What are you reading in 2021?

[Oh_hunnihunni]

I often wake in the middle of the night, and always get up, make tea, and reach for the novel de jour. A couple of hours and I try snoozing again. If it doesn't work, there is always daytime dreaming. Funny thing, I never have any problems falling asleep in the daytime!

But never a bad book...

[sarahk]

The worst thing about Auckland's lockdown has been the library deprivation.

I've donated a large number to our local little free library and have boxes more of less desirable titles waiting for the Selwyn Book Fair to start accepting books again.

The LFLs are springing up everywhere - keep an eye out.

[Lilith7]

I'm re reading Cakes & ale, Somerset Maugham which I last read several decades ago. It took a bit of getting into & seems quite wordy by today's standards. But I'm enjoying it again, especially the bits about the stupidity of the English class system & the crashing snobbery which was once prevalent - someone who had the nerve to come to the front door, or to speak to someone who was from the 'upper class', they 'weren't quite the thing.'

Good grief, we humans are such fools!

[Olive]

I'm reading Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You. I'm hardly the target audience but her beautiful prose and clever use of long emails is compelling and now, at about half way through, I'm starting to warm to her characters. I have a feeling it's all going to end better than it started and I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys clear and detailed writing.

[Zurdo]

Found a recent Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Bill Slider in the elibrary...21st in the series. She has so much fun wordplay, they are a hoot to read.

[Bracken]

Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, adapted by Patrick Tilley from the episodes in the first tv series.

Happy memories and amusing.

[Lilith7]

I'm reading again A year in Provence, Peter Mayle & enjoying it all over again. I'd forgotten that it was so funny, & that it enlightened me as to how it is that the French & the Scots have always got on so well.

[Oh_hunnihunni]

Joe Abercrombie's latest The Wisdom of Crowds is on my bedside table now, and it is looking good from the first few pages I demolished last night...

[Lilith7]

Thoroughly enjoyed a years in Provence again, a lovely book.

I've just got - & started already - the third in the Reveille series, Redemption, R H Van Der Weert. It was to have been the final but apparently the characters weren't inclined to bugger off, so she's working on the next one already.
Its actually to be a birthday gift for youngest granddaughter but I'm reading them (carefully) first.

[Oh_hunnihunni]

I have put Abercrombie aside for a while. Lots of violence going on in there, and picked up Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Boy, it's fun. And good. And not too hard for this social science nerd to grasp. I might just stick with this until it's over. Mob violence and regicide can wait.

[Lilith7]

I have put Abercrombie aside for a while. Lots of violence going on in there, and picked up Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Boy, it's fun. And good. And not too hard for this social science nerd to grasp. I might just stick with this until it's over. Mob violence and regicide can wait.

Coincidentally, that's the very book I set out to buy this morning!

Well, one of them - I've finally got the whanau to understand that really, I'm the world's easiest person to buy a birthday/Xmas present for - just give me a book voucher & I'm happy as Larry. So went to the best bookshop in town  this morning, ( Scorpio books) & bought myself Windswept & interesting, Billy Connolly but when I tried for Hail Mary, they'd sold out. So their lovely staff have ordered it for me; with luck it might even arrive just as I finish the Billy Connolly one.
But first - Redemption.

[Lilith7]

Finished Redemption a day or so ago but finding its staying with me a bit, definitely looking forward to the next one.

Now reading Billy Connolly's Windswept & interesting & thoroughly enjoying it; he has a way with words.

[Olive]

I've just started to read Louis de Bernieres' The Dust the Falls from Dreams. It's been in my Kindle library for years and I've only just got around to it, more fool me because it's wonderful. I wasn't that comfortable with his writing when it veered off into magic realism, but this one (so far) is a beautifully written Edwardian family saga.

[Lilith7]

I finished Windswept & Interesting laughing - he's surely one of the funniest people on the planet, we may have to have a week's mourning when the big yin falls off his perch.
At least we know what's going on his headstone, in tiny letters so you have to get up close to read it, it will say 'You're standing on my balls.'

Started Project hail Mary & wish I had the time to read more at once but will get there.

[Magoo]

adrian mckinty
dana stabenau (sp)
and a stuart mcbride book
at the moment

[Olive]

I just had a nice surprise: I finished reading "The Dust That Falls from Dreams" (Louis Bernières), which I loved, and found that it is the first in a trilogy. So that's me set up for the holiday period.

[Zurdo]

Well that's better than finding out you've just read the 2nd or 3rd book in a Trilogy...one of my pet hates. I still fall for it, time and time again.

[Oh_hunnihunni]

Over the Holiday Season I am going to drown myself in Nora Roberts romances. And wine, and chocolates, and lots of easy salads.

Unashamedly.

After all, the woman writes so many I have heaps to catch up on.

---

I finished Windswept & Interesting laughing - he's surely one of the funniest people on the planet, we may have to have a week's mourning when the big yin falls off his perch.
At least we know what's going on his headstone, in tiny letters so you have to get up close to read it, it will say 'You're standing on my balls.'

Started Project hail Mary & wish I had the time to read more at once but will get there.

I look forward to hearing what you think.

[Lilith7]

Over the Holiday Season I am going to drown myself in Nora Roberts romances. And wine, and chocolates, and lots of easy salads.

Unashamedly.

After all, the woman writes so many I have heaps to catch up on.

---

I finished Windswept & Interesting laughing - he's surely one of the funniest people on the planet, we may have to have a week's mourning when the big yin falls off his perch.
At least we know what's going on his headstone, in tiny letters so you have to get up close to read it, it will say 'You're standing on my balls.'

Started Project hail Mary & wish I had the time to read more at once but will get there.

I look forward to hearing what you think.

So far, I'm cursing Andy Weir for making me feel sorry for a spider-like alien! 

[sumstyle]

I've finished Code Talker, which was an autobiography on Chester Nez, one of the Navajo marines that put together the unbreakable code in WW2 with the battles in the Pacific. Interesting back story with his memories of life on the reservation. Their treatment at the hands of white people - not at all dissimilar to the Maaori in NZ, complulsory land acquisition, happy for the men to fight in wars for the ruling class, but that didn't necessarily get them treated as an equal once back after the war.

Now listening to The Puzzle Women, which is a fiction book but based around the true facts of the Stasi in East Berlin, and all the documents they kept on the people they spied on. When the Berlin Wall was torn down, they started shredding all the evidence on the "lost people", yet there was a team of women that painstakingly recreated the pages manually so that records could be found of the disappeared.