Musings on the byways of popular culture
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While we are taking stock of the year 2024 and the art that got us through it; let’s talk about the books we read and loved and why we loved them. And I don’t necessarily mean books published for the first time in 2024; I want to know what you enjoyed regardless of when it was written. Novels, non-fiction, poetry, childrens books, your granny’s old diaries – let us know about all of the books that most lightened your heart this year!
I’ll mull it over myself and put my answer in the comments…
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It’s the one for books! What have you read this year that you have loved & would like to share with your fellow AW mob?
No need for them to be 2023 releases, anything goes I reckon
note to self. Shelf space is low, you know you get eye rolls when yet another books lands on the mat & your excuse of ‘oh this, I preordered it months ago’ does not carry any weight! Just because a book sounds interesting does not mean you should immediately buy it & leave on you shelf!
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So, we’re writing lists, and checking them twice; how about listing your favourite reads of the year then? Not a poll, just recommendations and friendly discussions, and any year of publishing allowed, of course. Novels, non-fiction, poetry, cookbooks, manga, lavish coffee table slabs of glossy photographs matching the personality you always wanted – I want to hear about anything and everything that made you a happy reader this year! No need to rank them (unless you like doing it), but do tell us why you enjoyed them, so the rest of us can be inspired to blow our upcoming food budgets on the one comfort even bigger than eating: buying more books (perhaps read them too, eventually)!
(I’ll list mine in the comments)
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Afternoon all. In the spirit of the recent “headphone giveaway” by Sir Pencil:
if anyone would like a free (used) copy of Martin Strong’s Great Psychedelic Discography, PM me – first past the post, etc.
I was going to give it to the local chazza, when I remembered the number of groovy, laid-back, good-vibe psychedelicists who frequent this site – thought it might find a more appropriate home…
Peace: out
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It’s a good idea to have a clear out every now and then – take everything off the shelves and go through 45+ years of book collecting to decide what are keepers and what are chuckers. I found 100 books that either I’m never going to read or that are way past their use-by date. Current affairs books from the time of Blair and earlier, old text books, philosophy tomes that I’m so relieved I don’t need to refer to, novels by star authors I thought I would dedicate time to, but never got around to it, old Bond books that I picked up for the classic covers, but didn’t fancy delving into.
When I look at my shelves now, they’re still full, just not completely overloaded with dead wood slices. ~275 at a rough count, so about a 35% cull.
The question is, what do I do with them? Just put them out in the street book cabinet shelves and let anyone passing by help themselves? Or try to make a little cash on a book sale site. I’m pretty sure that’s wasted effort and nobody would pay anything for them, but I thought I’d ask the Afterword bees » Continue Reading.
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I’d love any book recommendations the Massive might have, as I’m dithering over what to read next. My most recent reads have all been immensely enjoyable- ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ by Anthony Doerr, ‘An Instance Of The Fingerpost’ by Iain Pears & I’ve just finished the last part of Don Winslow’s gruesomely illuminating ‘Border’ trilogy, if that’s ant indicator of current tastes. I have the final part of the Wolf Hall trilogy & ‘To Paradise’ by Hanya Yanagitata on standby, but I’m not really feeling them right now. So, any meaty belters you’d recommend? I tend to prefer 400 pages plus, just to indulge in the immersion of a novel, but have no hard & fast preferences. Cheers!
As this Christmas promises to be another unpromising one – a knackered back means leaving the flat further than the bins downstairs is a bit of a chore, while our new favourite variant means prospective visitors may not now actually visit so it’s likely to be solitary – I thought I’d stock up on some reading. Here is what’s arrived. Yeah Yeah Yeah I’ve read twice before and is the best music book I’ve ever read, but this is apparently the US version and a bit different, and I’m also looking forward to reading it for the first time ever on good old fashioned paper. The other plan is to start reading the Bernie Gunther novels in chronological order (setting, rather than when written), but that’s on Kindle so less visually appealing. Any other reading plans, or maybe you have lives/health which means Christmas might be a smidge more exciting?!
A few months back I caught Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 movie Outback (the best Aussie movie ever! If you’ve not seen it, drop everything and go and watch it!), and have been reading a fair amount of Aussie outback thrillers ever since.
Having loved both Jane Harper’s The Dry and Chris Sumner’s Scrublands, I couldn’t resist taking a punt when I saw Gabriel Bergmoser’s The Hunted for 99p on Amazon. Well worth it the book was, too!
The story concerns Maggie, a young Aussie woman desperate to learn what became of her mother following her disappearance several years before. Along the way she meets and befriends, Simon, a wimpy backpacker in search of “The Real Australia”. Persuading her gullible new friend to venture off the beaten track, the pair eventually chance upon a community of feral scavengers with a taste for what Royston Vaizey butcher, Hilary Briss, used to call his “special stuff”.
With Simon offed and her literally having bitten off more than she can chew, our badly injured anti-hero flees and is taken in by the owner of a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Equal parts The Hills Have Eyes and Straw Dogs, the siege that » Continue Reading.
So after publishing the book of my blog on Amazon, I sat back and waited for the sales to flood in, and nothing happened. Initially I had thought I would happy with just publishing a book. But now I am thinking it would be nice to have a few sales, and a few people reading, as I did make an effort to write it.
So I am looking at the various advertising options – Amazon marketing, google or Youtube, etc.
Anyone had any experiences of Internet advertising they would like to share ? My initial research suggests the feedback is mixed.
Thanks
If you had to cast a movie/TV series of the books, who would you cast as Jackson Lamb?
Am currently halfway through reading Joe Country and I was racking my brains to try and think of who’d be the ideal actor. The only candidate I could come up with was Michael Gambon (well MG as he was about 30 years ago….)
How about you?
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The idea and plot behind this book is really good but sadly I did not like the formatting. The story is told over 3 timelines (1 year ago, the present and now) and I found it difficult as it kept switching between each timeline.
I really struggled with the first third of the book and then it was like someone else was writing the story and it did get more interesting.from that point. Amanda Brittany is clearly an experienced and clever author but this book, sadly, did not connect me very well with the characters and settings.
Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an early review copy of this book to read on the Kindle. Also thanks to the publishers and author for the work that they do.
This book is published on the 28th August in paperback and on the Kindle.
#ILieinWait #NetGalley
@Amanda Brittany Author
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Hello all,
Not been on this site for a long while for many reasons. Just wondering if anyone had recommendations for psychological thrillers.
I have just read A Predator And A Psychopath by Jay Kerk and have pasted in my review below:
This book scared me. This book shocked me. This book made me angry. This.book was very adult material. But what a book this was. Never read anything like this before. This is the first book I have read by Jay Meek but I will definitely be looking out for more. Beware: Having read this book you will always ‘remember it.
Cheers – Joe
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I know that reading is very much a personal thing, but has anyone got any thoughts on the books of David Mitchell?
Cloud Atlas has been sitting on one of my shelves for years, unread, as has (I think) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but I am preparing (mentally) to go through a (physical) clear-out of books and I’m not sure that I can bring myself to even make a start on either to find out if I might like them, preferring instead to go by the fact that “if you haven’t picked them up in the last five years, ….”.
Based on the review of Utopia Avenue in today’s Guardian, I am not tempted by what the reviewer calls Mitchell’s ongoing “metanovel” or by the following lines from the review:
“… the frustrating, elusive magic of wresting melody out of four strings and a pick-up is vividly evoked, as Jasper “slams into an amp-blowing, bent-string howl and fires off a scale of triads, sliding from high E, all the way down”.”
I am not sure what I find most remarkable about that: the possibility that Jasper (a lead guitarist) might find it a little less frustrating » Continue Reading.
I have been using my shielded quarantine to write a daily blog about my favourite songs. Not really done any writing before, but it helped me fill my time and gives some sense of achievement.
I am now stopping at song 101 (returning to work soon), but I am interested in printing them in book form, as a souvenir for myself or gift for my supportive family and friends. Probably about 20 copies.
Any one had any experience of using the print on demand websites in the UK ? Any useful feedback ?
Thanks
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I, and I’m sure many of you, will have noticed the tendency among publishers to go for larger font sizes in new books, thus making books much fatter than they need to be. Earlier today I was browsing in a local book shop and noticed John Le Carre’s novel Absolute Friends, looking a bit bigger than I recalled. This edition runs to 438 pages and costs £8:99. I’ve compared with my paperback edition from 2004 which was 383 pages and cost £6:99. So that’s a 14% increase in size. Using the Bank of England inflation calculated the cost then is equivalent to £10:22 today, and adding in the 14% increase in size today’s price should be £11:65 (I realise this is a crude equivalence, but this is a blogpost, not a management report). I’m mystified by firstly the increase in the size of books generally, when we’re in an age where we’re supposed to be conserving resources and secondly by the lower prices. No doubt printing technology has improved in the intervening years, but my feeling is that this is so unnecessary.
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Sad to hear that writer Philip Kerr has passed away at the relatively young age of 62. I know from previous threads that I’m not the only fan here of his Bernie Gunther books; best described to the uninitiated as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe dropped into Nazi Germany then dangled into various scenes of noir into the 1950s. They’re up there with the best crime novels of recent decades. Apparently we’ve got one more to look forward to – Greeks Bearing Gifts – set for publication next month. But after that no more of one of my annual reading treats. I suppose this is the point where I reread all of them.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/25/philip-kerr-obituary#comment-113992568
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Anyone read the winner or any of the rest of the shortlist? Anyone care?
I used to religiously read the shortlist and discovered many fantastic writers and novels (and some duds) as a result. But the balance of good v bad seemed to shift in more recent years and I lost interest. Picked up the thread again last year and read five of the six, but ye gods….
This year’s list hasn’t interested me in the least to date, with the one exception, as it happens, of the winner, Lincoln in the Bardo which I read a review of when it first came out and thought it sounded interesting. Will give that a go at some point but not sure about the rest of them. And meantime I cannot imagine that any of them are better than Sebastian Barry’s unbelievably great ‘Days Without End’ which unaccountably didn’t even make the list.
Thoughts from the Afterword’s literary critics?
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Spent some time this morning mooching around the new Library/Cinema/Theatre complex in Chester. Whilst browsing around the large (and busy) cafe/non-fiction area*, I realised the music playing was familiar – ‘Working Class Hero’, complete with f-word. I looked around but no one else seemed to notice (peasants!) but I did think Paperback Writer might have been more appropriate. * Yes it is confusing.
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Waking up at about 4am the other morning and unable to get back to sleep, I went onto the radio iPlayer and scrolled through that day’s programmes and came across “Too Many Books”.
The title alone was enough to make me listen, but I also remembered reading @vulpes-vulpes thread about books to a good home not long before.
Anyway, listening to Too Many Books is a half hour worth spending. It has gentle humour, some pathos and a man that buys books (including a Smash Hits annual and one about Tim and Jeff Buckley) at car boots.
What’s not to like about that?
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I’ve spent the last couple of days decorating the living room, which means that I have had to move all the piles of CDs, DVDs and books for which there is no longer room on the shelves and, for the moment, pile them in the spare room ready for selling or charity shop disposal. It hurts getting rid of this stuff, doesn’t? I’ve done it before and honestly not regretted losing my precious possessions, or re-bought them, but I still hate to see them go.
Yesterday I went out for a walk after being cooped up in my flat for so long and came across this heart-breaking sight. I asked the couple in the house before having a rummage and it turns out they are moving somewhere smaller but none of the local charities could take such a large donation (about 2000 books, they thought). I rescued some of course, including firsts of Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. No great financial value, but I couldn’t let a copy of The Quiet American that someone had cherished so much that they had stored a 1967 newspaper clipping about a screening of the film inside go to landfill.
http://i.imgur.com/JO1jtQm.jpg
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I read a lot, I can’t put it down – Nick Lowe
Sometimes it’s easier to retreat into yourself, to shut up shop, “shut out that stealing moon” – as Thomas Hardy described it – and simply exist in a penumbra of your life. When I sense I’m becoming maudlin and self-absorbed or over-burdened with worries, both real and imagined, I read. Reading gets me out of the shadows and helps me re-engage with the world. I have always at least 2 or 3 books on the go but when I get into one of my prolonged dark moods I seek out an extra level of compensation from the written word. Years of reading has helped me to help myself when it comes to choosing a book or an author to revive a part of me that feels undernourished, overlooked or sadly lacking in vitality.
For example I’ve been reading classic Westerns by writers like Zane Grey, Larry McMurtry and Louis L’Amour. Their books help me escape from an insistent gut feeling that I’m chronically (as well as chronologically) out of step with the modern world and should simply accept it rather than fight it. There’s something liberating about » Continue Reading.
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His autobiography is 99p on Kindle today only
