Reading Record 2022 - Uniquely Portable Magic - The Bear and Badger

acemuzzy

Gremill wrote:

acemuzzy wrote:

Well nobody helped. So I'm now trying Eight Detectives.

Use of Weapons is amazing.

Yeah I kinda know the other three are all meant to be great, but thought I fancied something easier to keep my overall reading mojo up!

LivDiv

1. Atomic Habits by James Clear
Self help book on forming good habits and ditching bad ones. A really good read especially for this time of year.
It focuses on ditching goals as the focus, instead looking at process and becoming the person that may achieve that goal anyway rather than the goal being an arbitrary end point. Lots of advice on how to position habits so you actually do them and remove or replace triggers for the bad habits.
I've managed to develop a few good habits since starting the book on boxing day. Things like doing a short morning workout and remembering to moisturise everyday.
It uses decent references to back up its preaching from examples of famous people to actual studies.
[9]

Wookienopants

LivDiv wrote:

1. Atomic Habits by James Clear Self help book on forming good habits and ditching bad ones. A really good read especially for this time of year. It focuses on ditching goals as the focus, instead looking at process and becoming the person that may achieve that goal anyway rather than the goal being an arbitrary end point. Lots of advice on how to position habits so you actually do them and remove or replace triggers for the bad habits. I've managed to develop a few good habits since starting the book on boxing day. Things like doing a short morning workout and remembering to moisturise everyday. It uses decent references to back up its preaching from examples of famous people to actual studies. [9]

That's a great book, I really enjoyed it.
Have you read "Make your bed" by William H Mcraven? Very good and deals with similar ideas

LivDiv

I have.
Another good read. I think "Make your Bed" is worth it even if you have no intentions of following the advice.

poprock

Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint by Russell Davies.

Russell is an extremely modest genius. He does the same job as me, but for much cooler companies and with much more important clients (like the UK Government, Nike, Apple and Honda). He’s probably better at what we call ‘presentations’ than anyone else on the planet. This is a book he wrote recently about PowerPoint (and presentation software in general, but mostly PowerPoint because that’s what most people use).

First, Russell explains who he is, what he does, and what the hell gives him the right to pretend to be an expert. Then he writes about the history of PowerPoint, about what presentations really are and what they do, and why they’re important and worth thinking about. Finally, for the second half of the book, he gives advice on how to be good at PowerPoint and presentations in general.

It’s all in Russell’s usual relaxed and chatty style. The book is only short (under 300 pages and half of those are big slide-like typographic illustrations) and it feels like you’re reading a really fascinating blog post. That’s what Russell does - he finds something interesting, learns about it, and explains it in ways that make you find it as fascinating as he does. Then he points towards a few vague thoughts on what it could all mean and what you could do if X or Y were true … he sparks inspiration by first being interested and then being curious. And this book, well it’s about the thing he’s always been most interested in. So it’s quite a thing.

To quote from one of the early pages: “Cashpoints give you cash. PowerPoint gives you power.” That’s the sort of simple idea that makes you want to learn more. Or at least, it does for me.

Brilliant book. Maybe not for everyone, but brilliant.

b0r1s

Sounds great. I hate bad presentations and love great presentations. I’m guessing we are in a similar sector (marketing) where presentations are vital to our success.

The book that made me look at how to present, probably much older than the book you referenced, is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Highly recommended to anyone, in any industry, who has to make a presentation.

poprock

Yeah. While presenting is very relevant to my work, I hope I didn’t make that sound like a business advice book - it’s more of an exploration of why this superficially dull subject is actually really interesting.

b0r1s

While I appreciate that just the word presentation can send people to sleep I think that is more to do with how most presentations happen. When you see someone great presenting it is very entertaining and engaging.

Gremill

That sounds like the kind of book that I would hate, get lot from, then despise myself for reading.

Raiziel

1. Death’s End by Cixin Liu.

I started this book in November. It’s taken a long time to get through it because I had to keep putting it down and picking up something else just to get a break from it. What an absolute chore of a book. It’s not as bad as The Dark Forest, which I found to be completely without merit, but it still inherits many of its flaws. And many of those flaws also applied to The Three Body Problem, but what I loved about that book, what propelled me through it at breakneck speed was the mystery of it all. I loved being all at sea to what the actual fuck was going on. It just layered mystery upon mystery upon mystery and wrapped it all up in a beautiful exotic physics bow. I hardly noticed Cixin can’t write believable characters with dialogue that might actually come out of a persons mouth because I was having too much fun trying to work out what the hell is going on.

Death’s End actually has some neat ideas here and there, which is why I found it marginally better than The Dark Forest. But it’s not enough. One of the books I put this down for, Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez, is a collection of short stories, and she does more in just a thirty page short story to make her characters feel believable than Cixin does in Death’s End’s entire bloated length. It’s a book with some great sci-fi ideas, but there’s nothing here to glue it together. When I finished this book I was just relieved that it was over. Onto better things. Speaking of which…

2. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.

This is a sweet story. It’s not going to win any awards for originality, as this really is a modern retelling of It’s a Wonderful Life, but it’s executed about as well as you could hope for. The prose has an elegant simplicity about it that reminds me of the likes of Christopher Priest, Andrew Michael Hurley and Iain Reid. It’s a story about regret, and about getting comfortable in you own skin and seeing the potential in yourself. It’s gentle, earnest, and sometimes even wise. A good book. Not quite good enough to shunt his The Humans up to the top of my tbr, but I’ll definitely get around to it sooner or later.

regmcfly

I've got 3 novels lined up beside my bed, but please give me credit because I just finished reading an Edge from cover to cover for the first time since 2020.

acemuzzy

I have 23 books on my bedside table and can never decide which to read next. The tottering tower of becoming borderline precarious.

davyK

I have the Suez book and a Betjemen poetry collection + my Kindle at my bedside. I'm reading a fair bit of poetry at the minute instead of books.

LivDiv

2. ...And Away by Bob Mortimer
A wonderful, hilarious, tender, humble book written by a man of the same traits.
Its so refreshing to read an autobiography that remains so grounded. Bob never really accepts that his own talent has put him where he is as he instead pours over the generosity and brilliance of his friends and colleagues.
Such a lovely human being and its a pleasure to be able to gain a bit more insight into his story.
[9]

Cos

It was really interesting how he downplays his contributions at times. I kind of wondered how much truth to it there might be but when I listened to the next Athletico Mince, it removed any doubt. He’s bloody brilliant.

Gremill

So very fookin sorry about that sir.

Cos

His Sting and Peter Beardsley crack me up every time.

Raiziel

3. Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg

This is the science fiction story of a man returning to a planet once colonised by humans (and of which he was an administrator). His intention is to journey into the wild mist country and bear witness to a mysterious rite that the intelligent indigenous aliens go through. Along the way he is charged by an alien elder to bring back a man who has committed an as yet unknown crime. Now I haven’t read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but it’s pretty clear even to me where the inspiration for this story comes from. There’s even a character called Kurtz!

But this is not a bad story at all, and it’s very well written. There’s a dreamy melancholy to much of it, and I was also reminded of Ballard’s The Downed World, where Man is belittled and subsumed by an ascendant natural world. As the protagonist ventures deeper into the jungle he is forced to confront his sins, and so the physical journey becomes a spiritual one. No top marks for originality, but the world building is good, and it does what it does very well. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Will very likely check out more from Silverberg. I should probably also get around to reading Heart of Darkness.

Cos

2. If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell

Part biography and part behind the scenes of Hollywood, there's plenty of frank and fascinating insight into how the business works for an actor at Campbell's level. More so if you're a fan of the movies and shows he's been involved in obviously.

A decent chunk of the book documents the making of Evil Dead. I knew Campbell and Raimi were friends but didn't realise that went back so far or that Campbell was so heavily involved in getting Evil Dead made. Super interesting to hear the details about how they pulled it off, from getting finance together, practicalities of filming and special effects, then getting distribution. It's a level of dedication and invention that it's difficult not to be impressed by.

Charting his progress to becoming an 'actual' actor post-ED holds the interest surprisingly well - the level of honesty about his situation and limits, little details of how casting works and how much effort is needed just to keep a foot in the door. On the downside, there are some cringe moments when he talks about the craft which feel a bit overblown and mentions of women he knew or worked with verge on creepy several times.

I didn't realise quite how old this book was (originally published in 2001) so some of his work since then I'd been hoping to read about wasn't included but that's also probably for the best as it was starting to feel a bit overlong by the end. The stage of his career most recent to publishing is much less engaging (at least for me as I was less interested in the films/shows) but still had enough nuggets about backstage practices to make it worthwhile. Overall, reading about someone like Campbell holds more interest for me than some A lister's bio and there's plenty to satisfy anyone with an interest in him, indie movie making or the ins and outs of managing to stay working in the industry.

Gremill

I read that years ago and that's almost exactly how I felt about it.

Wookienopants

I read that a couple of years back and really enjoyed it.
Big fan of Campbell.

He's written another, Further Confessions and it's worth a read

davyK

The Inimitable Jeeves is a collection of connected short stories presented chronologically in sequence. Wodehouse's prose is incredibly easy to read and the flowery use of language is a delight.

It's hard to read this and not hear Laurie and Fry providing the voices of Wooster and Jeeves but it doesn't matter....it may even add to the enjoyment.

This had me properly laughing in places. Rightly famous and if you dont get annoyed by the Edwardian toffery of the world this is set in this is highly recommended.

Raiziel

4. Diaspora by Greg Egan

This book is hard sci-fi. The hardest sci-fi I’ve ever read, in fact. It begins almost one thousand years in the future where there exists in the solar system three types of intelligent beings: ‘fleshers’ are what remains of the biological human race and have confined themselves to Earth, ‘gleisner’s are humanoid-shaped robots who have spread out into the solar system, many of which busy themselves doing their thing in the asteroid belt, and lastly there are the ‘citizens’ which are software-based intelligences living in polis’, which are I suppose mainframe thingies buried deep under the earth. Diaspora centre’s it’s story around this last type of lifeform. The first chapter describes one of these lifeforms being born. Here’s a snippet:

By the eighth iteration, the womb’s memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would be required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them—but some gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.

The entire first chapter, not insignificant in length, goes on like that. I have to admit I did start to worry what I was about to put myself through. Things do become a little more easygoing on the reader after that initial chapter, but this is not a book for the faint of heart. Egan has a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and it really shows. There’s no way your garden variety science fiction writer is penning something like this. And it is amazing. So often in the reading of this book I felt like I was just about holding on to the narrative by my fingernails, but what a ride. It’s made me look at the possible future of the human race in a whole new way. The year’s only just begun and this is already a massive reading highlight.

LivDiv

3 A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow
Game of thrones innit.
I've read up to the the start of A Feast for Crows before on Kindle but that was a good while back when the show was on season 4 I think.
Picked up all 7 paperback books in a charity shop last year, unread condition £2.50 for the lot.
So I started from the beginning. As a quick review on the others. I love the first book, second is up there as well.
Not too much to say on this one. Its a bit of a bridging book really, there is a lot of shuffling of pieces on the board. Enjoyable enough.
[7]

davyK

2nd volume of the Jeeves stories, Carry On, Jeeves keeps up the quality and mirth. The author is an artist with the pen. The prose alone is worth it. Effortless reading and pure enjoyment.

tigersgogrrr

1: Beneath the Moon by Yoshi Yoshitani.

A lovely collection of 78 fairy tales, myths and legends from around the globe, each retold in a single page. Very enjoyable and beautifully illustrated throughout.

Gremill

Diaspora sounds right up my street Raz, it's now on the list.

Edit: RESULT! It's 99p on Kindle at the moment.

Raiziel

Good stuff! I think you’ll really enjoy it, Grem. It goes in some wild narrative directions as the story progresses. I’ll certainly be reading more from Egan.

Cos

I read Axiomatic last year, a collection of short stories by Egan, which I really enjoyed. A few in particular that I would've loved to be expanded which is always a good sign. I'll check out some other work.

Raiziel

5. The Midwhich Cuckoo’s by John Wyndham

I liked The Crysalids. Liked it enough to want to read more from Wyndham, and thank goodness for that, because I loved The Midwich Cuckoo’s. It’s so far and away a better novel than The Crysalids that it almost felt like I was reading a book by a different author altogether. The prose is often frothy and playful, and while reading it I had the sense that here is a writer so comfortable in his craft that he is just having a lot of fun in the way he unfolds the telling of his tale. It’s morally philosophical, too, adding great depth to a fun story. And what a delightful character Gordon Zellaby is! I absolutely loved his fusty monologues. I looked the book up on Wikipedia after I’d finished it and discovered it’s been adapted into a film called Village of the Damned, which I’ve somehow not seen. There’s no way it’ll be a patch on the book, but it’ll be interesting to watch. I feel like I’ve just read a book by one of the masters. I don’t know if he’s counted as such, but I’m looking forward to reading more from the man. The Day of the Triffids will be next.

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