Books - What are you reading?

I've got this on the way, and that Rory Stewart book

https://amzn.eu/d/5lBqOm2

Brave New World was far more prophetic and insightful of things to come than 1984, but the latter is the one more people have heard of and read.

Murakami's 'Colorless Tsukuru ...' was a bit off IMO.
Narrative centered around a man falsely accused of rape... had a bit of a incel/mens-rights vibe to it.

Recently finished:

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch - very strange but hilarious in places. It won the Booker Prize but lots of reviews are very po-faced about supposed shortcomings which I think are actually them taking far too seriously a book that Murdoch clearly had a great time writing. The narrator is a hoot.

Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin - this had been highly recommended to me but I didn't think it was all that. It was quite an interesting concept but felt a bit like a good idea for a short story that had been fleshed out quite quickly.

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle - loved it. It is in a bigger volume of the Barrytown Trilogy and I'm looking forward to the next couple when I'm done reading this:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. As painful as a paper cut, as clear as the cold wind at the top of a mountain and as evocative as the best you've ever read. War, love, death, loneliness, camaraderie and the dark teak jungle. A tour de force.

Finding myself reading more pseudo samizdat stuff. This arrived today!

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This is brilliant..

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I wrote the same a few pages back, one of the few books I haven't finished.

Sounds great, I've just ordered a copy.

Saw this lady at a thing yesterday, and enjoyed what she had to say:

I'm re-reading Blood Meridian really slowly to appreciate the rhythm and nuance of the language. He invented a new way of writing. Did he write anything else in the same style? I've read No Country for Old Men, but that seems almost amateurish by comparison.

Moscow X by David McCloskey if anyone is looking for a superb spy thriller

incredible book. i once interviewed dylan carlson from the band Earth who said ow important it was for him which made me read it.

I think the Border Trilogy books are closest to Blood Meridian in style.

My Xmas and birthday haul. Nothing immediately grabs me.

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I've read the windup girl before

i’d take murphy off hands if you like. bloody love SB

This is my current pile. I'm one of those irritating twats that reads them all at the same time.

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I've just finished Negative Space by B.R Yeager. I'm not sure what I thought of it. It felt quite trashy to start with but really ramped up throughout and had a pretty unique, oppressive quality to it. In hindsight I might have chosen something a bit less unpleasant to finish the year on. It did just sneak me past my 30 book reading goal for the year though.

You've probably heard by now, but 'Going Infinite' by Michael Lewis is garbage. I liked some of his earlier books, but this time he's way out of line. Lewis doesn't go as far as to claim Sam Bankman-Fried, the subject of the book, is entirely innocent. But he does his best to downplay his culpability and instead tries to build the case that Bankman-Fried is just a whimsical genius.

Moneyball took a fair amount of flak, as I recall. I tend to be suspicious of anybody spinning a good narrative (which he really is skilled at) out of historical events; at best they're leaving out important things that aren't part of their narrative thread, while often overstating the significance of much that they do include.

Just waiting for Argyll to be released should be good

The only one of his books I had any personal background in was Flash Boys, which was at best very one-sided. Picking Brad Katsuyama as his narrative vehicle gave it a pretty distinct bias.

I quite liked Going Infinite. I agree it wasn’t anywhere near critical enough of crypto as a whole (Number Goes Up is a good read for that) and SBF doesn’t come across as evil, just very off the end of some personality scale, super bright in a narrow band, and insanely out of his depth.

He could have explored and critiqued the system that allowed him and others to continue for so long (more of The Big Short style), and the book ended badly with the one sided negativity about the bankruptcy lawyer, and the stupid “looks like the had the money all the time! So they weren’t actually bankrupt!” angle, which soured it for me.

But as an account of the rise and fall of SBF, it’s fine

Seems I read 56 books last year with an average length of 424 pages.

Lowest rated was the Feather Men by Ranulph Fiennes which was pretty shit, I didn't give any 5 star ratings to anything this year (apart from some books that I re-read).