Be Excellent To Each Other

2024 Thread

Is anyone going to challenge JBR's crown as Undisputed Beex Book Reading King?

1.) Prester John - John Buchan

Jolly old Boy's Own adventure, in which a doughty Scots lad foils a plot and saves the day. Bonus points for having a heroic dog named Colin and for extensive use of the word "Portugoose", meaning a single Portugeese. It's all old fashioned nonsense, and probably was even in 1910 when it as published but it is quite good at what it aims to be, and he's somehow very good at writing rock-climbing scenes.

I’ve only got about 10% of The Stand left (and it’s the newer edition with the additional chapters and extended wait) which I reckon I should be credited four or five books worth for.

Oh my, that thing is HUGE. Isn't it something like 1,200 pages?

1,325 for this extended/reinstated version.

1. A Voyage around the Queen by Craig Brown

The life of Liz as experienced by others.

It follows a similar path to his Beatles book, grouping anecdotes and stories in roughly chronological and thematic chapters. It just didn't have the pace of the earlier work, and some parts became a struggle to get through. For example, I get what he was trying to do in the chapters recounting his and others' dreams about the Queen, but a long chapter of such tales with little attempt to order them for even comic effort just became pretty tedious. Other parts work much better, including his lengthy descriptions of the corgi lineage, the rules on who should courtesy to whom, and It's a Royal Knockout.

His main argument throughout is that the Queen was ultimately unknowable, and people projected themselves onto her.

1. The Chronic(what?)cles of Amber - Roger Zelazny

An epic quest of siblings, godlike to us, who come from the 'real' centre of things, Amber, but can journey to our 'shadow' worlds to have a good time, recruit troops, as they see fit. It's long, made up of 5 short novels, and as the introduction says, a bit too much recapping in the later ones. But the interplay and plotting between the siblings is always good, and there's invention up the wazoo.
There's a second chronicle to follow a son, which I might get to eventually, but it would be too much of a good thing right now.

2.) The Hammer of God - Arthur C Clarke

Apparently the inspiration for Deep Impact, story of a Big Asteroid that may, or may not, kill everyone. A Spaceship goes to stop it from doing that. Quite good, in a sort-of "here are some space things happening" way. No character development or anything fancy like that, and an odd sub-plot about religious fantatics.

The Stand by Stephen King
Well, I finished this today. A few random thoughts:

I mean, it’s good. I almost gave up about a quarter of the way in because I kind of felt I had the measure of what was happening, and I did. You could have told the story well and richly in about 25% of the space, and I wouldn’t say that the character journeys were ground breaking, but the character studies were good.

Some of the race descriptors made me wince. They were supposed to, but they were so prevalent in the text that to modern readers in the U.K. you might be forgiven wondering if so many of the characters of the time would really have spoken like that, and then you realise that they probably would have, especially in parts of the U.S.

Stephen King shouldn’t write sex scenes.

It was paranormal light, but that’s a good thing, as it’s very much a human story.

People should not have used this book as a how-to manual during Covid.

I've read The Stand twice. First time when I was about 12 and voraciously reading every book I could get my hands on, so I read all my dad's books. That was the original abridged version and it still took me about 2 weeks to read through.

I read the unabridged version when I was commuting for 2 hours a day and it definitely kept me company during those long bus rides.

Great book. I love a long and detailed story. The climax is bobbins of course (Stephen King, innit?) but it works better on the page than it did in the 90s mini series for sure

I think I might have read it when I was about 12, too. Though I have no memory of the content, I have a memory of having and reading the book. I think I read a load of his books at that age, for much the same reason as you - hey we’re in the house. Also loads of Dennis Wheatley books, which for some reason my grandmother had a red leather bound collection of.

But the content of the stories themselves have disappeared with time, so it was fresh to me.

2. A Voyage Around the Queen - Craig Brown I have absolutely no interest in the Royal Family, but Craig Brown is great, and this was 99p on Kindle. And then Kern's review nudged it to the front of my mind. As Kern says, throughout he proves his point that people project onto the Queen, and he manages something similar in the book, in that if you like the queen, there's stuff for you, if you don't, likewise. If you're ambivalent? You can also find what you want. It's irreverent without being showily so, made me laugh a lot and tear up, too. Fabulous.

I love the 99p Kindle offers.

Whenever I see a book that looks interesting, I add it to my wish list then every so often sort by price to see which ones are currently discounted.

I also do this - and add a provenance-note to avoid wondering why the book's there. The simple joy of finding a wishlist book is now a bargain!

I feel this is a kick starter I could get behind

https://authorforecast.com/?utm_source= ... 9889010758

People pay for books?!

‘Be more Grim… Smash and grab your local Waterstones today!’

3.) Get Shorty - Elmore Leonard
A Miami loanshark ends up in Hollywood and does gangstery things AND movie producer things. Elmore Leonard's not quite Raymond Chandler, but he's not that far off, so I'm gonna read more of this chap too.

The Librarian has entered the chat.

You'll be telling me people pay for movies next.

.

I would.

Highly recommend the TV series Justified, which is based on some of his stories. Set in a quasi-contemporary Kentucky, which a gun-slinging US Marshall in the shape of Timothy The Olyphantman.

Walton Goggins is a brilliant nemesis, and it brims with most excellent dialogue and one-liners (until S4, where I feel quality has dipped significantly, though many seem to rate S4).

So, how do you read your books – on a Kindle? I know you used to be able to upload .PDF books to Kindles some years ago, can you still?

1. Starship Thrive - Ginger Booth

Thrive has 6 months until their launch window opens – and closes.

The prizes Denali offers are jewels beyond price. An actual starship awaits on the sea bottom. The greatest nanite scientist of the system can finally tell Sass how she came to be immortal.

Be careful what you ask for.

In the finale of the Denali arc, our heroes visit the ocean floor, battle an aggressive ecosystem, and come to terms with a strange new world.

And just maybe, they’ll win a starship. Fuel not included. Additional taxes and grueling acts of heroism may apply.

Book 4 in the Thrive Space Colony Adventures. Suggested for fans of Firefly or Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper books.

Yep, although I tend to use .epub files.

I can even email them to an email address that Amazon provides for me and it automatically sends them to my Kindle.

I must have a false memory of it, but I was certain that I had remembered Amazon pulling that service years ago to force you to use their book downloads. I must be thinking of something else.

I think it's used for people who like to upload academic stuff to Kindles.

Your honour

I have a server running that automatically finds and adds new books by authors I like, and exposes them via a very simple webpage so I can browse to it in my Kindle browser and just download them directly. BOSH

Don't fucking tell me I can't have stuff for free, Amazon you biotch

Pretty nifty (and shifty)

That's me!

The Englightenment of the Greengage Tree - Shokoofeh Azah. Magical realism story set around the Iranian revolution. Liked the latter, less keen on some of the former. At times it was a little too much 'and here's another proverb', though some of it was very beautiful.

Sex Power Money - Sara Pascoe. If you've seen her act, you're well aware she's interested in these subjects. She captures her voice really well (which I suppose should be obvious, but it doesn't always transfer between spoken and written), and it's very funny in places. Struggles a bit with a conclusion, but the meat is in the main.

The Tailor of Panama - John le Carre. A tailor is recruited to be a spy. Quickly spots that it's in his interests to recruit others, particularly if all payment comes to him, and all stories come from him. Suits his handler, too. All very satirical. Reads like a dreamscape of overheated 'ex-pats' in the tropics, swanning around combining fantasy with hedonism.

In at the Kill - Gerald Seymour. He recently broke his habit of making one-offs to do a series with a near-retired, should be retired, old clerk with a genius for pulling strings and enveloping others in a plot, Jonas Merrick. That makes them slightly less edge of the seat, as you Seymour's gift is for complicated stories that leave you wondering until the very end if it'll be an ending you can live with, but here you can be fairly sure Merrick will survive. Though even then he is put into some very hairy situations for a non-active agent. Seymour has a very particular style - dialogue is always clipped and the same - but if you can bear it there is ratcheting tension.

Because I don'tknow what you mean and what you don't - Josie Long. Another comedian who has captured her own voice, though as this is fiction it's less literal than Pascoe' book. This was highly recommended and I wasn't sure how I'd get on with it, but she can't half write. Definitely on the themes you probably know she covers - social justice and the lack of it - but getting under the skin of the protagonists in each short insight into fictional lives.

4.) Maigret on Holiday - Georges Simenon
Maigret gets bored on holiday at the seaside while his wife is sick and gets sucked into a local murder. Short but smart detective novel, with no outrageous twist or crazy reveal, just a clever detective solving mysteries by being clever. I might give the TV show a go as well.

2. The Eagle's Conquest by Simon Scarrow
The Romans invade Kent.

As flawed as the first book but yet I continue reading them.

5.) Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Kinda like if Harry Potter had failed his OWLs and had joined the Fuzz instead. I think I've seen these mentioned on the board before - I'm not going to say it's the best book ever but I enjoyed it enough to want to read the next one at some point. Also, it made me sing the title to the tune of "Werewolves of London". so that's a plus point.

6.) Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
Been forever since I've seen the film ( but as I recall, we both kind of liked it ) but this is quite a bit different, less romantic and with a totally different ending. The book I had also included some short stories, which I liked an awful lot.

3. Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God by Catherine Nixey

A look at the variety of religious groups and beliefs in the first two or three centuries CE before the Roman Empire adopted its form of Christianity. Wide ranging and taking in a diverse cast of prophets, regions, and beliefs but easy to ready with some wit in each chapter. Admittedly infancy gospels where baby Jesus goes on killing sprees will never not be funny, but it also goes in some depth to what Roman world was like during this period.

7.) Declarations of War - Len Deighton
A collection of war / spy short stories. A bit too reliant on "Ahh, you didn't expect that, did you?" type endings. A stand out was Adagio, which was about a pilot's frame of mind over the course of a 30 second flash of combat. Otherwise, nicely diverting but it's gone on the "goes to charity as will never think of again" pile.

8.) Moon Over Soho - Ben Aaronovitch
Second in the Wizardy Policeman series and another jolly read. Vagina Dentata Ladies and Jazz Vampires running riot in London, disturbing the Queen's peace. I'll read the rest of these when I come across them!

4. One Midsummer's Day by Mark Cocker

A cosy, poetic, and endlessly fascinating book about swifts and what they can tell us about the planet. One of those that I was sad to finish.

5. Of Dice and Men by David M Ewalt

Saw on this on a shelf in the library when I was looking for something else but seemed interesting so picked it up.

It's a mixture of a history of Dungeons and Dragons and a life-long player's personal experiences of the game. Although I don't play it, it was fascinating to read about its origins and its impact.

The book is very readable, but probably tries to do too much in one volume. I would have loved, for instance, to have read more about the corporate excess during the early boom years of the 1980s, or about how some of its predecessors came about (if you're going to cover chess or early war games, you probably should cover its more recent ancestors in as much detail). Moreover, as this is an updated reissue of a book that came out in 2013, subsequent developments and controversies, such as the arguments over licencing, are crammed into a thin afterword. I also wasn't that interested in the author recounting tales of past games - they probably mean something to him, but I wasn't that engaged. But it covers quite a bit and for someone like me with little knowledge of the game it was engrossing and entertaining enough.

6. When the Eagle Hunts by Simon Scarrow

The Bromans continue their holiday in Kent, fall in love with some locals, and discover that the Druids aren't exactly nice people. Oh, and we finally have a named legionary for hilarious comic relief.

How to be a Liberal - Ian Dunt. As relevant as it was when Kern (?) read it the other year. Hope-based guide to how to battle trends towards illiberality, without getting bogged down in definitions.

Happy Old Me - Hunter Davies. He wrote the first (main?) biography of the Beatles, and had some lovely columns in the Sunday Times, but is less suited to this kind of 'how I am happy despite my wife's death'. She was the better, more serious, writer, as he freely mentions, and this is frothy, done with levity but not really managing to be that light because he returns to the same themes. Seems like a lovely old gent, mind.

Factfulless - Hans Rosling. I remember Rosling from his Ted talks, when those were a serious thing, playing on our perceptions of the world. I knew enough to pick counter-intuitive answers, and got 8/11 on the questions he poses, but even that's only 8/11 given I was trying to be counter-intuitive. Extreme poverty in the world is down to 8%, for example, and it's important to know that - if only to not allow capitalism's adherents to know it and pretend that since it has succeeded there, it succeeds everywhere. The book ends up being pretty subversive - making the point that because the pace of change is so fast that our perception of individual countries ends up being wrong, and that not just countries change, but cultures change within a lifetime. That is very *not* the view of the right, even the ones who aren't saying "some people are just different". I hadn't realised Rosling died a few years ago, but his work is really important, and being carried on by daughter and son-in-law.

Munichs - David Pearce. A dramatised version of the Munich plane crash in 1958, which killed much of Manchester United's team and the travelling press. An insight into a different world (where you could support Man United without biting your tongue).

Mr Paradise - Elmore Leonard. Dark humour in a fast-paced thriller that doesn't outstay it's welcome. Like a satisfying film that whizzes by in an hour and a half.

9.) The Call of Cthulhu - H. P. Lovecraft
Old school spooky shenanigans in a bunch of short stories. Maybe the real monster was inside us all along, or maybe it was inside Mr Lovecraft, manifesting in his somewhat strange view of non-white people. Players of the Call of Cthulhu RPG will be glad to know that he solves two distinct "haunted house" scenarios using dynamite and bulldozers.

7.The Game Changers by Tim Clare

Entertaining book about various games and what they tell us about ourselves. As well as the usual suspects (eg Senet; Ur; Goose; Monopoly) there's discussions of the cultural and social aspects of gaming (the sections on people's need to play in Ukraine hit hard).

Whilst some material is not new (yes, we know about the Landlord's Game), he makes some interesting observations and connections that were new to me. For instance, he argues that the 19th century use of a spinner rather than dice might not just be about Victorian fears of bringing gambling instruments into the home but also the cost of and duty on dice.

It did feel in parts more like a series of articles and I sometimes felt that some of the more interesting connections he draws required more than the cursory paragraph. It also just kind of stops rather than having a final chapter to tie everything together. But it was an easy and witty read, clearly written by someone who loves the subject.

8 Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin

Working class lad makes good.

Some interesting background to Starmer, particularly how his family and legal career shaped him, but after he becomes an MP it gets a bit plodding.
Stops in early 2024, perhaps to leave room for a sequel?

Any mention of his father's occupation?

2. In Too Deep (Jack Reacher #29) - Lee & Andrew Child

Reacher had no idea where he was. No idea how he had gotten there. But someone must have brought him. And shackled him. And whoever had done those things was going to rue the day

Reacher does Reacher stuff.. Solves a crime and mullers people Kinda what you expect.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - George Saunders. 7 Russian short stories, explained, broken down and built up again. Much more interesting than it might sound, it might make you read differently. Read the story, then have it broken down - it works really well on Kindle, too, with links to jump back and forth. For the first, he breaks it down page by page, often saying 'this could be annoying, right?!' So for the others, he takes different approaches. He's a great writer, this is a fascinating book. There are writing exercises in there, too, if you want to see where you'd edit to make a difference (though the main lesson here is - edit! Less is more!)

Safe Enough: And Other Stories - Lee Child. Short stories, not about Reacher. Pithy and action packed. With a bonus Reacher collaboration at the end. Solid.

A Short Gentleman - Jon Canter. A short (pompous) gentleman tells the story of his life, and how he came to be a criminal. Good story, and actually laugh-out-loud funny, which is rare.

Titanium Noir - Nick Harkaway. Le Carre's son shows he can write on his own, not just finishing dad's books. Noir detective thriller in a world of new technology and new humans. Great.

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Lee Ypi, academic (and also the subject of the Spectator's "I couldn't listen she was too lovely" disgrace) grew up in Albania as it went from 'socialism' to whatever comes next. Fascinating account of being a child who knows only one way until all of a sudden it is swept away. She doesn't get lost in the weeds, which makes it easy to skirt over the weirdness within, but it's all there - essentially, parents having to pretend they believe in the system otherwise their children might unwittingly drop them in it. The sacred coke cans are a highlight.

The Trials of Koli - M.R. Carey. Second part of a trilogy in a post-apocalyptic landscape where tech from the beforetimes is still around, but sparse and sacred. Fantastic.

The Fall of Koli - M.R. Carey. ...and so I moved straight onto the end, where there's more tech which makes it shift more from fantasy to sci-fi, which it does effortlessly. I loved the main character, and the world, and everything, really.

His first novel, also Sci-Fi, is excellent.
The Gone Away World