2022 Reading Challenge

mgp said:
How have you enjoyed Zen/Motorcycle? I read that one last year and struggled with parts of it.
Click to expand...
I am really getting a lot out of it. Although as I'm sure you remember, sometimes the concepts take awhile to understand and/or sink in. I find that talking about it after helps me process it all a bit more. My wife won't need to read it, as she's my main sounding board after I finish a chapter. I have about 100 pages remaining, but it's not a very quick read (for me anyway) so I'll need a couple sittings to finish I think.
 
Ha! I only name drop the big books, because I'm working on improving my image.

I also read Dave Grohl's memoir (as mentioned) and really enjoyed it. He's like the Forrest Gump of rock music, popping up with Paul McCartney, AC/DC, Joan Jett, or Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

And then I read a book called Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. I went in completely blind (xmas gift from my mom) but enjoyed it a lot. It's kind of an adventure/mystery/environmental book that takes place in the not-so-distant future.
 
Some fun challenges here if anyone is struggling for ideas or gets stuck knowing what to read next:

www.penguin.co.uk

13 fun reading challenges to set yourself this year

Travel around the world, connect with your family and make exciting new discoveries with our suggestions for kick-starting your reading habit this year.
www.penguin.co.uk www.penguin.co.uk

I love the idea of Around the World in 80 Books. I might, just for kicks, plan a version of this out myself even if I never get around to reading them all.

I just finished 2022 Book 3: A Study In Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle. It's the first in a Penguin anthology of the Complete Sherlock Holmes which weighs in around 2100pp containing all 4 novel(la)s and 5 short story collections. I figure the whole anthology is a multi-year project as I'll add a couple of titles to my reading each year. I enjoyed this first one well enough and flew through it in a day's scattered reading but, hope for more character development of the main repeat players as the books progress.
Doyle used a really interesting narrative method whereby Holmes became involved and captured a killer in Part 1 and then the backstory of why the killer was motivated was told in Part 2 before returning to Holmes as he laid out his method of capture to Watson. I don't know if that's consistent throughout the books but I liked it here. As a kid I loved the Agatha Christie detective books but never got around to reading a Sherlock Holmes story so I'm glad I finally got around to this one.
 
Book 3:

Lost In The Vaults: Rare Collectables And Forgotten Gems From The Jazzwise Magazine Archives by Daniel Spicer

This was an unexpected read as it's a book that I was only made aware of earlier in the week. I put the order in, it arrived, and I read it all in the space of a couple of days. It's a collection of columns that Spicer wrote for Jazzwise magazine between 2006 and 2019 with updated amendments in relation to sold prices and reissues. Each page highlights a single rare or forgotten jazz record, with musician credits, label info, and a write up of the album. Its a really easy read and I had youtube pulled up to pull up the music of the ones that really stood out to me.

272024161_5106447952713392_5375763193666591044_n.jpeg
 
I went out for a meal last night and popped into a charity shop en route. Not much in the vinyl section but I did spot a Murakami book in the corner of the shelf so I snagged that. Looks to be a behemoth of a book but I'm looking forward to it having enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

IMG_3772 2.JPG
 
Book #2

Second read of 2022 down. I'm definitely reading lighter fare than most, but here goes.

Walter Mosley "Devil In A Blue Dress" (1990 WW Norton; read 2020 Washington Press edition)

Impressions: Originally published in 1990, "Devil in A Blue Dress" is Walter Mosley's first novel and is now generally regarded as a classic hard-boiled American noir. Set in late 40's Los Angeles, Mosley spins a tight yarn with twists and turns that are both earned and surprising. The story itself is a classic noir trope: character of decent but malleable morals is lured into a complex series of events that he cannot escape from, forcing him to bend his morals further and further along the way. But this is framed here by commentary on racial tensions and the general powerlessness of the protagonist against white authority. The author uses color to highlight this throughout. Mostly, these are subtle references but there are also several obvious uses of color for effect. For example, Mr. Albright, wearing a Panama hat, a white suit and driving a white Cadillac (but armed with a black pistol) is the obvious opposite to the protagonist. But the shadows exist as well, including the titular devil in a blue dress - where does she fit on the spectrum? Near the end of the novel, the protagonist approaches Mr. Albright's house in the dark and is disappointed he cannot discern its color before going in to risk his life. This is a fun little wink by the author telling the reader that it is unclear what the hero will find inside. All in all a great story and definitively an essential read for fans of the genre.

IMG_2120.JPG


Next on the docket and continuing my deep dive into the genre is a Nordic Noir novel: "The Keeper of Lost Causes" by Jussi Adler-Olsen. Seems appropriate given the arctic temperatures we've been having lately.

1643038436844.png
 
I'm up to 5 so far this year (and one audiobook I gave up on because I wasn't enjoying it). A few days ago I finished Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier:

1643059236685.png

Amazing cover aside, I really enjoyed this book. It's about a pregnant teenager who feels lost in life and becomes obsessed with a woman who regularly orders pizzas from the restaurant she works at. If you like slice of life (pun not intended) contemporaries I would recommend it, I gave it 4/5 stars.

I'm taking a sci-fi writing workshop next month, so I feel like I should pick up something space-y to go along with it. I'm considering either Axiom's End or All Systems Red. I'm nervous to have other people read my writing but I'm excited to learn!
 
Indymisanthrope said:
You guys are a bunch of literary big brains who are apparently able to concentrate on actual ideas.

Me, I've just finished Book 7 of a paperback fantasy series about a king's private force of magical bodyguards. Dave Duncan was a middling but prolific author who wrote a series of books about the "King's Blades." The gist is that juvenile delinquent boys show up at this academy/fraternity that trains them to be the best swordsmen in the world. At the end of their education, the king visits, the boys swear an oath to him, and they perform a magic ritual that involves him taking their sword and running it through their heart (it heals immediately). This ritual turns them into enchanted guards who are attuned to their wards with enhanced instincts and abilities (for example, they don't need to sleep anymore), and will go to superhuman lengths to protect the person they're bound to. The king can also 'gift' Blades to private individuals.

There's a trilogy (sort of, it's hard to explain), followed by a YA trilogy that was collected in a single volume (and also is heavily dependent on the reader being familiar with the previous volumes, so I'm not sure why he went the YA route with them at all), then five standalone novels set in this world. After the 'rules' for how all of this works are established in the first book, all of the subsequent installments are about exceptions to the rules that put a twist on the reader's expectations. Lots of swashbuckling and traveling to distant lands for various reasons.

Anyway, it's paperback garbage and it's fun. I read the first book after stumbling across it in the library almost 25 years ago (remember what it was like to just go to the library and randomly pull books off the shelf to figure out what you wanted to read?? WILD), and am just now finishing the whole series for the first time, up to the last novel that was published posthumously in 2020. The first book, The Gilded Chain, can be read as a self-contained story, and it's by far the best one. After that there's a lot of strange left turns and narrative dead ends. They're loaded with interesting ideas, but again, Duncan was not the most sophisticated writer, so he often introduces an idea and then fails to explore it, or gets bogged down in flashbacks that are not completely relevant to the story. There is lots and lots of worldbuilding, sometimes at the expense of just moving the damn plot along. It feels like the kind of thing that could have been a successful anthology series for other writers to come in and spin off concepts or characters that Duncan introduced in the main series. This last stretch of books feels like it suffered from inferior editing as well (use of modern phrases like "you can't fight City Hall" that don't belong in this medieval setting, or introducing a stand-in for Tenochtitlan and literally calling it El Dorado).

Overall, it's by turns fun and frustrating. It's fascinating to think about how much time and effort he put into designing this entire world across 9 (or 11, depending on how you're counting) books and four different decades, only for a lot of it to go unexplored and just sort of evaporate into the ether.

It's, um. It's not Murakami.
Click to expand...

Honestly, you kind of have my attention. I like the literary snob stuff of course but I think the junkfood has it's place. I can be worried about not getting around to any, and sometimes one wonders if there's junkfood books more deserving of being considered SoMe Of ThE bEsT eVaR than a lot of the literary snob stuff but don't get on the list because critics can't muse about sYmBoLiSm. I may add The Gilded Chain to my reading list.

Oh, and your description of Duncan bizarrely is almost exactly how Vonnegut describes Kilgore Trout in Slaughterhouse Five, which is frankly interesting enough in it's own right.
 
Okay, kinda 2 down but both were started in December so eh. Didn't read as much the past month-ish as I'd been doing - but, ebbs and floods. Also, like, apologies for below. I feel like I forget the difference between what needs to be said and what I say because I think it's interesting to say it.

Beyond Weird - Philip Ball: I went through this too fast to really have thought about it much, both for simple anxiety reasons and the fact that I was reading it on my brother's Kindle and so wanted to get it back to him. For a book that's supposed to be about getting past the idea of trying to come up with simple physical intuitions about quantum mechanics it's surprisingly hung up on it's own premise. He returns often to the question of what quantum mechanics means but he doesn't really settle anywhere long enough to appreciate until the last couple of pages. And admittedly where he does settle is firm enough but it doesn't really guide naturally to that point, and his bias for this argument is present throughout the book. Also, even speaking as someone who doesn't put much stock in Many Worlds Interpretation, he's surprisingly down on it, unhelpfully so. That said, except for one part in the middle where he's going on about the boxes of an Assyrian king, the experiments or thought experiments are well-chosen and the thrusts of these pointedly unintuitive concepts are fairly plainly laid out. And I do appreciate the lack of breathless speculation about quantum computers, I was fearing the worst when he started to bring them up. Overall there's no reason not to check it out if you'd like to know something more of quantum mechanics but I can't help but feel there would be better places to start.

2824497.jpg


Wuthering Heights - Emily Brönte: Uh. Not even sure what to say about this, except that I love it a lot and can see myself returning to it every few years. What a feat of imagination. This book follows several generations of not a small cast and they're whole lives, they're people. Sympathetic people. Terrible people. All of them, sympathetic, terrible people. I've actually written these thoughts elsewhere but I'm not sure how else to put it so I'll repeat myself: Emily writes with the glee of having thought of something both true and unthinkable to say, not out of sheer desire to be provoking but something that it would be inherently neglectful to deny the existence of. It makes Edgar Allan Poe seem like an æsthete and Nathaniel Hawthorne seem like an idealist. If this doesn't sound like you might enjoy reading this then you probably wouldn't. Nothing is for everyone and anything this potent is liable to create people who can't see the appeal, but if you think you think a book can and indeed only does earn it's beauty for it's rot then I can't recommend it enough, if, y'know, you can get past it being 170 years old and the diction it comes with. And my copy thankfully includes a few helpful line breaks that indicate when transitioning between narration frames but I wouldn't be surprised if copies that didn't would be somewhat difficult to read, not that it goes between those frames often.

9781435159662_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG


Next up: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Can't remember why this came up but my brother apparently had to read this in college and liked it a lot, read the preface and immediately wanted to know the book. Seems like it'll go well against the past two I just read for reasons I'm unsure of. After this I plan on Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.

9200000031600028.jpg
 
Last edited:
Phaneronic said:
After this I plan on Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
Click to expand...
Have you read it before?

I tried to read Bleak House when it was assigned during my last semester in college, but just ran out of time and didn’t finish. I tried again a few years later and hit a wall about 40% of the way through. There were so many characters to keep track of that I kept a running list of the page numbers where each character was introduced (and the chapters where they were described in detail) and folded it up and used it as my bookmark (a trick I picked up when reading Crime and Punishment in high school). But, the problem was, I filled up the page, and also filled up the backside of the page. And I think the dilemma of trying to figure out what to do at that point became a roadblock. The issue with this novel is that a lot of the characters seem so minor that they’re not worth keeping track of, but then they’ll resurface ten or twenty chapters later and you’ll have completely forgotten who they are and what you’re supposed to remember about them, lol.

My copy of the book has been sitting on top of a pile of papers on my desk at home basically as a paperweight, with my cheat sheet folded up and tucked inside at the end of Chapter 27. But maybe I can finally cross it off my list this year. I really loved everything I read and would enjoy seeing how it’s all tied together and resolved.

image.jpgimage.jpg
 
Novel 2/2022

Juli Zeh „Über Menschen“ (about 400 pages) from 2021

Juli Zeh is a popular current female writer in Germany, who's in her 40s and already has written several novels. Some of them as „Empty hearts“ and „New Year“ are available in English language.

I've enjoyed reading her current novel, and have read it rather quickly within a few days. The plot plays in spring and summer of 2020, and it's the first novel I've read in which the Covid pandemic plays some role. The book deals with a large bunch of current topics and developments within Germany as well as with questions of mentality. The main character is a rather liberal woman called Dora, who after having broken up with her ecological boyfriend, is moving from Berlin to rural Brandenburg to get away from it all, only accompanied by her dog. She has bought an old house in a little village there. The difference between people living in cities and rural areas is another topic of that book. When Dora finds out that her seemingly nice neighbor actually is a racist and Neonazi, she doesn't know how to deal with that. The book dives down into their relationship and the mixed feelings she has. I don't want to tell too much, in case somebody's going to read it in the future. To me the novel is a great mixture of funny and sad scenes, of light and deep thoughts. I've enjoyed reading it a lot.

Also I see how this thread is really motivating me to read more novels again, which is really great. Thanks to all participating in this :) I'm enjoying all your reviews/ thougts on the books you read.

IMG_20220126_163209.jpg​
 
Book 1

Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers by Stephen Deusner
20220126_202818.jpg

I started this one back in October - a week before the baby was born with the lofty goal of being finished before their arrival, but was less than 30 pages in by January 1st. The length of time it took me to read, however, has nothing to do with the content being uninteresting or poorly presented - in fact, it's quite the opposite. Despite taking nearly four months to read this, I finished it in about six sittings.

Deusner's decision to tell the DBT story by geography and it's histories rather than strictly chronologically proves the perfect means for this in-depth look at the band, their songs, their surroundings and their history. This book is everything I could've wanted in a book about the Truckers and more, with heavy participation from band members past and present and covering ground right up until very recently it would be very improbably for somebody else to come along and supplant this as the definitive DBT book. And very enjoyably written.
 
Book 4: Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford

Light.jpg

I loved this book, I'm struggling to think I'll read another book this year that grabs me the way this did.
The story isn't new, it's an alternate history/future of a group of five fictional kids who were victims in a very real V2 missile attack on a Woolworths in New Cross, South East London during WW2. It's a 'what if' that attack had never happened.
The writing is musical, Spufford sings his way through the sentences and once you find the rhythm, it reads at a clip.
His characters are both loveable and loathsome and he left me a terrifying dilemma where I was left wondering if that instantaneous evaporation of life wouldn't have been the better outcome for some of the kids as we pass through their alternate adult existences.
Music and musical sub-cultures play their fair share in the narrative and I think many here would enjoy this, highly recommended.
 
Book 4: Kent State by Deborah Wiles

Yet another book from my YA lit class. This one wasn't required reading, but my professor brings in books every week and allows us to check them out and write a couple paragraphs for extra credit. As a native Ohioan and someone who has always been interested in the grusome history of America, I had to grab this from her. It's a short book, about a hundred pages. It's written in free verse poetry, intended to sound like an oral history of the massacre. It has about six different voices, and it's like all of these people are sitting and remembering the event. No one can completely agree about what happened that weekend, but none of them are completely wrong in what they remember. It's really thought provoking and utterly devastating. The author ends the book by naming so many senseless tragedies that have happened sense then - Virginia Tech, Parkland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, so many others. Part of me feels like we never learn, but I think that's why books like this as so necessarily. Even though we as a society have become numb to all of these shootings and pain... We can still find empathy. And we can teach teen readers to be empathetic, and maybe they can be the change.
 
Book 1: Testimony by Robbie Robertson

My first book of this year, had wanted to read this for a while being a large fan of both the Band and Bob Dylan. Excellent storytelling and pretty entertaining throughout, though clearly slanted towards Robertson's side of things as to the subject of the disputes that occurred later in life, particularly with Levon Helm. Almost 500 pages, it took a little longer to get through than I expected.
20220129_134233.jpg
 
Book 4:

Jazz From Detroit by Mark Stryker (University of Michigan Press, 2019)

This was a Christmas present and really is fantastic. The book provides a detailed analysis of the impact and contributions that Detroit has provided to the jazz scene over the years. Stryker does this by providing historical and cultural information, with the majority of the book consisting of short biographies/interviews/studies of key musicians that were born and raised in the city. I was unfamiliar with a few of these musicians but, as is the case with jazz, they all played with other "big" musicians that helped shape their development. The biographies are arranged in chronological order of sorts, with the early players being at the beginning and the contemporary musicians being at the end. Well worth a read and I thoroughly recommend it.

IMG_3993.JPG
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top