Book Lists 2024 • Page 3

February / March update. Reading has been slow this year.

Lincoln In the Bardo was unlike almost anything else I've ever read. I loved the style and structure and themes.

Negatives has a lot of great photos and a few interesting insights into the emo scene that I hadn't heard before.

Children of God tries to do a lot, continuing the human story of The Sparrow and expanding on culture and society of the alien world, and it doesn't always come together, especially at the end. As with The Sparrow, the best moments are found in Emilio Sandoz's grappling with faith and loss.

 

I feel like posting in here might fire me up to read a bit more.

This year so far just:

Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 by Chris Payne
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El Mohtaw and Max Gladstone
The Far Side Gallery 2 by Gary Larsen

 

Update for the last two months. So far my reading pace continues! I'm loving how much I'm reading these days. And I'm actually checking stuff off the TBR and exploring new authors and it's all going really well. Would love to make more time for comics, but oh well. A few thoughts on a few of these things.

• Roverandom is charming and will likely become a bedtime story for my boys.
• Leafdust & Deadwood and Tangleweed & Waterbloom were both so phenomenal that I read them like 12 times each, but I'll only count them once. :P
• Eleventh Cycle was grim and gruesome and really compelling for its Dark Souls/Berserk vibes; I'm glad it's getting a fresh edit and a special edition, because I'm excited for more in this world.
• Dawn of the Ranger and the other short stories were really nice, I'm enjoying the Last Ranger series quite a bit, great action-fantasy with some cool worldbuilding.
• Red Rising and Golden Son were both great, I'm having a good time with this series, glad I finally started it.
• Sorcery in Shad was an excellent conclusion to the Primal Lands storyline; Beneath the Moors was Lumley at his finest with the Elder Mythos discovery narrative.
• Last Stand of the Stone Fist was cool and I'm definitely going to be reading more Michael R. Miller now.
• The Tapestry at Briarmount Abbey was amazing; everyone should be reading Bradley P. Beaulieu. His fantasy writing is stellar.
• Similarly, Wraithbound is very, very good. I love Tim Akers's writing. Can't wait for more.
• The Rest to the Gods was slower than I'd hoped, but the world seemed cool. I'll be reading an ARC for the debut, which released in July I think.
• Outcasts of the Wildwood was weirder than the first one haha. These books are so strange. I like them, but it's like reading a medievalist's childhood fever dream, and I'm not sure who I'd actually recommend them to.
• All Systems Red was good fun! I'm on the Murderbot train for sure.
• The Night Eaters is wonderful; not as good as Monstress, but still an excellent read.
• Night Fever was a solid one-shot from Brubaker and Phillips. The Reckless books were even more fun. I'm sad to have (for now) concluded those stories. I really loved the ambiance.
• The Dark Web stuff for Spider-Man was typical of a lot of Spider-Man stories lately: lots of great ideas, some weird ones, and some hit-or-miss execution. But I'm still having a good time and enjoying them overall.

 

Likely ending my month with Riven Earth, which is a great indie debut! I've been re-reading The Bound and the Broken by Ryan Cahill since I expect beta reads to happen fairly soon before moving onto Stormlight re-reads.

Glasgow Boys is a brilliant fiction novel by Margaret MacDonald in the vein of Shuggie Bain & Young Mungo that I highly recommend. Not a long book but one, for me who grew up in Glasgow, that really had nostalgic and relatable incidents.

I've got a few shorter reads coming up but i'm really trying to find my next "In Ascension" - book I picked up last year on a whim that became best book of 2023!

 

April/May update. Picked it up a little bit this month.

Know My Name is a striking, harrowing read because of the subject matter. I didn't follow the case all that closely when it was happening, but I obviously remember the headlines, and Chanel's experience is an important one to read and reflect on.

The Gods Themselves is my favorite Asimov I've read so far. Two decades removed from Foundation, he became a much better writer, and the scientific and philosophical ideas in this one are some of his most interesting.

Cheating a little bit with the Aaron West "book" — it's just a little companion piece to In Lieu of Flowers, but it's a neat little expansion on the story of the album.

Picked up The Watchers in anticipation of the movie, and thought it was a tight, effective horror/thriller. I said this in the movie thread too, but I'm not at all surprised that Shyamalan was interested in this.

 

Had no idea this thread existed! Aiming for 70 books this year and just reached the halfway point this morning (all physical).

January:
- 'Reward System' by Jem Calder
- 'Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes and Get Away with Anything' by Oliver Bullough
- 'Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success' by Miki Berenyi
- 'The Five Wounds' by Kirstin Valdez Quade

February:
- 'The Vaster Wilds' by Lauren Groff
- 'Walkaway' by Cory Doctorow
- 'Western Lane' by Chetna Maroo

March:
- 'Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home' by Amanda Thomson
- 'How Do You Live' by Genzaburo Yoshino
- 'Sisters' by Daisy Johnson
- 'Pearl' by Siân Hughes
- 'Tyll' by Daniel Kehlmann
- 'Slum Wolf' by Tadao Tsuge
- 'Dream of Ding Village' by Yan Lianke
- 'Akira Vol. 1' by Katsuhiro Otomo
- 'Leaving the Atocha Station' by Ben Lerner
- 'Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy that Swept Punk, Emo and Hardcore - 1994-2007' by Dan Ozzi
- 'How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy' by Jenny Odell

April:
- 'Serve the People!' by Yan Lianke
- 'A Small Revolution in Germany' by Philip Hensher
- 'I Am Behind You' by John Ajvide Lindqvist
- 'Akira Vol. 2' by Katsuhiro Otomo
- 'Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism' by Yanis Varoufakis
- 'Masters of Doom' by David Kushner
- 'Kala' by Colin Walsh
- 'Akira Vol. 3' by Katsuhiro Otomo
- 'The Whistling' by Rebecca Netley
- 'The Maniac' by Benjamín Labatut

May:
- 'Akira Vol. 4' by Katsuhiro Otomo
- 'Akira Vol. 5' by Katsuhiro Otomo
- 'Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World' by Naomi Klein
- 'Virtual Society' by Herman Narula
- 'Akira Vol. 6' by Katsuhiro Otomo
- 'The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How it Owns Us' by James Ball

June:
- 'Prophet Song' by Paul Lynch
- 'The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories' edited by Jay Rubin
- 'Kairos' by Jenny Erpenbeck
- 'The War of the Poor' by Éric Vuillard
- 'The Testament of Mary' by Colm Tóibín
- 'Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup' by John Carreyrou
- 'Boulder' by Eva Baltasar
- 'Ghost Music' by An Yu
- 'The Silver Bone' by Andrey Kurkov

July:
- 'Whale' by Cheon Myeong-Kwan
- 'Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women' by Christina Lamb
- 'Hawk Mountain' by Conner Habib

 

January:

Anne Sexton - Love Poems
Dan Ozzi - Sellout
Patrick Carnes - Out Of The Shadows

February:

Voltaire - Candide
Chuck Palahnuik - Damned

April:

Nick Soulsby - Swans: Transcendence and Sacrifice

June:

Geoff Rickly - Someone Who Isn’t Me

 

Hello,


I hope I’m in the right place and would be very grateful for help please.


Past few years I’ve been reading more. But really only read biographies, which in punk rock world are limited and I’ve now run out of books.


I’m not very good at novels as I am not very good at visualising things well. I’ve read the Maltese Falcon, was alright but I still struggled.


Going to give Geoff Rickly’s book ago but looking for any ‘entry level’ novel recommendations.


Cheers

 

July/July update

Inciting Joy was a recommendation from my mom. She's not much of a reader and what she does read isn't usually my taste, but this knocked me out. A great collection of personal essays with phenomenal prose and a unique voice.

The Institute was solid, mid-tier King. His endings have improved so much over the years, but this felt like it lost some momentum in the middle.

I really liked The Virgin Suicides. The first-person plural narration is a really effective device, making the reader (and maybe me in particular, having once been a shy suburban teenage boy) feel complicit in the voyeuristic fascination with the Lisbon girls. I've had Middlesex sitting on my shelf for years as well, and I might jump into it pretty soon after how good this was.

 

Pretty solid July -


Michael Deagler, Early Sobrieties
Charles Frazier, The Trackers
Kimi Cunningham Grant, These Silent Woods
Justin Cronin, The Ferryman
Hua Hsu, Stay True

Loved all of these except These Silent Woods which I found pretty meh. Not really my type of book but read it after seeing it on Bob Nanna’s story haha.

And about halfway through Beautyland by Marie-Helene Berntino and enjoying it a lot.

 

My OP has been updated with all of my comic book reading to date.

Making my way through a lot of DC. Nearly all caught up with what’s new on the DC Universe app.

I’ll be finishing up Immortal Hulk before I try to re-read House of X and Powers of X and get caught up on the X universe.

 

It got slow at work for a minute, so I got this updated since May. It got long so I hid each month behind quote tags. Currently reading book one in the Sun Eater series, Dragonsteel Prime, and a book about Iceland.

 

My goal of 30 books is slipping away. Silver Nitrate ended up taking me 3 months to finish, and Best Served Cold is looking like it'll take me 2 months.

I wish I was able to finish a book per week like some people seem to but I lack the dedication

 

Haven't done an update post in a bit.

I obviously got really hooked on Brandon Sanderson, the last couple months have just been going through the Mistborn books with some palate cleansers in between. I really, really loved the first trilogy. A little mixed on the second so far, but still enjoying it quite a bit.

For the non-Sanderson stuff:
Loch Ness Uncovered is my sister-in-law's new YA non-fiction book, about the history of the Loch Ness Monster and also the idea of fake news. Fun, informative read.

The Pusheen book is cute, if kind of insubstantial.

Not sure if it's cheating to log the liner notes to The Idyll Opus, but it is a full hardbound book with a Danielewski-worthy layout and supplemental essays.

The Divine Comedy was challenging but worthwhile. Reading anything that old, even in translation, makes your brain work in ways it just isn't used to. I expected this to be a little more biblical or mythological than it is. A surprisingly huge amount of it is dedicated to the aristocracy in the various Italian cities that Dante spent time in, and specifically all the things they did to end up in hell.

The Conference of the Birds is a fascinating read from an era and tradition that I haven't really spent much time learning about. It was cool to read shortly after The Divine Comedy as they're structured pretty similarly. Also neat as a mewithoutYou fan, since a lot of Aaron Weiss's lyrics play with similar concepts.

 

Going to try and get to 50 by the end of the year. Started My Friends by Hisham Matar last night.

1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
3. Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond by Henry Winkler
4. The Future by Naomi Alderman
5. The Cider House Rules by John Irving
6. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
7. The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Lee
8. The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark
9. Tear It Down by Nick Petrie
10. If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura
11. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
12. James by Percival Everett
13. The Pelican Brief by John Grisham
14. Beartown by Fredrik Backman
15. All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
16. Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino
17. Trust by Herman Diaz
18. Greenwood by Michael Christie
19. Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler
20. A Widow for One Year by John Irving
21. The Trackers by Charles Frazier
22. These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant
23. The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
24. Stay True by Hua Hsu
25. Beautyland by Marie-Helen Bertino
26. The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson
27. Broiler by Eli Cranor
28. Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
29. North Woods by Daniel Mason
30. Continental Drift by Russell Banks
31. Old King by Maxim Loskutoff
32. The Trees by Percival Everett
33. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
34. Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend by M.J. Wassmer
35. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
36. Joe by Larry Brown
37. We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
38. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
39. Red Rising by Pierce Brown
40. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
41. The Women by Kristin Hannah
42. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
43. In the Distance by Hernan Diaz