rubbish, but then I did read it at school. I doubt the passage of time or the absence of pressure to ANALYSE it would make it better, however. The 'roaring twenties' is just a very dull era, although one can reconcile oneself to it knowing that all these rich people end up bankrupt by the end of it.

Has anyone read the new Harry Potter book? I'm halfway through at the moment and it's actually really enjoyable.

No I'm an adult.

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Originally Posted by Adamski

Has anyone read the new Harry Potter book? I'm halfway through at the moment and it's actually really enjoyable.

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Bought it for my sister for her birthday and it only arrived yesterday. I flicked through it before giving it to her but didn't look at it properly. Will probably check it out at some point, or just go to see the play.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

No I'm an adult.

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Maybe in the literal sense :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hammer

Bought it for my sister for her birthday and it only arrived yesterday. I flicked through it before giving it to her but didn't look at it properly. Will probably check it out at some point, or just go to see the play.

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I think I read that the play is fully booked for months, definitely would like to go and see it. It's gotten some great reviews.

Is the new Harry Potter book, which is a play, actually readable as a book - since it is a play? Most plays I've read, always for some literary assignment in class were quite dull/weird to read. Admittedly, they were always either Shakespeare or Becket / Ionesco / Some other abstract fucker.


Also, is the new Harry Potter book that is in fact a play actually about Harry Potter himself, or some random Troll a gazillion years ago that nobody cares about?

No, it's not readable that's why I'm halfway through in a matter of hours.

and no, it's called Harry Potter & the cursed child but it's not about Harry Potter.

Well that's a great title then.

Started reading that Irish history book, it's actually very good and non-biased, though I'm sure the extremists could tell me it's loyalist/unionist shite.

What is it?

Loyal to the Core? Orangeism and Britishness in Northern Ireland

How can you tell that it's unbiased?

I'm just joking.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I'm only at the mid-14th century. But the way it's written it's argued so far that Ireland was crying out for stability, be that Ard Ri, the English via MacMurrough/Strongbow alliance, or Edward the Bruce and the Irish Kings.

It wouldn't have argued in favour of Henry the II if it was biased surely, or in favour of the Scots/Irish alliance.

Wait, what one are you reading?

There's not really such a thing as an 'unbiased' history book anyway.

The one I linked to.

Oh right. Never heard of Mike Cronin. That other one you mentioned actually looks good. Two of the authors of it (McAuley and Tonge) are big dogs on NI.

Reading Absalom Absalom by Faulkner because I'm a sophisticated intellectual.

Shit is dense but delicious.

I'm starting The Outsider, a sort-of-but-not-really autobiography thing by Frederick Forsyth.

It seems to be off to an interesting start but I might just be glad it's not Blood Meridian.

Is losing a book you are half way through possibly the worst feeling in the world? :cry:

Was it The Big Book of Divorce Metaphors?

lol

Are you still knee-deep in the Balkan mud, Magic?

I'm reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. It might just be that I'm not doing anything else with my life, but I'm tearing through it.

Irish history now. I think I left it on my car roof in an orange part of Glasgow and drove off lol.

I'm reading The Passage by Justin Cronin. It's excellent. It took me about forty years to get through less than 400 pages of Blood Meridian and I've done about 300 of this (it's 900 or so in total) since the weekend.

Has a bit of the Stephen Kings about it (I've seen comparisons to The Stand but it's so long since I've read that I'm not sure whether those are accurate) and some parts are almost like World War Z as well. Loving it.

Gents,

I'll probably have asked before, but I'm looking for another 'epic / high fantasy' series to get into. I've re-read ASOIAF over the summer, but I need a proper series to get into over the next few months.

Any suggestions? I wouldn't be interested in anything with a sci-fi element, if that's of any help.

The Bible.

How does it compare to the Book of Mormon?

Oh shit.

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Originally Posted by GS

Gents,

I'll probably have asked before, but I'm looking for another 'epic / high fantasy' series to get into. I've re-read ASOIAF over the summer, but I need a proper series to get into over the next few months.

Any suggestions? I wouldn't be interested in anything with a sci-fi element, if that's of any help.

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Malazan.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26233572-i-see-you

Bought that so I could get free delivery on my self-help book. Seems to get pretty good reviews and will give me a break from history/serious bookage.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Malazan.

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What's the background / premise and number of novels in the series?

Ten books, of which I've read four (and as I've harped on about before, it's actually fucking finished unlike ASOIAF.) Wikipedia has it as "epic fantasy" and certainly it's aimed at the same target audience as the likes of ASOIAF are. The premise is a touch more difficult to pin down because from book to book he'll change a large number of the characters from book to book and he doesn't always tie the story of an individual novel to the existing, overarching narrative until later in the book. Which makes it sound like he's jumping about and it all feels disjointed and haphazard but it's not, he does a brilliant job.

I suppose the short version would be that the Malazan Empire is very large and powerful but is face threats on multiple fronts. Some on a typical, fantasy-esque potential-end-of-the-world type scale, some just the threat of it collapsing in on itself, one story strand focuses in a revolution of sorts taking place elsewhere. One big difference is that as fantasy stuff goes Malazan is more overtly magical. It's just people running about lobbing lightning bolts at each other but it is there and it's very different to ASOIAF on that front.

From what I've read I personally prefer them. It has loads of characters and a lot of them are excellent, it has a lot of story threads but even early on you feel like there's an actual purpose to them and he knows where he's going.

I feel like I've waffled a bit here and probably not sold them very well but I'm sure there have been four or five of us on here now who've read at least some of them and nobody's given them a poor review that I can recall.

How's the first novel stack up? If it's difficult to get into, I suspect I'd struggle to maintain enough interest to get past the first one.

Also, what POV is it written in?

He doesn't spend too long setting stuff up in the first one. He sets up what he needs to and then fairly quickly gets the story rolling with the initial core of characters.

And it's written third person. It does generally stick to a character or group of characters for the course of a given chapter but you're not getting into their heads all the time the way you do in ASOIAF. Some characters you get it more than others, other characters you just get more stuff revealed through their conversations.

Although they're quite complex in places I don't think them to be difficult reading at all. There's a lot going on but Erikson knows what he's doing and it hasn't threatened to become an unwieldy mess from what I've read.

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Originally Posted by GS

How does it compare to the Book of Mormon?

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Originals are always better than the remake.

Keep at it babes, I wanna see the real knockout punch

Allan Moore gave a very positive review of a book written by my ex-lodger in the New York Times. Deffo gonna milk that minor vicarious achievement.

I'm on the third instalment of the Clifton Chronicles, quite a nice read without been amazing. Anyone else reading them?

Beyond Freedom and Dignity - BF Skinner

Proper WTF territory, this. He basically espouses the kind of society set out in 1984. There's some really jarring phrases in there too, like 'we work on the assumption that people's behaviour often stems from their motivations, intentions and desires.' He says it as though he thinks differently, but he hasn't yet explained what he does believe. From what I know about him, it'll be something related to us basically being the sum of all our conditioning and fuck all else. So I imagine he's going to espouse the kind of conditioning by which everyone can be controlled completely.

He's pretty serious about it too. He regards society as a machine and laments the fact that we can change gear in a car and be very precise in the adaptations we can make to a car, but can a government do that with people's behaviour? No. Our social policies are very inefficient, and he wants society to be controlled in such a way, I think.

Edit: I think it's largely because he's a behaviourist, he thinks we're all just forms of genetics and conditioning and that we have no freedom anyway, that he justifies this kind of stuff. It's an interesting read so far.

I picked up a Hemingway collection for about £9 earlier in the year, and have now read seven of the eight books therein. On balance, I'd say he's overrated. For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Moveable Feast are probably the two strongest, the latter especially being a surprise in that I wasn't expecting it to be overly strong. It's similar to Orwell's "Down and Out" in that sense, which I also enjoyed a lot more than it's more well-known counterparts Homage to Catalonia and Road to Wigan Pier (the latter being tedious).

The Old Man and the Sea is the novel(la) he won the Nobel Prize for, and I just can't see it. It's a nice fable, sure, but it's nothing special. A Farewell to Arms is also not strong, and you can basically boil it down to "war, love, it rains, everyone's miserable". The Sun Also Rises, in my post-reading research, is described as a "masterpiece". I don't see it in the slightest, but perhaps I'm being unfair. Bull-fighting in Spain between the wars should be an interesting backdrop, but most of the characters (including the main love interest) are contemptible so if they'd wound up being gored you'd barely have cared.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro had some good stories, but broadly speaking wasn't great. The Green Hills of Africa is also a bit tedious in its recounting of his time engaged in big-game hunting, and not just because of the really quite obvious racism which depicts the "natives" in your standard fashion.

Overall, there's a sense he just thinks he's a bit great and has bought into the "Ernest Hemingway" persona a bit too much. Orwell, writing at the same time, has the better novels (1984 and Animal Farm), and a comparable, marginally better, memoir in "Down and Out". Then again, the rest of his fiction is a bit shit but his piercing insight on the political scene wins him the day.

I might read the rest of Hemingway's work at some stage in the future. The book I haven't started is "Death in the Afternoon", again about bull-fighting but I'm not sure I have the patience to wade through it right now. Perhaps another time.

I've only read For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises but I much preferred the latter. For Whom the Bell Tolls was too long and boring for me. It was a relief to finish it.

I'm currently reading last year's Booker Prize winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. It's based around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976 and takes in a load of Jamaican and regional politics. I'm struggling to get into it. There are a lot of different narrators and a lot of the book is written in the Jamaican dialect. I'm trying to stick with it though as it's meant to be worth it.

I've been reading a lot recently.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano was long, strange and brilliant. Not an easy nor pleasant read but it definitely paid off in the end. To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia is a short novel about a crime in Sicily, it was enjoyable but didn't make too much of an impression. Snow Country is by a Japanese guy who won the Nobel Prize but I didn't really get it, there were scenes I liked but as a whole it went over my head. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon was great, very entertaining, the prose was really fine.

Bolaño. :cool:

Yeah Mahow, how far in are you?

Currently on the second book, about 10 or so chapters in.

Took a long break after the first so I've forgotten loads which isn't handy.

Liking the second a lot more than the first thus far.

Just ten more books to go! It does take a little while to get going (and there are some bits in later books that are a bit of a slog) but it really is worth it.

Twelve books to go, no?

I can't remember at what point it is in the series that it becomes a bit more of a slog. Was it two or three books where it took a noticeable dip before Sanderson saved the day by remembering that really it's only Rand, Mat and Perrin we really care about?

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Originally Posted by Ian

Twelve books to go, no?

I can't remember at what point it is in the series that it becomes a bit more of a slog. Was it two or three books where it took a noticeable dip before Sanderson saved the day by remembering that really it's only Rand, Mat and Perrin we really care about?

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I think it was around books 7-10 that were the slowest, with 10 really peaking with the side-plot fuckery that nobody cares about. There's an argument for 9 being half decent because of what happens and the implications of it. But then after those it's on to 11, which is one of the best of the lot.

There comes a point where it feels like his plan for each book was to cut the remaining plot in half and filling the rest of the it with waffle but the actually interesting bits were still good enough to keep my interest. It made the first Sanderson book feel like such a refreshing change of pace.

He got too immersed in the mad web of side-stories and minor characters and also in building up the detail of the world he'd created.

Struggling a bit for recommendations, anyone got anything along the same lines as the following authors?

Christopher Brookmyre
Brett Easton Ellis
Chuck Palahniuk
Jay McInerney
John Niven

Not really sure what genre this would fall under which is half the problem I'm having...

Michael Chabon or Donna Tartt, both went to school with Bret Easton Ellis I think. The Secret History is a fantastic book.

I'm really struggling with the first book. Just too much going on.

So where was I?

Night by Elie Weasal

The sequence is too familiar by now - pogroms, ghettos, deportation, concentration camps, selections, gas chambers, death marches. But this was one of the first widely read accounts of the holocaust, from the perspective of a Hungarian Jew, recounting the events as they happened in particular to himself and his father. It is, as I say, well-known by now, but the details still don't fail to shock. I'm thinking of the authors anger at his father for drawing the anger of the SS as he is beaten to death. The hanging of a child. Words of encouragement from SS guards who also shoot dead stragglers.
It's short and simply written, with Weasal also recounting the effect of these horrors on his Jewish faith. It appears that despite declaring the God of Israel to be dead here, that he did nevertheless retain his belief afterwards. I'm at a loss to know how.


As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

A short novel with a reputation for both merit and difficulty. The story is about a family of rural Missispians travelling across the country in an effort to bury their dead mother. Each chapter is narrated by a different person, with little in the way of context. It's at first a disorienting and opaque approach, with some effort and thought required to figure out what is going on, much less to draw any conclusions from events. But it does begin to pay off, with the story in turn humorous and profound. By the end you begin to understand the characters complexities with earlier events put into some context. And then it ends.
Now this leads me to believe that a second (or even third) read-through would be much more rewarding. And I understand that that gives Faulkners work some value as a literary artifact, much in the sense that Joyce's more difficult output has. And I might return to it at some stage, but as a casual reader with limited spare time, I'm not sure that I can necessarily justify studying the likes of this to the extent that is required to fully appreciate it.


For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

This is Hemingway's novel set during the Spanish Civil War, again based on his own experiences. It's the story of an American fighting for the International brigades, sent behind enemy lines to destroy a bridge in an effort to assist with an offensive that is planned by the Republican side. It's not overtly political, more concerned with the war than the politics behind it. I'd say it's the best I've read by him to date - beautiful and tragic and alive. Certain sequences are harrowing to read, the characters are fascinating and multifaceted - capable of the most extreme cruelty, bravery and cowardice, but kept relatable and sympathetic throughout.
Some of the linguistic choices are strange - the characters speak Spanish and he translates it literally throughout - with 'thou' and 'thee' and other oddities. He also censors the swearing - "I obscenity your mother". But they don't really detract.
Great stuff from a fascinating period of history.


The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia by Angus Roxburgh

This is a history of Russia since the fall of communism, primarily focusing on the rise and rule of Vladimir Putin. It's an interesting overview, with some of the particular stories and insights being revealing in terms of the reasons why Russia has lurched back into authoritarianism - although the general picture of corruption and autocracy that it paints is hardly all that ground-breaking.
The author is a former PR consultant to the Putin government and while one suspects that this might align him with them in some sense, the reality is quite different. My main criticism in particular is that it's quite western-centric, limited in the extent that it portrays the Russian point of view, or the experience of the Russian people, and far too uncritical of the policies of the west.


The Disposessed by Ursula Le Guin

Nominally science fiction, this one is actually a political exploration. The main character Shevek belongs to a planet of peaceful anarchists, and travels to nearby moon where capitalism is the norm. Le Guin constructs a plausible working model of an anarchist society and examines its strengths and weaknesses, and those of its rival in a mature and balanced way. At its best this leads to some quite profound observations about human beings and human society. At its worst its slightly dated, some of the cold war era tropes and allegories no longer relevant.


The Amazing Colossal Apostle by Robert M Price.

Another book by the most prominent proponent of the Christ-myth theory, this one aims to determine what can be said, if anything about the historical Paul. The conclusion, unsurprisingly is that Paul is every bit a literary creation as Jesus is and that if there was a real historical figure at all we can only speculate broadly about him, the Christian Paul being entirely a fabrication.
Largely this is done by deconstructing the Pauline epistles and attempting to demonstrate that they could not have been written by Paul or any other individual. They are instead pseudo-biographical works which have been edited and redacted repeatedly by religious authorities possessing various motivations, starting with gnostics, then Marcionites and finally Catholics. Their current form was arrived at well into the 2nd century. While historians (as opposed to fundamentalists) now take some of this for granted with several of the epistles, Price demands that we see them all in this way.
The real Paul is hypotheticised to have been a gnostic leader, nothing to do with any Jesus movement and potentially having been deified to some extent himself. He survives in Christian tradition only as Simon Magus, an evil sorcerer, with the character of Saul/Paul being the version co-opted and domesticated by the emerging Catholic church in order to heal the divides between Jewish and Marcionite branches of Christianity.
The logic here is impressive, the depth and breadth of Price's learning remarkable. It's difficult not to be convinced by the thrust of his argument, even if there are details that one might quibble with and questions I still have. I'm probably not familiar enough with mainstream scholarship to come down firmly on one side or the other but this is serious stuff that ought to require a massive effort to refute.

Ursula Le Guin is someone I've been interested in checking out. Might have to get that book as it sounds interesting.

Thanks for that Henry, last book sounds very good.

I recently read Storm of Steel - a book based on World War I from a German soldier perspective. Not a book for someone who is looking at the historical context of the war but rather someone who is interested in what it was like to be thrown into pure destruction. It's quite incredible to read about some of the great battles (Somme for example) and makes you wonder how anyone could have survived with the shells, grenades, gun fire and mustard gas happening every time you were on the battlefield. It's interlaced with some lovely down times as well, where the serenity of sleepy French villages are resting spots for the soldiers and it makes you forget one of the bloodiest wars in human history is occurring a few miles away. It's a very interesting read.

Currently reading The Idiot and And the poor suffer what they must so will come back to this (if I remember).

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Originally Posted by Kikó

I recently read Storm of Steel - a book based on World War I from a German soldier perspective. Not a book for someone who is looking at the historical context of the war but rather someone who is interested in what it was like to be thrown into pure destruction. It's quite incredible to read about some of the great battles (Somme for example) and makes you wonder how anyone could have survived with the shells, grenades, gun fire and mustard gas happening every time you were on the battlefield. It's interlaced with some lovely down times as well, where the serenity of sleepy French villages are resting spots for the soldiers and it makes you forget one of the bloodiest wars in human history is occurring a few miles away. It's a very interesting read.

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Ooh I have that. Dan Carlin mentioned it in one of his podcasts and I got it on his recommendation. Looking forward to checking it out.

Cool, will persevere although I've been reading it on and off since the start of the year.

Cheers for the recommendations @Spoonsky

Because I'm a sucker for alternative history type things and nobody shows that Castle show on TV here, I was recommended to pick up Making History by Stephen Fry (the same Stephen Fry I presume, I didn't know he wrote). Anyone read it and is it worth it?

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Originally Posted by Giggles

Because I'm a sucker for alternative history type things and nobody shows that Castle show on TV here, I was recommended to pick up Making History by Stephen Fry (the same Stephen Fry I presume, I didn't know he wrote). Anyone read it and is it worth it?

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Yeah, I've read that. I really enjoyed it.

Other Nazi-related alternative histories that are worth a look are 'Dominion' by CJ Sansom and Fatherland by Robert Harris.

I saw this one in the shop the other day too and thought it looked interesting. Might get it soon.

Is the TV show The Man in the High Castle? That was a book too. By Philip K. Dick.

Reading a few things at the mo.

The Keeper: Saving Goals and Achieving Them - Tim Howard's autobiography. Standard fare for a footballer's autobiography really. Decent thing to read between calls at work. Probably better than most, actually, but then I tend to the avoid the ones that are clearly shit.

The Bottom Billion - Only just started this but looks promising. I'll probably wait until after my holiday to crack at it properly. It's about how to turn the shit countries into slightly less shit countries, and how to develop the shit out of them or some shit.

Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century I'm only a chapter into this but it is fucking brilliant so far. Can't wait to give it a good go.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

Yeah, I've read that. I really enjoyed it.

Other Nazi-related alternative histories that are worth a look are 'Dominion' by CJ Sansom and Fatherland by Robert Harris.

I saw this one in the shop the other day too and thought it looked interesting. Might get it soon.

Is the TV show The Man in the High Castle? That was a book too. By Philip K. Dick.

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Yeah that's the show. Does any UK channel show it?

I've heard of Fatherland too and it was a toss-up between this and that one. I also have a copy of Bolloxology I want to read after the Fry one, so I'll grab the other one after.

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Originally Posted by Giggles

Yeah that's the show. Does any UK channel show it?

I've heard of Fatherland too and it was a toss-up between this and that one. I also have a copy of Bolloxology I want to read after the Fry one, so I'll grab the other one after.

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I'm not sure but I think it's only on Amazon Prime. Can't you download it anywhere?

You should give Dominion a go too. It's probably the best of the three of those.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

I'm not sure but I think it's only on Amazon Prime. Can't you download it anywhere?

You should give Dominion a go too. It's probably the best of the three of those.

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It's only €5 so I'll get it for after the other two.

Our ISP are threatening to cut people off with no warnings for downloading so I'm going to have to locate a PAYG broadband dongle before I can look for TV stuff.

Oh, shit. I'd be switching ISP pretty soon.

Can you still stream?

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Originally Posted by Hammer

Reading a few things at the mo.

The Keeper: Saving Goals and Achieving Them - Tim Howard's autobiography. Standard fare for a footballer's autobiography really. Decent thing to read between calls at work. Probably better than most, actually, but then I tend to the avoid the ones that are clearly shit

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Does it touch on his Tourettes?

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Originally Posted by Spoonsky

Does it touch on his Tourettes?

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Yeah a fair bit. He has OCD too as they both often go together and he talks about a lot of all that. It's clearly written for the general American audience on the back of his heroics against Belgium in 2014 and explains a lot of things about the basic rules of football which wouldn't be there otherwise. It's a decent read though.

The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty by G.J. Meyer.

English history is something I have only a partial understanding of, so I've set out to rectify that. This is a fairly heavy tome charting the history of the infamous Tudor Dynasty of the 16th century. After a brief section on Henry VII (who by most measures after an improbable rise to power ruled in a reasonably prudent way) most of the book is dedicated to the tumultuous reign of his son, his well-known marital intrigues, his tyranny and his destruction of the old church. It's then followed by short sections on Edward VII and Mary I (each who only ruled briefly) before finishing with a somewhat longer section on Elizabeth I.

It's interesting and entertaining throughout, pitched at a level that I found appropriate with some knowledge taken for granted, but with intermediate chapters explaining background topics (the reformation, the role of parliament, contemporary lifestyles and so forth). I would perhaps have liked some more attention paid to the underlying social trends - the new landowning class created by Henry's confiscation of church property and the new Protestant merchant class whose ideas were spread by the printing press are mentioned but they would have a huge role to play in future centuries that isn't really appreciable here.

I come away from it all with a profoundly negative view of Tudor England. The Catholic Church is portrayed as being nowhere nearly as decadent as one might have thought and Henry's actions are shown as entirely opportunistic and brutal. Living standards are shown to have declined throughout, the relatively prosperous medieval kingdom degenerating into a heavily-tiered society with a minority living in opulent wealth and a majority in grinding poverty. Even the international standing of England is depicted as suffering, with the Crown lurching from one financial crisis to another. This all holds even during the time of Elizabeth, who to my uninformed mind would have at least have had at least as many positives as negatives. But here she's just another despot, petty and cowardly, who just managed to live a little longer.
And yet it would, in a few short decades, lead to the beginnings of the modern parliamentarian system and thereafter to the industrial revolution. Omelettes and eggs maybe? Fascinating stuff.

I hadn't read any Stephen King at all up to this point in my life but I'm really into his Dark Tower series at the moment. Has anyone else read it? I'm close to finishing up the fourth instalment, Wizard and Glass, and it's potentially my favourite so far. It's between than and the previous one.

It feels little bit disjointed sometimes but generally it's ace. I really like the world and the mythology he's created.

Stephen King is god tier, even if he should have stopped writing books in 1995. I dont remember reading that series though

The Dark Tower is phenomenal. Dunno which I'd say is my favourite Song of Susannah feels like the one I remember least about.

Can't go into it without spoiling the ending for Alex but I like the way they're setting up the film.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Magic

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26233572-i-see-you

Bought that so I could get free delivery on my self-help book. Seems to get pretty good reviews and will give me a break from history/serious bookage.

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What a load of shite.

Any book with a cover like that will be.

Have any of you got a Kindle Oasis? Is it worth the extra cash over a Paperwhite/Voyage?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

The Dark Tower is phenomenal. Dunno which I'd say is my favourite Song of Susannah feels like the one I remember least about.

Can't go into it without spoiling the ending for Alex but I like the way they're setting up the film.

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Yeah, I'm trying to involve anything regarding the film for fear of spoiling the story. I do think Idris Elba will be a good Roland though.

I think what I like most about Wizard and Glass is the that it's nearly all set in the past when Roland is still young, and you get more of a sense of what a Gunslinger's role in the world was, what they were meant to be and meant to do in the grand scheme of things, rather than this lone wanderer that he's turned into.

The world and, particularly, the dialogue is really immersive though. I really wish it was a real-life thing to be able to tell people that they've "forgotten the face of their father" when they make you angry. :D

I tried reading the Dark Tower and got as far as some bloke chasing after someone else through a desert and stopping at an old man's house.

I think that's quiet early in the first book? The first one is bit weird really, it's not very representative of the rest of it. It just lays some basic groundwork. The second one is where it really picks up.

It's pretty much the first thing that happens - I only read about 50 pages I think. I've got the audiobooks though so might give them a crack at some point.

I've just finished the fourth Long Earth book. I'm committed now and have to read the fifth but Christ, I wish I'd given up after the second. Every single fucking time it sets up a bunch of stuff, makes you think something lasting might happen and then ends on a wet fart of a finale.

This one has a major event in terms of the series happen and the death of a character who's been in all four and I still couldn't bring myself to give a shit.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The three Bronte sisters are famed 19th century writers with a whole list of classics to their names. This one is the only novel by Emily Bronte, who had a short life and poor health but it's reputed by many to be the best of them all. Set in rural northern England, it tells of the doomed romance of Heathcliff and Catherine, and its effects on their families and associates.
I was taken aback at how dark it is - at turns violent, ugly, misanthropic, stark and cruel. The characters lead miserable lives and go out of their way to inflict misery upon others. Heathcliff in particular is vindictive and obsessed with revenge, not only against his enemies but against their families. He destroys his own and their lives pursuing it. A very long way from what one expects from genteel 19th century society.
One imagines that some of it might be drawn from the authors own experiences, her ill health and frustrations. There's just a hint of the supernatural (verging on horror at times). Perhaps an unreliable narrator. Certainly hints of a proto-feminism and class politics. All very far ahead of its time.

I'm on a terrorist thriller thing called First Response by Stephen Leather about an ISIS terror chap coerces a load of non-ISISists into a suicide bomb threat to release ISIS inmates from Belmarsh. I've not got to whatever the twist is going to be yet but while I'm enjoying it it's annoying how much he's forcing across points that only a moron or a cunt would need to be told anyway.

You're telling me not all Muslims want to kill all the white people? Well shiver my timbers, Leather, you so crazy!

After this I need to get back to some series. I've got one more Long Earth book (ugh), the next First Law book, the next Malazan and some more Discworld to be cracking on with.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

I've just finished the fourth Long Earth book. I'm committed now and have to read the fifth but Christ, I wish I'd given up after the second. Every single fucking time it sets up a bunch of stuff, makes you think something lasting might happen and then ends on a wet fart of a finale.

This one has a major event in terms of the series happen and the death of a character who's been in all four and I still couldn't bring myself to give a shit.

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So I've read the first two, but couldn't bring myself to keep going. Reckon I should just give it a miss? I found the second one a bit uninspiring.

Uninspiring is exactly the word. I would advise you not to bother. I'm going to finish it because I've got this far but it's just a series of teases to things that never happen, appearances of interesting species that don't matter and a load of characters who aren't unpleasant, for the most part, but nor do you actually care about. Too much of it feels like a "What if?" that spends too long talking about the raw facts of the setting they've created and not nearly enough actual story.

I love Discworld so much I'm basically just going to blame Stephen Baxter for it being such a waste of an idea.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

Uninspiring is exactly the word. I would advise you not to bother. I'm going to finish it because I've got this far but it's just a series of teases to things that never happen, appearances of interesting species that don't matter and a load of characters who aren't unpleasant, for the most part, but nor do you actually care about. Too much of it feels like a "What if?" that spends too long talking about the raw facts of the setting they've created and not nearly enough actual story.

I love Discworld so much I'm basically just going to blame Stephen Baxter for it being such a waste of an idea.

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That's kind of how I found it. It's not that I didn't like it. It's that I really didn't care about the characters after the first book. It's a nice piece of world-building, but the stories were certainly more Baxter than Pratchett.

Pratchett signed my copy of Thief of Time, which is something I will always value.

In terms of fun book series that don't demand too much of you, I really like the Dresden File series.

The story's all gotten a bit heavy in the last bunch of books, but the premise is fun and it never takes itself too seriously.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ItalAussie

That's kind of how I found it. It's not that I didn't like it. It's that I really didn't care about the characters after the first book. It's a nice piece of world-building, but the stories were certainly more Baxter than Pratchett.

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I think the world-building and that they're very easy reading are what's kept sucking me back in. And probably the same hope that kept me going with the Walking Dead as long as it did, that it'd turn into something as good as it could be. I've only one Long Earth book to go now though and I don't see it changing.

Reading The Autobiography of Martin Luther King at the mo. It's a laborious in terms of very specific things he does and people he visits at specific times, but that's more do with the book being selections of his writings at different times being thrown together. It's strange for him to be talking about high-end philosophical ideas and then chat for 30 pages about the precise order in which he went to visit different people about a particular issue. The erratic pace would be fine in a normal book but in the Kindle edition there's not much indication beforehand of what you're going to get in the next chapter. It's a cracking read though, and really fascinating to see how his faith influenced him throughout and pushed him towards trying to make a difference. The stuff about his faith and his opinions on the role of the church are the most interesting parts so far for me, actually.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

The scope here is considerable - the entire history of our species. It starts well, and the first few chapters covering human evolution followed by the cognitive revolution and then the agricultural revolution are intriguing and offer an interesting perspective. Unfortunately as it moves on, the author appears to lose track of his task, and the narrative degenerates into a series of dubious opinion pieces about politics and philosophy. (Political philosophies are equated with religious creeds for example.) It's still reasonably well written with some thought-provoking ideas, but as it staggers towards its conclusion, it begins to dawn that perhaps Harari wished he had written a different book. His last chapter about cybernetics and AI anticipates the follow-up Homo Deus which is about the future of our species. That might be worth a follow-up some time if he can restrain himself a little better.

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp

Alternative history this time - I found the premise intriguing, concerning a 20th century man who travels back to 6th century Rome and attempts to prevent the Dark Ages from happening. It's quite short and reads almost like a fable (or a thought experiment) rather than realistic history. The protagonist, Padway, displays an uncommon resourcefulness, having little trouble adjusting to the wildly different society and it's language and in short order inventing the printing press, telegraph and various other improvements. Still, it's an entertaining flight of fancy that lays proper credit at the feet of the engineers who built both the classical and modern worlds.

I'm onto Before They Are Hanged, Abercrombie's second in the First Law trilogy. He's so readable.

With him and Erikson to catch up on I'm genuinely a bit gutted I made so much effort to get up to speed on ASOIAF

Perv: The Sexual Deviant in all of us, by Jesse Berring. Very interesting book. He reckons that a large proportion of people have some kind of idiosyncratic, 'out of the norm' type of sexual inclination/fantasy that they keep under wraps due to the stigmas still existing in society about sexuality. He argues that whether or not is harmful is the indicator of whether or not you should judge someone, because people can't really decide on their sexual interests. All good stuff. He applies the argument to paedophiles one of the last chapters, where it gets a bit more dicey. Lots of studies apparently suggest that giving paedophiles access to child porn does often satisfy their sexual needs enough to prevent them from doing any harm to real children, so he weighs up whether or not you should just let them have it, or that maybe one day they could make CGI child porn. It's a bit weird but seems to make sense really. The prevailing theme though is that while people are more open about their sexuality than they've ever been, there's still a lot of stigma and there's a long way to go when it comes to accepting all the different variants of it. Especially considering how many people do have stuff hidden in their locker.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock. I'm about half-way through this. A lot of the science is over my head but I'm learning a lot and I'm getting the gist of it, which is that the Earth itself has a self-righting mechanism in the same way the human body does (eg shivering/sweating etc), although with the Earth it can take centuries to kick in properly. A lot of the evidence he provides seems circumstantial to me but it's interesting all the same, and I'm learning a fair amount about science and shit even if I don't buy the idea that 'Gaia' is a conscious force, even if it might be homeostatic. I mean, a lot of the homeostatic elements of the human body aren't conscious and are just done automatically, so I don't see why he has to think that Gaia is conscious. It's a bit irritating that he chooses to personify the planet like he does, but it doesn't bother me enough to stop reading.

Lewis wrote a book? The fuck.

:D

It's on the missus' Christmas Kindle.

I'm pirating fuck outta that shit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AD

The last 15% of Reaper's Gale (7th Malazan book) really was ridiculously good. Probably one of the most exciting climaxes to a book I've read. My love for this series is getting to silly levels now.

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I'll be starting #5 soon. Have you read Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy? Same sort of stuff as ASOIAF and Malazan. I'm halfway through the second and loving it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Baz

:D

It's on the missus' Christmas Kindle.

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A war history related book, I presume?

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Originally Posted by John Arne

A war history related book, I presume?

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A Dummy's Guide To Mooching About Hull

Ah, read it.

I still can't get through this first Malazan book. Getting to the stage now where I feel I need to go back and read it again from the start.

Oh yeah I forgot I meant to read those.

What's the trouble you're having, Adamski?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AD

Afraid I haven't. Will be looking for a new series after Malazan so will make a note of that series. A trilogy may be a good idea after reading a 10-book behemoth of a series.

Which Malazan book has been your favourite so far?

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Tough question. Memories of Ice, maybe?

Not a duffer among them though. Or certainly not in the four I've read.

You've fucked up the spoiler there, AD, and you're probably ruining lives in the process.

Get that spoilered @AD.

But yeah, Itkovian is ace. The bit with Anaster was awesome.

Well, I guess that's one series I don't have to bother with.

Finished The Great Hunt last night and I enjoyed it a lot more than The Eye of the World, although it's also made me appreciate the first a lot more as it did a good job of starting the series off.

Other than the last few and the very first one I can remember bugger-all about the individual books. I also can't remember when it's first peak was. Somewhere from 3-5 I would say.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mazuuurk

Oh yeah I forgot I meant to read those.

What's the trouble you're having, Adamski?

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Pretty much what AD says below. There's no structure to it, no indication of time they're in, who is who, what's relevant and what isn't and a whole lot of magic speak going unexplained. It's basically like trying to read a half Spanish half English book and understand what the fuck is going on.

I know I'll love it so I'll try and power through but motivation is through the floor.

That sounds absolutely fucking dire, actually. Sounds like it's all the things that would infuriate me with a book (or a film, as it were, for that matter).

I'm normally the first person carefully trying to check previous entries for a fantasy series on Wikipedia to remind me who the fuck people are and the first Malazan book didn't bother me at all. When you need to know stuff you'll know.

I get why it'd be off-putting though.

Well I mean... how the fuck can a series take a couple of books to get into!? If you said a couple of chapters or even half a book then yeah.


I found Game of Thrones quite hard to keep up with actually, I kept having to backtrack who's who and did what when, specially since I can be a bit of a sporadic reader. So if this is even more difficult, then I dunno if I should even attempt it. Though I'm dying for a new good Fantasy series to read.

I'm sporadic like Maz although when I get going I hammer through quite quickly. Hoping for a bit of non baby downtime throughout the holidays to get the first book done.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mazuuurk

Well I mean... how the fuck can a series take a couple of books to get into!? .

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For me, despite the structure, it didn't. I was there well before the first book finished. He is, for me, comfortably a better writer than big George.

Hmm well, maybe next summer :thbup:

Does anyone know if there is an audiobook of any of the D&D rulebooks?

LONDON (AP) - The world's nerdiest sentence was discovered on an internet forum based in the UK today.

:D

A late contender for post of the year.

Played, bruh.

Having finished The Crown, what from Churchill is worth reading on its own merits?

The River War
The World Crisis (you can get away with the condensed one volume version)
Marlborough: His Life and Times
Great Contemporaries
The Second World War
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

Cheers.

There's also "My Early Life", which is very good.

His account of his escape from the POW camp is great.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It's Christmas, so why not? I may have read it as a child, but can't remember.It has had an enormous effect on culture and I'm certainly familiar with all of the story beats - Scrooge, Marley, Tiny Tim and the various ghosts. So while it's hard to come to it new, one as usual appreciates Dickens' prose, his usual outrage against poverty and injustice and the elements of the story that aren't so ubiquitous.


The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

Brian Greene is a leading proponent of string theory and this is his third popular science book. This one focuses on the various parallel universes that have been implied by modern physics. I found it a welcome refresher for a lot of that material, although I would suggest that the substance of the book is highly speculative to say the least, and probably treated with unwarranted regard. Greene himself makes the distinction between scientific realists like himself who suggest that their theories actually represent reality and scientific instumentalists, who regard them only as tools useful only insofar as they yield accurate predictions. I lean to the latter camp, and with the likes of string theory itself being untested (and perhaps untestable) I find speculations upon its possible further-reaching implications which are also untestable to be a step too far.

Finished the second The First Law book, and it was excellent. Battered through The Girl on the Train since yesterday afternoon. It's good and I can see why it's so popular but it's pretty lightweight and even I, who doesn't normally suss these things, saw the big reveal coming from about half or two-thirds of the way through the book.

Got the fifth Malazan book next, Midnight Tides.

Couldn't be arsed with another serious book so I'm reading 'All Families Are Psychotic' which I'm unsure of. Had a couple of lols so far though.

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http://i.imgur.com/ZTPIN5W.jpg

This may or may not have happened because I stepped on it when going for a piss in the middle of the night (I have no idea how it got where it was). On the plus side, you get my little finger from my 'gammy hand'.

Really shit as I was really getting into the third Wheel of Time book.

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I fucking loved it when Elayne walked up to Egwene and slapped her, a proper :drool: moment as she's been a right sulky cunt in this book especially since they left Tar Valon.

Cut your nails.

The one on show is actually one of my shortest.

I'm not sure what I find worse, the talons on that claw or you enjoying Jordans female characters. Still, early days.

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Originally Posted by Disco

I'm not sure what I find worse, the talons on that claw or you enjoying Jordans female characters. Still, early days.

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I enjoyed the action that was performed, Egwene needed to be slapped down.

I do enjoy Nynaeve though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sir Andy Mahowry

The one on show is actually one of my shortest.

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Why?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Adamski

Why?

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I guess I'm liable to go to extremes.

I used to bite them down really short and since I stopped I always let them grow out quite a bit.

The end is in sight on the Dark Tower series now.

Wolves of the Calla, in the middle section, was harder going than the previous instalments but ultimately was still a pretty good read. I've moved straight on to Song of Susannah, which is a much shorter piece of work in comparison, so I'm aiming to whizz through that and then on to the grand finale.

If anyone has read it:

Toggle Spoiler

It's all getting a bit meta and weird though. I think one of the reasons I found Wolves such hard going in the middle was they introduce and then dedicate a lot of time to the Father Callahan character, who I knew fuck all about but obviously came to realise is a main character in Salem's Lot, which I've neither read nor seen the film adaptation of.

Anyway, in the story the character of Callahan has now discovered an actual copy of Salem's Lot, by Stephen King, that got brought through from alternate-world New York and is wondering why some man from another dimension appears to have written a fictional work that seems to dictate the events of his actual life.

They've now all gone back to said alternate world and, in short, I've got a strong hunch that Stephen King is about to write himself into his own novel before this whole thing wraps up.

By the time the whole thing was done there were some aspects of the "our world" stuff in the Dark Tower that I liked and some that I really, really didn't but he does at least sow the seeds for it really early.

I'm on the fifth Malazan book. It was harder going early doors because, like the fourth, you're suddenly thrust into something separated from what you've read previously. It's picking up now though, and Tehol/Bugg are a very entertaining double-act.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alex

The end is in sight on the Dark Tower series now.

Wolves of the Calla, in the middle section, was harder going than the previous instalments but ultimately was still a pretty good read. I've moved straight on to Song of Susannah, which is a much shorter piece of work in comparison, so I'm aiming to whizz through that and then on to the grand finale.

If anyone has read it:

Toggle Spoiler

It's all getting a bit meta and weird though. I think one of the reasons I found Wolves such hard going in the middle was they introduce and then dedicate a lot of time to the Father Callahan character, who I knew fuck all about but obviously came to realise is a main character in Salem's Lot, which I've neither read nor seen the film adaptation of.

Anyway, in the story the character of Callahan has now discovered an actual copy of Salem's Lot, by Stephen King, that got brought through from alternate-world New York and is wondering why some man from another dimension appears to have written a fictional work that seems to dictate the events of his actual life.

They've now all gone back to said alternate world and, in short, I've got a strong hunch that Stephen King is about to write himself into his own novel before this whole thing wraps up.

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I read the first book and thought it was utter, utter shit. Weird gor the sake of being weird and NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS.

I like King, but that was poor.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spikey M

I read the first book and thought it was utter, utter shit. Weird gor the sake of being weird and NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS.

I like King, but that was poor.

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I've tried the first book and gave up for the same reasons. Apparently it picks up after the first book though....but then, I really can't be arsed to read an entire book 'in preparation' for the rest. I've got better things to do.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spikey M

I read the first book and thought it was utter, utter shit. Weird gor the sake of being weird and NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS.

I like King, but that was poor.

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I didn't think it was shit, but I know what you mean. The first one is a bit strange. It's only a couple of hundred pages though, and it ends acting as more of a sort of prologue to the rest of it to be honest.

How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman

Having read some of the more prominent books from the "Christ myth" point of view, I decided to have a look at the ideas of the most prominent mainstream scholar who holds to a historical Jesus, who happens to be Bart Ehrman. I had in fact previously read some other historical Jesus stuff, notably Reza Aslan but he doesn't seem to be as widely respected, nor is his work as thorough as this in its interepretation of the New Testament.
Ehrman plausibly outlines how Jesus the man originally would have claimed to be the Messiah, a Jewish king who would overthrow Roman rule and clear the way for the new age, representing the Kingdom of Heaven. Upon his execution and failure in this task some of his followers claimed to experience visions of him. In light of this he was re-interpreted as a human being who had been exalted after death by God to become the Son of Man, a supernatural figure who was to lead the armies of heaven in the coming apocalypse.
This "exaltation Christology" began by placing the exaltation after Jesus's death, but it was then moved backwards by his followers to having taken placed during his life, at his birth and eventually "before all ages".
Along the way the title "son of God" became appended, originally referring to a lesser divinity much in the same way that angels are in the Old Testament, but eventually acquiring the much grander implications that we're familiar with today. These "higher" Christologies are known as incarnation Christologies.
Am I sold? Well, not quite. It is as I said, plausible. But most of the above is based on interpretation of the gospel accounts. The letters of Paul seem to indicate that higher Christologies existed much earlier rather than being late developments. Ehrman tries to explain this away but I suspect that there's something else going on - perhaps the fusion of two seperate belief systems, one stemming from a historical figure and the other from a mythical one.
It is unlikely that we'll ever have closure on any of this but I find it fascinating to weight the different viewpoints.

Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman

This one elaborates on the history of textual transmission of the New Testament, outlining how and why what we read today is very different from what was originally written.
The subject is a little more dry, but Ehrman keeps it interesting. Starting from the oral transmission of the material, through the theological debates of the first three Christian centuries, subsequent translations from Greek to Latin and the other languages, he explains how the diverse and very human books of the NT have become homogenised and corrupted by those of faith essentially attempting to impose their doctrines on them. Often this was "accidental" but sometimes also deliberate.
I have never been a believer in biblical inerrancy of course but even from my perspective this was eye-opening. These aren't minor textual variants. For centuries the works were copied by hand by barely literate scribes. The oldest extant documents originate after this, and our English-language copies often derive from the more unreliable versions, translated from a translation. The question is begged of believers - what exactly are you saying is inerrant?

Still going through the fifth Malazan book. Really, really enjoying it now. But for the slow, uncertain start it would be pushing for my favourite of the ones I've read.

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Tehol and Bugg are very funny, the Udinaas/ Feather Witch stuff is bubbling up nicely, Trull I'm enjoying way more than I remember from the other one he was in and the Rhulad story is just excellent.

Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds

Back to some hard sci-fi. Reynolds has the credentials to write this stuff, with a a PhD in astrophysics and so forth.
He tells of a highly advanced human civilisation in the 26th century, on various colony worlds and split into various factions as a consequence of genetic and biomechanical engineering. The story centres around the obsession of a scientist with a long-dead culture and the manner of their extinction. It's all highly dystopian, verging on horror at times.
There are some problems. It's probably a little too long. None of the characters are at all likeable. Some of the writing is a bit contrived - cutting away from the action at times to create artificial cliff-hangers, and having characters withhold information thus making their motiviations difficult to understand.
But as world building it's really good, setting up a universe full of danger and full of mystery that is ripe for exploration. I might not have gone any further but the sequel is apparently better, so I'll get to it soon.

Have you read any Peter Hamilton @Henry?

Or have you read Children of Time?

That's a no to both, though I've heard Hamilton mentioned as being similar.

I got recommended the first Peter Hamilton a while back, been meaning to get on it. Apparently they're quite similar but Hamilton paints a less bleak picture of the future.

Children of time looks better @Boydy, so might go with that.

I picked it up because it won the Arthur C Clarke award so I assumed it'd be good. Finding it a bit hard to get into though.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

I picked it up because it won the Arthur C Clarke award so I assumed it'd be good. Finding it a bit hard to get into though.

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Oh I thought you were recommending it. I'll hang off for a bit then.

Nearly at the end of this Malazan book and it's built up to a tremendous climax. Might just settle down with it and a beer to get a finish. It's interesting to have a war in this sort of book where neither side are really the baddies or the goodies.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Adamski

Oh I thought you were recommending it. I'll hang off for a bit then.

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I've read a decent bit more since that post. It's getting good.

Is that the only thing you read, @Ian?

What, that one book or the Malazan series in particular? This individual book has taken me ages, I realised this the other day. I think it's partly because it got off to a slow start.

That series.

Nah. Probably a lot of my posts in here are Malazan because of a discussion or two there has been in here about them and because they're fucking massive so I'll probably post about a given one a few times as I read it.

I currently have First Law trilogy, Malazan, Long Earth and Discworld on the go as far as series are concerned, and usually when I buy my next load of books I'll buy some extra things as well.

I've just bought Neuromancer, anyone read that?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Adamski

I've just bought Neuromancer, anyone read that?

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I read about 30 pages but couldn't get into it. It was one of them where I was counting the pages to the end of the chapter. Let me know how you find it.

Fuck sake. Ditched Malazan for the same reason.

It's probably well-regarded for a reason though, I guess. There's quite a lot of books I just don't click with, especially novels, so it's probably worth a bash.

If you like the idea of Neuromancer but find it hard to get into, maybe it's worth trying Snow Crash.

It's another founding member of the cyberpunk genre, but a lot easier to read, I reckon.

I'm really enjoying Neuromancer, maybe about 50 pages in. Will add Snow Crash to the list.

Reading Beyond Belief at the moment, which I bought after watching Spotlight.

It's a good read but it's making me really fucking angry.

Reading "The Name of the Wind." Yet another fantasy thing. My mate was banging on about it so borrowed it off him. Seems alright so far.

I needed something to replace ASOIAF so I started the Hannibel Lecter series. Red Dragon and SOTL were decent enough but I'm really hooked on Hannibal and it's vastly superior to the first 2 (so far, at least), probably because he's in it more.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

Reading "The Name of the Wind." Yet another fantasy thing. My mate was banging on about it so borrowed it off him. Seems alright so far.

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I read that and the sequel last year after seeing somebody on here singing it's praises, Maz I think. I thought they were both really good. The world he's created seems really well developed. The way he explains the workings of the various schools of magic that exist, for example. I thought that was really cool.

I'm onto the last book of The Dark Tower series now. I'm still very much enjoying it but it's never quite managed to hit the heights of The Wastelands and, in particular, Wizard and Glass again. I've just been picking at it for the last week or so, I need to knuckle down and power through to the end.

I'm still enjoying The Name of the Wind but the main character is so absurdly good at pretty much everything that it's beginning to grate on me a bit.

Val Mcdermid - The Distant Echo.

Pretty good.

Take that, Hennerz.

1177BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

The Bronze Age Collapse is an interesting subject, referring to the period at the end of the second millennium BC where the old palace-based kingdoms in the Mediterranean and Near East stopped functioning, precipitating a dark age and subsequently the onset of the less centralised Iron Age. The year 1177 BC is somewhat arbitrary (as are all such dates) but I'm okay with that. This is ostensibly an effort to give an account of the history leading up to this collapse and examine the reasons for it.
Unfortunately it's a fairly poor book. There's little effort to provide the kind of narrative structure that usually exists in popular history books. Instead it takes the form of a what is essentially a series of archaeological notes, with dozens of names of various kings and rulers strewn around the text. Some of the vignettes are interesting but together they don't add up to much other than to tell the reader that there was quite a lot of trade going on between the various powers of the time, as well as some warfare. The conclusion then examines the various theories concerning the collapse - including climate change, famine, rebellion and invasion (of the mysterious sea peoples) but ends up taking no position other than that perhaps it was a mixture of these things.
I think perhaps Cline's effort falls between the two stools of popular history and academic history, but is unlikely to appeal to readers of either.

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Originally Posted by Ian

I'm still enjoying The Name of the Wind but the main character is so absurdly good at pretty much everything that it's beginning to grate on me a bit.

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:D

It's good to know it wasn't just me who thought this. He quite often comes across as an arrogant little bastard, in my opinion. I actively disliked him at certain points in both books. I suppose he is recounting his own story for posterity though, so maybe that's his intention as a narrator, to embellish his own legend.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is one of Dostoevsky's less celebrated works, telling the tale of a gentle and kind young man who returns home after recieving treatment abroad for his epilepsy. This Prince Mishkin is intended to represent a Christ-like character and to illustrate what happens to such a person in todays world (or in 19th century Russia as it were). Coming in to some money, he's quickly caught in all manner of intrigue including a love triangle and some attempts at extortion. It's not giving much away to say that it doesn't end well.
It is as one would expect, fairly long-winded. But that's less forgiveable here because there's such a preponderous of melodrama, and less of the weighty contemplation that marks out Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. When he does get going, Dostoevsky is even more reactionary than usual, espousing what seems to be a brand of slavophile theocracy.
It still has its moments of insight and pathos but not one for the casual reader.

Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo

This is a "true crime" book about the career of Richard Kuklinski, telling of his life as a serial killer and mafia hitman. Kuklinski had an abusive father and apparently began murdering people as a teenager, claiming dozens of lives and eventually working for the Mafia as a contract killer even though as a Pole he could never become a member. He also dabbles in pornography and money laundering.
It is diverting in the morbid kind of way that these usual are. Unfortunately it's poorly written, in quite a banal style and with the author prone to repitition of certain points.
It's also based mostly on interviews with Kuklinski which magnifies another problem. With crime stories one always tends to doubt the veracity of some of what one is being told, but here the claims made stretch credibility so much that one comes away with the impression that whoever he may have killed, Kuklinski was a fantasist who became carried away with promoting the role that pop culture had assigned him. His various claims include being involved in the assasinations of two Mafia bosses - although it appears from other sources that this is disputed by those who were convicted of the crimes.
A more skeptical author might have framed this better, but of course the less sensational story doesn't sell as well.

I finally finished The Dark Tower this morning. I stalled a few times with the last book, mainly due to King's slightly annoying habit of introducing new characters and spending a lot of time detailing their backstory when it really felt like he should just be moving the existing story on. The last couple of hundred pages were pretty brutal, story-wise, too. It made for quite a demoralising read in places.

Ultimately I really enjoyed the series though. I've got a few gripes with what I thought were some pretty underwhelming resolutions to certain threads of the story, but overall it was great. I was sort of vaguely aware, without spoiling anything, that the ending wasn't to everyones liking, but I liked it and thought it was quite appropriate.

I hope the film is good. Although the fact that it's meant to be out in three or four months and there's a distinct lack of press surrounding it (they haven't even released a trailer yet) doesn't particularly fill me with confidence. It seems to me pretty obvious that television would be a far superior medium for it anyway. It would work brilliantly as a HBO series, a la Game of Thrones.

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Originally Posted by Alex

I finally finished The Dark Tower this morning. I stalled a few times with the last book, mainly due to King's slightly annoying habit of introducing new characters and spending a lot of time detailing their backstory when it really felt like he should just be moving the existing story on. The last couple of hundred pages were pretty brutal, story-wise, too. It made for quite a demoralising read in places.

Ultimately I really enjoyed the series though. I've got a few gripes with what I thought were some pretty underwhelming resolutions to certain threads of the story, but overall it was great. I was sort of vaguely aware, without spoiling anything, that the ending wasn't to everyones liking, but I liked it and thought it was quite appropriate.

I hope the film is good. Although the fact that it's meant to be out in three or four months and there's a distinct lack of press surrounding it (they haven't even released a trailer yet) doesn't particularly fill me with confidence. It seems to me pretty obvious that television would be a far superior medium for it anyway. It would work brilliantly as a HBO series, a la Game of Thrones.

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I loved the ending. Have you heard how it and the film tie together?

As a whole I think the series was at its peak in books 3 and 4 but I was pretty much hooked throughout.

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/whee...ny-1202390897/

Wheel of Time TV series will be coming.

Sony had better not fuck it up.

Yeah, imagine the disappointment if the middle series ended up being a snore and all the female characters* being tedious caricatures. Oh, wait....

* bar the Aiel, maybe.

I still haven't gotten round to them but they can just cut those out.

Just get Brandon Sanderson to tell them broadly how he'd have trimmed all the shit out of books 5ish to 11.

Made a start on House of Leaves today after having to abandon the Kindle version years ago due to footnotes and stuff.

Danielewski knows how to write horror.

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Originally Posted by Ian

I loved the ending. Have you heard how it and the film tie together?

As a whole I think the series was at its peak in books 3 and 4 but I was pretty much hooked throughout.

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Yeah, I think so anyway.

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Apparently he has the Horn of Gilead in the film, which would essentially make it a sequel to the book series and the start of a "new loop" for Roland, so to speak? I think that's quite clever. It would also give them free reign to change a few things without book readers getting too annoyed by it.

Obviously there is some significance to him now having the horn. It's an important part of his past, and obviously ties in with his ultimate destiny somehow. So by now having it he must be getting closer to achieving whatever the ultimate outcome is right? I sort of see him as being stuck on this permanent loop (albeit unwittingly) until he manages to do everything "right".

I suppose my three main issues with the way things turned out were all to do with Roland's three main adversaries. The fact that he never got a proper showdown with Walter annoyed me. Mordred just rocks up and kills him on a whim and that's the end of that.

You then have Mordred set up as this huge threat, but Roland makes incredibly light work of him. Although he did get Oy, was was probably the hardest death to take out of any of the Ka-Tet members for me. :(

And then the Crimson King was quite underwhelming I thought. He was just this crazy, shrieking old man lobbing grenades off a balcony. Who gets drawn and then erased out of existence by some kid we just met about 100 pages shy of the end of the whole series.

But then at the same time I don't think showdowns with big bad guys are actually the point of the series at all. If you think about it Roland never actually comes up against anyone, or anything, in the whole story that really causes him to break sweat in a fight. Not even close really. He regularly takes on entire mobs (the Wolves) and wipes out entire settlements of people ( Tull in the first book, or when he attacks the place where all the Breakers live) with relative ease.

I think what he struggles with is meant to be more of a personal nature. Like, he needs to go the opposite way a bit and not be as much of a cold, hard methodical killer, as he is. His downfall is the people around him getting hurt of killed because of his decisions.

I agree with you on the peak of the series too, The Wastelands and Wizard and Glass were the two best books for me, with the latter probably just pipping the former as the absolute high-point.

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Originally Posted by Alex

Yeah, I think so anyway.

Toggle Spoiler

Apparently he has the Horn of Gilead in the film, which would essentially make it a sequel to the book series and the start of a "new loop" for Roland, so to speak? I think that's quite clever. It would also give them free reign to change a few things without book readers getting too annoyed by it.

Obviously there is some significance to him now having the horn. It's an important part of his past, and obviously ties in with his ultimate destiny somehow. So by now having it he must be getting closer to achieving whatever the ultimate outcome is right? I sort of see him as being stuck on this permanent loop (albeit unwittingly) until he manages to do everything "right".

I suppose my three main issues with the way things turned out were all to do with Roland's three main adversaries. The fact that he never got a proper showdown with Walter annoyed me. Mordred just rocks up and kills him on a whim and that's the end of that.

You then have Mordred set up as this huge threat, but Roland makes incredibly light work of him. Although he did get Oy, was was probably the hardest death to take out of any of the Ka-Tet members for me. :(

And then the Crimson King was quite underwhelming I thought. He was just this crazy, shrieking old man lobbing grenades off a balcony. Who gets drawn and then erased out of existence by some kid we just met about 100 pages shy of the end of the whole series.

But then at the same time I don't think showdowns with big bad guys are actually the point of the series at all. If you think about it Roland never actually comes up against anyone, or anything, in the whole story that really causes him to break sweat in a fight. Not even close really. He regularly takes on entire mobs (the Wolves) and wipes out entire settlements of people ( Tull in the first book, or when he attacks the place where all the Breakers live) with relative ease.

I think what he struggles with is meant to be more of a personal nature. Like, he needs to go the opposite way a bit and not be as much of a cold, hard methodical killer, as he is. His downfall is the people around him getting hurt of killed because of his decisions.

I agree with you on the peak of the series too, The Wastelands and Wizard and Glass were the two best books for me, with the latter probably just pipping the former as the absolute high-point.

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Oy's death broke my heart.

Holy shit House of Leaves is a masterpiece.

Bought two books. I'm currently reading The Forever War.

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Originally Posted by Mike

Bought two books. I'm currently reading The Forever War.

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I've got that but not read it yet. Any good?

I'm reading Pele's autobiography.

I'm not too far in but it seems good. Bit funny that it's set in the future of 1991

I find it vaguely satisfying that G. R. R. Martin is very obviously and publicly annoyed that the Game of Thrones TV series has overtaken the books.

He has absolutely nobody else to blame but himself.

It's laughable. Useless twat. I've mentioned before that Erikson got 10 Malazan books written in 12 years, and Brandon Sanderson got through three Wheel of Time books in relatively short order. Martin needs to sort himself out.

Speaking of fantasy thingies, I'm reading the third of Abercrombie's "The First Law" trilogy. It's bangin'.

Doesn't he usually justify it with 'oh come on guys I can't just do that I have to write other stuff?!!?!'

Not least TV episodes for that.

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

Nate Silver is best known for his website, Five Thirty Eight, which aggregates political polls in order to predict the outcome of elections. His wider interest is in Big Data and prediction generally and this book is his summary of the field, "the signal" being the relevant data pointing to the correct outcome and "the noise" being the remainder.
He spends a chapter each on some of the areas where such prediction techniques are used - among them politics, economics, the stock market, various sports and natural phenomenon. It's generally quite absorbing, and he writes about these topics in a way that attempts to be as free from bias as possible. I found that my interest in the book varied throughout in line with how much prior interest I had in a given subject - the parts about baseball were a real slog since I don't care for it, whereas those about chess were fascinating.

Finished the First Law trilogy yesterday. Great stuff. If you like the like of Game of Thrones, Malazan, whatever you really need to be getting in about it. It has some unanswered questions and what feels like a sequel-bait ending but obviously isn't because it was written nearly ten years ago. There are some standalone novels that I'll read at some point where it seems the main characters from the main trilogy get some mentions and bit part appearances but up next is the sixth Malazan book.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

This is a short and possibly unfinished work by the famous absurdist Czech writer whose name has slipped into the dictionary under the term "Kafkaeque".
It relates the story of bank worker K. who on his 30th birthday is arrested and put on trial. He isn't told what the charges are, and his attempts to engage with the court are maddedingly unsuccessful.
On the surface it's a satire on bureaucracy gone mad, and perhaps a prescient warning about totalitarianism (it was written in 1913). And for perhaps the first half of the book, it's hard to get to grips with. But as it nears the climax it aquires some degree of profundity. Does the court represent society, the universe, God, fate, or all of these things? K. has hints of all of these things, and what tantalising hints of actual meaning he can glimpse are out of reach, each path he pursues leading to further absurdity.
The ending is like a gut punch. Certainly one of the most extraordinarily pessimistic things I have ever read.

Aye, even though you know how it is going to end all along it's still a powerful kick in the balls.

I've realised over the last few weeks that I don't know very much about Ireland. Any recommended reads?

@GS, @Boydy, @Henry etc.

Roy Foster's Modern Ireland.

Or if you want something shorter and easier, The Very Short Introductions to Northern Ireland and Modern Ireland by Marc Mulholland and Senia Paseta respectively are good.

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Originally Posted by dino

I've realised over the last few weeks that I don't know very much about Ireland. Any recommended reads?

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It's a very broad question. Are you interested in history or what?

Yeah modern history I guess, non fiction preferred

The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh

Welsh has focused his new book on one of his most notorious characters, the violent alcoholic Francis Begbie. The central thrust is that Begbie has reformed, and is now living a comfortable existence as an artist in California only to be drawn back into his old world by the death of his son in Scotland. I didn't like it much. While I can buy into the idea of Begbie addressing his anger management issues somewhat, his development into an urbane intellectual type who has read Elliot and can quote Nietzsche is a step too far. And when his old self resurfaces as you know it will, Welsh draws him as a methodical master criminal rather than the loser that I'd always assumed him to be, giving him a street reputation that he probably didn't deserve. It's all a tremendous disservice to the character and an unwelcome retcon to the Trainspotting universe.
The plot and indeed the other characters are serviceable, a vehicle to explore Begbie's personality. But overall, I fear that Irvine Welsh has simply become too bourgeois and needs a fresh start in his writing of some sort.

I've noticed over the last couple of Malazan books that Erikson isbgrtting funnier without it compromising the overall tone. He's so good. Piss off, GRRRRR.

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Originally Posted by Sir Andy Mahowry

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/whee...ny-1202390897/

Wheel of Time TV series will be coming.

Sony had better not fuck it up.

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Have you read all of these Mahow? I've started on The Eye of the World recently, it seemed like a decent solution to the "epic fantasy series" shaped hole in my life that The Dark Tower has left behind.

I've got to be honest, I found it to be a bit of a slog early on, but I'm a couple of hundred pages in now and it's starting to pick up. The idea of reading all fifteen volumes (or however many there are) is quite daunting though.

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Originally Posted by Alex

Have you read all of these Mahow? I've started on The Eye of the World recently, it seemed like a decent solution to the "epic fantasy series" shaped hole in my life that The Dark Tower has left behind.

I've got to be honest, I found it to be a bit of a slog early on, but I'm a couple of hundred pages in now and it's starting to pick up. The idea of reading all fifteen volumes (or however many there are) is quite daunting though.

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I've done the first three and took a bit of a break.

First took me a while to get into but I really liked the second and third.

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Originally Posted by Sir Andy Mahowry

I've done the first three and took a bit of a break.

First took me a while to get into but I really liked the second and third.

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Yeah, I think this is it. There's a lot of exposition. He fucking loves a nice, long descriptive passage. :D

Not that there's anything wrong with that, I like his prose for the most part. It's just a bit sluggish at times. It wasn't something I could sit and read a hundred, or even fifty, pages of in one sitting, for example. But now they've properly set off on the journey it's picked up a lot. I'll stick with it and report back.

Wait till you get further into the series all he bangs on about is skirts and petticoats.

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Originally Posted by Haystacks Horace

Wait till you get further into the series all he bangs on about is skirts and petticoats.

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When I was trying to decide whether to get started on it or not I stumbled across some giant reddit thread where they were all banging on about something similar to this and I was wondering what the fuck it was all about. :D

The last few before Sanderson took over and finished the series with a bang are a real slog. But it's a testament to how good the first bunch are that I kept reading.

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Originally Posted by Haystacks Horace

Wait till you get further into the series all he bangs on about is skirts and petticoats.

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And the importance of various minutiae of different political systems throughout the unnecessarily complicated world he builds up.

Actually the biggest issue isn't even that, it's that there is about a three-book slog in there (9-11 or something?) where he genuinely seems to forget that the characters we care most about are Rand, Perrin and Mat and insists on pissing about with his oedipal obsession with matriarchal figures that he's about a thousand times more interested in than most of his reason.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but Sanderson's final three books of the trilogy were the best it had been since somewhere in Jordan's first five, I'd say.

EDIT: And per the above, it's definitely worth powering through if you enjoy the series enough to get to the weaker ones. The final (I think it is) scene of the Gathering Storm is just wonderful.

All the female characters have proper cuntish tendencies too.

Egwene needs to die in a fire.

I do love a bit of Nynaeve though which isn't surprising.

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Originally Posted by Ian

And the importance of various minutiae of different political systems throughout the unnecessarily complicated world he builds up.

Actually the biggest issue isn't even that, it's that there is about a three-book slog in there (9-11 or something?) where he genuinely seems to forget that the characters we care most about are Rand, Perrin and Mat and insists on pissing about with his oedipal obsession with matriarchal figures that he's about a thousand times more interested in than most of his reason.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but Sanderson's final three books of the trilogy were the best it had been since somewhere in Jordan's first five, I'd say.

EDIT: And per the above, it's definitely worth powering through if you enjoy the series enough to get to the weaker ones. The final (I think it is) scene of the Gathering Storm is just wonderful.

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A man knows.

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Originally Posted by Sir Andy Mahowry

All the female characters have proper cuntish tendencies too.

Egwene needs to die in a fire.

I do love a bit of Nynaeve though which isn't surprising.

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She's horrible. I don't think there's been a single instance in which she's spoken yet where she wasn't having a go at someone, usually in reference to how juvenile and/or stupid the male characters are, or something along those lines.

I'm not really sure why she's decided to go along with them at this point, given that she doesn't know Moiraine, would presumably be wary of Lan (because he's just a big, scary bastard who doesn't like anyone) and appears to actively despise everyone else involved in the journey.

Lan is an absolute boss. :cool:

I reckon you could easily cut the WoT books to either make it look like Jordan loves women more than anything in the world or fears and despises them. The Aes Sedai and their general refusal to listen to any sort of reason they haven't thought of themselves, for example. Egwene is particularly unpleasant though. I'm sure she has legions of fans of her for being such a strong, independent woman but she's just awful..

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Originally Posted by Ian

I've noticed over the last couple of Malazan books that Erikson isbgrtting funnier without it compromising the overall tone. He's so good. Piss off, GRRRRR.

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Erikson writes comedy surprisingly well, as evidenced by Bugg and Tehol being one of my favourite relationships in the series. It brings a nice lightness to the book sometimes, where it can get a bit grim, and helps us give a shit about the characters. Rarely seems out of place too, which is probably due to his believable characters.

I finished Dust of Dreams last week (9th Erikson instalment) and it was really. As usual, slow build up during the book with a few plotlines which I found a bit boring, but some absolutely terrific scenes and a strong ending:

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Hetan's hobbling, the deck of dragons reading, ublala and draconus meeting and becoming travel partners, Gesler and Stormy, the finale battle

Onto Orb, Sceptre, Throne now, which is Esslemont's 4th instalment. It's okay so far but I'm not sure if I'd recommend people reading Malazan to read Esslemont's books too. 10 big books in the main series is already a lot of reading and Erikson's books are far superior to Esslemont's. The redeeming factor for Esslemont is that he gets to explore some cool stories and races, such as the Stormwall; Dancer and Kellanved's night of ascension; the Crimson Guard; and, in the one I'm reading now, the Seguleh. So probably only worth reading if you don't mind another 6/8 books on top of Erikson's 10.

LOL at Haystacks Harold pretending to read.

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Originally Posted by AyDee

Erikson writes comedy surprisingly well, as evidenced by Bugg and Tehol being one of my favourite relationships in the series. It brings a nice lightness to the book sometimes, where it can get a bit grim, and helps us give a shit about the characters. Rarely seems out of place too, which is probably due to his believable characters.

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Tehol and Bugg were absolutely superb. Iskaral Pust has been good throughout (especially when talking to Mogara) and in this one Telorast and Curdle.

And many of the Bridgeburners were funny enough throughout anyway.

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Originally Posted by Henry

LOL at Haystacks Harold pretending to read.

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Actually I read lots of books. It upset me a bit that you took the piss as you seem a good guy as opposed to GS who seems a cunt.

Anyone tried to write a book?

I'm thinking of giving it a bash as I have some ideas but I don't really know where to start. I suppose just practicing and doing it for fun would help.

Never a novel. Short stories, personally. I'd do a plot outline otherwise it'll be difficult to not fuck up somewhere along the way.

I've tried, it's bloody difficult. Practising and doing it for fun is a good start but there's also a lot of technique and discipline that needs to be learned before you can do it well.

Short stories are a good place to start, too.

When I was 14 I wrote a 33,000 word 'novel'. Since then I've tried to write other ones but usually never got past 10,000 words. It's really hard.

What happened to the one you were writing Jimmy? No, not 'I, Cristiano'.

It went the way of Fry's game, I imagine.

I used to enjoy writing stories at school, but I have the same issue most people have. Good ideas, fuck all by way of execution.

DS and GS could both knock out a decent book. Aimed at very different audiences, obvs.

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Originally Posted by Spoonsky

When I was 14 I wrote a 33,000 word 'novel'. Since then I've tried to write other ones but usually never got past 10,000 words. It's really hard.

What happened to the one you were writing Jimmy? No, not 'I, Cristiano'.

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I've got it sitting there 'finished' in the dark recesses of my hard drive but it's a complete mess, devoid of a proper structure or anything resembling a plot. I'll probably never click on it again. Still, it was fun to smash out the 100,000 words or whatever it was.

I might have another go this winter at something different, having had a very steep learning curve with that one 18 months ago.

The most difficult thing is that typically at about 25,000-40,000 words you will realise that everything is shit and wrong and you need to rework the entire thing from scratch, which needs time and willpower which I don't have.

The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

The epic quality of Russian history continues to fascinate me - the sheer vastness of the place and the staggering numbers associated with its many tumults. And while I'd read quite a lot about the 20th century and to a lesser extent the 19th, I was only very vaguely aware of the period preceding that. So a history of the dynasty that ruled the place seemed a good idea to get up to speed and having read this authors biography of Stalin previously I decided to go with it.
I certainly learned a lot. The barbarism stands out. Peter the Great may have made great strides towards modernisation and been a military genius, but his appetite for torture - he tortured and (probably personally) murdered his own son - casts his status as a national icon in a fairly sinister light.
The brideshows. The palace coups. The dashing Potemkin. The burning of Moscow. The freeing of the serfs. The stuttering attempts to modernise while refusing to budge on the principle of autocracy. The revolutions of the 20th century. Rasputin. The incompetence of Nicholas II. The grisly murder of the royal family by Bolshveik thugs. It's all suitably dramatic and puts modern-day Russia in a more rounded context. The character of the Russian people is different in many ways to that of western peoples. A man like Putin must know this stuff inside out.
My major criticism is that there's a lot of focus on the personal lives of the Romanovs. Lengthy sections describe their love letters to each other, their sexual daliences and other salacious details. While some of this is probably necessary, there's too much and it probably detracts from the social and political programs that were going on. That said, this is the history of one family rather than of the state. The narrow understanding that this work gives me of the latter whets my appetite for more.

Malazan 6 (the Bonehunters) might be the best in the series so far (it'd be this or Memories of Ice.) About 100 pages to go and I think I'll sit and get them read today. It hasn't hit a duff note yet.

Really enjoying Homo Deus right now. I guess it's the point of it, but it really feels like a very succinct description of where we are right now as a species.

Anyone read House Of Leaves? Managed to buy it for £2.81, after waiting a long time for it to be under £15.

Brave New World by Audlous Huxley

In the future, the nanny state has gone into overdrive and abolished all pain and discomfort through the use of eugenics, drugs, brainwashing and consumerism. Unfortunately this has also meant the abolition of family, love, art and much else of value. Bernard Marx (upon whom some mistakes have been made) begins to question the state of things.
It's frequently mentioned as a classic of dystopian fiction alongside the likes of Nineteen Eighty Four. I didn't find it to be quite as good as all that. It's a little heavy-handed at times with several anachronisms (Henry Ford is an object of worship for some reason) and is as much a satire of the kind of utopian fiction doing the rounds in the early 20th century as anything else. But the writing is frequently gorgeous, helped by the allusions to Shakespeare and there is a lot that is thought provoking about the nature of suffering and struggle.

I couldn't get on with how it was written, in general. I thought the explanation of the society at large and especially the Shakespearean stuff was bloody great though.

Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis

Varoufakis was the Greek finance minister for 6 months in 2015 following the election of the left-wing Syriza party to office with a pledge to escape from the disgraceful austerity programs and "debt bondage" imposed on his country by the EU and IMF. Observers will know that after fraught negotiations Syriza capitulated and Varoufakis resigned. This is his memoir of the period.
And it's terrifying. The troika of institutions refused to negotiate, wrapped the Greeks up in bureaucracy, threatened, blackmailed, u-turned and lied. At various points they even admitted that the programs that they were imposing were unworkable but that they were unable to lose face by changing course.
Wolfgang Schable (the German finance minister) is identified as the chief villain. His endgame is to effectively control the budgets of all Eurozone countries from Berlin - he wants to "take the troika to Paris". To do this Greece must be made an example of. His boss Angela Merkel restrains him somewhat and wants Greece kept in the Eurozone but has little care for their well-being.
Others, particularly the odious Jeroem Dijsselbloem (president of the extra-legal Eurogroup) serve as lackeys for Schauble. The French are spineless and say one thing in private, another in public (though Emmanuel Macron is one of few cast in a good light so his subsequent tenure should be interesting).

Syriza themselves are unable to hold together in the face of the onslaught, with leader Alexis Tsipras gradually resiling from his promise to leave the Euro should he be backed into a corner. His actions following an eventual referendum on the proposed offer - which he wins despite hoping that he will lose - cannot be seen as other than a cowardly betrayal.
The Greeks are also hamstrung by their own central bank being against them, and by factionalism within their government.

Varoufakis has many scores to settle both with his own colleagues and the Europeans. His accounts of meetings are of course open to challenge by them.
It has also been suggested that Varoufakis has an outsized ego and that comes across here at various points, but I'd argue that a milder character could not have endured the intense pressure he was subjected to.

It's never less than immensely readable, which is impressive given the plethora of economic statistics. All in all, this is a devastating exposure of the rotten state of the European Union. The personalities portrayed in it are likely to be furious at how candid Varoufakis has been.

Grabbed Ready Player One for the Kindle. Deleted Ready Player One roughly 15% in.

Quite possible the worst piece of writing/art/anything to ever fucking exist.

Nomad by Alan Partridge

A follow-up of sorts to the fictional autobiography of the fictional radio DJ released a few years back, this is ostensibly an account of a walking tour of Britain that Partridge has undertaken to honour his late father. In reality it's a desperate attempt to restart his stalled career and to get back on TV and takes many tangents into Alan's various preoccupations. Partridge is a frustrated, conceited narcisicst with closeted homosexual urges. He harbours delusions of celebrity and good taste but is in reality a regional nobody viewed with contempt by his colleagues.
It's probably one that is suited best to existing fans of Partridge, filled as it is with in-jokes and references to his previous appearances across various media. As a fan myself I found it frequently hilarious, at its best moments illuminating something of the soullessness of modern society - Partridge's Britain is one of corporate chain stores, industrial parks and crippling alienation.

I'm in the last third or quarter of the second Kingkiller book and the protagonist is still a bit of an annoying twat. Given the structure of it it's entirely possible that this will either be justified or that he'll have had some sort of comeuppance for it to make me feel better but blimey, what a tool.

He is a very unlikeable character, proper smug little bastard.

Have you read past the whole Felurian bit yet Ian? I can't remember how far into the book that occurs, but I think you probably will have done. What a load of shite that was.

Yes, I've just got past that bit.

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One of the few weaknesses he has is his shitness with women... and lo! He's taught to be the perfect lover by a fucking pixie. Fuck off.

The only cool bit of that was the evil tree. I liked that.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Yes, I've just got past that bit.

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One of the few weaknesses he has is his shitness with women... and lo! He's taught to be the perfect lover by a fucking pixie. Fuck off.

The only cool bit of that was the evil tree. I liked that.

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That was my exact issue with it too! :D

At least he's shit with women.....oh no, wait, here comes a hundred pages worth of "Fifty Shades of Fairy Sex" to turn him into the worlds undisputed greatest in the sack. Christ.

The second book is really good though. I'm not sure when the third one is due. Soon, I hope. It's meant to be the last I think. Although unless it's about five thousand pages long I find that hard to believe. There seems to be so much more still to cover.

I'm still on with The Eye of the World myself, and still finding it a bit of a slog if I'm totally honest. When it picks up it's great, but it just seems to drag for long periods of time between shit happening.

I was going to ask where you're up to in it but I think it's about fifteen years since I read the first one so I probably remember naff all about it. It's definitely a peaks-and-troughs sort of a series though, even on a chapter-by-chapter basis. That Felurian bit aside the Kingkiller ones, for example, are at last consistently entertaining.

Have you read anything by Joe Abercrombie?

It's a bit confusing to explain exactly where I'm at because it splinters of into various different stories, but:

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They all get split up when a shit load of Trollocs chase them into river and then:

- Rand and Mat have just made it to the big city (Caemlyn?) after passing through innumerable small villages and being chased all over the shop by Trollocs and Fades and generally evil shit. Thom Merrilin appears to be dead but I don't think he will be.

- Perin and Egwene were on their own for a bit, met a man who somehow appears to have taught Perrin to talk to wolves (which is actually quite cool) and then got captured by the religious nutters in the white cloaks. The Children of the Light, or something.

- Morraine, Lan and a very reluctant Nynaeve (who can also use "the power" apparently, all the women can use the fucking power it seems) were just sort of trundling along at their own pace but have just found and rescued Perin and Egwene from the above situation.

So I'm guessing they will all reunite at some point for a bit of a final act.

No, I haven't read anything by that bloke. I've not heard of him before to be honest. Good?

I read his stuff on the recommendation of Lofty and Townsend. He's really good.

The ones I've read are the Shattered Sea trilogy which are aimed at young adults and while they're easy reading they're good and you'd probably breeze through them. Then I read The First Law trilogy, which are excellent. The main characters in it are superb and if you're into your fantasy stuff you should definitely give them a bash.

Thanks, I'll have a look into it. I do plan to move on the the second book with The Wheel of Time, but something else in-between might not be a bad shout.

I started a re-read of the Wheel of Time not long ago, but I've not made much progress yet. Things are definitely sinking in much better the second time round, but just knowing the sheer amount of material I have left makes it a bit of a slog already.

I finished The Exorcist last night. It's really made me feel a little bit off. Not sick or anything, just...off. Great book though.

Dangerous, by Milo Yiannapopodopoulos

I agreed with his stance on the victimising self-pity politics that we see so much nowadays and the danger behind the tendency for people to shut down a dialogue rather than engage. I disagreed with almost everything else though. Which is fair enough, but he generally comes across as a bit of a twat.

Pavement by Richard Butchins

This was a fairly short one - set somewhere in the near future, a disabled and impoverished Londoner who has become alienated by society to the extent that he wonders if he's invisible to those around him recounts in the first person the process of his becoming a serial killer. Drawing heavily from the likes of Crime and Punishment and from American Psycho, it nonetheless gives its own twist by connecting the activities of the anti-hero to the growing inequality and atomisation of our culture. His angry rationalisations and varying mental stability lend things a realistic tone - even if it isn't as disturbing as it would like as often as it would like. If it weren't for a series of cryptic dream sequences breaking the flow between the chapters, this would have been an impressive debut from the writer.

Anyone heard anything about the new His Dark Materials book from Pullman?

I really enjoyed the series as a teen but not sure how it'll play 15 years later. I also can't be arsed to re-read all 3 books and have forgot about 90% of what happened. There was a knife that cut between dimensions, there was a polar bear with a helmet that fought things and the stand-in for the Catholic Church was evil, that's about all I've got. Oh, everyone had a pet animal that they were trying to seperate from the person for some reason? Something to do with the soul and putting it into creating clean energy?

Any reviews about?

Currently ripping my way through Sleepwalkers. What a tremendous book, it really is mental trying to decipher all the shit that led up to WWI, especially when you have direct contradictions between private memoirs/letters and public facing opinions in the big players (and even the little players). It is very impossible to do such a thing without years passing and things being revealed, so I guess when WWIII happens nobody will see it coming. The only people who see these things coming are the lunatics that are hell bent on war anyway.

Awkward: The Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome

It's alright. The science is really interesting but there are parts of it that are like a self-help book for awkward people, which is a cool idea not an interesting read for anyone else.

I'm on Stiletto, the follow up to The Rook. It's good but it feels very middle-book-y and just doesn't have quite the same feel as the first, with Myfanwy not being the primary character.

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Originally Posted by nsd

I started a re-read of the Wheel of Time not long ago, but I've not made much progress yet. Things are definitely sinking in much better the second time round, but just knowing the sheer amount of material I have left makes it a bit of a slog .

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I found all my WOT books while doing a clearout and was trying to muster up the enthusiasm for a re-read but I don't think I can. My problem is that if I start i suspect I'll end up trudging through the massive slog in the middle.

Might just do the Sanderson ones again.

I've started the second WOT book (The Great Hunt) recently, it's alright. Quite a bit of weird shit got thrown in towards the end of the first one. It felt almost like a different book for the last hundred pages or so.

I think this might have been mentioned in this thread before, but the author has a somewhat grating habit of repeating certain little actions over and over again in his writing. For example, Rand, Mat and Perrin are constantly licking their lips before they speak. All the fucking time. I honestly feel like it might have already happened a hundred times.

@Alex & @Ian - if I thoroughly enjoyed the Kingkiller books partly because of the reasons you don't seem to (I really like the main character because he seems generally quite Badass, and because he's the focal point of the whole story*), - will I then enjoy the Malazan books?

I'm looking for some (concluded!) fantasy epic series to read, but I'm a little sceptical to the Malazan books because from what I read about them they are fairly complex and there isn't much of an overarching story going across the books, and no real main characters?







*though I'll partly agree to the Felurian bit in that that was a bit stupid and kind of felt like a reflection of the authors wishes of how his way with women would be IRL for himself... Did you ever read "The Magician King"? It has a similar "geek who wrote a book" vibe about it but much much worse.

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Originally Posted by Mazuuurk

@Alex & @Ian - if I thoroughly enjoyed the Kingkiller books partly because of the reasons you don't seem to (I really like the main character because he seems generally quite Badass, and because he's the focal point of the whole story*), - will I then enjoy the Malazan books?

I'm looking for some (concluded!) fantasy epic series to read, but I'm a little sceptical to the Malazan books because from what I read about them they are fairly complex and there isn't much of an overarching story going across the books, and no real main characters?







*though I'll partly agree to the Felurian bit in that that was a bit stupid and kind of felt like a reflection of the authors wishes of how his way with women would be IRL for himself... Did you ever read "The Magician King"? It has a similar "geek who wrote a book" vibe about it but much much worse.

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There are a lot of subplots but an overall arc for the series does become apparent as you go on, and after the first few a lot of the characters are recurring.

They're probably the best fantasy books I've read so I would absolutely recommend at least trying the first and taking it from there.

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Originally Posted by Alex

I've started the second WOT book (The Great Hunt) recently, it's alright. Quite a bit of weird shit got thrown in towards the end of the first one. It felt almost like a different book for the last hundred pages or so.

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I think the first book was originally just going to be a standalone thing but obviously it transformed into a whole saga, so it can feel kind of disjointed.

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Originally Posted by Alex

I think this might have been mentioned in this thread before, but the author has a somewhat grating habit of repeating certain little actions over and over again in his writing. For example, Rand, Mat and Perrin are constantly licking their lips before they speak. All the fucking time. I honestly feel like it might have already happened a hundred times.

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So much sniffing and tugging of braids and folding arms under breasts. And I feel like I've never known so much about cuts and materials of dresses.

I've finally got round to starting the final book in the main Malazan series. Some of the foreshadowing is making me :drool:

Once I'm done with The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents I'll be getting onto Malazan 7.

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Some of these fights with Rhulad should be tasty.

Edit: Finished The Amazing Maurice in a few hours. Excellent stuff. Got The Last Hero to be cracking on with and then my next Diacworld after that will be another City Watch one. :drool:

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Originally Posted by Ian

Once I'm done with The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents I'll be getting onto Malazan 7.

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Some of these fights with Rhulad should be tasty.

Edit: Finished The Amazing Maurice in a few hours. Excellent stuff. Got The Last Hero to be cracking on with and then my next Diacworld after that will be another City Watch one. :drool:

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There are some pretty awesome battles in addition to that too. It's a good book actually, quite a lot of cool stuff/moments/characters.

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Originally Posted by AyDee

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There are some pretty awesome battles in addition to that too. It's a good book actually, quite a lot of cool stuff/moments/characters.

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Fuuuuck. My memory of Midnight Tides was that.... I dunno whether Tehol Beddict was implied to be dead but I'm sure I thought he was caught up in something I was meant to assume he wouldn't survive.

And yet there he is. With Bugg. In the dramatis personae at the start of Reaper's Gale. Him and Bugg were amazing. I'm very happy if I get more of that pairing.

A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch

This is an ambitious undertaking, charting the entire history of Christianity from its dual origins in Jewish and Greek culture through to the present day. The author has a background in Anglicanism, and while one can always find quibbles (I had some with his assessment of the Enlightenment) on the whole it was remarkably balanced, maintaining a respect for Christianity while not shying away from its controversies. He keeps it engaging despite the subject matter necessarily veering into the obscure at times, and manages for the most part to avoid the danger of rushing past important events (the aforementioned origins are a bit of an exception). I certainly learned a lot - the towering influence of Augustine, the importance of the Chalcedonian settlement, the evolution of the papacy (and how late it achieved its eminent status), the recent conflicts within Catholicism and so forth. A really good overview for the non-specialist.

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Fuuuuck. My memory of Midnight Tides was that.... I dunno whether Tehol Beddict was implied to be dead but I'm sure I thought he was caught up in something I was meant to assume he wouldn't survive.

And yet there he is. With Bugg. In the dramatis personae at the start of Reaper's Gale. Him and Bugg were amazing. I'm very happy if I get more of that pairing.

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Not only is that probably my favourite relationship, but they're also two of my favourite characters in and of themselves. The concept behind Bugg's character is great.

I'm just over halfway through the final book now and it's gripping, quite a lot of shite going down and loads of explanations for why stuff is/has happened. Verging on a bit too much exposition at times but everything is coming together very nicely. :cool:

Following getting into baseball I'm actually reading 'Moneyball' (previously impenetrable as I didn't understand the jargon).

It's a great read as far as the insular world of baseball is concerned, but as if some charlatans are trying to apply this shit to football, and as if Billy Beane himself is now poncing around as some kind of demigod.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Really interesting shit. People join mass movements to smother the feelings of personal inadequacy. I think it's not particularly new, although this bloke seems to be the dude that first talked about it. It's a great read.

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”

(I've recently got into Goodreads which has a 'common quotes' facility, which is quite cool)

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Widely regarded as one of the most prominent writers of science fiction in the 20th century, it's always been an oversight that I hadn't read Heinlein. Of his works I had been told that variously that this is the best and most accessible.
It depicts a future uprising on the moon against its colonial earth-based authorities. Our main characters, with the aid of a sentient computer (the most interesting personality in the book) begin a conspiracy to overthrow these authorities and establish their own state.
I didn't agree with the politics, which are a little idiosyncratic, based mostly on libertarian capitalism but which also seem to legitimise such things as rigging elections, terrorism, summary execution and so forth.
That said, the prose is quirky and interesting, and the unfolding revolution is quite thrilling to observe. Heinlein's quality is such that one finds oneself rooting for the participants despite the above, and also despite a couple of plot contrivances that are used along the way.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Widely regarded as one of the most prominent writers of science fiction in the 20th century, it's always been an oversight that I hadn't read Heinlein. Of his works I had been told that variously that this is the best and most accessible.
It depicts a future uprising on the moon against its colonial earth-based authorities. Our main characters, with the aid of a sentient computer (the most interesting personality in the book) begin a conspiracy to overthrow these authorities and establish their own state.
I didn't agree with the politics, which are a little idiosyncratic, based mostly on libertarian capitalism but which also seem to legitimise such things as rigging elections, terrorism, summary execution and so forth.
That said, the prose is quirky and interesting, and the unfolding revolution is quite thrilling to observe. Heinlein's quality is such that one finds oneself rooting for the participants despite the above, and also despite a couple of plot contrivances that are used along the way.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Mil...ary+Camouflage

Anyone want a free PDF copy?

I have to do a History book review (ugh) and this was one of the options. Downloaded a digital copy from the Uni Library and stripped it of the DRM so I could use it on any device.

I'm alright, actually.

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Originally Posted by AyDee

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There are some pretty awesome battles in addition to that too. It's a good book actually, quite a lot of cool stuff/moments/characters.

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A few hundred pages in, nearly, and this is simmering away nicely.

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Karsa Orlong has landed in Lether, but more importantly so has Icarium and they're seemingly building towards some big shit with him. Mael / Bugg is shitting himself and there was literally a fucking Earth tremor when he set foot off the boat. This is gonna be sweet.

With Baz having a baby I get to buy all the best children’s books I know from work. She’s getting some right belters for Christmas. The Day the Crayons Quit being my favourite of the bunch.

Until Victory Always by Jim McGuinness

Jim McGuinness is a former player and manager of Donegal Gaelic Football team. As manager, he led them to great success in the 2010's, taking them from relative obscurity to win three Ulster titles and one All-Ireland title in a four year spell. This chronicles that period and parts of his previous life. The latter parts are extremely personal, focusing much on the deaths of two of his brothers by way of illness and a road crash.
His tenure as manager was an astonishing achievement yet there have been many criticisms of his methods (some of which I share) including the effect his negative tactics have had on the game as a spectacle.
So perhaps inevitably there is quite a lot of controversy - some biting back at the media criticism of his team, some criticism of the county administrators for their approach (which notably scuttled the teams prospects in 2013), and accounts of how he parted company with a player for providing inside information to a journalist and with his assistant, both of which have been the subject of high profile disputes.
I found some of his focus on the psychological approach to the game to be a bit overbearing - defeats are always chalked up to this being lacking. But the account is frequently exhilarating, engendering a lot of respect for both McGuinness and his players.

Finished the main Malazan series at the start of last week. Feels weird to finally finish it. 3,325,000 words apparently in the main series, which is even more than Wheel of Time. Was definitely worth the time and is comfortably my favourite fantasy series that I've read, not that I've read all that many.

On to Sanderson's Mistborn series now. About 40% of the way through the first one and it couldn't be any more different from Malazan in terms of pacing. Has started well and both the plot and magic system are intriguing, so I imagine I'll blitz through the series.

I think I'll genuinely be sad when I finish Malazan. So much left. :drool:

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Originally Posted by Ian

I think I'll genuinely be sad when I finish Malazan. So much left. :drool:

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You've still got a lot of great moments to come. Enjoy.

Finished 'The Final Empire' (Mistborn Book One) this morning. Really, really good. Some interesting twists on some fantasy tropes, lots of character development (albeit mainly limited to a few characters) and a pretty interesting magic system. It had quite a few twists which were nicely done too. Looking forward to reading the second instalment.

Finished 'Well of Ascension' (Mistborn Book Two). Again, a great book. I thought the first third or so was a bit slow but the rest was exciting and full of twists. Not as good as the first book imo but still enjoyable.

Bought Philly McMahon's yesterday, got rave reviews everywhere.

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

I had reacted with much skepticism when previously physicists raised the notion of parallel universes. If this is anything to go by, the idea is gaining at least some traction in the scientific world.
After the usual primer on both relativity and quantum physics, Tegmark launches into the core of his book - that our current theories imply several levels of parallel universes - those that are beyond our cosmic horizon, those that are in separate inflationary universes and those arising from the quantum wavefunction (the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is increasingly being disregarded). Finally and most speculatively he asserts that these nested universes (and thus reality itself) rather than just being described by mathematics are in fact a mathematical structure, and that other such structures could also exist. In effect this means that everything that can be conceived does in fact exist.
Exploring the implications, Tegmark also runs into what's known as the "measure problem", concerning the calculation of probability when dealing with infinite universes - leading him to suspect that spacetime may not be a continuum (and thus may be granular at some level).
It remains very speculative but I was willing to give it more of a hearing this time. Tegmark writes well and leaves the reader with the suggestion that progress is being made on this stuff - which is probably why it's worth reading books like this every year or so even if a lot of the material is the same.

Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the new Millennium by Bart Ehrman

I'd missed this one when reading a couple of Ehrman's books at the start of the year. Whereas the ground covered in those concerned how Jesus became to be regarded as God and how the Bible has been changed as it has been passed down to us, this explores who Jesus actually was in a historical context.
Though there is a lot of debate about this stuff, Ehrman propounds pretty much the mainstream historical view. This amounts to his being an apocalyptic preacher, expecting the imminent end of the world. After limited local success in Galilee, his message that their rule is coming to an end runs afoul of the authorities in Jerusalem and they have him executed.
Having explored this subject in moderate detail now, I'm still not sure what to think of it. The various criteria used to examine historical sources are applied differently by Ehrman than the "Jesus mythicists". Chiefly in dispute is the criteria of dissimilarity. While he quickly eliminates obvious embellishment such as the nativity stories and the resurrection (despite repeated tiresome reassurances to believers who might be reading that historical investigations shouldn't affect their faith) Ehrman seems to grant most gospel traditions historical status to some extent - the faith healing, the twelve, the betrayal by Judas and so forth. All of this can be disputed - and Ehrman fails to much consider the writings of Paul (probably the earliest) in his reconstructions. To me it sticks out a mile that Paul's ideas are very different to that in other writings, so there's a piece of the puzzle missing somewhere.
This probably sounds critical - it's an enjoyable read but probably pitched too low for me at this stage - I don't need a paragraph explaining to me what a pagan is. My mind isn't made up on the historicity question. I suspect that the answer may lie somewhere in between the various approaches but given the difficulties it is probably best to keep an open mind.

Finished the final book of the original Mistborn trilogy. Very satisfying read. Lots of twists once again, some I foresaw but others either happened differently to how I expected or were a complete surprise. I'd probably say that some of the book dragged a little bit but the character development was good once again. Sanderson's magic system is really interesting though and he fleshed it out appropriately in connection with the plot, as opposed to any info dumps.

Would highly recommend it. Not sure what I'll read next. The girlfriend has got me Elantris (another Sanderson book) for Christmas but won't be able to start reading that for a week or so After a year of basically just reading fantasy (damn Malazan), I may have to resort to non-fantasy for a little bit.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

As a prominent 19th century English writer, George Eliot is often compared to Dickens and so seems like someone whose work is worth the time. This is a short novel and seems like an easy way in, before hopefully tackling something like Middlemarch at a later point.
The story concerns the eponymous Silas Marner, an ageing miser expelled from a religious order and his new life in an unfamiliar village. It's a pleasurable read, and has a fable-like quality, perhaps deceptively so since it touches on themes ranging from religion to industrialisation to social class. The characters are arguably more rounded and realistic than in Dickens, their backgrounds and experiences determining their characters to a larger extent. I was impressed in particular as to how it convincingly portrays another place and time, a pre-industrial England that was rapidly disappearing.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Yeah, it's alright. He's still in his early twenties and there's too much info about him faffing about in Harlem for my liking, but I'm sure it'll get good as soon as he starts doing shit.

I got this for Christmas, perfect type book for me.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....4,203,200_.jpg

I'd love to be the guy who writes books like that. 32 NFL ones to churn out and put in different coloured covers. 92 football league clubs, 30 baseball teams, however many basketball teams, four golf and tennis majors, all the rugby playing nations, all the cricket playing nations. You'd never be out of work.

While the centralized nature of American sports does create this stuff, you also get the best sports documentaries because you only need permission from one source.

The NBA ones are fantastic.

Yeah wouldn't work for soccer as they're all too separate as entities.

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Originally Posted by phonics

While the centralized nature of American sports does create this stuff, you also get the best sports documentaries because you only need permission from one source.

The NBA ones are fantastic.

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There is that, but then on the flip side you have to take the 'Hall of Fame' deadly fucking seriously, so it's not all moonlight lambadas.

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

Flann O'Brien is a renowned Irish novelist, albeit someone I didn't know much about. I went into this expecting some gritty realism about 20th century Ireland in the vein of Joyce or Kavanagh. I was wrong.
The story concerns a young man who has committed murder for money with a colleague. Upon attempting to retrieve the loot, he begins a surreal journey - meeting characters including three policemen who (besides planning to hang him) show him all manner of miraculous things including a lift to eternity, a series of infinitely small boxes and bicycles that merge with their owners. Throughout our protagonist also holds forth on the works of de Selby, a philosopher/scientist with similarly bizarre beliefs. It ends with a twist of sorts, demanding a re-interpretation of some of what has gone on.
I didn't enjoy it. It's obviously aiming at absurdism, something like Kafka. But while the latter seems to have satirised life and the human condition, O'Brien seems to be making (among others) a special point about the uselessness of scientific enquiry. Or perhaps I'm not getting it fully. It is a complex and challenging work which others may have taken more from.

Malcolm X has grown up a bit and now is mooching around with some nutter from the Nation of Islam, out to scourge the world of the 'white devil'. It's a fair bit more interesting than hearing about the minutiae of his hustling days, but I reckon it'll kick off good and proper when we get to the 1960's.

I'm reading Freakonomics at the moment. It's really bloody good.

@Henry did you read that because of the rubberbandits?

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Originally Posted by Boydy

@Henry did you read that because of the rubberbandits?

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No, did he mention it on the podcast or what?

Not sure if he mentioned it on it but he goes on about Flann O'Brien a lot.

Reaper's Gale done and Erikson's consistency in the Malazan books doesn't let up. Brilliant stuff.

Dunno what I'm reading next. Shadow of War put me in a Lord of the Rings mood but come payday I'll probably get something else. And I might well just power on with more Malazan.

I think I'll give the first of those Malazan books a go.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Reaper's Gale done and Erikson's consistency in the Malazan books doesn't let up. Brilliant stuff.

Dunno what I'm reading next. Shadow of War put me in a Lord of the Rings mood but come payday I'll probably get something else. And I might well just power on with more Malazan.

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Some great stuff in RG.

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Beak's death is probably one of my favourite moments of the series. Erikson has such a great way of making the deaths actually feel tragic and that one hit me right in the feels. Trull's a legend in RG too.

I finished reading Elantris (Brandon Sanderson) yesterday. Fair few similarities in the types of characters and plot mechanisms that he uses in the Mistborn series, but some pretty cool characters and an interesting magic system again. It was an enjoyable read but his Mistborn series is better for me, probably unsurprising considering Elantris was his first book.

Next up will probably be The Name of The Wind (Patrick Rothfuss).

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Long and repetitive. Has its moments but I'm not sure I 'get' it. There's a lot of American literature I don't 'get'.

I thought it was pretty dull too.

If you're end a post-apocalyptic mood try Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandell. It's way better than The Road.

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Originally Posted by Kikó

I'm reading Freakonomics at the moment. It's really bloody good.

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Yeah I really enjoyed it as well.

I think The Road is one of the best I've ever read. McCarthy rules.
Obviously not everyone will agree - but the post-apocalyptic setting is at least partially beside the point.

Why is it one of the best you've ever read? Was there a high allegory that I missed?

'A man loves his son', whilst nice, is hardly original. I just got complete fatigue from being told hundreds of times that things were black and burned and that they were carrying the fire.

I thought The Road was decent.

Blood Meridian might be the most pain-in-the-arse thing I've ever read.

Other than Rasselas, perhaps.

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Originally Posted by Boydy

I thought it was pretty dull too.

If you're end a post-apocalyptic mood try Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandell. It's way better than The Road.

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I’m all about The Passage. :eyemouth:

I really enjoyed The Passage. Need to move onto whatever the sequel is called.

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Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd

Why is it one of the best you've ever read? Was there a high allegory that I missed?

'A man loves his son', whilst nice, is hardly original. I just got complete fatigue from being told hundreds of times that things were black and burned and that they were carrying the fire.

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Well, it's all in the execution, innit? I thought it was quite profound and evoked Melville and Hemingway. It's also the most powerful environmental message I've seen conveyed in a novel.

I have Audible versions of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (great read / listen about the Everest disaster in 1996), Alan Partridge: Nomad, and Klopp: Bring The Noise by Honigstein. Anyone want one? If you haven’t been sent an Audible book before you get your first one for free.

I've listened to Nomad as well - it's great in 20 minutes doses.

I'll get Thin Air as my credit renewed today.

Audible really is terrific value - £7.99 for an audiobook every month. Just looking on iBooks the same ones go for at least £10 or more.

Audible and Spotify between them are the best value purchases I make every month. Quality of life + a lot.

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Originally Posted by Ian

I thought The Road was decent.

Blood Meridian might be the most pain-in-the-arse thing I've ever read.

Other than Rasselas, perhaps.

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By Samuel Johnson?

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Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd

Audible and Spotify between them are the best value purchases I make every month. Quality of life + a lot.

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Replace Spotify with google music and I agree (for me).

I subscribe to the economist which is hands down the best mag out there for current affairs.

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Originally Posted by Spoonsky

By Samuel Johnson?

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That's the one. It's diabolical and an utter waste of time.

I quickly got bored of Spotify, but Audible is great. I have rinsed Stephen Kings back catalogue in it’s entirety (I think). Any recommendations for similar, lesser known authors?

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Originally Posted by Ian

That's the one. It's diabolical and an utter waste of time.

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What did you go and read that for?

We read an excerpt in my literature class last semester, it was interesting but not exactly the sort of thing you'd pick up for fun.

Read the whole thing (it's not very long) in English literature at school. He ends up going back to the fucking valley he spent 25 years wanting out of because he's a fanny.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Read the whole thing (it's not very long) in English literature at school. He ends up going back to the fucking valley he spent 25 years wanting out of because he's a fanny.

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Replace ‘Valley’ with ‘Seaside Town’ and you’ve pretty much read an unofficial biography of me.

Fair enough.

I recently read The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas which is a wonderful little collection of essays. It's a great entry (if probably slightly outdated, it was published in the 1970s) into biology for the less-scientifically minded, and touches on themes of philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics among other things. Really terrific.

Neverwhere: Ace
The Secret Lives of Cows: Weirdly calming
Rivers of London: Fun and dumb
The Wandering Earth: Great hard sci-fi

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies

This is essentially an update on the progress of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in light of latest science, 50 years since it started scanning the skies for radio signals. It examines the steps needed for intelligent life to form (the Drake Equation) and concludes that the two main hurdles are those that remain dimly understood - biogenesis and evolution of intelligence from lower forms. It also reviews the searches performed by SETI thus far and concludes that while we've only scanned a small portion of the sky, our capabilities to do so are accelerating and the longer we go without detection the more rare it appears that life is. More radically, he suggests that the field has been hampered by anthropomorphism and that even the focus on radio may be misguided, as it's possible that this is a technology that will have peaked in the late 20th century. Instead Davies suggests that we conduct our search more widely to include such things as lasers and directed neutrinos.
In general, Davies implies that things are looking somewhat more pessimistic than they were and as a scientist (even one at the forefront of such activity) his tentative opinion is that we are perhaps the only intelligent life in the observable universe.
It's an interesting read and a welcome update to the topic for someone who read much of Carl Sagan's output a couple of decades back.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

This one hardly needs an introduction, being the inside story of the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. It led to much controversy upon release.
The book appears to be derived from direct access that Wolff had to meetings in the White House as well as accounts from participants. He has taken the material collected and edited it into a form something like a novel, narrating the story. There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly that this narration is presented as omniscient when it ought to be a lot more tentative and call attention to its sources and biases much more often. Secondly that it tends towards the gossipy and the salacious. There is very little serious politics here.
Unsurprisingly Wolff portrays Trump as a shallow narcissistic blowhard, uninterested in and incapable of performing his duties. What's more interesting is the picture presented of his staff - how chaotic it all is, with various factions competing with each other. Those factions are represented by Steve Bannon (the fascistic outsider), Rince Preibus (nominally the chief of staff and representing the Republican mainstream) and "Jarvanka", consisting of the presidents daughter and son-in law. It's a bizarre and deeply shocking spectacle, the small mercy being that even the participants seem to recognise how unstable it all is, and that it may end before long.
Misgivings about how any of the particulars are open to questions aside, it does present a picture that rings true in general and is essential reading in our current historical moment.

What is it about writing book reviews that makes you forget how to properly format paragraphs?

I said that book would be a novel weeks before it was released. The man can't help but make shit up.

Now reading 'Nomad' on some of your recommendations, it's brilliant. Books of that type are so hard to get right as well but there's a laugh basically every paragraph.

The thriller? That's all I can find by that name.

Alan Partridge.

Oh, right. That makes more sense.

I’m not sure why that exchange was funny, but it was.

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Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd

Now reading 'Nomad' on some of your recommendations, it's brilliant. Books of that type are so hard to get right as well but there's a laugh basically every paragraph.

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I think his books are better as audiobooks. Actually hearing them told in his voice really adds something, especially the really tangential footnotes.

I use Audible every day so don't know why I didn't think of that. Might switch mid-book.

So I was re-reading Lord of the Rings between things while waiting for payday to buy something and was quite enjoying it. Some of the lines are funnier than I recalled (despite the dialogue being very of it's time, what with groups of people apparently speaking in perfect unison and the like) but I'd forgotten that the films made some of the good guys massive dickheads. I reckon at least half of the prominent characters who aren't on the side of Sauron get one act of shitheadery given to them for the films, or just a more obnoxious personality.

Anyway, I'm onto the back end of it now where things are less interesting (and obviously I'll have all 17 endings to get through) so it can go back to being my book for reading on the loo or when I want to read before bed but don't want to risk forgetting new stuff because I'm knackered.

Otherwise it's onto Night Watch, by Pratchett. Vimes. :cool:

I've had it in mind to try Pratchett for a while, I've always been put off by a) hating it when I read one at age 8 or something (I always used to start certain things far too early because my reading age was way above average but my 'emotional age' was the same as anyone else) and b) the fact that mainly weirdos like it.

Would I like it?

I'm not sure but it would barely cost you to give them a bash. I'm a "read them in publishing order" man but if you wanted to give yourself the best chance of liking them you probably start with Guards! Guards! , which is the first of the City Watch books.

They get less outright funny as the series goes on and Pratchett focuses on certain themes and toying with specific sets of genre tropes rather than just laughs but they're no less enjoyable for that to my mind.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate by Naomi Klein

This is a worrying book, documenting how we are in the process of changing the climate of our planet in dangerous ways and how our current economic system is incapable of accommodating the substantial changes required to mitigate this. Klein first notes the behaviour of energy companies, environmental groups and the effect that "free trade" agreements have had on them over the past three decades. This has been to prevent alternative energy sources from being developed and will at present lead to five times more carbon being dumped into the atmosphere by 2050 (including from such technologies as fracking and oil extraction from tar sands) than can be accommodated while keeping temperature rises to 2 degrees.
She then moves on to calling out green billionaires such as Richard Branson, environmentalist organisations that are (or have become) essentially fronts for polluters, and debunking "magical thinking" - proposals to fix the problems through geoengineering - suggesting that all of these things serve to delude the public and stall any real change. Finally she turns to activists (including native Americans) who are making progress through court challenges and other activism. Throughout, Klein ties all of this to her left-wing political perspective.
While the dangers are real, the book is too long and a bit too preachy, reading quite a lot like a manifesto. This is a shame because this kind of thing needs to be read much more widely than it is.

Criticism of the 'magical thinking' of geoengineering from someone who preaches the 100% renewable magical thinking is pretty lol. I agree that kind of stuff needs to be read much more widely than it is, but unfortunately it is hard to find sources that don't lean too much towards either side of the idealism spectrum.

My current pet peeve is cities calling themselves 'powered by 100% renewable energy' when they most definitely aren't.

Alone in the Universe by John Gribbin

This is another speculation on the possibilities of alien life, albeit from a different angle. Gribbin examines the Fermi paradox and the lack of evidence for life and concludes as a result that we are alone. He then criticises the Drake Equation as insufficient, obscuring as it does many of the factors required for the development of intelligent life and spends the rest of the book examining these.
Such factors range from the availability of heavy elements, safety from cosmic radiation (only a small region of our galaxy meets these two criteria and no region of many other galaxies do) to some unusual features of our Sun, the arrangement of our Solar System and the Earth itself. For the earth, those further include our large moon, our magnetic field, the existence of plate tectonics, the dimly understood events of the Cambrian Explosion, and a set of remarkable climactic and geological events that transformed "monkey into man" in the recent past. The conclusion is that while life may arise rarely, intelligent life requires a series of confluences so vanishingly unlikely that they will not have been repeated within our galaxy at least, and perhaps anywhere. It ends with the warning that our species seems unlikely to last and that even without our deleterious impact, our planet is unlikely to remain hospitable for life for much longer.
It's powerfully argued and persuasive, at once presenting a picture that is gloomy and yet starkly beautiful.

Finished Night Watch. Good stuff, as per. This possibly does less with time travel than Pratchett does with the things he's taking the mickey out of in other Discworld books but it's still a good read and Vimes is still a great character.

Moving onto 'The Twelve' by Justin Cronin.

I'm 200 pages into Mandela's autobiography and it's brilliant. The oppression and outright racism they faced in South Africa is just incredible.

My wife's asked for some Fearne Cotton book for Mothers Day so I figured I'd get free delivery and pre-ordered these (in paperback; hardback are already out):

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:thbup:

Got a book on the history of Budapest.

The fact dropping at the boarding gate sure will be embarrassing for those stag parties.

I'm not very smart, and I haven't read it since 9th Grade.

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Wasn't that the point of the book? Mans inhumanity to it's own creation?

I read that on Twitter as well.

In my university the idea floating around is that it is about climate change.

Not that there isn't promise, but this Malazan stuff is hard to get into. I'm having trouble keeping track of all the characters and their motivations in my head. And the magic system is bewildering.

A normal reaction to the first book, apparently. I'm about two-thirds through.

There's a lot to it and I'd be lying if I said I don't occasionally have to dip into the wiki to remind myself what a certain character did last time I saw them but I still love it.

As for the magic, I'm sure there are people who understand all this shit about decks and warrens and holds and whatnot but I've realised that a very loose understanding is all I need.

I'm currently on the Wee Free Men, the first of Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books. There's nothing notably "young adult" about it other than a young protagonist and I guess he pulls the odd punch regarding language or specific details of the story but otherwise it's just more Discworld. Which is a good thing.

I really enjoyed Nelson Mandela's book "Long Walk to Freedom". An excellent, incredible and amazingly told story of his life and his resilience despite the society he was in. Really recommend it.

Next up - The Spider Network.

Decided to use audiobooks to get start knocking down these Wheel of Time books so I've been putting book 4 on in the car.

Kramer and Reading are great narrators, so much so that they make all the female characters to be about 10 times worse than I thought they were.

Elayne and Egwene have gone from marginal dickheads to full on cunts.

Jordan weirdly worships women and can't write a likeable one at the same time.

I may re-read the last three again soon.

The only one that I still like is Nynaeve.

Angry women :drool:

If she'd just stop tugging on her fucking braid.

Lan has some badass moments that you're still to experience for the first time though. What a man. :wub:

Sean Penn's book sounds like an absolute must read.

An excerpt.

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I might burst that's so delightfuly bad.

That reads like it was produced by a neural network

Anyone read The Devil in the White City?

It's good. I recommend it.

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Originally Posted by John

Sean Penn's book sounds like an absolute must read.

An excerpt.

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I might burst that's so delightfuly bad.

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Did you see the part where the woman gets so excited, she shits herself a little bit?

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

This is the first book in a well-regarded epic fantasy series about the Malazan Empire. It concerns an attempt by the Empire to conquer the city of Darujhistan, and the attempts of various other powers - including those within the city, various gods and other non-human races to thwart it. It's a challenging read, opening in the middle of the action and giving the reader little opportunity to grasp what is going on in terms of either the motiviations of the very large cast of characters or in terms of the complicated magical world that they exist in. Results are mixed - in one sense you identify with the characters themselves who often have limited knowledge of their situation. In another it's frustrating to be halfway through before you have a remotely clear picture of what's going on. By the impressive ending - Anomander Rake has got to be one of the coolest characters I've encountered in some time - I felt that I could do with a re-read.
At over 700 pages, I don't think I'm going to do that right now, but it probably would be quite rewarding. And since Gardens of the Moon sets things up very well for the rest of the series, I suspect that subsequent books will be more so.

It's worth saying that your feeling of the first book not giving you a clear picture of the wider story until halfway through basically applies to the series as a whole. One book has about 150 pages at the start where you've got no idea of the relevance and the fourth appears at first to be somewhat tangential.

Fucking love them though. Only three to go.

Anomander Rake is one of the most beloved characters among fans, for sure.

I'm actually reading one of Esselmont's Malazan books at the moment, after finishing the original Thomas Covenant trilogy (very good series). It's sad how much better Eriksson is than Esselmont but this one (Blood and Bone) does seem to have some potential at least.

Coincidentally I came in here to say I just started the first Malazan book as I'd finally finished off the end of the Magician series.

Will I incur the wrath of the fanbase by just reading them in the order they were published?

That's how I'm doing it. I didn't know there was a reason not to.

I've been told the books jump around the timeline so they can be read in some sort of chronological order. I couldn't be bothered with that though.

If you're reading Esslemont's novels in addition to Erikson's main series then the order is a bit more important, but if you're just reading Erikson's series then by publication date is the obvious choice (which Erikson has said himself).

Read quite a lot recently. Read the Millenium series (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), which was decent. The writing isn't necessarily amazing but the plot is interesting enough. Also finished The Name of the Wind, which is the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicles. Really, really good and would recommend. Maybe a little slow at times but it works, especially in terms of characterisation. Rothfuss adds in loads of little details which just make it that little bit more realistic and immersive. Straight onto the second book for me.

I read everything with these things in publication order.

I've enjoyed the first two Kingkiller books and like them despite thinking the main character is a total arse.

I need to find a map, the drawback of the kindle is you can't easily flip back to the beginning to have a look.

Just had an email telling me @Lewis’ book is under £15.

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Might buy one.

Another Malazan book down, Toll the Hounds.

I can see why upon Googling it when finishing this morning it seems to be one of the more decisive ones among the fanbase. I can see why some people aren't impressive about the amount of Kruppe POV but that didn't bother me that much. I really liked the extra depth it gave some characters like Kallor. Not the best in the series but still good.

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And the final series of chapters in Darujhistan where all the stories came together and the various scraps converged around Dragnipur were superb.

Rake. :cool:

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"A Hat Full of Sky" finished. I imagine there are people reading Discworld and skipping the YA stuff. Those people are fools. Pratchett is brilliant. And the Hiver is a brilliant creation.

I'm enjoying the Malazan series but 5 and a half books was too long to wait for someone to ask Just what the fuck exactly is a warren?

Does that mean you're on the Bonehunters? That was one of my favourites so far. You're at the point now where the overarching narrative is coming together more after the first few books jump about a bit.

And yeah, wardens, holds, etc. I have no clue. At the bit you reference is it Paran who's gone, "No really though, what?"

No, we haven't seen him for about two books (I'm reading on kindle so I have no idea of the book names), it was the Acquitor when she meets Iron Bars etc. I'm on the next one now which seems to have shifted back to Seven Cities.

I also started the Malazan books recently. I'm only a couple of hundred pages into book one, but they mention warrens all the time and I'm similarly confused by the situation.

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My understanding of it at the moment leans towards it being some sort of figurative, magic "well" that the wizards and mages draw their power from. But at the same time, they occasionally mention actually going in to the warrens, and even using them as sort sort of fast-travel mechanism for going places. So presumably they physically exist as an actual place too?

I'm really liking Gardens of the Moon though. It's great. I've binned off The Wheel of Time for a bit in favour of this. No offence to Robert Jordan, but I find the writing style in Malazan to be significantly more interesting. I also really like the huge scope of it and all the intrigue and whatnot.

I read before starting it that it might get a bit confusing because it jumps around a bit, which is fair. But I quite like that feature of it. It makes the world feel really lived in right from the get go. Like you've just been dropped into this one little corner of this big, expansive empire with all this history but you need to sort of work out for yourself what the fuck is going on.

Also, it has a in it bloke who's name is "Whiskeyjack". If that's not good writing then I don't know what is.

Yeah my understanding is that a warren is a little pocket dimension that magic users are born with an affinity to and can both draw power from and actually go to. There is definitely more to it than that but I think a basic grasp is enough to enjoy them.

How far did you get on Wheel of Time?

That's my 'practical' understanding of them but then weird stuff happens (such as spoilery stuff at the end of a particular book). I do like the different styles used for different characters/groups though. The escapades of Tehol & Bugg were like having a discworld book in amongst the other stuff.

WOT is odd, I really enjoyed large bits of it but it's not something I recommend to people. It's such a huge investment of time that I feel bad about the large stretches of tedium that crop up before the author switch.

Yeah Tehol and Bugg are great and as you say Erikson mixes it up quite well.

The problem with WOT before Sanderson came in and fixed it is that Jordan became too lost in the minutiae of the world he'd created and forgotten that the characters people actually cared about were Rand, Mat, Perrin and one or two others and a few key storylines.

No Robert that's fine, don't get back yo telling me if the Asha'man are going to be made to turn the world inside out, Elayne's choice of earrings ahead of some political meeting is much more interesting.

It felt like he would take the remaining story, cut it in half, and then spread it throughout the next book but keep them the same length. Those last couple of books though. :drool:

Oh yeah. very good. The Gathering Storm was good too but there was an awful lot of the start of it where you could tell Sanderson was just getting rid of the crap that wasn't required. But the final scene with Rand in that

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was properly good where he's finally shedding some of the demons and Lews Therin and whatever

was properly great and set up the next two books brilliantly.

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The bit in the last book where he goes out to an army of darkspawn and fucking slaughters them without moving too. :drool:

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Originally Posted by Ian

Yeah my understanding is that a warren is a little pocket dimension that magic users are born with an affinity to and can both draw power from and actually go to. There is definitely more to it than that but I think a basic grasp is enough to enjoy them.

How far did you get on Wheel of Time?

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Only the first couple of books. I was finding it a bit of a slog if I'm honest. I'm sure he grows into it, but I find Rand to be a bit of a drip and his whole reluctant hero angle annoys me a bit. Also, Egwene and Nynaeve are both complete tossers.

I'm not ruling out going back to it, but I need to leave it alone for a bit I think.

Egwene is a total bell-end and that doesn't change so far as I recall.

Someone leaked a code for 3 months of Kindle Unlimited. You can cancel the auto-renew straight away. :thbup:

"The Fox" by Frederick Forsyth was really boring. He's just a bit shit these days.

Onto Thud! by Terry Pratchett so I'm happy now.

Remarkably, I know someone who is a semi-regular drinking partner of Frederick Forsyth, and let's just say it wouldn't be possible to be a fully regular drinking partner of Frederick Forsyth without dying.

Tell him to tell him to sack the booze and write better books again like he used to.

Or up his booze. Whichever.

I finished the first Malazan book recently and thought it was, on the whole, really good. It was hard to follow in places, but I expected that going in to it. Particularly towards the end, a lot of shit started going off that I didn't fully understand, and which I don't expect to get answers to anytime soon. Like you're just getting this little snapshot of a very complex world without much real explanation. But his writing is so compelling I can easily get past it, and I'm certain it will all work itself out in the long run.

I really like the way he works in large areas of grey, in that there aren't really any absolute heroes or any absolute villains. Not as I see it, anyway. The guy who seemed to be the villain at the beginning of the book ends it seeming like a fairly reasonable character, and on the reverse you're left wondering who some of the more ostensibly "good" characters really are and what the fuck they're actually up to.

It being compelling while am not sure if I'm meant to not understand stuff was basically where I was with it. His characters are excellent too, for the most part. I can't think of any off the top of my head that when you realise you're with them for a chapter that you go "Uuuggghhh."

I'm just near the end of the first Warhammer novel I've ever read and it's decent, though it has a premise of basically a Dirty Dozen / Suicide Squad but-Warhammer thing, the only problem being that barely anybody in the group seems that much of a wrong'un and the protagonist is a fairly typical reluctant hero / leader type. Decent enough.

I've got Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Fry's Mythos winging their way toward me and then I'd better get onto the penultimate Malazan book.

Lookin for some book recs in the following categories if anyone has any ideas:

1) An in-depth, technical discussion about health-care policy, from the US perspective if possible (asking a British messageboard for this is suboptimal but whatevz). I read this and it was alright, but it was a lot of anecdotes and claims without much substance. Fundamentally I don't think I'm any better equipped to contribute to a discussion about healthcare policy than I was before reading it.
2) A discussion on international trade - interested in both case studies-type reading as well as attempts to formalize arguments into something broader.
3) Something about the Bolshevik revolution and the split between Trotsky and Lenin.
4) Something about the early days of the EU. Not EEC early, more 90's and 00's stuff. Interested in the political and economic side of things.
5) I re-read Piketty's Capital with more seriousness and I still think it's fantastic stuff. I don't think I've ever read a book that makes something that academic so accessible. I'd love to read something similar; doesn't have to make similar arguments or come to similar conclusions at all, just as long as it dives relentlessly into some topic and argues a thesis.

EDIT: Trotsky not Leo fucking Tolstoy

What has Ireland done to you?

We do love a bit of Trotsky.

I'm onto Dust of Dreams in my Malazanathon (or You Just Thought They Were Dead as I now think of this series) and I've really started to lose interest, the previous book (Toll the Hounds?) was a real struggle to get through.

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Originally Posted by mugbull

3) Something about the Bolshevik revolution and the split between Trotsky and Lenin.

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What split? Do you mean Trotsky and Stalin, or are you referring to events prior to 1917? I can probably recommend all sorts of stuff. Read Trotsky's own History of the Russian Revolution for starters, though obviously bear in mind what it's perspective is. Then maybe read A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes.

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Originally Posted by mugbull

5) I re-read Piketty's Capital with more seriousness and I still think it's fantastic stuff. I don't think I've ever read a book that makes something that academic so accessible. I'd love to read something similar; doesn't have to make similar arguments or come to similar conclusions at all, just as long as it dives relentlessly into some topic and argues a thesis.

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Any topic or do you mean economics? Try anything by Yanis Varoufaikis for that - there's one about European economic history (this probably satisfies number 4 on your list as well) one about US economic history and another about his failed attempts to negotiate a reverse to EU austerity being forced upon Greece.

If big histories are what you're after, there are two volumes by Francis Fukuyama worth reading - The Origins of Political Order and then Political Order and Political Decay. Avoid his earlier shite about The End of History. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel impressively explains much of human history.

Or on a philosophical tangent, read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which passionately argues that we should all kill ourselves. Seriously.
Or Alone in the Universe which more or less convinced me last year that there are no ET's out there.

There's a shitload of pop science stuff I could go through, as well as the history of religion and that kind of thing, but possibly straying too far from your requirement.

Anyway, I've read this lot since my last post in here.

Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World by Philip Jenkins
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A Few Bloody Noses: The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution by Robert Harvey
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals by Neil Faulkner
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future by Yanis Varoufaikis
When Google met Wikileaks by Julian Assange
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy by Yanis Varoufaikis
Amongst Women by John McGahern
The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics by Roger Penrose

Currently I'm on Middlemarch.

Ah Varoufakis.

"Here's how the EU raped Greece"

"Here is why we should most definitely keep the EU about and make it even more powerful"

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I'm onto Dust of Dreams in my Malazanathon (or You Just Thought They Were Dead as I now think of this series) and I've really started to lose interest, the previous book (Toll the Hounds?) was a real struggle to get through.

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One of the best scenes of the series is in that book but it was also one of my least favourite books iirc. As usual tho it gets better the further you get in.

As always Toll the Hounds has some really good stuff but it did feel a little like a deep breath before settling into finishing the series.

Which scene, @AyDee? I'm gonna guess something in Darujhistan at the end?

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Originally Posted by Ian

As always Toll the Hounds has some really good stuff but it did feel a little like a deep breath before settling into finishing the series.

Which scene, @AyDee? I'm gonna guess something in Darujhistan at the end?

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Was referring to Dust of Dreams.

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Hetan's hobbling. Probably one of the most harrowing things I've read in fantasy. The big battle at the end of the book is pretty sick too.

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Originally Posted by Henry

What split? Do you mean Trotsky and Stalin, or are you referring to events prior to 1917? I can probably recommend all sorts of stuff. Read Trotsky's own History of the Russian Revolution for starters, though obviously bear in mind what it's perspective is. Then maybe read A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes.



Any topic or do you mean economics? Try anything by Yanis Varoufaikis for that - there's one about European economic history (this probably satisfies number 4 on your list as well) one about US economic history and another about his failed attempts to negotiate a reverse to EU austerity being forced upon Greece.

If big histories are what you're after, there are two volumes by Francis Fukuyama worth reading - The Origins of Political Order and then Political Order and Political Decay. Avoid his earlier shite about The End of History. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel impressively explains much of human history.

Or on a philosophical tangent, read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which passionately argues that we should all kill ourselves. Seriously.
Or Alone in the Universe which more or less convinced me last year that there are no ET's out there.

There's a shitload of pop science stuff I could go through, as well as the history of religion and that kind of thing, but possibly straying too far from your requirement.

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Thanks for the Russian recommendations. I'll take a look at Varoufaikis, I've always liked his positions without really knowing too much about him.

I've kind of gotten tired of the 'big histories' tbh - I've read all of the ones you suggested and they were cool at first but the more of them I read the more wishy-washy they seem. A lot of them seem to say the same things, too, and I feel like i've already internalized everything Fukuyama or Diamond would say.

Tried to give that The Secret Footballer book a go but the font was so large I felt like I was reading something for someone in Year 5. I carried on but then I realised they were just his articles that I'd already read a few years ago anyway so I gave up.

I read one of his last year, although there were lots of lol anecdotes about obviously Tony Pulis, the rest of it was rambling bollocks.

He milked it too much. Should have revealed who he was many years ago when people actually gave a solitary fuck.

Ive started reading 48 Laws of Power. It is amazing.

I'm listening to "The coddling of the American Mind" and it's BRILLIANT. Really recommend it.

This is for books mate.

But yeah, it's good

His butler reads it to him.

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Originally Posted by SincereTheRebel

Ive started reading 48 Laws of Power. It is amazing.

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This sounded like an absurd book just judging by the title, but then I looked it up on wikipedia:

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The book is a bestseller,[2][3] selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States,[4] and is popular with prison inmates and celebrities.[4][5][6][7][8][9]

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Lmao

Fits my needs then. Im a minor celebrity around here.

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Originally Posted by Disco

His butler reads it to him.

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She's great.

So 2019.

Read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. It was decent but Stephen Fry's Greek one was a better go at the same sort of thing.

Malazan Dust of Dreams up next. Nearly at the end now. (Well, about 2000 pages away but whatever.)

I'm still on with book two of Malazan. I'm probably about half way through. Felasin doesn't have much luck in life, does she?

I just read the Karla trilogy, and I have to say that Le Carre is an absolute master.

The second one is a little bit odd, comparatively, but I think it might actually hold up well on re-reads. I wasn't quite sure where it was going or how it fit into anything until I had the real big picture in front of me. The final stanza of Book 3 is very nice as well. However, they all pale in comparison to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which must be the best spy novel ever written.

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Originally Posted by ItalAussie

I just read the Karla trilogy, and I have to say that Le Carre is an absolute master.

The second one is a little bit odd, comparatively, but I think it might actually hold up well on re-reads. I wasn't quite sure where it was going or how it fit into anything until I had the real big picture in front of me. The final stanza of Book 3 is very nice as well. However, they all pale in comparison to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which must be the best spy novel ever written.

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Have you read any Eric Ambler?

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Originally Posted by Boydy

Have you read any Eric Ambler?

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Nope, but if it's of a similar vein, I'm definitely up for it.

Similar-ish, yeah. Not usually proper professional spies working for security services, more regular joes who end up embroiled in shady intrigue. The Mask of Dimitrios is brilliant.

Just finished the second part of The Way of Kings and it was very, very good. The last third of the book was excellent tbh, Sanderson does his reveals well and it becomes a real page turner when you're getting lots of twists and turns.

Some great characters arcs too, altho not totally convinced by Sadeas's character arc.

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Kaladin is an absolute boss.

Compelling fight scenes too. Before this, I was reading some fantasy that my dad gave me (The Faithful and The Fallen series) but that really does pale in comparison to better writing so think I'll stick with the good stuff.

I need to give some of Sanderson's stuff a try at some point. Once I've got Malazan and Discworld done and dusted I'll need a new series to get stuck into so maybe one of his will be the way to go. I've heard a lot of good things and I've discussed me thoughts on his trilogy to cap of The Wheel of Time before.

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Originally Posted by Ian

I need to give some of Sanderson's stuff a try at some point. Once I've got Malazan and Discworld done and dusted I'll need a new series to get stuck into so maybe one of his will be the way to go. I've heard a lot of good things and I've discussed me thoughts on his trilogy to cap of The Wheel of Time before.

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Would definitely recommend him. Nothing will ever beat Malazan for me but it is nice to be able to grasp the magic systems from time to time and Sanderson excels when it comes to magic systems (he has a science background so everything has logic to it).

Where to start with Sanderson is a tough one but I'd probably say the Mistborn series is as good a place as any.

I'll eventually read The Wheel of Time when I find myself with a spare few years...

Yeah the magic in Malazan probably does make sense but I only have a loose grasp of how holds, decks, warrens etc. all work.

Luckily you only need a loose grasp because it's fairly clear when Quick Ben is donning it.

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And by extension the eye-opening demonstration of Icarium's power when Ben is getting his arse handed to him.

Dust of Dreams, a couple of hundred pages in, is off to a slightly odd start.

I only got about half way through that one, partly because I'd read the entire series back to back but also because it spends ages on people who I found it very hard to give a shit about.

It's doing an awful lot of jumping around between a lot of new or very minor characters.

You get a couple of pages of Tehol and Bugg and go "Aha, here we g-..." then it cuts to some kids dying in a desert. Then back to Fiddler or Tavore and again you think stuff is about to happen and it does but it then cuts away again.

It's really not apparent what bearing any of it will actually have on the plot as a whole, which makes it very difficult to care about. I really just want them to get to whatever the macguffin is they're going towards, I struggled to be interested in all the disparate groups of assholes in various stages of misery along the way.

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Originally Posted by Disco

It's really not apparent what bearing any of it will actually have on the plot as a whole, which makes it very difficult to care about. I really just want them to get to whatever the macguffin is they're going towards, I struggled to be interested in all the disparate groups of assholes in various stages of misery along the way.

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So I'm only a couple of hundred pages in.

They've had Fiddler's reading of the deck, then faffed about a bit, when I finished up on the train this morning it was partway through Tavore being typically vague about what the Bonehunters are up to next and I wish they'd just say what exactly she's up to at this point.

A reddit poll to determine the best order had Dust of Dreams as the weakest of the series, just below Gardens of the Moon and then it's a bit of a jump up to The Crippled God in 8th so while it doesn't sound like he necessarily maintain his standard all the way to the end of the final book is on a par with the other ones near it in that poll (Midnight Tides and Toll the Hounds) I'll be happy enough.

This is a very slow start though. Hopefully once the various threads start to come together as they tend to do in Malazan books it'll pick up.

Another thing for me is that the actual Malazan Empire stuff seems to have been largely abandoned. Now I expect that will factor into what Tavore is up to but still.

While we're talking Malazan, I'm probably in the final third of Deadhouse Gates now and it's been excellent so far. I've definitely enjoyed it more than Gardens of the Moon, which itself was pretty great.

My only real issue is that, whilst all the story threads are pretty entertaining, the bits with Duiker and Malazan 7th Army and their massive, impossible escape trek through the desert are so good that I always just want to get back to those bits.

He writes about large-scale military exchanges probably better than anyone else I've come across. It's always properly riveting stuff whenever they head into battle.

Dust of Dreams is starting to feel a lot like a "Right I need to get all this together before the finale"-type of book. I can't say I'm not enjoying it still because I like the way he writes the characters and the characters are excellent but it feels like there is a shitload rapidly being bundled together and that's why we're jumping about. There's now a bit more clarity about where the rest of the book is going to go but the way this is so far does make me curious about what The Chained God is going to be like.

Also it's frustrating that we're in Letheras but not getting more Tehol and Bugg. :(

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Originally Posted by Alex

While we're talking Malazan, I'm probably in the final third of Deadhouse Gates now and it's been excellent so far. I've definitely enjoyed it more than Gardens of the Moon, which itself was pretty great.

My only real issue is that, whilst all the story threads are pretty entertaining, the bits with Duiker and Malazan 7th Army and their massive, impossible escape trek through the desert are so good that I always just want to get back to those bits.

He writes about large-scale military exchanges probably better than anyone else I've come across. It's always properly riveting stuff whenever they head into battle.

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The Chain of Dogs stuff is superb and you're right about the military exchanges too. Where the lore sometimes gets a little cumbersome and pool of characters can be unwieldy his writing for fights (either big military ones or scraps between two people) are always excellent along with the characters / dialogue.

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Originally Posted by Ian

The Chain of Dogs stuff is superb and you're right about the military exchanges too. Where the lore sometimes gets a little cumbersome and pool of characters can be unwieldy his writing for fights (either big military ones or scraps between two people) are always excellent along with the characters / dialogue.

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It really is excellent. The further into it I read the less I see it having a happy ending, unfortunately. But the way he writes the about the various exchanges is brilliant. It's never unbelievable that they live to fight another day either, because you really do buy into the Malazan army as this well oiled, military machine that always has a plan.

I really like how he weaves magic into the military exchanges too. Whenever the mages or warlocks get involved it's never just some magical, deus ex machina that comes out of nowhere and neatly resolves an impossible situation. He kind of paints it more as this often pretty unpredictable, sometimes quite horrifying aspect of war where they're sort of lobbing these magical weapons of mass destruction at each other and seeing who is left standing at the end of it all.

The best example of this so far for me probably being in the beginning first book when they have all the mages attack the floating fortress (I forget what it's called now) that Annomander Rake lives in and, in the ensuing exchange of magic, end up accidentally wiping out a massive chunks of their own army when they get caught in the crossfire.

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Originally Posted by Alex

It really is excellent. The further into it I read the less I see it having a happy ending, unfortunately. But the way he writes the about the various exchanges is brilliant. It's never unbelievable that they live to fight another day either, because you really do buy into the Malazan army as this well oiled, military machine that always has a plan.

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I think it's to some extent because battles aren't being won by Hero McPlotarmour murdering a load of people by him or herself. Sure you've got guys like Fiddler and Quick Ben who are an important part of any battles they're in and similar characters for other factions but not too many Big Damn Hero moments.

@Ian

I've finished Deadhouse Gates. What a fantasic read.

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The conclusion of the Chain of Dogs strand was both magnificent and horrifying. The endings for Coltaine and Duiker were properly heartbreaking. :(

That dickhead High Fist too, not only leaving Coltaine to die but then getting tricked into surrending his entire army to the rebels. Who then proceeded to nail all 10,000 of them to trees and leave them to die. :|

The Felesin stuff was prettty interesting I guess. It'll be interesting to see where that goes now, given that she's now the reborn version of the magical rebel leader and about to face off agaist her own sister, who's coming to fuck shit up in the name of the Empire. She needs to stop being a cunt to Heboric all the time though.

The only stuff that ultimately felt a bit pointless was the Kalam and Fiddler stuff. Particularly Kalam, because he just decides (I think) he doesn't want to kill the Empress anymore and then Shadowthrone (who I think is the old Emperor, who was killed by the current Empress, but now somehow reincarnated as a sort of evil God? I'm very unclear on this part of it all!) just turns up and magically transports him off to safety.

One of the things I'm most looking forward to in future books (assuming they develop it) though is the ongoing "World's Greatest Bromance" between Mappo and Icarium. :cool:

Just you wait until you meet Tehol and Bugg. :drool:

Mappo and Icarium is good. Tehol and Bugg is amazing. And genuinely very funny.

Dust of Dreams has a really weird structure. I think when I skimmed the foreword he says it's not your usual novel or whatever but this is just a bit strange. For the penultimate book I was expecting a bit more focus and shuffling of characters together for whatever the final things are going to be in The Crippled God.

I am finally getting to a point in DoD where I'm actually keen to read more of it. It's only taken 900 pages.

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I'm not sure if I ought to have worked out that the ghost is Icarium but I still find that whole section a bit odd. I think I'd suspected (or it outright tells you? I've already forgotten) that they weren't a group so much as some odd collective but... yeah.

I feel like in the last fifth or so of the penultimate book the ante should be being upped and not me reading it now getting into it but wondering what the fuck is going on with some parts.

The last book must either be super busy or just leave half the threads with no conclusion. Unless lots of the stories are just supposed to be background colour and not have any proper resolution.

Did you say you haven't finished Dust of Dreams?

If one thing that's just happened where I'm at is about to be explained how I think it is then I think a bunch of characters are about to be herded together here (that was happening to an extent in Toll the Hounds to an extent as well) toward whatever the climax in The Crippled God is going to look like.

EDIT: It's also interesting how mixed a reception The Crippled God seems to get when you look at rankings, reviews, etc. Everything from "don't even bother reading this even if you're read the first 9" to "this was a perfect way to end the series." Presumably the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

My kindle tells me I got 55% of the way through before all those miserable tribes doing miserable things to each other drove me away.

At the very business end of Dust of Dreams now.

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I've got a big exciting battle on the go where the Malazans / Bonehunters are once again getting to be shown to be proper hard bastards but unless I've missed something I'm not exactly sure WHY this battle is happening yet....

Still, battles in these books are always written well so I'm enjoying it.

How many of these books are there?

Ten of the main series. There are other, related series that I've no idea if I'm going to bother with, they're not essential to the story anyway.

This radio thing doing the rounds is pretty good (go from about twenty minutes). The woman wrote a book about how the Victorians started executing men for being gay, which obviously informs prejudice today and blah blah blah, and which is obviously getting praise all over. Then matey blows a big hole in it and she tries to 'Well yes but...' her way through it.

Watched that earlier. Lol at her.

Right, that's Dust of Dreams done and winging it's way towards me soon will be the finale. DoD ended with more of what Erikson's good at and pulled some of the random stuff together. I'm still not sure what it's all doing there or why certain things happen but hopefully they'll be explained in The Crippled God.

I also started the Luther book which is a prequel and it's actually quite engaging. Not the most complex writing but he adds extra layers to the characters that he doesn't get to in the short TV series.

Luther: The Calling is decent but when you know exactly where it ends it does take some of the tension out of it. Decent though and whereas watching the first series you basically just got told that Henry Madsen (the guy Luther lets fall in the very first scene) is a bit of a wrong'un it's in the book you learn what a proper nutter he was. I think it loses something from not having him and Luther get a proper interrogation-style chat on the go as I liked those bits a lot in the show, more so than Luther magically realising the killer must be mimicking deaths from 1760s literature because he eats his Big Mac before his fries or whatever.

Onto Unseen Academicals now and I've not got very many Discworld books left which makes me a bit sad.

I thought they petered out a bit with the last couple of books. Going Postal was the last really good one for me.

I like Making Money a lot but I think the Tiffany Aching books are more consistent than the non-YA ones by the time he was writing them in turns.

Unseen Academicals finished. I enjoyed it because I just like how Pratchett wrote and the Discworld in general but it's probably the least I've laughed reading any of his books. Only 4 Discworlds to go now.

Started The Crippled God this morning on the train. In a radical change of pace for the opening of a Malazan book I'm about 6 pages in and I either recognise all the characters so far or at least know what story thread they're part of!

Did a load of reading last week and polished off the main Malazan series plus the three Path to Ascendency books. Crippled God was a thousand times better than the previous awful trudge of a book and on the whole he did a great job of pulling the relevant plot threads together into a good ending. My two big gripes with the series remain though, the amount of pointless shit that had very little bearing on anything (try counting the number of plot strands that ended up leading nowhere) and would it have killed him to just explain a few things every now and again or been slightly less allergic to letting some of the main players get any page time.

Path to Ascendency I highly recommend for anyone who liked the main series, it makes some of the stuff you've already read about make a lot more sense.

Yeah, I thought Dust of Dreams sorted itself out slightly right at the back end but there was too much mystery and set-up for other things and not enough shit going down for any book in a series, let alone a penultimate one. Crippled God is significantly better so far. And with some of the stuff I know / assume is coming there's plenty left to look forward to.

If you're looking for more fantasy stuff with that out of the way I can recommend the First Law trilogy if I haven't done that previously.

I'll check that out once I'm done with the other Esslemont books (in the probably vain hope that someone tells us what the hell went on with Laseen and any tiny bits of Dassem I can get)

Let me know how all the Esselmont ones are as I was undecided whether I wanted to dig into all of those.

The three Path to Ascendency books I can already recommend, it's basically the Empire origin story. I'm not loving the others quite as much, possibly as they're one-shots rather than being part of a series but they are interesting in that they fill in bits of the background the main series either leaves out or glosses over. If you're interested in what went on in the Empire after the main series went elsewhere then I reckon you'll like them.

Today I learned that Steve Bruce has written three novels, and if this review is anything to go by they are brilliant:
https://www.balls.ie/football/steve-bruce-novel-293169

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Harper Lee has famously only published one novel in her lifetime. Well, she can eat shit because Steve Bruce has published three.

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I mean she did two but still, Brucey's won that one.

Still powering through The Crippled God. Yedan Derryg. :drool:

Also lol'd reading this exchange on the train:

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“You stand before a god! Speak your eloquence for all posterity. Be Profound!"

"Profound ... huh." Temper was silent for a long moment, studying the cobbles of the alley mouth. And then he lifted his helmed head faced Shadowthrone, and said "Fuck off.”

Into the last third of The Crippled God now and we're definitely into the realms of:

https://ruthseverewx.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/jr.jpg

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It was obvious as soon as the thing happened in Dust of Dreams that Quick Ben wasn't going down unseen like some fucking chump but it was still a badass moment when the Forkrul Assail stops him, then when she nears he looks up and smiles and then Kalam absolutely fucking eviscerates her.

What a fucking moment.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Today I learned that Steve Bruce has written three novels, and if this review is anything to go by they are brilliant:
https://www.balls.ie/football/steve-bruce-novel-293169



I mean she did two but still, Brucey's won that one.

Still powering through The Crippled God. Yedan Derryg. :drool:

Also lol'd reading this exchange on the train:

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“You stand before a god! Speak your eloquence for all posterity. Be Profound!"

"Profound ... huh." Temper was silent for a long moment, studying the cobbles of the alley mouth. And then he lifted his helmed head faced Shadowthrone, and said "Fuck off.”

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https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon...._AC_US218_.jpg

Looks brilliant.

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Originally Posted by Ian

Into the last third of The Crippled God now and we're definitely into the realms of:

https://ruthseverewx.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/jr.jpg

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It was obvious as soon as the thing happened in Dust of Dreams that Quick Ben wasn't going down unseen like some fucking chump but it was still a badass moment when the Forkrul Assail stops him, then when she nears he looks up and smiles and then Kalam absolutely fucking eviscerates her.

What a fucking moment.

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Whatever you think about the lead up to it the last book is pretty damn good.

I know it helps that it's coming off the back of Dust of Dreams (which probably in hindsight will prove to have been useful even if it's not any fun to read) but The Crippled God is just full of good moments.

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The whole scene where Tool and his T'lan Imass army meet Gesler and Stormy and discuss joining them to try and send the Crippled God home got me a little, I can't lie.

Poor Tool. :(

I enjoyed surprise Kruppe.

I should have been more clear that I'm still going through it but that bit WAS good.

Love a bit of Kruppe.

Crippled God finally finished. It really felt like the reward for trudging through Dust of Dreams.

Because there are so many characters it feels like a bunch of them didn't get a very satisfying ending but I suppose that was always going to be the case. So many good moments though.

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Gesler and Stormy's ascent of the Spire ending in fucking Bent helping take down the Forkrul Assail, Ganoes and Tavore meeting up again, Hood absolutely battering an Assail while shouting he's had enough of their 'justice', Whiskeyjack and Korlat reuniting, Hedge staying with Fiddler, the Khundryl having one last glorious charge, Mappo dying (:() only to be replaced by Ublala Pung. Just so many memorable bits.

The only minor qualm I have is that while the Crippled God was always a pitiable figure through the books he'd done so many awful things to never really be a sympathetic one and I don't recall there being a hint at a possibility for redemption which meant the Bonehunters suddenly being all "but we get to save him, yo" a little jarring. That said, it's entirely possible that I've just forgotten it because of the sheer density of the series.

I did see that Eriksson is doing the "Witness" trilogy now which is to do with Karsa Orlong. :drool:

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Originally Posted by Ian

Crippled God finally finished. It really felt like the reward for trudging through Dust of Dreams.

Because there are so many characters it feels like a bunch of them didn't get a very satisfying ending but I suppose that was always going to be the case. So many good moments though.

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Gesler and Stormy's ascent of the Spire ending in fucking Bent helping take down the Forkrul Assail, Ganoes and Tavore meeting up again, Hood absolutely battering an Assail while shouting he's had enough of their 'justice', Whiskeyjack and Korlat reuniting, Hedge staying with Fiddler, the Khundryl having one last glorious charge, Mappo dying (:() only to be replaced by Ublala Pung. Just so many memorable bits.

The only minor qualm I have is that while the Crippled God was always a pitiable figure through the books he'd done so many awful things to never really be a sympathetic one and I don't recall there being a hint at a possibility for redemption which meant the Bonehunters suddenly being all "but we get to save him, yo" a little jarring. That said, it's entirely possible that I've just forgotten it because of the sheer density of the series.

I did see that Eriksson is doing the "Witness" trilogy now which is to do with Karsa Orlong. :drool:

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The whole series is basically Truncated Story Arc: The Novel, a larger than normal proportion of the books are given over to storylines/characters that never really go anywhere (HI KALLOR) beyond building a better picture of the world. I think this is partly down to the origins of the setting itself (a homebrew rpg campaign) but it can be slightly jarring, and exactly what you might expect from an author who purposefully made the first few chapters of book one as impenetrable as he could in order to discourage particular readers.

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The Crippled God stuff I took this way: one of the main themes of the series seemed to be compassion, anyone who has it is a good guy and all the nasty fuckers who you aren't supposed to like have none of it. The fact that Tavore and the Bonehunters are going to the ends of the earth on a hopeless mission to release a god trapped on their planet through no fault of its own paints them as the biggest heroes around. However nasty Crip-G was (and actually, he's no less nasty than a whole host of other players and arguably is simply trying to survive long enough to recoup his power for.....reasons not yet explained but hinted at in other books) the 'good guys' are still able to treat him with compassion and empathise with his plight rather than exploit him for power and personal gain. You're right on one thing though, this is never really delved into in the books at all, it's never laid out on a conversation between characters (it might be hinted at by Fiddler and Tavore but it's a line or two of obscure dialogue). I think that's deliberate on the authors part, he seems to want to allow (or force) the reader to make their own mind up about aspects of the story that would have been presented more starkly in more traditional fantasy series.

Have you decided if you're going to dip into the other books yet?

Yeah you very much feel like rather than trying to tell a complete story or set of stories he's telling you, as the name suggests, the story of a handful (so to speak) of key Malazans (because even the Empire stuff didn't get wrapped up as snugly as I thought it would) so Kallor and a bunch of others play their part in that then go about their business.

I definitely want to get into this Witness trilogy when it comes about.

What else would you recommend of the other ones?

I wanna give some Brandon Sanderson a go at some point.

I think how much you enjoy the other ones will depend on how interested you are in what happens to the empire away from the focus of the main books.

The Path to Ascendency trilogy I would definitely recommend, Esselmont has a similar enough style that you don't really notice (swap word or the day 'potsherds' for 'gyre' and that's basically it) and I enjoyed these three the most. If you like them then read his other 'Novels of...' I've read nearly five of them and while they aren't quite as good as the main series they're worth checking out.

I shall bear it in mind. I think I am gonna give it a little break though. I borrowed a couple of Pratchett books I've not read off my friend so I've read Dodger (it's fine, but a little like his collab with Stephen Baxter in as much as not an awful lot happens and it feels like they're giving you a slice of a time period and telling you about it, though in this case sort-of historical London rather than futuristic sci-fi) and am now on Snuff.

I've got I Shall Wear Midnight on the way to so I can keep on top of reading all the Discworld stuff in order once I've read Snuff, slightly out of order, and I think then I might have a look at some Sanderson.

Or possibly this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Steel-Frame...gateway&sr=8-2

Joe Abercrombie is starting a new series in the same setting as The First Law trilogy. :drool:

So since previous posting I've finished Snuff (decent) and I Shall Wear Midnight (excellent) by Pratchett and a Mass Effect tie-in book (much better than I expected.)

Now on the first Mistborn book and have high hopes for it given what a good job Sanderson did with ending The Wheel of Time.

Since the last post I've cleared off the first couple of Mistborn books which were both excellent so I'll be getting into some more of those, probably something else I've forgotten, '52 Times Britain Was A Bellend' which was quite entertaining and am now on the last Discworld book. :(

So it's fairly clear that The Shepherd's Crown wasn't a hundred percent finished when Pratchett died and having seen something Neil Gaiman commented on that he didn't get written in time there's obviously some stuff that would have been expanded upon. Still good though and there are things about it that make me wonder if he knew it was going to be his last.

I've now made a start on Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner, which is basically about mech pilots though they don't call it that. It's off to a good start.

Despite only really loving Weird Weekends, and actively disliking his newer stuff to the extent that i stopped bothering about 10 years ago, I have really been enjoying Louis Theroux's autobiography. Audiobook,naturally.

The stuff around his time at uni, and scrabbling around for crappy work after he graduated is particularly interesting. He's a good egg, but I wish he'd never decided to be a SERIOUS DOCUMENTARY MAKER, cus he's so much better in his weird weekends approach.

Yeah I read it and thought it was terrific. He goes a bit OTT on the Savile stuff later on but I suppose that is what he's known for.

And from the book you infer why he doesn't do any more weird weekends etc, which is that he clearly (even if he doesn't quite say so) finds the approach shallow and cheap.

I've always thought a smidgen of it was trying to impress his dad, the PROPER writer.

To be fair to him, he shouldn't have kept doing weird weekends type stuff his whole career, and moving into more serious stuff was probably the right move. Deep down I just wish he was better at it.

His dad sounds like a cunt to be honest. I can't remember how far through the book he details his dad's antics at his wedding, but, yeah.

Anyone read the Moscow trilogy from Simon Sebag Montefiore? Absolutely brilliant.

Pretty sure they're on my list.

I've read his two Stalin biographies, which I thought were quality.

Re-reading Three Men in a Boat. Funniest book written in English, don't sue me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vercetti

Pretty sure they're on my list.

I've read his two Stalin biographies, which I thought were quality.

---

I've got those - Young Stalin and Stalin right?

Just finished the Crying of Lot 49. Enjoyed it. The stream of consciousness stuff confused/annoyed me at times, but the plot is quite easy to follow, despite being fairly deranged. The thing that absolutely makes the book is the comedy though. It's genuinely very funny throughout, and it would be a load of pointless wank without that.

Pynchon is a wonderful author (I assume this is linked to your TP quiz from the other day). In the realm of absurd, laugh-out-loud dark humour, I also thoroughly enjoyed Catch-22.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kikó

I've got those - Young Stalin and Stalin right?

---

Those are the ones.

I have a bit of a thing for Soviet stuff, so I hammered out both of those, a couple of Lenin biographies, and "The Last Empire" about the eventual collapse of the USSR, in a short amount of time.

I also bought, but have yet to read, Gorbachev's autobiography. Should have got bang into that during the lockdown, really.

Just started on this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russia-Bloo.../dp/0008300054

You might like it.

I'll check that out, cheers. Looks right up my street.

I'm about to crack on with this. Should see me through a couple more days of nothing.

I've started with the Discworld series over the last few weeks I've been enjoying it. I've finished the The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic (both good, I probably preferred the latter but they're just one long story really) and nearly finished Equal Rites, which has definitely been my favourite so far. It feels like a massive step-up in his (presumed) mission of using the the fantasy genre to satirise various real life issues.

It really starts getting into its stride now so you're in for some good ones, you only really notice it going back to them but the first three feel like a slightly different style. Your last sentence is bang on, although for me he manages to stop short of being preachy or too on the nose and lets the satire do the work for him.

Yeah as it goes on I think it's less laugh-out-loud funny but as Disco said, you're right with the last bit.

I've started listening to a podcast called Desert Island Discworld where it's a guest coming on to talk about a specific book. A lot of them talk about how you could skip the first two and that in Equal Rites the Granny Weatherwax character is almost in her Beta form before she gets fully fleshed out but I read them in order and was never put off. I think the issue is probably more if you read those after. I've finished them all now, Alex, and you've a lot of good shit to come. There aren't really any proper duffers in my opinion but you're about to get into a run of exceptional books from the point you're at. :drool:

The end of the affair by Graham Greene is quality.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Disco

It really starts getting into its stride now so you're in for some good ones, you only really notice it going back to them but the first three feel like a slightly different style. Your last sentence is bang on, although for me he manages to stop short of being preachy or too on the nose and lets the satire do the work for him.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ian

I've finished them all now, Alex, and you've a lot of good shit to come. There aren't really any proper duffers in my opinion but you're about to get into a run of exceptional books from the point you're at. :drool:

---

You weren't wrong chaps. Mort was excellent, and definitely my favourite of the series so far. Death's cameo's in the previous three were always highlights, so a book that revolved more specifically around him was always going to be a winner.

I find a lot of the funnier bits are the ridiculous little asides that Pratchett occasionally throws in, usually for the purpose of comedy world building. I often find myself laughing out loud at them.

I've just finished Blood Meridian. That was an interesting book. Very bleak, but often quiet profound. It seems to go out of it's way to disavow any romantic notion of the Old West. Just "violent men committing horrible acts" is the prevailing order of business. Which I imagine it's probably quite close to the real thing.

I've never read any McCarthy before. I maybe wouldn't have it down as the absolute nailed on classic it often seems to be regarded as (his style of writing is a little off-putting and hard to follow at times, I found) but it certainly held my attention. Quite an intense read in places. The Judge is as fascinating a character as I've come across in a long time.

Blood Meridian is the closest I've ever come to just binning off a book altogether.

Hated it. I've read that and The Road and I'm all for not being a grammar Nazi but McCarthy's work is just obtuse to me.

And the bloke just wants to read a book and not have to activate his brain to work out who's saying what or whether what's happening is a verb or an adjective and he thinks oh ffs i need to double check this last sentence so anyway the protagnist says the thing or has he done the thing is really not clear but hopefully the next couple of sentences will clear it up nope oh bloody hell what is this shit anyway the read is fighting his every instinct to close the book and not read the next Malazan because honestly what even is this anyway a person does another terrible thing and shrug whatever everybody does terrible things all the time fucking hell thought the reader how much of this book is left oh jesus there are still 128 pages im not sure this sentence will ever end let alone the book

That is exactly what I was getting at with my comments regarding his writing style Ian. :D

Massive, earth shattering events would quite often just casually occur in the middle of one of his massive, unpunctuated missives and have you reading back entire pages like "hang on...what now?". I actually had a quick look online right after I finished it and I seem to have completely mis-interpreted the ending for this very reason!

The lack of quotation marks in particular is infuriating. It's not clever at all, and I don't know why the publishers indulged him in that nonsense. There were also large chunks of dialogue and, sometimes, entire run-on conversations that would occur completely in Spanish which, not knowing any Spanish, was a bit odd.

I'm sure he would, from the artistic perspective, tell you that he was putting you in the position of the protagonist who (presumably) also did not speak Spanish. I could have very much done without it though.

Although I finished The Road it bored the shit out of me.

I started Blood Meridian years ago and gave up very quickly.

The Road pissed me right off as well to the extent I won't even try Blood Meridian. One has to be entertained by this stuff ffs.

Is The Road the same then, I'm guessing? With the style of writing?

If anything I found it a pain in the arse in the opposite way to what Ian said (not having read Blood Meridian), as it was all in short sentences. Starting with the wrong words. He looked at the ash and the trees. Bleeding dead grot from the moon. That boded barren ill. He didn't know why. An eagle lurched overhead and he wondered if the sky would shed its silliest metaphors. Until the night time came. Then the non-sequiturs rose, misshapen, blue. Like the sea he remembered from childhood.

:D

I might give that a wide berth then. I'm not saying I won't read anything else the guy has done as, generally speaking, I did enjoy it. I'm just not sure I can be arsed again right now.

That would send me round the bend. Like a poem that's winding up for 800 pages with no finish.

Nothing can be worse than Joyce

Before I read Blood Meridian (for "fun") I'd have said the worst book I ever read was Samuel Johnson's Rasselas whoch I had to read for A Levels. Some Abyssinian prince is kept with his siblings in a secluded valley to protect them from the world, or whatever. He's miserable because boo hoo my pampered life is too boring.

So he decided he's going to get out of the Happy Valley, see the world and FIND THE SECRET OF HUMAN HAPPINESS. So about 20 years later (not exaggerating) he finally manages to escape, ponces about places in Egypt for a bit and then decides his quest is impossible and just fucks off back to the valley. The end. It's only 90-odd pages but I'm not sure I've ever endured a more pointless story.

In other reading news, I've barely read anything in lockdown other than re-reading old stuff before bed when I'm tired and don't want to concentrate. If not having an hour of commute every day is going to be the norm I'm going to have to make time for myself to read because I had so much time to read going to/from work before I didn't bother much in the house unless the mood particularly took me. I'm going to make a push to get Steel Frame finished though because it is really good.

I'm currently making my through Slaughterhouse 5 and it really wasn't the book I was expecting it to be. So it goes.

My reading gets done during the breaks I give myself whilst working from home. Usually 5-10 minutes an hour and then whatever spare time I have on my lunch.

I just started reading Vonnegut too, Breakfast of Champions. A lot like Joseph Heller, but even more idiosyncratic

Just thinking about Heller and Catch 22 gives me a minor migraine.

That was such a good book though

Catch 22 is another I gave up on.

Vonnegut is great though.

Been working my way slowly through The Five (about the lives of the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper) - it's an excellent read but I go through phases of being really into reading and others where I just don't make the time to do so. Hoping to read more in the school holidays, and have bought Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann to spur me on to finish The Five.

I've barely been reading properly during lockdown but I'm making an effort to finish Steel Frame. It's building up to a nice mech battle which I am thoroughly in favour of.

I have finished the book! I am a reading god. Despite my lockdown habits holding up my finishing it Steel Frame is excellent.

I've moved onto The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack, about a fella who through circumstances I haven't got to yet has been reanimated to become a zombie slave for some sort of sea-monster-fishing operation. It's by Nate Crowley whose games writing I love and is very funny on Twitter and interviews and podcasts and things so I've got high hopes for this.

I've got four books to read on my holiday (or finish):
- A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
- The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs
- The Barrytown Trilogy - Roddy Doyle
- My Life in Football - Kevin Keegan.

Should be a nice varied mix of topics.

I don't really do biographies but I might get the Bob Willis one.

Bob. :cool:

That would be a cracker actually. I highly recommend Bobby Robson's audio book as the great man narrates it.

Currently reading this. Really good so far.

https://blackwells.co.uk/jacket/l/9781474608053.jpg

Rusty Firmin is a good name.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kikó

I've got four books to read on my holiday (or finish):
- My Life in Football - Kevin Keegan.

Should be a nice varied mix of topics.

---

Let me know what you think of that one. I might pick that up at some point.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kikó

I've got four books to read on my holiday (or finish):
- A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
- The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs
- The Barrytown Trilogy - Roddy Doyle
- My Life in Football - Kevin Keegan.

Should be a nice varied mix of topics.

---

- A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
Absolutely brilliant crime thriller. Set in Derbyshire in the 60s , a disappearance of a young girl gets the outsiders called in to help the backwards village of Scarsdale. I think I'll pick up some more of the McDermid books - she's got a whole series around Manchester which I never realised.

- The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs

Last book I read off the 4. More interesting when he's talking about the countries development (case studies of India, Russia etc interesting), less interesting when he's spelling out the practical steps on how (probably because it's the same message a number of times - give more aid to allow countries to rise out of the poverty trap). Worth a read if you are into the subject matter.

- The Barrytown Trilogy - Roddy Doyle

This is 3 books into one - the Commitments, the Snapper and the Van. Written in conversational style across the books, it follows an Irish family across 3 different subject matters. The Commitments is the set up of a soul band in Dublin (became this film- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/) , the Snapper is the young girl having a baby from a mysterious father (or she doesn't want people to know who it is) and the Van is about a chipper van being bought and run based around the 1990 Ireland WC run). The Van is just brilliant. The scenes as these daft old blokes try and work this pokey chip van while having stones thrown at it by the local chavs, chip fat flying everywhere, sweat dripping off and mixed in with Ireland's world cup run is just a joy. Well worth a read.

- My Life in Football - Kevin Keegan.

I was a bit disappointed in this one. Keegan had an amazing career and considering he made it was a miracle in itself but something about the story was flat. I think the best thing was Keegan describing Jimenez at Newcastle. What a complete fraud of a man he is, the best anecdote was them meeting with Luca Modric's agent and him being told by Jimenez that Modric was too small and wouldn't make it in the Barclays Premier League sponsored by Barclays!

The Commitments is great.

Champagne Football is proving entertaining.

Got Wenger's book but not sure whether to ingest it via audiobook and have him read it to me. The only problem is, as predicted by the Arseblog podcast, he is a bit drier when reading from a script than when he was in organic conversation like interviews etc.

Really need to get back into fiction reading too, at one point I was reading 3 books a week but I couldn't tell you the last time I read one.

By checking this thread the other day I realised I'm only on about my fourth or fifth book this year.

I really need to force myself to include a bit in my daily routine (other than just before I go to sleep) to make up for the fact that I'm not reading an hour per day while commuting.

I consumed Ferguson's autobiography (barf) via audiobook and I would say it was a lot better having Kenny McScot, the generic Scotsman read it to me than it would have been having the man himself doing it slurring the words between glasses of Barolo. Whether that would be the same for Wenger I don't know, but he never really learned to speak English intelligbly so I reckon it would grate.

I've wanted to read some Roth for a while so currently reading The Human Stain - the writing is top drawer, even though I sometimes wish these people were capable of writing about characters that aren't Ivy League English professors.

I've struggled this month to finish a book but hopefully will finish this soon. It's absolutely brilliant considering it's just talking about the sea.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pr...hoCRv8QAvD_BwE

I mostly only read kids books these days, and 99% of them are Dork Diaries level awful, but I'm reading The Beast and the Bethany at the moment and, without knowing how it's going to end up, would definitely recommend it to any small(ish) child owners or weirdos who like kids books [Harry Potter] as adults.

"child owners." :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd

I consumed Ferguson's autobiography (barf) via audiobook and I would say it was a lot better having Kenny McScot, the generic Scotsman read it to me than it would have been having the man himself doing it slurring the words between glasses of Barolo. Whether that would be the same for Wenger I don't know, but he never really learned to speak English intelligbly so I reckon it would grate.

I've wanted to read some Roth for a while so currently reading The Human Stain - the writing is top drawer, even though I sometimes wish these people were capable of writing about characters that aren't Ivy League English professors.

---

Try American Pastoral or The Plot Against America.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd

I consumed Ferguson's autobiography (barf) via audiobook and I would say it was a lot better having Kenny McScot, the generic Scotsman read it to me than it would have been having the man himself doing it slurring the words between glasses of Barolo. Whether that would be the same for Wenger I don't know, but he never really learned to speak English intelligbly so I reckon it would grate.

I've wanted to read some Roth for a while so currently reading The Human Stain - the writing is top drawer, even though I sometimes wish these people were capable of writing about characters that aren't Ivy League English professors.

---

On the flip side - listen to Bobby Robson's. That's definitely worth having him read it.

I've got Steve Peters Chimp Paradox book as well on the go which he reads which also works.

The best one I've ever heard of that type was Ball Four (probably the best baseball book ever written) which Jim Bouton read for audiobook as an old man having written it as a much younger man, and you can hear him sort of laughing to himself at points and the emotion coming through as the memories come flooding back in the text.

I will definitely try those, Boydy - the writing style I find infectious and he has proper searing insight of the type that, say, newspaper columnists all wish they had.

Decided against audio Wenger.

Has anyone read Conn Iggulden's Greek series? I enjoyed all his stuff but forgot about him after his War of the Roses series concluded.

Im at the parents so going to re-read A Scanner Darkly again.

After almost exclusively reading fantasy this year, I picked up Say Nothing by Patrick Rassen Keefe at the start of the month and just finished it. I knew nothing about Northern Ireland / the Troubles / IRA going into it but feel like I've got at least somewhat of a sense of what went on now. I think it's been receiving rave reviews and justifiably so; would recommend.

Reading The Stand and loving it so far

I've been pulled back into another F1 book after hearing about Sid Watkins' books. I remember thinking after Newey's book I'd heard enough about Imola 94. In Sid's first book, the first chapter is on Imola. :moop: Once I'm done with those two I'll dive back into fiction or something. John Le Carre's Agent Running in the Field is getting some facebook ads so it'll probably be that.

I've started Obama's book. Cool that he narrates it for the audio version.

I'm reading Moby Dick at the moment. It's a strange book.

When he allows himself to get going his writing is excellent and it can be really riveting. But then he breaks up the story by occasionally diverging off into these weird, almost text-book style tangents about the history of the whaling industry and what not. For example, he dedicated maybe the longest chapter I've read so for to just meticulously cataloguing all the various types of whales in the world. So it can be quite tough going in places.

Back reading Syd Watkins' first book because I need something to kill time at work. I think the way he recounts Ronnie Peterson's death is more harrowing than Senna's. I hate the tifosi more, now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alex

I'm reading Moby Dick at the moment. It's a strange book.

When he allows himself to get going his writing is excellent and it can be really riveting. But then he breaks up the story by occasionally diverging off into these weird, almost text-book style tangents about the history of the whaling industry and what not. For example, he dedicated maybe the longest chapter I've read so for to just meticulously cataloguing all the various types of whales in the world. So it can be quite tough going in places.

---

Don't try reading any Homer, almost half of the Iliad is him listing the ships they used to get to Troy and what must have been every fucker on them.

Last year I read the 5 (excluding prequels) books of Asimov’s Foundation series. The first couple were fantastic, and then the story nearly became too big and it became a bit of trudge towards the end. There are some spectacular plot twists over the course of the series.

Onto his robot series now. Caves of Steel was very good. I think Naked Sun is next.

Currently trying to finish off Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s taken nearly two years and 3 concerted but stop-start efforts, but I’m finally approaching the end now.

So yeah I’m on a sci-fi kick right now. Although I don’t know if Foundation is really sci-fi or some kind of geopolitical psychological thriller.

If you're into robot-y sci-fi things @CJay I can recommend Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner.

I'm still on Sunburn at the moment but it's quite easygoing so I'm ripping through that pretty quickly. Deciding whether or not once I'm done I can be arsed with this David Jason sort-of autobiography thing my mum and dad decided to get me for Christmas (the sole reason being "Well he likes Only Fools and Horses", I've never expressed any special interest in David Jason and don't usually read autobiographies.) On Waterstones it has reviews from such luminaries as Zoe Ball and Chris Moyles so it must be good, eh.

Thanks Ian, sounds good. Will add that to the list. :thbup:

After Sunburn (fuck The Sun, man) I went on to The Birdwatcher, a police thriller thing which is pretty light and doesn't have a particularly gripping ending (or endings, as it's also telling a story of the protagonist's childhood) but was a decent enough read.

I'm now onto Notes from Small Planets by Nate Crowley. Crowley is one of my favourite writers across his gaming stuff and what he puts on Twitter and the other book I've read and I'm liking this so far. It's basically a riff on typical fantasy and sci-fi tropes by way of a travel guide. It is physically a beautiful little book and it's been funny so far.

Reading I Am Legend which has been enjoyable and not massively taxing, which is what I need really.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

I'm now onto Notes from Small Planets by Nate Crowley. Crowley is one of my favourite writers across his gaming stuff and what he puts on Twitter and the other book I've read and I'm liking this so far. It's basically a riff on typical fantasy and sci-fi tropes by way of a travel guide. It is physically a beautiful little book and it's been funny so far.

---

I'm really enjoying this. It's like Bill Bryson and Terry Pratchett had a very hairy little baby. Though structured more like an actual travel guide than Bryson's stuff.

Middle England by Jonathan Coe. I was looking for a funny, contemporary British novel and this is a pretty enjoyable attempt at exploring the Brexit landscape. There are some very good set pieces but it doesn't really go anywhere narrative-wise and ends up being a bit too floppy to actually make any kind of meaningful conclusion. Although most of the better characters are remainers, I think it's trying very hard to be even-handed (it tries somewhat to sympathise with leavers from the Frank Sobotka 'We used to make things, in this country!' angle) but still ends up being a bit of a smug remainer soup. Was worth reading though, 7/10.

One more F1 book for the pile. Murray Walker's 'If I'm Very Much Mistaken'. Not a lot here that I haven't already absorbed by osmosis but still enjoyable. Delves more into the earlier broadcasting stuff but, again, nothing I didn't already know. Some decent anecdotes but the main driving force is Murray's absolute enthusiasm and pride for everything he's done in life.

The audiobook narrated by the man himself really, really sells it.

Just read the power and the glory by Graham Greene. It was dead good AND a good length - boshed it out in two evenings. I think 200-250 pages is gonna become the book equivalent of a 90 minute film for me, e.g. a major preference.

I finished Notes from Small Planets (it was ace, Crowley is the best) and am onto Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. Which is the third of this specific trilogy but that itself is part of 7 books in the series or something? I dunno.

I'm reading Norman Moss' book about Karl Fuchs 'The Man who stole the Atom bomb'. It's about the race to build the atomic and plutonium bomb and subsequent years after. Amazing how the SCIENCE were able to create something of such magnitude in such a short space of time.

I'm reading Dune at the moment and it's very good. I love the whole world he builds in it. It sort of spills onto the page almost fully formed from the get-go too, which is a difficult thing to do. I was invested from the first chapter. There are so many fascinating little details to it and well thought out little quirks and bits of colour and backstory that he throws in that just flesh it out perfectly.

I also now feel like George Lucas basically owes Frank Herbert a co-writing credit for large parts of Star Wars.

I've considered Dune, though people who I've asked said to read the first book and stop there

I'm on Mistborn 3 at the moment. Sanderson is very readable.

I bought Dune a year or so ago. Should probably get to it at some point.

Masters of Doom was going for a fiver on Apple's book store. Looking forward to getting into that. I've heard it's a good tale of Doom's development and ID software.

Well I finished the Mistborn book I was on and it came to a surprisingly good ending so after that trilogy and finishing off Wheel of Time Sanderson clearly knows how to do an ending so which is not the most common trait.

Currently reading a Warhammer/Blackhearts book as I just wanted something short and breezy so I'm already nearly done with that.

A Joe Abercrombie book next. :nodd:

After that I should probably read something non-fantasy to mix it up.

I am a boring non fiction master at the moment, once I have completed the latest round I might get my kindle charged up again and start getting fiction devoured.

The last few books I have read are Wenger's autobiography (haven't finished it, terribly dry, didn't even get to the Arsenal part). That's Not The Way It Works by Bob Saenz, a book on screenwriting, currently half way through Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, a book on screenwriting, to be followed up by The Film Director's Intuition by Judith Weston, a book on screenwriting. Bit of a theme there.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shindig

Masters of Doom was going for a fiver on Apple's book store. Looking forward to getting into that. I've heard it's a good tale of Doom's development and ID software.

---

I read it yonks ago and It was great.

Yeah, I'm early days on it but I'm amazed at how much of an edgelord Romero was.

https://dondeq2.com/2018/11/30/melvi...y-john-romero/

I have been reading a James Patterson novel, but lost interest in it halfway through. The problem is I have bought a new book on 9/11 that I want to read, but I have a rule that I cannot read the new book until the old book is completed. It's a whole catch-22.

James Patterson is balls. Just sack that off.

Yeah I think you're right. :( Still might just get through it quick time. Maybe just read every other page. :cab:

I always knew they weren't GREAT but I had to read some back to back when I ran out of my own stuff on a holiday years ago. I'm sure this would be true of many authors if you powered through a few of their books in a row but it really drove home how not very good he is.

Masters of Doom is finished. I really enjoyed that. You see how game development changes from an indie pursuit to a big effort requiring dozens of people and all the highs / lows that come with it. The author's got one about GTA but I just don't find the Housers especially compelling. That terrible BBC effort with Daniel Radcliffe probably ruined them for me.

I've spent way too much time watching Carmack lectures on youtube.

A lot of 'airport' authors are just brands now rather than quality. I used to enjoy the odd Lee Child inbetween genre changes/series changes as a pallette cleanser, literary sorbet in the form of short clipped sentences.

Forgot I pre-ordered a signed copy of Bob Mortimer's autobiography which turned up yesterday, nice surprise.

I bet that's a good read. Although I wonder if he erm... switches off for it.

It is what you would expect so far, fishing and WILTY blended up and spat out.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ian

James Patterson is balls. Just sack that off.

---

I finished The Summer House by James Patterson. It was alright but no better.

Anyone listen to audiobooks?

I've a few books I want to read but as I've not been on holiday in ages, I've just not. So I figured I'd put podcasts on hold for a little while and listen to an audiobook in the car instead. I only get like 15 mins a day but I'm enjoying it nonetheless. Can see me listening to more once I've finished this one. First one I've gone for is an Elliott Smith biography, Torment Saint. Widely panned by fans, mostly because he used a misheard lyric (torn mid sail) as the title and well apparently he backs up Jennifer Chiba who most of us want to believe did a murder, rather than believe our sweet sweet prince took his own life, but I'm really enjoying it.

Best part is, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was being read to me by Agent Doggett from the X-Files, aka T-1000, so it all sounds cool as fuck. I've never heard throwaway stories about 15 year olds recording songs onto a cassette in their mates garage sound so damn badass.

I periodically listen to them. I've got Bob Mortimer ready to go and my father in law actually has just recorded one so that'll be the next two. Last one was Obama which was long but good to hear him actually read it.

I used to listen more when I was on long walks but I barely do it anymore so don't really find time to dedicate to it.

I can neve find the time. I already gave up music because of podcasts and it's at the stage now that I can't even listen to all the ones of those I want to.

My hour walk to work was perfect because you couldn't distract yourself with this place.

27 in the library currently with 6 outstanding. The narrator is key.

Started reading The Magical Faraway Tree, or whatever it's called but my wife's old copy was too tatty so bought a new copy, and it had changed the names of the three kids from Jo, Bessie and Fanny to Joe, Beth and Frannie. :cab:

Modern names for modern times.

I'm currently about two thirds of the way through The Three-Body Problem that I got as a gift for Christmas and I'm really enjoying it.

It's this mad, sometimes quite complex, but very entertaining Chinese sci-fi novel. It manages to heavily incorporate a lot of elements I know almost nothing about (namely physics and the Chinese Cultural Revolution) into proceedings but still remain very readable. They did a really good job on the translation of adding appendix notes throughout at the bottom of the pages to give context to a lot of the Chinese references they make and the more complex scientific concepts they bring up.

Loved that whole trilogy. They're big-ass books but the story's great.

The story is fantastic. It's one of those where I genuinely can't get my head around how somebody would come up with something like that. All the stuff where he's in the "Three Body" simulation is so weird and fascinating.

I've heard of those and may need to try them at some point.

I've just finished 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed) by Nate Crowley which, unsurprisingly given his other writing, got some proper laughs out of me.

I'm now onto the second book, The Trouble With Peace, of Abercrombie's latest trilogy. Only just started but I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

Has anyone read The Secret?

Isn't that a wanky self-help book?

I finished The Three-Body Problem, fantastic book. The ending was mental. The sequel is on order.

In the mean time I'm about two thirds of the way through The Black Company, which I am really enjoying. It's sort of a dark fantasy book but it's an interesting take on it, because it's kind of from the point of view of the bad guys. Well, it's not that simple really. But they are a company of soldiers for hire who are (at least as far as I can tell) in the employ of the baddies. It's a fun twist on it.

The author has a really interesting, quite snappy writing style too. There's not a great deal of exposition in terms of what is going on in the world at large. Almost none at all, in fact. It's told from the view point of one character and you just get this kind of "front line" perspective of what is happening to his section of the company at that given time, and you pick up little bits here and there about the over-arching situation as it goes along.

It sounds a bit confusing but it's actually really good. Don't get me wrong, I love a good exercise in world building as much as the next man. But let's be honest, it can back fire sometimes too. So it makes it refreshingly direct and straight to the point for a fantasy novel. Shit just constantly happens and it's done and they move on.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Baz

Started reading The Magical Faraway Tree, or whatever it's called but my wife's old copy was too tatty so bought a new copy, and it had changed the names of the three kids from Jo, Bessie and Fanny to Joe, Beth and Frannie. :cab:

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Quality books.

For other, modern Children's classics, would recommend The Beast and the Bethany [not read the sequel yet] and JK Rowling's efforts. The Ickabog is excellent and The Christmas Pig is also very good thus far.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by niko_cee

Quality books.

For other, modern Children's classics, would recommend The Beast and the Bethany [not read the sequel yet] and JK Rowling's efforts. The Ickabog is excellent and The Christmas Pig is also very good thus far.

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Yeah we read The Christmas Pig in the run up to Christmas. I didn’t really like it, but my daughter seemed to and she could definitely relate to it cos she’s got a tatty grey rabbit that she bloody adores.

Will keep those others in mind when we’ve read this Faraway Tree beast. We’re all much preferring reading one continuous story in short bursts (chapters) rather than a random short kids book every night, so it’s certainly the way forward. My wife grew up bumming the Harry Potter books so I’ll let her poison her mind with them though, and I’ll go and tidy the loft or something.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alex

I finished The Three-Body Problem, fantastic book. The ending was mental. The sequel is on order.

In the mean time I'm about two thirds of the way through The Black Company, which I am really enjoying. It's sort of a dark fantasy book but it's an interesting take on it, because it's kind of from the point of view of the bad guys. Well, it's not that simple really. But they are a company of soldiers for hire who are (at least as far as I can tell) in the employ of the baddies. It's a fun twist on it.

The author has a really interesting, quite snappy writing style too. There's not a great deal of exposition in terms of what is going on in the world at large. Almost none at all, in fact. It's told from the view point of one character and you just get this kind of "front line" perspective of what is happening to his section of the company at that given time, and you pick up little bits here and there about the over-arching situation as it goes along.

It sounds a bit confusing but it's actually really good. Don't get me wrong, I love a good exercise in world building as much as the next man. But let's be honest, it can back fire sometimes too. So it makes it refreshingly direct and straight to the point for a fantasy novel. Shit just constantly happens and it's done and they move on.

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Have you read the Malazan series? Sounds right up your street if you lile The Black Company.