Books - What are you reading?

I enjoyed this when I read it a few years ago. Might re-read it and The Plague by Albert Camus to really set the mood for 2021.

I listened to a few hours of The Fellowship Of The Rings audiobook today. Enjoying it a lot so far. I read The Hobbit as a kid but I've not read any other Tolkien. The historical prologues were mind numbingly dull but you can really tell he'd built this whole huge world for the books to take place in.

I watched the first few series of GoT but had never read the books. I got bored near the end of lockdown Christmas. In a week I've gone from "Never read them" to "Where's the next one? It's been 9 fucking years already!"

Just finished M John Harrison’s “The sunken land begins to rise again”. Superb and disorientating. At times like Ackroyd or Sinclair but with a real sense of dislocated identities and lack of any certainty. You start off thinking you will discover something “real” within the narrative and then you discover that’s really not what the book is about at all.

I’m a few chapters through this and really enjoying it.

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Just started this. Very candid so far. Although I feel he knew more about what he was doing than he’s letting on. Just my opinion mind.

Very well written and has confirmed my desire to never go to prison.

Glad you like it, I found it very interesting.

Never been a fan of Fantasy novels before, However I'm about halfway through the Night watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko after a recommendation on here and really enjoying it - Thanks whoever highlighted it.

Any other recommendations in a similar vein to this series would be appreciated.

Thanks.

That's on my reading list this year. Haven't read any of his stuff since In Viriconium ans Viriconium Nights, years ago.

I finished "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" by Peter Hedges earlier. I'd highly recommend it, good and melancholic.

Has anyone read any of the 33 1/3 series?

http://333sound.com/33-13-series/

If so, are they books about the albums themselves, or books about the authors' relationships with the albums?

Any other recommendations in a similar vein to this series would be appreciated.

The Laundry Files series, Charlie Stross. Black humour/satire but is similar in the sense of set on contemporary Earth, only with eldritch horrors lurking in the shadows and a shadowy organisation with the job of keeping them at bay. The humour is secondary to the horror and doesn't spoil it.

Just finished The Body. Not as interesting to me as Short History of Nearly Everything but did contain some fascinating bits and pieces.

So, that took 3 months, reading a page to a chapter per night:
https://www.lfgss.com/comments/15617512/

I bought the REM Murmur one as a gift. Skimmed it. From memory it was rather disappointing and didnt make me want to read it properly. It was more about the album, making of, people involved etc than the author's relationship.

Probably depends on which one in the series you are thinking of getting.

Thanks very much @itsbruce
Bought the 1st one - The Atrocity Archives to try.

In a similar vein, may I suggest:
Daniel Keown's The Spark in the Machine
Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of all Maladies

On an unrelated note:
Non-fiction from last year
James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life
William Finnegan's Barbarian Days

Best Fiction from last year:
Andrew Hunter Murray's The Last Day

Reading that very very slowly, just got to Tavarua.

I assume you already read these earlier stories from William Finnegan ?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/08/24/playing-docs-games-part-one?intcid=inline_amp&_gl=114xz0p8_ga*YW1wLWltLXdIZTVlYmJPWkF6cDM5dDA5X0M3Ni1ycS00czdYRVJhZ1Z4OFFPdzdwbXRpdFF5M2VwNks5VlViVEJjOFI.

Finished it a couple of days ago. Well worth reading just for the insight into how dysfunctional prisons are.

I’m currently reading suicide notes. It’s good but I’m struggling to get into the flow of it. Some books the words just stream off the page and before you know it, you’re done. This one feels like I’m really reading every word

I’ve just finished Sapiens ‘a brief history of humankind’ by Yuval Noah Harari on audiobook. That’s sixteen hours im not getting back. I jest of course, some interesting commentary on our evolution and stuff I’ve learnt but I could have done with an abridged version aka Sapien Light. And the closing chapter was enough frankly

I’ll probably skip Homo Deus, nothing worse than future forecasting our evolution without human spirit and endeavour.

Next book it’s Oliver Stone’s - chasing the light.

Haha thanks. I'll add to list. I moved onto this :D

No- just intrigued by the book. Really quite good. Will peruse again.

This is great.

I wasn't a massive Beatles fan (I liked some of what I'd heard, but felt a bit daunted by the amount of stuff out there), but reading an extract from this in The Guardian last year encouraged me to give them more of a go.

Since then I've been deep into their music, and I've been reading this for the last few days.

It's unlike any biography I've read before - although it's generally chronological, every chapter is a different anecdote or essay, and it works really well. He's a very droll writer, and clearly loves his subject, while being generally suspicious of the veneration they receive and the anorak nature of some of their fans and biographers.

Definitely recommended even if you don't really like The Beatles.

Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’. Paul Turner translation. Don’t be put off by the age, read the introduction. It’s incredible how long society has been discussing the same things and human nature has been preventing them.

It’s incredible how long society has been discussing the same things and human nature has been preventing them.

Some irony there, given that he went swiftly from being a reformer to an arch conservative, defender of the faith and burner of heretics.