What books are we reading at the moment ?

[T42]

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Thailand after global ecosystem collapse/rampant global warming effects.  Different local factions + westerners all trying to score points off each other. Difficult first couple of chapters since hard to discern a likeable protagonist but once in it's good.

Finished it: very good and very imaginable, in particular the idea that

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Western agricultural/GMO companies could flood the world with successive tailored plagues in order to sell their remedies.

[L CC]

I'm basically going through a book a day at the moment.
Started Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series.
Liking it so far (1st of 5).

[Nuncio]

Currently on the 5th of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie detective series. Funny (in a literary way, so no more than light chuckles) and very good, if you can accept extreme coincidence piled upon extreme coincidence, and tethered near the end of the book to a different pile of extreme coincidences. I can. But I've got 120 pages into this one without a death (except one in the past), without our hero being beaten up or punching a dog, and with but a few fairly explainable coincidences so far. So a bit different from the first 4.

That's a coincidence

I won't say what I thought of the denouement of #5.

[L CC]

I take recommendations from Spooners very seriously.

[ian]

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Thailand after global ecosystem collapse/rampant global warming effects.  Different local factions + westerners all trying to score points off each other. Difficult first couple of chapters since hard to discern a likeable protagonist but once in it's good.

Finished it: very good and very imaginable, in particular the idea that

(click to show/hide)

Western agricultural/GMO companies could flood the world with successive tailored plagues in order to sell their remedies.

(click to show/hide)

Pharma companies already do, so you don't have to imagine it. They didn't need actual plagues though.

Oddly, agricultural companies, while not angelic, have in part ensured fewer people than ever in history are going hungry.

[T42]

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Thailand after global ecosystem collapse/rampant global warming effects.  Different local factions + westerners all trying to score points off each other. Difficult first couple of chapters since hard to discern a likeable protagonist but once in it's good.

Finished it: very good and very imaginable, in particular the idea that

(click to show/hide)

Western agricultural/GMO companies could flood the world with successive tailored plagues in order to sell their remedies.

(click to show/hide)

Pharma companies already do, so you don't have to imagine it. They didn't need actual plagues though.

Oddly, agricultural companies, while not angelic, have in part ensured fewer people than ever in history are going hungry.

8 billion and counting...

[CrazyEnglishTriathlete]

Chasing After Danger by Terence O'Brien

Bought this out of curiosity, because my cycle commutes have been taking me past Fairoaks Airfield (Chobham), and its Wikipedia entry led me to him, as he had flown there in training.  Well-above-average WWII memoir told in a way that puts a lot of today's news into perspective.  I have two more instalments to read when I get home.

[T42]

Son & his partner gave me 3 Paolo Bacigalupis for my barfday.  First one was about deprivation & factions in Thailand being bloody 'orrible to each other. Started another last night: it's about water domination games in Colorado, IOW about deprivation & factions being bloody 'orrible to each other. Didn't fancy more systemic/systematic misery so moved on to third. To judge from the first two pages it's about deprivation & factions being bloody 'orrible to each other in the subcontinent.  PB must get a kick out of being a miserable bugger/possible Guardian columnist, but he can do it ohne mich.

[cygnet]

After the Duncton Wood trilogy (I could not stop reading, after all what's a mole to do) I was bought for Chrissymuss - Colditz by Ben MacIntyre a riveting read and as my birt is in January the four books of the Hyddenworld (also btw way a Aladdin mantle lamp to read by if the scroats we call government allow the lights to go out) series, Spring is the first and after a difficult first few chapters (the after effects of brilliant Duncton ?) I am in and well and truly hooked.

I have somewhat belatedly (as in 25years intervening period) acquired (missing from my bookshelves) volume 2 of the Book of Silence, so have been rereading Duncton Wood to reacquaint myself with moledom. Just started on my recent purchase!

[Mr Larrington]

Just finished Stephen King's “Billy Summers”, in which the paranatural and supernormal are limited to a couple of oblique references to the Overlook Hotel and Hemingford Home.

Back to John Le Carré-on-spying it is then.

[Sergeant Pluck]

The Race Against the Stasi - Herbie Sykes - an account of Dieter Wiedemann, the GDR cyclist who defected to the west during trials for the Olympics in 1964.  Part cycling biography, part love story, part harrowing account of living during the formation of a police state, woven together expertly and intriguingly.  I haven't sat down and read so much of a book in one go for years.

I have been searching backwards through this thread for something new that appeals and this was the second that I found, the first being Jurek’s recco for Carol Donaldson’s On the Marshes. But as I want something NOW, and On the Marshes is not on Kindle, yours wins.

[Snakehips]

I was thrilled to find a copy of  Nazis on the Nile: The German Military Advisers in Egypt 1949-1967 by Vyvyan Kinross  under my Christmas tree.

Which I have now read and can thoroughly recommend.

P.S. I am rather a slow reader.

[fimm]

I'm also reading a Christmas present: "First Man: The Life of Neil A Armstrong" by James R Hansen. It is interesting.

[rafletcher]

Keigo Higashino’s Death in Tokyo, the third of his Detective Kaga books.

[slope]

Again, repeat, subsumed and just as consumed as the first time - The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis

[T42]

L'Ombre Chinoise, a 1931 Maigret about a murder in the Place des Vosges, not far from where we first alighted in Paris in 1972.  Our first restaurant dinner in France was a couple of hundred metres away on Bd. Beaumarchais. It's probably a pizzeria or a hamburger joint these days.

[Efrogwr]

Again, repeat, subsumed and just as consumed as the first time - The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis

I've read a few Kingsley Amis novels and generally found them to be irritating. The Old Devils is an exception, amusing and humane.

Lucky Jim is the other exception.

[slope]

I've read a few Kingsley Amis novels and generally found them to be irritating. The Old Devils is an exception, amusing and humane.

Agreed. Not unlike Brydan and some of his poetry, dare I suggest?

[rafletcher]

Peter May's final book A Winter Grave. Set in 2051 in a Scotland suffering from climate change (albeit an uexpectedly cold and wet change) with flashbacks to 2023. Not sure how I'll get on. My first exposure to him was the Lewis trilogy, which I enjoyed, but others I've tried I've not really engaged with.

Aaand I didn’t gel with this one either. So, trying an older Karin Slaughter Triptych. Better than expected.

[Mr Larrington]

Halfway through Stuart MacBride's “The Dead Of Winter”.  Only two killin's?  What’s that all about

Edit: livened up a bit towards the end

Also the author acknowledges one Tom Chicken at his publisher.  My evil cow-orker Mr Watkinson set his account up at the BigCo.  Username KFC

[rafletcher]

Well, the Peter May didn't last long, I just can't get along with his style. And the Karin Slaughter was, for trash fiction, not bad but waaay too long (and that seems to be a trait of her writings sadly), so now I'm on something I'm finding thoroughly enjoyable, My Darkest Prayer by S.A. Cosby, he of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears.  This is his first novel, before he got well known with Blacktop Wasteland. It is excellent.

[orienteer]

The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak.

Based around the troubles in Cyprus in the 1970s, and a descendant's life in north London in the 2010s.

It's been a long time since I've finished a novel, this one was both enthralling and written in short chapters moving between time periods and characters, including a fig tree with conciousness.
.
Also intriguing as we we had an unexpected day in Cyprus in 1974 (due to runway problems in Rhodes), two weeks before the Turks invaded the north of the island. We took the opportunity to hire a taxi for the day to tour the island, including the north.

[rafletcher]

On to the latest Jane Harper "Exiles". Not started it yet, so remaims to be seen. My wife (who loved The Dry) failed to get beyond a couple of chapters. I've liked all but her second outing (Force of Nature), so who knows.

[Wowbagger]

“A Short History of Nearly Everything”. - Bill Bryson.

What an incredibly sad book. He spends 563 pages extolling the sheer cleverness of the human species and then, quite succinctly, a mere 10 concluding that despite all this cleverness we are destroying everything. It was published 20 years ago, so I think he’s actually very prescient. I still think that had the effort been made by the right people at the time we would have had a fighting chance of turning it round.

Instead, we invaded Iraq.

[T42]

Philip Wylie wrote a novel about destruction of the world through humanity's abuse of its environment in 1972.  He didn't include climate change, blaming rather widespread chemical pollution, but the fundamentals - i.e. profit and convenience trumping all other considerations - were right.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1044551