2022 50 Book Challenge

[Fueco]

My brother and I have an annual net going for who reads the most books each year. Audio books never count. It’s not reading.

I absorb just as much information listening to audiobooks as reading real books, so you can keep your rules out of this thread. I’m not competing with anyone here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/07/31/is-listening-to-a-book-a-cheating/

 

[mak1277]

I absorb just as much information listening to audiobooks as reading real books, so you can keep your rules out of this thread. I’m not competing with anyone here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/07/31/is-listening-to-a-book-a-cheating/

Oh I don’t care what you do. I wish I could listen to books but I can’t (or don’t want to) multi-task when I’m reading. I can’t drive and retain anything I listen to, for example. For me the act of sitting down, eliminating distraction and reading is almost as important as whatever it is I’m reading. It’s almost, but not quite, meditation.

 

[Fueco]

30. Clive Cussler’s The Devil’s Sea: A Dirk Pitt Novel, by Dirk Cussler

Clive Cussler died a couple of years ago, but his son has taken over the writing of his series. The books are still fun, light reading, and honestly, I can’t discern a difference in the writing.

 

[Fueco]

31. Unf#ck Your Brain: Using Science To Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-Outs, and Triggers, by Faith G. Harper

interesting audiobook by a psychologist. Aside from the extraneous swearing, there are some gems in here.

 

[Fueco]

32. The Wild Birds: Six Stories Of The Port William Membership, by Wendell Berry

A collection of short stories from Berry’s Port William books. These stories (and the others) track moments from the lives of residents of Port William, Kentucky, a small town on the backs of a tributary of the Ohio River.

Berry’s work feels like a raw look at life in a dying town that is very familiar to Berry as that’s where he has spent most of his life.

 

[Fueco]

33. Letters To The Sons Of Society: A Father’s Invitation To Love, Honesty, and Freedom, by Shaka Senghor

A book written as letters to the author’s sons about issues facing society, and more specifically, African American men and boys.
If you were to read one book on these issues, this would be a good one to start with. Senghor spent nineteen years of his life in prison for murder. He spent that time becoming an eloquent voice for the community.

 

[SixOhNine]

OK, got a couple to catch up-

19. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein
This came up in a different thread and I decided to give it a re-read, since I didn't remember it well. Realized a couple of chapters in that I didn't remember it because I've never read it, despite being a big Heinlein fan in my teens. It very much shows its age- casual mild racism and distinctly sexist. Plus, I'm fairly certain Heinlein was a borderline pedophile (ephebophile, technically, I guess). That said, he does a really good job with language to develop a unique protagonist and develop a sense of "the future". The are some interesting ideas in there, too, along with Heinlein's usual Randian silliness. I didn't really enjoy the book, but it was interesting.

20. What Abigail Did That Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch
A spinoff novella in the Rivers of London series, it features 13 year old Abigail Kamara, the cousin of Peter Grant. She's a fun character and has popped up briefly in a couple of other books, but this is the first where she's the focus. A quick, but definitely enjoyable, read.

21. Caliban's War, by James S. A. Corey
Book 2 in The Expanse. I think maybe the writing's a little better than it was in the first book, but it's still not good. A I read the books, I'm running a comparison against the TV series in my head. Obviously, they're similar, but there are a lot of differences, too. Enough so that I'm not 100% certain what's going to happen or exactly who various characters are. That said, I think every change in the show improved on the books. I don't think there's a single instance where I thought, "wow, that is so much better than it was on TV."

 

[PhilKenSebben]

It very much shows its age- casual mild racism and distinctly sexist. Plus, I'm fairly certain Heinlein was a borderline pedophile (ephebophile, technically, I guess).

I have noticed this a decent amount in certain classic authors of science fiction. It is interesting to see people writing about a future and just not thinking any of those things would go away at all.

 

[SixOhNine]

I have noticed this a decent amount in certain classic authors of science fiction. It is interesting to see people writing about a future and just not thinking any of those things would go away at all.

It feels less like not thinking those things would change and more like not even realizing they exist. It's just a constant, like breathing- you don't even notice it, especially if you're a straight white man in early 60s America.

That said, it reminded me that I missed one of my recent books-
22. Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey
Kind of an oddball. It's a future western set in Arizona, with culture largely regressed to the late 1800s, complete with sexist repression and women as something between property and second class citizens. Modern stuff exists, but it's almost entirely reserved for "The War" at the border. Esther, the protagonist, decides to run away from home after her secret girlfriend is hanged. Her method of doing so is to hide in the back of a wagon driven by The Librarians, women officially tasked with traveling from town to town distributing "approved" reading materials. They turn out to be something a bit more complicated. It's very LGBTQ, and much like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, I think it reflects the time of its writing (2020) and the perspective of its writer (Gailey is non-binary) much more than any possible future.

 

[Fueco]

It feels less like not thinking those things would change and more like not even realizing they exist. It's just a constant, like breathing- you don't even notice it, especially if you're a straight white man in early 60s America.

Heck, the majority of white guys in the country still don’t think it exists or has ever existed.

 

[mak1277]

Catching up:

27 - A River for My Sidewalk, Gilean Douglas
Billed as a "female Thoreau from Canada", Douglas lived alone on Vancouver Island for the better part of a decade back in the 40s/50s. She originally published this under a male pen name. In the genre of "hermit memoire" I quite enjoyed this, especially since it was a random find at my local used book store.

28 - Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
I'm trying to re-read books that I read in high school. I will say that I definitely appreciated this one more as an adult than I did when it was compulsory reading. It's certainly good literature, but yeah, still depressing as hell.

29, 30, 31 - Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Food, MaddAddam (MaddAddam Trilogy), Margaret Atwood
It says something when I actually read all three books in a sci-fi/dystopian trilogy. In this one, most of humanity has been wiped out by a plague/virus. All three of these books leaned heavily on flashbacks and all three were written from a slightly different perspective/character's POV. I can say I like pretty much everything I've read from Atwood.

32 - Headwaters, Dylan Tomine
Despite being about fly fishing, and despite being composed of numerous short essays/stories, I found this really difficult to get through. So many of the stories were simply variations on the same theme...I feel like 75% of the book could've been condensed into one story. Many of the stories had been previously published as magazine articles, so I understand the repetition was probably caused by that, but it just became hard to want to read the same story again and again (e.g., the author mentioned "the biggest steelhead I'd ever seen" in no fewer than 4 of the stories). Anyway, this doesn't get ranked anywhere near the Gierach, McGuane level of fishing writing.

 

[Fueco]

34. 1984, by George Orwell

A reread. I read this for the first time maybe twenty years ago. It’s even more fitting These days.

 

[mak1277]

33 - Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

really a good book. There are any number of summaries of this online so I won’t try to explain it in a few words, aside from saying it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a while. Certainly #1 out of 33 this year so far.

 

[Fueco]

35. The Centrist Solution: How We Made Government Work and Can Make It Work Again, by Joe Lieberman

A case for a return to civility and working together in government. Obviously, partisanship is over the top these days. I found myself agreeing with Senator Lieberman more often than not. He writes well, and the stories from his career in politics certainly help make his case.

 

[Fueco]

36. Remembering, by Wendell Berry

This is the third book in the Port William series. This one reads as a paean to the old ways, when most Americans lived in small towns and farmed their 80 acres.