The Book Thread

ennspek

What are you reading or listening to at the moment?

All recommendations welcome.

After a lifetime of assuming I don't like Stephen King I have started "The Stand". Although he's no Joyce (some of the writing is cringe worthy) it's quite a page turner.

boogieman

Didn’t we already have a “what are you reading” thread? Probably long buried now. 

I’m currently reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, it was recommended on here recently. It’s excellent. 

Oh and if you haven’t read Stephen King’s Billy Summers you really should. It’s one of the best things he’s ever written. Not horror themed, but then most of his really good stuff isn’t, like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and The Shawshank Redemption. 

BluesLover

Get Carter, by Ted Lewis. A great read, but you'll have Michael Caine in your mind's eye as you read it.

sev112

While on holiday I’ve just finished Gerald Seymour’s new hardback one, his 39th!  All secret service / spy themes with human beings stuck in the middle, and his books have been written for all of the trouble spots over the world since the late 70s.   He is in between Frederick aforsyth and Le Carre in his writing style.  He has multiple strands and characters that by some hook or crook come together by the end.

his first book was Harry’s Game in the early 80s, which was televised and had the famous haunting Clannad theme tune sung by Enya I believe.

he was an investigative reporter.  I once went to a UK nuclear facility for an induction to work on a project.  The induction was mainly H&S stuff etc, but the interesting bit was when the security guy turned up to talk about security.  He showed one of Gerald’s fiction books and asked if anyone had read it. I said yes and he asked me how I thought he had got all his information about the site, it’s buildings, it’s processes, it’s security etc. i said presumably in co-ordination with the site/security people.  Apparently not, apparently Gerald just started going to the local pubs, shops, etc and just chatted to people over a period.  And people love chatting and apparently tell you quite a lot, that a good investigative journalist can pull together.  I was quite shocked! 

ennspek

boogieman said:

Didn’t we already have a “what are you reading” thread? Probably long buried now. 

Probably. I searched books (because I'm basic) and only guitar books showed up. Apologies if this is a duplicate.

GuyBoden

Alan Moore's Jerusalem, an epic tale about Northampton. Over 1200 pages long. All three books are in one volume.

Book 1 and Book 2 are good reads, I'd gave the fantasy book 2 a speed read, fantasy not being my thing.

But, overall, a great read. Recommended  

 

Brio

Ignition!  by John Dury Clark.
An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

Does what it says on the tin.

BRISTOL86

A book hasn’t captivated me from the off like this has in a long time. 

@ennspek Stephen King’s short story anthologies are worth a look (there are many). They range from the brilliant to the awful but there’s always some belters in each collection. 

‘Full Dark, No Stars’ is a good starting point, only 4 stories in that so they’re all decent length but fairly quick reads. The first story, 1922, is brilliant. 

duotone

Re-signed up to Audible for 4 months (they had a half price sale) last week and used my first credit on A Promised Land by Barack Obama. 

I really wanted to get the audiobook as he reads it himself & to buy it on CD was £35+, so this was the much cheaper option at £4. Am 4 hours in atm, another 25 hours to go!

https://obamabook.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/a-promised-land-barack-obama.png

tony99

The Plague - Albert Camus

thecolourbox

I don't read nearly enough but, a bit like with my music and film tastes, I find I have fairly specific likes and dislikes which can either get me obsessively hooked or switch me off straight away. I'm also usually significantly behind the curve (as I am with music also) as I tend to ignore things until any hype has died down to see if they are still interesting enough. As with my music tastes there is a lot of contradiction in what I like or dislike. I really don't enjoy detective/murder mystery books, and I'm not too keen on "real life" books, but then one of my all time favourite books is Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time which is essentially a "real life" book which contains a fair bit about detectives and murder mystery (albeit about a dog).

I re-read it on holiday in November and I'm ashamed to say that was the last book I read. Having watched and loved His Dark Materials over Christmas I'd like to re-read (or listen to audiobook) of that again, as I really loved it and it's been a good 15 years or so since I read them.

Generally my favoured authors in the past when I've read more often, included Graham Greene, Roald Dahl, Jasper Fforde, and my absolute favourite - Franz Kafka. I'm probably not clever enough or have the attention span sufficiently to read more books though I'd like to. I just don't enjoy the "finding out" process as much as I do with music, and of course reading takes up more time to decide you dislike something than music does

HippoPete

May I pick up on Mr Boogieman's recommendation above and suggest Joyland and Later by Stephen King both from the publisher "Hard Case". the first has a smidgeon of the supernatural, the latter quite a bit more but both more crime than horror.

I also cautiously recommend SK's "Revival" because it's full on Stephen King fever dream horror in the second half but the initial chapters describing a high school kid learning guitar, playing gigs under-age and of course, getting the girl are sublime.

JerkMoans

Phipson on Evidence, 20th edition, chapter 18. Reminding myself of the rule that evidence of good character is generally inadmissible in civil proceedings.

GuyBoden

tony99 said:

The Plague - Albert Camus

Very topical, you must be a M.E.Smith Fall fan too.  

Blueingreen

Currently Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire. Recently finished her Transit of Venus. I think she’d be marmite but I’m really enjoying her. Wonderful prose stylist, ferociously intelligent, plot and character perhaps lacking.

In between I read the new Jonathan Coe. Coe at his most typical, “state of the nation” stuff.  In many ways I think he’s just not a very good writer, prose is workmanlike and characters can be stereotypes. His political analysis is sensible and fair but not especially original or penetrating. And yet he manages to serve up a pretty enjoyable read, and very moving at the end (I won’t go into reasons why, to avoid spoilers).

Recent disappointment Hammet by Maggie O’Farrell. Very well received fictionalised story about Shakespeare’s family, but I thought it was overwritten tosh and gave up before the end.

Roland

We were away last week. Looking for novels to read on my iPad I came across faded page.com, so have been binge re-reading Nevil Shute and Raymond Chandler.

boogieman said:

I’m currently reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, it was recommended on here recently. It’s excellent. 

An excellent book.

boogieman

BRISTOL86 said:

A book hasn’t captivated me from the off like this has in a long time. 

@ennspek Stephen King’s short story anthologies are worth a look (there are many). They range from the brilliant to the awful but there’s always some belters in each collection. 

‘Full Dark, No Stars’ is a good starting point, only 4 stories in that so they’re all decent length but fairly quick reads. The first story, 1922, is brilliant. 

The Different Seasons anthology by SK is excellent, it includes Shawshank Redemption and The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) which are both superb. For me SK is always better in non-horror mode as he’s just so damn brilliant at characterisation. Some of his horror/ fantasy books are good of course, but he does seem to write two shite ones for every good’un lately. I really liked the concept of his “11/22/63” and the sort of time travel dilemmas it throws up. Doctor Sleep (sequel to The Shining) is very good too. 

RocknRollDave

I am trying to work my way through the Doctor Who books, having been a big fan of the Target books as a kid.
The BBC is putting out similar versions of the modern-era series, so I have also been reading those.

Just finished The Witchfinders (Jodie Whittaker era story) which was enjoyable enough. 
Prior to that, I read Mark Gatiss' story The Crimson Horror, which was absolutely top notch.

Aisde from Dr Who, I read Frankenstein for the first time recently. Found it a bit dense and heavy going, but enjoyed it.

Think I shall have a go at The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde next, which Mrs nRollDave bought me for xmas.

After that, possibly Bob Mortimer's memoir, then I want to re-read Daisy Jones and The Six, which I absolutely loved when I read it the first time, and which I need to re-read to wash away the memory of the hugely disappointing Amazon Prime adaptation, which might lead viewers to believe the book was pants.

ennspek

And Away, Bob Mortimer is great. It ruins Would I Lie To You though!
His novel, The Satsuma Complex is also quite good fun.

BRISTOL86

boogieman said:

BRISTOL86 said:

A book hasn’t captivated me from the off like this has in a long time. 

@ennspek Stephen King’s short story anthologies are worth a look (there are many). They range from the brilliant to the awful but there’s always some belters in each collection. 

‘Full Dark, No Stars’ is a good starting point, only 4 stories in that so they’re all decent length but fairly quick reads. The first story, 1922, is brilliant. 

The Different Seasons anthology by SK is excellent, it includes Shawshank Redemption and The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) which are both superb. For me SK is always better in non-horror mode as he’s just so damn brilliant at characterisation. Some of his horror/ fantasy books are good of course, but he does seem to write two shite ones for every good’un lately. I really liked the concept of his “11/22/63” and the sort of time travel dilemmas it throws up. Doctor Sleep (sequel to The Shining) is very good too. 

I was a bit meh about Doctor Sleep. But The Shining is one of my favourites of all time so it was gonna be a tough act. 

Pet Sematary is my favourite by a country mile. I like some of the stories from Bazaar of Bad Dreams and Skeleton Crew. 

The Long Walk was great too, and Revival which was mentioned above. 

Winny_Pooh

Otherlands