Last Book You Read....

[Shadow Play]

On 01/01/2021 at 00:04, D.A.F.C said:

A great brand ruined after otsi left

Shadow project is still decent.

No doubt about it Massimo Osti was a genius.  If you’ve not read it already the book IDEAS FROM MASSIMO OSTI is well worth a look.

If you’re also interested in 80s / 90s terrace fashion in general DRESSERS is pretty good as well.  Credit to the Motherwell lads who wrote and contributed to it.

[NotThePars]

Finished the third Expanse novel, Abaddon's Gate, and on to the 4th, Cibola Burns, which I've read over half of in a couple of days. They're really easy reads and enjoyable although I still think the TV series is much better at developing the characters. The latest addition, Elvi, is murder in the books and completely sound on the show.

[Detournement]

The Human Stain by Phillip Roth was my first book of the year, I spent too much of last year ploughing through heavy non fiction so I'm going to try to redress the balance a bit this year with more novels. This one despite being published in 2000 is about cancel culture in the wake of Monica Lewinsky featuring a professor in his 70s who gets cancelled for calling two students who never appear in his class 'Spooks' only to find out they are black and suffer a huge backlash. He then gets doubly cancelled for taking up shagging a cleaner in her 30s (being old and extremely horny is a common Roth theme). There were a couple of minor plotlines about a Vietnam veteran and a French professor which didn't really work for me but it's always a pleasure reading Roth especially when he is wearing his Nathan Zuckerberg mask and I battered through 360 pages in three days so I obviously enjoyed it.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. Both were purchased from the Oxfam shop on Royal Exchange Sq when I was out doing my Christmas shopping. It was a pleasure to do that stupid head tilt while scanning the shelves.

[tongue_tied_danny]

I picked up Max Hastings' book about the Korean War on Googleplay for 99p then other day.

Pretty good so far. Hastings is a fantastic writer on the Korean conflict doesn't get nearly as much attention as Vietnam or other 20th Century wars. I certainly haven't read up on it that much.

[DiegoDiego]

Mr Tickle - Roger Hargreaves.

A day in the life of the titular Mr Tickle, who starts his day lazing in bed and then, seemingly with boredom his only motivation, wanders around his town being a total arsehole, disrupting people who are trying to do their jobs. Few escape his wrath: the grocer, teacher, postman and train guard all fall foul of his antics. Even the police are seen as viable targets for Mr Tickle's terrorism. Eventually, again seemingly out of boredom, he goes home and the book ends.

It's an intriguing concept but it never really goes anywhere. There's no explanation of how Tickle got such long arms or why he uses them to strike fear into his community rather than getting cats down from trees or helping folk change lightbulbs. It does finish by raising the possibility that every community harbours a Mr Tickle and any of us can become victims of such miscreants. Hargreaves seems to forward the proposition that the higher trust a society is, the more damage can be caused by a sole actor working against it, that like a child raised in pristine conditions, all it takes is one germ to bring the whole thing crashing down. Tickle seems to act with absolute impunity and perhaps here Hargreaves is encouraging us to keep our guard up as a society and remain vigilant against those who threaten the system. I imagine there are many of a right-wing persuasion in places like Sweden who will nod along to this book, having seen their society transformed by those who, like Tickle, look different from them and threaten their way of life.

I battered through it in a day and though the book has obvious flaws it's well worth a read.

[coprolite]

Saints of salvation. Final part of Peter F Hamilton’s salvation trilogy.   Lots of good ideas and some good set pieces. It was set on a massive scale but never felt quite epic enough to fill that. Worth reading if you read the first two but disappointing as a stand alone.

[Mark Connolly]

10 minutes ago, DiegoDiego said:

Mr Tickle - Roger Hargreaves.

A day in the life of the titular Mr Tickle, who starts his day lazing in bed and then, seemingly with boredom his only motivation, wanders around his town being a total arsehole, disrupting people who are trying to do their jobs. Few escape his wrath: the grocer, teacher, postman and train guard all fall foul of his antics. Even the police are seen as viable targets for Mr Tickle's terrorism. Eventually, again seemingly out of boredom, he goes home and the book ends.

It's an intriguing concept but it never really goes anywhere. There's no explanation of how Tickle got such long arms or why he uses them to strike fear into his community rather than getting cats down from trees or helping folk change lightbulbs. It does finish by raising the possibility that every community harbours a Mr Tickle and any of us can become victims of such miscreants. Hargreaves seems to forward the proposition that the higher trust a society is, the more damage can be caused by a sole actor working against it, that like a child raised in pristine conditions, all it takes is one germ to bring the whole thing crashing down. Tickle seems to act with absolute impunity and perhaps here Hargreaves is encouraging us to keep our guard up as a society and remain vigilant against those who threaten the system. I imagine there are many of a right-wing persuasion in places like Sweden who will nod along to this book, having seen their society transformed by those who, like Tickle, look different from them and threaten their way of life.

I battered through it in a day and though the book has obvious flaws it's well worth a read.
 

There are other books in the series too. Really helps you get up towards the 50 books a year target on Goodreads.

[NotThePars]

@mixufruit Zizek would tell you to ignore the moralising fraud Solzhenitsyn and read the Kolyma tales instead. I’ve only read a couple of the short stories so can’t say if I agree with him yet

[Saigon Raider]

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. Impossible to really describe the plot without major spoilers.

Overall, it was alright, 3/5 on Goodreads from me. The end was a major disappointment but it kept my interest. Decent in between book before going onto The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie.

[coprolite]

On 01/01/2021 at 19:17, Monkey Tennis said:

Somewhat late to the party, but I've just read Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent.

Quite pacey I suppose, but I didn't think much of it in truth.  It's Graham Greene, so obviously, we know he can write.  There were only odd flashes of his brilliance though.  Apparently it was written both at and on speed, which I think shows.

Even coasting in neutral Greene is better at writing than 95% of other authors. 

[NotThePars]

Zizek can f**k off I'll read what I like tbh.
What's the fraud accusation against Solzhenitsyn?

I’m more referring to his reputation which conveniently glossed (and still glosses in some circles) over the fact he was a far right crank, a Russian chauvinist, and an anti-semite.

[Detournement]

52 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Not in the least attempting to defend him from these things but does that subtract from what he had to say about his experience of the USSR?

The question is why is Solzhenitsyn's account of the USSR taken as fact but Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson's accounts of the USA are dismissed?

[coprolite]

27 minutes ago, Detournement said:

The question is why is Solzhenitsyn's account of the USSR taken as fact but Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson's accounts of the USA are dismissed?

That's a pretty strange question 

[NotThePars]

Not in the least attempting to defend him from these things but does that subtract from what he had to say about his experience of the USSR?

I can’t really speak to his direct experience but to sort of allude to what Detournement started to say I wonder why he’s held in such an authoritative regard when even someone like Shalamov isn’t for example. Especially when Solzhenitsyn made such glaring (and suspect) false statements around details like the Jewish composition of the early Bolshevik government.

[NotThePars]

45 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

You dig a little into the background of just about anyone whose work you admire and you'll find something disappointing. If we only read and appreciated the literature of people with well rounded personalities and no dreadful shortcomings, I'm not sure it'd be such an engaging passtime.

That's not really what I'm trying to say but I feel like we're arguing past each other anyway.

 

I finished books 6-7 of The Expanse and can comfortably say that they're the best in the series. Someone's been reading AJP Taylor and translated that idea of a self-conscious Great Man of History self-mythologising his bluffing and staggering through events into the narrative of book six and it's superb. Book 7 ups the ante and then some and despite my reservations of how the book's setting is altered at the end of book 6 I think it's done well.

[Duszek]

1 hour ago, MixuFruit said:

You dig a little into the background of just about anyone whose work you admire and you'll find something disappointing. If we only read and appreciated the literature of people with well rounded personalities and no dreadful shortcomings, I'm not sure it'd be such an engaging passtime.

This is very true and applies to all art - painting, music, stand-up comedy... 

[Detournement]

5 hours ago, MixuFruit said:

By who?

Reading your review of the Cancer Ward you seem to have taken it as a definitive account of the USSR and more generally AS has been widely promoted as the most accurate chronicler of the USSR by Western liberal media. 

The Black Panther writers I mentioned all detail their experience with an inhumane prison system and oppression by a political system they oppose yet almost no one accepts their perspective as a definitive account of the USA. 

It's enlightening to think about why they are not as well received as Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

 

[charger29]

Finally got round to reading Permanent Record by Edward Snowden.
A decent read if you have an interest in him, privacy or I guess whistleblowing in general. Having said that, the book is mainly a biography of his life until 2019 so there's better books out there if you want to learn more about the specifics of his whistleblowing.
I've never really seen it discussed anywhere but a part of me thinks there may have been a 2nd person involved in some capacity. Perhaps helping get the files off the computer and onto his micro SD. In the book he didn't want to explain in detail how he got the files off as he feared an adversary would then use this exploit against the NSA. This makes very little sense to me. Why not just tell the NSA what the exploit is? He was in the intelligence community for over a decade and one of the reasons he blew the whistle was because of his apparent love for his country, but he just keeps this to himself? Even with all the espionage charges, I just don't get it.
The most interesting part of the book is probably the chapter on his last role at NSA. He trained for and got another job after he got the files out of the NSA facility in Hawaii. He did this as he only had a basic understanding of the documents now sitting at home and wanted to learn more. He would also soon have to explain to journalists, and therefore the wider world, the highly technical documents.
8/10

[Comrie]

Panic by K.R Griffiths.

An interesting take on a global plandemic where everyone barring those with a specific blood type are turning into feral pack killers. It's set around St. David's, which is probably the last place you'd expect a novel like this to take place. Interesting- probably being generous with the extra star but I thought the concept was intruiging.

[dysartrovers]

I only Come on here now in the hope that@diegodiego has gotten round to the next installment of the Hargreaves series