Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 04:11:59 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Reading plans for 2020

Started by Captain Crunch, January 02, 2020, 10:42:07 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Captain Crunch

Do you have any reading plans for 2020?  Looking at the upcoming releases is very depressing:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50463141

Another book by a young doctor, Richard Osman's first novel and Jenni Murray has written a book about her weight; oh Puffy hold me back!  Christ.

New releases aside you could try a reading challenge.  Most of them boil down to this sort of thing:




Seems a bit rigid to follow to the letter but useful to have to hand if you're stuck for ideas.  And I love the green books. 

Any plans or anything you're looking forward to? 


Sebastian Cobb

I'm just about to pick up The Time Traveller's Wife so that's about 6 off that list already.


jobotic


Twit 2

Gonna try and read 25 books, about one a fortnight.

Funcrusher


earl_sleek

Although I've read almost all the Discworld books (just missing a couple of the Tiffany Aching ones), I haven't read some of them in years, and I've never read the entire series all the way through. I've already read The Colour of Magic so far this year - blasted through it in a few days and was surprised how much I enjoyed it, given how Discworld was just a parody of fantasy tropes at this point with none of the development it would eventually have. But it's a good parody, and doesn't just rely on it's parodic aspects - it's a decent fantasy novel in it's own right.

I'm not gonna read exclusively Discworld until I've finished the series - even as a Pratchett fan, I think I would get sick of him - and it'll probably last into 2021 at least, but it's sort of comforting that I'll always know what book is lined up next.

Captain Crunch

Inspired by Serge on here I started keeping a record of all the books I read.  It does help to keep it going and makes it easy to look back and think "hmm, no books with an animal on the cover for a few months, must rectify that". 

This year I'd like to read more old / classic YA stuff along the lines of Rumble Fish or Kes.  Also I'd like to read more upbeat fiction as most of the stuff I go for tends to be about people scrabbling around in filth or getting prodded with sharp sticks.  Any recommendation for either of these would be much appreciated please. 



Ray Travez

just started a free trial on kindle unlimited. Maybe should start a thread about it. Fascinated by the rot. Kindle unlimited is full of crap and corruption!

Anyway, my reading plan is to bang through some of the crap and chaff on there quite intensively. Hopefully some good stuff too. After that, I'd like to finish some books I've had lying around for a while; Moneyland, McMafia, that sort of thing. 

Ray Travez


Mister Six

Quote from: Ray Travez on January 08, 2020, 03:43:01 AM
just started a free trial on kindle unlimited. Maybe should start a thread about it. Fascinated by the rot. Kindle unlimited is full of crap and corruption!

Please do! I'm intrigued!

I'm still planning to get through some of the spy books recommended to me in the thread I started before, but I also have this lot waiting for me:

Respectable by Linsey Halney (given to me by a lovely friend who's all about the class warfare)

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan (sort of a Yes Man for millennials. She's very funny so while I usually find all the "I'm an introvert!" stuff online tedious, I thought I'd give it a go)

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (loved the film years ago, love Chabon in general so I don't know why I waited this long)

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (not all of them. At least not in one go)

The Invisibles, books three and four by Grant Morrison and chums (do comics count? Fuck it. Loved this years ago. First volume - contained in books 1 and 2 - is shaky, but the second volume here is brilliant, kinetic stuff)

chveik

I want to read some BS Johnson, any recs on which one's the best starting point?

one_sharper

Quote from: chveik on January 09, 2020, 01:40:16 AM
I want to read some BS Johnson, any recs on which one's the best starting point?

I'm not sure whether this would be the consensus, but I found Christie Malry's Own Double Entry a really good starting point with Johnson. I picked it up after hearing David Quantick talk about it on Backlisted. https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/5-b-s-johnson-christie-malrys-own-double-entry

buttgammon

I'd agree with Christie Malry. It's relatively short and accessible, but is also a really funny introduction to Johnson's style and ideas. I did a seminar paper about it a few years ago, and I was delighted to hear people say they'd read it off the back of that.

Captain Crunch

Quote from: Mister Six on January 09, 2020, 01:28:30 AMRespectable by Linsey Halney (given to me by a lovely friend who's all about the class warfare)

Really enjoyed her 'Estates' book, will keep an eye out for this one too. 

Captain Crunch

These '100 best' lists were popular around the year 2000, the BBC recently revised one:

QuoteIdentity
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Days Without End – Sebastian Barry
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
Small Island – Andrea Levy
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Love, Sex & Romance
Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
Forever – Judy Blume
Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Riders – Jilly Cooper
The Far Pavilions – M. M. Kaye
The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Adventure
City of Bohane – Kevin Barry
Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman
Ivanhoe – Walter Scott
Mr Standfast – John Buchan
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O'Brian
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkien

Life, Death & Other Worlds
A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri
Dune – Frank Herbert
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett
The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman
The Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis

Politics, Power & Protest
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
Strumpet City – James Plunkett
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Unless – Carol Shields
V for Vendetta – Alan Moore

Class & Society
A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Poor Cow – Nell Dunn
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Coming of Age
Emily of New Moon – L. M. Montgomery
Golden Child - Claire Adam
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
Swami and Friends – R. K. Narayan
The Country Girls - Edna O'Brien
The Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling
The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ - Sue Townsend
The Twilight Saga – Stephenie Meyer

Family & Friendship
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild
Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
The Witches – Roald Dahl

Crime & Conflict
American Tabloid – James Ellroy
American War – Omar El Akkad
Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Regeneration – Pat Barker
The Children of Men – P.D. James
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

Rule Breakers
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville
Habibi – Craig Thompson
How to be Both – Ali Smith
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Psmith, Journalist – P. G. Wodehouse
The Moor's Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde

I doubt I'd enjoy reading all these just for the sake of finishing the list but might be ok for the odd bit of inspiration? 

Emma Raducanu

I haven't read a book for years. I know, get me! Where do you all read? I used to read on the train or on long distance bus journeys but I can never settle down and read at home because by the time I get to sit down, all I want to do is sleep. Think I'm gonna make an effort this year. My mum bought me a Kindle but I doubt I'll use it as most books on there cost an obscene amount.

Captain Crunch


Mister Six

Quote from: Captain Crunch on January 19, 2020, 09:48:24 PM
These %u2018100 best%u2019 lists were popular around the year 2000, the BBC recently revised one:

I doubt I%u2019d enjoy reading all these just for the sake of finishing the list but might be ok for the odd bit of inspiration?

The inclusion of "series" would make it tricky. Not that I'm complaining about Pratchett bring recognised but there are about 40 Discworld books alone...

(Generally a good selection, though I'm not sure why Narnia is in there twice but there's nothing by Ursula K Leguin, or any of the Hitchhiker's Guide books.)