Last Book You Read....

[Craig fae the Vale]

I finished Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart last week. Can see why it won the Booker. It's bleak but absolutely fantastic. Comfortably in the top ten books I've read.

[beefybake]

'Start' by Jon Acuff.

[madwullie]

Any science fiction recommendations? I'm particularly into first contact novels at the moment. Recently read axiom's end, just finished the three body problem. Unsure if it's worth getting the rest of the TBP trilogy. Enjoyed the first, but it was pretty self-containing, a decent story in its own right and I've already met the aliens.

[madwullie]

28 minutes ago, madwullie said:

Any science fiction recommendations? I'm particularly into first contact novels at the moment. Recently read axiom's end, just finished the three body problem. Unsure if it's worth getting the rest of the TBP trilogy. Enjoyed the first, but it was pretty self-containing, a decent story in its own right and I've already met the aliens.

Well after a scout about Google, I've bought the next in the trilogy (The Dark Forest) , invisible planets which is a collection of Chinese Sci fi short stories, and John Dies at the End. 

Will report back 

[NotThePars]

2 hours ago, madwullie said:

Any science fiction recommendations? I'm particularly into first contact novels at the moment. Recently read axiom's end, just finished the three body problem. Unsure if it's worth getting the rest of the TBP trilogy. Enjoyed the first, but it was pretty self-containing, a decent story in its own right and I've already met the aliens.

The Sparrow was a pretty good and interesting take on the first contact premise even if I'm not sure how I felt about the twist.

 

If you want the classics then The Dispossessed is still a GOAT.

Edited January 30, 2021 by NotThePars

[welshbairn]

2 hours ago, madwullie said:

Any science fiction recommendations? I'm particularly into first contact novels at the moment. Recently read axiom's end, just finished the three body problem. Unsure if it's worth getting the rest of the TBP trilogy. Enjoyed the first, but it was pretty self-containing, a decent story in its own right and I've already met the aliens.

I don't think you can beat The Culture series by Ian M Banks, plus the various off shoots like Feersum Endjinn. Alistair Reynolds isn't bad either. I'm a bit ignorant on the newer stuff.

[dysartrovers]

Well after a scout about Google, I've bought the next in the trilogy (The Dark Forest) , invisible planets which is a collection of Chinese Sci fi short stories, and John Dies at the End. 
Will report back 

John dies at the end is absolutely brilliant. I think you may need to be a little insane to read it but great read as is the sequel

[coprolite]

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross. Supernatural horror crime caper, part of Laundry files series but without any of the actual Laundry. Ok, pacey and quite entertaining but short on interesting ideas. Characters felt quite cartoonish and not hugely interesting, with one or two exceptions. 

The King in the North-The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, by Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans. A compendium of articles mainly about a recent archeology/history project investigating the Northern Picts, covering the Black Isle down to Stonehaven.

I'd thought i was going to be reading a history that i'd just not learned much about, but it turns out that this is proper Dark Ages stuff on the edges of history. There's also not a huge amount of archeology. It's not pop history but it's also not academic Journals, so it was quite easy to read (occasionally having to look up words, like "vallum") without having that tendency to fill in unknowable details. I really enjoyed it. 

[NotThePars]

Finished The Expanse series so far. Those books escalate the stakes very well and it’s impressive restraint to get to book 8 and still not reveal the extraterrestrial threat beyond the effects of their responses. Wonder how they’ll wrap up that series this year.

Also read The Tenderness of Wolves for a book club. Much smaller story about a murder in the Canadian wilderness of the latter 19th century. Eh, it was fine. Think it tries to introduce too much that leaves it trying to rapidly cover up some plot lines. Ending was pretty good though, some conclusions and other mysteries left unanswered.

Reading Alex Branson’s Water, Wasted now. No idea how the host of Episode One could make a serious novel but looking forward to seeing what he does.

[Stellaboz]

Just finished "Nala's World" by Dean Nicholson.

He's a lad from Dunbar who is travelling around the world with a cat he rescued from the Bosnian mountainside. 10/10

Absolutely love following Dean's adventures and the video's he posts on Youtube and Instagram as 1world1bike. What started as a bit of a jolly across to India changed his life when he found Nala at the side of the road. He's since raised thousands and thousands of euros to donate to animal welfare charities across the world. 

 

Just started the first "Wheel of Time" last night. Hope it's good.

[ThomCat]

Shuggie Bain - Disappointing tbh.  Shuggie's loyalty and stoicism throughout was rather poignant but the characters other than Agnes and himself are stereotype pantomime characters. There is no nuance or unpredictability - the author has set out to write a bleak novel and no light must get it.   If they novelized the "Scotch Mist" Dark place episode by a 'mis-lit' author it wouldn't be too far off the mark.

[Saigon Raider]

The Heroes - Joe Abercrombie.

Holy shit, this was incredible. I have enjoyed all his books but this might be my favourite. 600 pages based on three days of war between the Union and the North. Loved the development of characters like Calder and Beck. Nobody writes battle scenes like him, amazingly vivid.

Next I am onto The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. It's about the rise of the East India Company. Have never read anything by him so looking forward to it.

[NotThePars]

George F. Kennan - Cold War Iconoclast by Walter Hixson.
I saw some footage of George Kennan sounding very forthright and impressive telling congress the Vietnam war was unwinnable in the Ken Burns documentary series, so picked this up to learn a bit more about the guy. I'm very ignorant of the immediate postwar period, so found it interesting US strategy with respect to the USSR more or less came down to an anonymous essay he wrote in the aftermath of WW2. Sadly he realised soon enough that containing communism was a massive waste of time and effort and spent the rest of his life attacking his own earlier ideas and their implementation. He's an odd character, not particularly sympathetic as an elitist with a dim view of democratic oversight not to mention straight up racist views of the phrenology calipers type. At the same time he has some impressive characteristics - he is made ambassador to Yugoslavia and becomes fluent in Serbo-Croat and lobbies for a softer foreign policy attitude to Tito's communism, unaligned with Russia or China. He recognises in the early 70s as the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation recedes, that environmental destruction is the major threat to humankind. His contradictory character I guess is best exemplified by his hating anyone without a realpolitik attitude as being stupidly dogmatic, whilst frequently chucking it in or getting sidelined by pissing off the wrong people, mostly because he considers the majority of his contemporaries to be beneath him in terms of sophistication and intellect and can't help but let them know. He kept his oar in till his death in 2005, and has a reputation as a titan of foreign policy, but really from the 50s and especially from the 80s onwards all he really did was carp from the sidelines. A weird read.

Enjoyed this footnote (FOOTNOTE FFS) in American Foreign Policy and its Thinkers on Kennan

“In the extravagance of his fluctuations between elated self-regard and tortured self-flagellation—as in the volatility of his opinions: he would frequently say one thing and its opposite virtually overnight—Kennan was closer to a character out of Dostoevsky than any figure in Chekhov, with whom he claimed an affinity. His inconsistencies, which made it easier to portray him in retrospect as an oracle of temperate realism, were such that he could never be taken as a simple concentrate or archetype of the foreign-policy establishment that conducted America into the Cold War, his role as policy-maker in any case coming to an end in 1950. But just insofar as he has come to be represented as the sane keeper of the conscience of US foreign policy, his actual record—violent and erratic into his mid-seventies—serves as a marker of what could pass for a sense of proportion in the pursuit of the national interest. In the voluminous literature on Kennan, Stephanson’s study Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge, MA 1989 stands out as the only serious examination of the intellectual substance of his writings, a courteous but devastating deconstruction of them. An acute, not unsympathetic, cultural-political portrait of him as a conservative out of his time is to be found in Harper’s American Visions of Europe, pp. 135–232. In later life Kennan sought to cover his tracks in the period when he held a modicum of power, to protect his reputation and that of his slogan. We owe some striking pages to that impulse, so have no reason to complain, though also none to take his self-presentation at face value. His best writing was autobiographical and historical: vivid, if far from candid Memoirs—skirting suggestio falsi, rife with suppressio veri; desolate vignettes of the American scene in Sketches from a Life; and the late Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relation”

[Dan Steele]

Trio by William Boyd. A tremendous piece of writing. Set in the 60s and tells interconnecting stories around a film being shot in Brighton. Boyd's building of characters is excellent and the different characters stories really draw you in to the 'big picture'. Loved it, but have to admit to being a huge fan of all his writing.

[Bairnardo]

Going back to Irvine Welsh, should I buy T2, or is that Porno rebranded?

I have read skagboys and trainspotting so what's next? Is it Blade Artist or Porno?

[Blootoon87]

Going back to Irvine Welsh, should I buy T2, or is that Porno rebranded?

I have read skagboys and trainspotting so what's next? Is it Blade Artist or Porno?

Not sure if T2 is Porno, but it's Porno then Blade Artist chronologically.

[paul-r-cfc]

Porno is T2 aye. Same general plot theme but the film had to change it a fair bit to make it work nowadays. The book is very 90s.

[paul-r-cfc]

My copy even has the sticker

[Blootoon87]

Glue is the third best Welsh novel after trainspotting and skagboys imo.
Interesting to see the poster who didn't like Shuggie Bain. I'm sure I'll read it at some point but I read in a review the fact the village the character lives in is called "Pithead" and that was a bit of a red flag to me - couldn't really have got less subtle could you. A friend of mine read it and said he felt you could tell the author hasn't actually lived in Scotland for about 20 years.

Marabou Stork Nightmares is my favourite from Welsh.

[Shandon Par]

6 minutes ago, Blootoon87 said:

53 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Glue is the third best Welsh novel after trainspotting and skagboys imo.
Interesting to see the poster who didn't like Shuggie Bain. I'm sure I'll read it at some point but I read in a review the fact the village the character lives in is called "Pithead" and that was a bit of a red flag to me - couldn't really have got less subtle could you. A friend of mine read it and said he felt you could tell the author hasn't actually lived in Scotland for about 20 years.

Marabou Stork Nightmares is my favourite from Welsh.

I’ve found his latest stuff quite good fun.