[DaveC]

How long did I sleep for? 😴😳 I have a vast amount of good reading to recommend but I promise not to put it all in one marathon post!

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[fried]

Oh, go on! Especially looking for a book on the politics of interwar years, Sleepwalkers for the 20s and 30s.

[DaveC]

I could suggest AJP Taylor on Britain between the wars,  or William Shirer on Germany, or David Kennedy's Freedom from Fear on the USA but I don't  have a book that really fits your brief. You've got me thinking that is a glaring hole in my library so I'll now be looking

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[fried]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XC73VSZ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492179201&sr=8-1&keywords=cry+havoc+the+arms+race

Cry Havoc. Looks like my next choice.

[kelvin]

So finally got to the end of Pratchett's Discworld - just the last one to go which I think I wanna read in paperback. What's there to say really? Never read any his books before, I'd sort of avoided them but they had me laughing out loud, they made me angry about our world and I think they've changed me in lots of small ways for the better. They took a year of intermittent reading and I've no idea exactly but I'm guessing 30 to 40 books? By the end I just wanted them out of the way but I guess if you'd read them as they were released, you'd have been psyched for the next one. Gonna have a break before reading the last one.

Recently read Kenton Cool's book - pacy reading. Way better than I expected but I have low expectations with regards to autobiographies.
Also on the big hill theme, my daughter bought me Into Thin Air, the chapters about the descent I found particularly gripping. Always wanted to climb Everest as a kid but reading this stuff and the circus it's become mean I'm happy on my own with a pad or two and no ambition to empty the wallet for a go. I was spitting bullets when I read of people ascending past folk in trouble. I can understand it to a point on the descent, if you're fucked yourself but on the ascent? I turned the air in my van blue at times and anyone walking past must have wondered what the hell was going on.

Currently reading The Boulder - unsure. Philosophy or art or one mans mad mind? Got a way to go yet, so it may get better.

I have some Neil Stephenson books to read, based on a friend's recommendation and she also recommended Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind. She gave me kindle copies of them but unfortunately my Catalan is worse than my Spanish unless it's climbing terms and general greetings, so the English versions have been procured. Oh, and Fiva, Fifa or something? That Gordon fella off UKC's book.

[DaveC]

I have been dipping into the short stories of Brazil's Clarice Lispector and recently read her first novel, Near the Wild Heart.  I'm currently reading her biography and all I will say is her life was as extraordinary as her writing.  Writes stories about female characters like nobody before or,  I suspect,  since.  The trite quote on her is "looks like Marlene Dietrich,  writes like Virginia Woolf " but I think she is far more important than that. Beautiful writing,  difficult and disturbing stories,  try the short stuff first. 

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[andy popp]

How long did I sleep for? 😴😳 I have a vast amount of good reading to recommend but I promise not to put it all in one marathon post!

Excellent! Looking forward to that.

[the_dom]

I've just finished Paul Beatty's The Sellout, which won the Booker last year. It's.. demented, profane and hugely, hugely funny. Highly recommended.

[DaveC]

I recently read the 2015 Booker Prize winner,  A Short History of Seven Killings, which is very, very violent,  also very profane, a disturbing story of the rise of Jamaican gangs and their spread into the USA via their connection to Colombia's drug cartels.  Told as a set of 1st person narratives by more than 20 different characters,  often in Jamaican patois,  it can be hard to follow and at 700pgs a bit long but I found it well worth the effort. 8/10

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[fatneck]

Just read Tim and Time Again by Ben Elton. Really enjoyed it! Lost it's way a little  bit in the middle but the plot gathers pace and had a brilliant ending. As ever, was left wishing I'd listened a bit more in history. Recommended!

[DaveC]

Just finished "The Novel,  A Biography", a massive (1172 pages)  look at the development of the English language novel over 700 years.  For someone like me with very limited knowledge of the historical background of literature,  this was an excellent book.  The author,  a poet,  editor and publisher himself, uses the writings of the novelists themselves, about their own work and about other past and contemporary writers,  to show how the novel,  whatever that is,  developed and changed across the centuries. Definitely not for casual reading or if you already know your literature well but if like me,  you'd like to know how Cervantes leads to Dickens,  to Kafka and Joyce, then on to the likes of Coetzee and Amis then this might be the book for you.

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[SA Chris]

Just read Tim and Time Again by Ben Elton. Really enjoyed it! Lost it's way a little  bit in the middle but the plot gathers pace and had a brilliant ending. As ever, was left wishing I'd listened a bit more in history. Recommended!

Sounds a bit like the idea behind the Stephen King book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11/22/63


I thought that after reading this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Casualty

[remus]

Forever War Series, Joe Haldeman

Good bit of sci-fi, especially books 1 and 2. There's some pretty clear analogies with the Vietnam war, and the author does a good job of mixing in some classic sci-fi elements (future shock, relativistic problems). Book 3 felt like a total cop out to me. While trying not to spoil the ending, it was a very unsatisfying conclusion to an otherwise very good storyline.

[andy popp]

How long did I sleep for? 😴😳 I have a vast amount of good reading to recommend but I promise not to put it all in one marathon post!

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You seem to be teasing us, one recommendation at a time. Drip, drip, drip.

[Muenchener]

she also recommended Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind.

Looks promising at the start, and I recommended it to Fiend on that basis a while back, but I found it lost its way rather quickly.

[Yossarian]

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived - Adam Rutherford

I just finished this (partly read, partly Audible) and thought it was one of the finest popular science books I've ever read. It's a lovely mix of the current state of genetic research, lots of interesting case studies - including extreme inbreeding in the Spanish Hapsburg family - and lots of calling out of charlatans (Oliver James, the team who claimed to have identified Jack the Ripper, etc.)

Really good stuff.

[kelvin]

she also recommended Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind.

Looks promising at the start, and I recommended it to Fiend on that basis a while back, but I found it lost its way rather quickly.

Interesting - I finished it last night and couldn't put it down, it slowly dawning on me that there was at least another book to follow.
I liked the way it wandered away from what you expected, much like real life has a ramble here and there and I thought the main character and how he did/didn't deal with infatuation/desire was pretty much spot on and perfectly described. It was almost like reading about myself.
I'm not really into fantasy stuff but this didn't feel like that most of the time.
Have you read the follow-up?

[Muenchener]

Pretty good world building I agree, but I quickly found our hero's effortless brilliance at everything except his love life tedious. Got partway through the sequel and gave up.

[DaveC]

💧💧A highlight of this last year for me was finally reading J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. Ballard is never easy reading but I have always found his prose interesting and his way of relating a story absorbing and this book was no exception.  It is a darker and far more complex story than the movie of the same name with few redeeming characters and you are in no doubt at any time that the boy Jim is in a struggle to survive and very much alone. Definitely recommended.

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[Brannock]

💧💧A highlight of this last year for me was finally reading J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. Ballard is never easy reading but I have always found his prose interesting and his way of relating a story absorbing and this book was no exception.  It is a darker and far more complex story than the movie of the same name with few redeeming characters and you are in no doubt at any time that the boy Jim is in a struggle to survive and very much alone. Definitely recommended.

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Also read this recently, thought it was very good, dark and with few redeeming characters is a good description.

[Will Hunt]

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. "Boys own" adventure stuff. Absolutely brilliant. Battles at sea. Evasion of the king's men. The Flight in the Heather. Loved it.

Moominsummer Madness. Read this after seeing it recommended on here. Enjoyed it a lot.

A Confederacy of Dunces. Great picaresque novel. The cast of characters are laugh out loud funny at every turn.

[Will Hunt]

Poetry: where does one start?

[andy popp]

Poetry: where does one start?

Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, especially the North American Sequence.

Here's one verse from 'The Rose' from that sequence:

"I sway outside myself
Into the darkening currents,
Into the small spillage of driftwood,
The waters swirling past the tiny headlands.
Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment
While on a far point of the rocks
The light heightened,
And below, in a mist out of nowhere,
The first rain gathered?"

I love this sequence so much and have gone back to it time and time again over the years.

[Muenchener]

Four Quartets

[andy popp]

I was going to say "Four Quartets" too, but its not exactly an easy route in (not that Roethke is much better). Also William Carlos Williams and for contemporary poets Deryn Rees Jones, who is a colleague of mine at Liverpool.