Book Thread 2022

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#1: Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith

I started this on New Year's Day and finished it this morning, so 2022 has already been a complete success, let's skip the rest of it. It's a kind of sci-fi detective novel I guess, with plenty of humour - I enjoyed it quite a lot, although my attention drifted on a few sections where they go into some kind of Dream Realm where anything can happen. I always find it a bit dull when anything can happen, because there's no real logic to it or something. But I liked the characters and the ending had a surprising emotional weight to it. Also: Lots of cat content.

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I read some michael marshall smith books about twenty years ago and can't remember anything about them except they had bright covers (one was bright orange and one was bright purple)

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these ones, presumably

https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/michael ... EeEALw_wcB

https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/michael ... oBEALw_wcB

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I definitely liked this one enough to read more at some point. But also I read it for this online book club thing I've been doing and apparently one book a month is enough to fill up my brain completely and now I may never read anything of my own volition ever again

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#2: Replay by Ken Grimwood

This is my selection for the book club mentioned in my last post so I read it again. The flaws were a little more apparent this time, and I'm slightly worried the other book clubbers reading it for the first time will rip it to shreds. But I still really like it, even if the incessant horniness of the main character keeps getting in the way of the storytelling

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Perhaps the sole purpose of time travel is to have sex

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If that was the first draft of Back To The Future, then it was far too dark for my tastes!

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i read some books (mostly while i was in cornwall):

piranesi (by susanna clarke) - a man lives in a flooded ruin of a castle filled with nothing but statues and birds. he remembers nothing else. the first half of this is amazing, and the second half is slightly less amazing but still pretty good. hooray. and also it reminded me quite a bit of that book i wrote a couple of years ago (the discontinuity), in that its told as a series of diary entries, is about loss and memory, and is strangely sad. and also theres lots of descriptions of waves.

peaces (by helen oyeyemi) - conetmporary fantasy thing set on a train. i've liked all her other books but this one i thought was a bit - well, not crap, but not brilliant. even if it is set on a train. i like things set on trains.

the manningtree witches (by AK Blakemore) - matthew hopkins is the worlds biggest arsehole and there is nothing you or i or anyone else can do about it. pretty good. poor old vinegar tom

notes from an island (by tove jansson and tuulikki pietila) - book about tove jansson and her wife moving to an island, told in the form of a sort of pretend diary by tove jansson, and illustrated with paintings by tuulikki pietila. almost impossibly lovely

alice in wonderland (with illustrations by tove jansson) - this was about a girl called alice and she has some adventures in this place called wonderland you probably haven't heard of it

also i got a book about hayao miyazaki for christmas, so i've been flicking through that now and again (its lovely but expensive - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hayao-Miyazaki ... 1942884818 ).

and also while i was in cornwall i went in a charity shop in penzance and they had these pretty amazing disney books - https://www.chroniclebooks.com/collecti ... ey-pleased - and they are also quite nice for flicking through. and were only £5 each, which was nice, considering they were brand new and cost £35 according to the back. although there was only four of them out of the six.

and also i bought abook about dinosaurs for my nephew but then it was too grown up for him really as its all about the science of how they know what dinosaurs really looked like (some of them are ginger! outrageous), so i have kept it for myself. but anyway that's also pretty good.

books are good i like them maybe i will read some more

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#2: Replay by Ken Grimwood

This is my selection for the book club mentioned in my last post so I read it again. The flaws were a little more apparent this time, and I'm slightly worried the other book clubbers reading it for the first time will rip it to shreds. But I still really like it, even if the incessant horniness of the main character keeps getting in the way of the storytelling

I wrote about this for that website I sometimes write for

https://www.the-solute.com/the-solute-b ... -by-vomas/

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Excellent. I remember liking replay, possibly because of all the weird nonsensical bits like them making an even better star wars for some reason, or whatever it was, rather than despite them

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one of my story ideas that i never bothered writing and then gave up when i read a book almost exactly like it was basically this idea, but about a person discovering they/you can travel back to earlier parts of your life you remember particularly clearly and then preceding from there again, before slowly discovering they're trapped in an ever branching multiverse of lives that they barely remember and have no interest in because all the things they remember are for lives they inadvertently obliterated by going back before they existed and starting a new life, etc etc, essentially over time becoming an utterly joyless husk who welcomes death, but then at the moment of death always then going back again anyway because they simply can't cope with the idea of actually being dead either

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it was going to be well fun

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love a bit of fun

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#3 Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Montgomery

Also for the book club thing. This was absolutely lovely, I particularly loved how well it describes the changing seasons and captures the personality of everyone on the island. It's sweet and sad and also hopeful and I loved it. The version I bought has the second book in it too and I'm definitely going to read that as well

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#4 No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Another book club pick. This is about a woman who has become a Twitter celebrity by accident, and basically spends her time making dumb jokes and feeling her brain rot away. But then something extremely unusual and quite awful happens and she suddenly has to deal with real life despite her brain being full of memes. It seems to be semi-autobiographical? I liked it a lot, it's strange and funny but then sad and quite beautiful, good combination IMO

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I’ve been reading a book by Jeff noon (a man of shadows). It’s a science fiction ish detective thing, about possibly the most boringly generic detective ever committed to print (he,s middle aged! His wife’s left him! He has some sort of I’ll defined tragic childhood event to ruminate on! His clothes are dirty and crumpled! He drinks whisky! All the time! His office is a right old mess!) in a city that’s basically the city from china mievilles the city and the city, but divided by timelines rather than borders. But not even the exciting sort of timezones, just basically gmt and British summer time type timezones

Anyway it’s utterly tedious and taken me a week to read about half of it. I’ve got the sequel to read after that but I’m not sure I can be bothered

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It’s really disappointing because I used to utterly love Jeff Noon when I was in my early 20s or whatever, but then he had a breakdown or something and didn’t write any books for twenty years, and it seems now he’s forgotten how to write

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I also recently read the goddess chronicle by Natsuo Kirino, which is a retelling of an old Japanese folk tale, and was pretty great and I liked it a lot

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Jeff Noon? More like Jeff AFTERnoon, haha

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Hooray. Best joke

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I’ve been reading a book by Jeff noon (a man of shadows). It’s a science fiction ish detective thing, about possibly the most boringly generic detective ever committed to print (he,s middle aged! His wife’s left him! He has some sort of I’ll defined tragic childhood event to ruminate on! His clothes are dirty and crumpled! He drinks whisky! All the time! His office is a right old mess!) in a city that’s basically the city from china mievilles the city and the city, but divided by timelines rather than borders. But not even the exciting sort of timezones, just basically gmt and British summer time type timezones

Anyway it’s utterly tedious and taken me a week to read about half of it. I’ve got the sequel to read after that but I’m not sure I can be bothered

I finished this eventually and it was all basically rubbish. But then I read the sequel and it was great. Which was a nice surprise

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The sequel was set in s city of literature where your lives had to conform to known stereotypes of fiction and fiction had to conform to known tedious genre specific stories, and therefore avntgarde and surrealistic art/ lifestyles were outlawed. But then some starts cutting up fiction and people get infected by nonlinear phrases and everything begins to go wrong somehow.

I liked it

[An Unicorn]

William S Borroughs will destroy us all

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I hope so

[richschnauzer]

William S Borroughs will destroy us all

but I am not his wife.

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this is nice

https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books

all the lone wolf books for free download

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hooray.

although i was thinking once of buying the rest of the ones i don't have but then i remembered that actually i didn't really like the ones i do have that much anyway

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they're certainly no house of hell

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chasm of doom definitely had the best cover image ever though

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i think about that cat beast surprisingly often really

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very good cat beast

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i read this today

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... u-zhiying/

which is based on an old chinese poem about a man meeting and falling inlove with a beautiful river goddess. it's astonishingly lovely looking, but also astonishing impossible to actually read, because the pages fold out in places so far they stretch almost all the way across the room (the book is roughly a foot square, and then the pages fold out up to six times sometimes, maybe even 8 once, i think, so i'm not even exagerrating)

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wow, that sounds pretty amazing

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It is really great. I just need to upgrade my room to room+

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Also the story/poem is nice, sort of sad

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due to my longish period of mild ill/self pity/despair the last few weeks, i decided to cheer myself up by re-reading all iain m banks culture books. anyway so far i have read consider phlebas (still brilliant, still utterly baffling that they ever let him keep that bit with the fat man feeding his followers shit and eating people alive bit in there), and the player of games (wonderful in every way possible really).

now i am reading use of weapons, which is much less fun on subsequent rereads when you know the structure/twists etc all beforehand, unfortunately.

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it was 9 years ago last week that poor old iain died and i am still sad about it

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i will always be sad about it

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also recently i read the ten loves of mr nishino, and parade by hiromi kawakami, and breast and eggs by meiko kawakami, and for some reason its only now i'm writing this comment that i've noticed they both have the same surname

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anyway they were alright. breasts and eggs was actually two different novels in one book, and the first one, which was the first third of the book, was great,a nd the second one, which wa sthe second two thirds of the book, and set/written ten years after the first, was long and boring and not so great

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i also read simon armitage's translation of sir gawain and the green knight, which i liked a lot (much better than the tolkien version i read before, which i found utterly unreadable really)

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I read

#5 Milkman by Anna Burns

This was kind of exhausting to read, because there are hardly any paragraph breaks and the chapters are hugely long, but other than that (which is mostly a symptom of my terrible attention span anyway) this was pretty wonderful. It's about an 18-year-old woman during the troubles who attracts the attention of an older man who holds some kind of power among the shady groups trying to exert power over people / blow them up if they don't fall in line. It's basically all her internal monologue about trying not to stand out in any way because any sign of being interesting is used against you. Which sounds utterly bleak but it's also frequently very funny, and the language is brilliant. Everyone is referred to by a generic nickname like "maybe-boyfriend", "first sister", "the man who doesn't love anyone" and the protagonist's three younger sisters are treated essentially as one entity called "wee sisters", and they're amazing. Anyway I liked it a lot, but it still felt like hard work to get through. Also apparently it won the booker prize but as usual I read it because of this book club thing I've gotten involved in

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due to my longish period of mild ill/self pity/despair the last few weeks, i decided to cheer myself up by re-reading all iain m banks culture books. anyway so far i have read consider phlebas (still brilliant, still utterly baffling that they ever let him keep that bit with the fat man feeding his followers shit and eating people alive bit in there), and the player of games (wonderful in every way possible really).

now i am reading use of weapons, which is much less fun on subsequent rereads when you know the structure/twists etc all beforehand, unfortunately.

i've now read most of the others again

state of the art: excellent, still
excession: really excellent, still
inversions: good (if player of games is iain banks trying to do urusla le guin, this is iain banks trying to do gene wolfe, i think, albeit strangely inconsequentially)
look to windward: i think i preferred this now to when i read it before maybe, although there's probably too many chapters of utterly tedious random culture citizen conversations about nothing, especially early on.

i don't know why after this all his culture books are so monstrously long (matter is 700 page slong,a nd it was shit, so i can't be bothered to ever read that again) but i might read the other two at some point maybe. i remember really liking surface details whenever i read that (hydrogen sonata not so much)

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although i might just be better off reading against a dark background instead because that's his best one even if it isn't a culture one. also i might just fling my copy of the algebraist into the nearest bin.

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there's a surprisingly large number of iain banks books where the intriguing first half of the book devolves into a load of rushed pointless bollocks, but the algebraist is definitely the worst of all of them for that. probably because the first half of the book is also a load of rushed pointless bollocks maybe

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i remember really liking surface details whenever i read that (hydrogen sonata not so much)

I didn't really like it that much when i read it again this time

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and i can't be bothered to re read the hydrogen sonata so that's all the culture books for me, forever, probably

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anyway that was quite a good month of re-reading old things and today also i've been re-reading against a dark background which is also still good so hooray for iain m banks

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#6 Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler

I didn't like this at all. It's about an alien disease brought back from Proxima Centauri that makes people stronger but also more like animals, with uncontrollable urges to breed and eat raw meat. It's endlessly bleak and unpleasant and contains the word "rape" more than any other book I've ever read. I also thought it was quite poorly written, but since even the negative reviews on Goodreads seem to say "the writing is great though", maybe I just didn't get it. There was some really clunky exposition and the way the narrative jumps around in time seemed to have no point to it whatsoever. Bad book.

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I recently bought a book by her but it wasn’t that one and also I haven’t read it yet

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What a useful and enlightening comment that was