New year resolutions.

[davywavy]

As usual at this time of year we think about the ways we can act better in the coming twelve months - be fitter, or nicer, or cleverer, or whatever. My normal resolutions are the same as Dogberts:

1) To show no tolerance to those less fortunate them myself.
2) To redefine morality to suit my own short-term objectives.
3) To conquer the earth and make humanity my slaves.

However, thinking about it none of those actually involve me changing the way I act in any way whatsoever and I think I need to do something different for 2010.
Anyway, at the start of this year as an intellectual exercise I decided to keep a note of all the books I read. In the event I probably missed a few, but the list I've got looks like this (in no particular order):


Bill Bryson
A walk in the woods
Down under
The life and times of the thunderbolt kid

Dante
The Divine Comedy

Cindy Lee Van Dover
The Octopus’ Garden

Slash & Anthony Bozza
Slash

Simon Schama
The History of Britain: At the edge of the world
The History of Britain: The British Wars

Barbara Steiner
The Phantom

Norman Davis (editor)
The Paston Letters

Terry Pratchett
Lords and Ladies

Thucydides
The history of the Peloponnesian war

Cassius Dio
The Reign of Augustus

Simon Andreae
The anatomy of desire

Harry Harrison
Make room! Make room!
The Stainless Steel Rats Revenge
Homeworld

Alastair Gray
Lanark

Iain M Banks
The player of games
Matter

Derren Brown
Tricks of the mind

Katherine Mansfield
Something childish but completely natural

Virginia Woolf
A room of ones own
Mrs. Dalloway

Peter F. Hamilton
The temporal void
The dreaming void

Malcolm Gladwell
The tipping point

Dan Abnett
Triumff, her majesty’s hero.

JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit

James Blish
Cities in flight

Nathaniel Pilbrick
In the heart of the sea

Yukio Mishima
The temple of the golden pavilion

Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Max Brooks
World War Z

Suetonius
The twelve Caesars

Enid Blyton
The mystery of the missing necklace

Stephen Saylor
The triumph of Caesar

Michael Brooks
13 things that don’t make sense

Naomi Klein
The shock doctrine

Robert A. Heinlein
The moon is a harsh mistress

PG Wodehouse
Stiff upper lip. Jeeves
Much obliged, Jeeves

Jasper fforde
The Eyre affair

Neil Gaiman
The graveyard book

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Superfreakonomics

Daniel F Galoye
Dark Universe

Boris Akunin
The state counsellor

Frederick Pohl
Beyond the blue event horizon

Daniel Defoe
A journal of the plague year

Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged

BBC books
The nation’s favourite poems of love

Neil Strauss
The game

Stuart Sutherland
Irrationality

Elmore Leonard
Be Cool


Now the thing which strikes me most about that list is just how darned short it is. Yes, some of the books are long, but even so it's only about one book a week. The last time I did an exercise like this (back in 2001) I'd cranked my way through nearly a hundred in that year, and back in Ye Goode Olde Dayes (i.e. before I got a computer and devoted my life to the wholesale slaughter of pixellated ne'er-do-wells) I used to get through a couple of hundred books a year. Clearly then, there's room for improvement here.

So that's my new year resolution for 2010: Read more. At least 2 books a week on average for the year.

What's your new year resolution? And, while you're about it, you might recommend me a book or two?

Comments

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

Have you read any of the Raffles books?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

All of 'em :)

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

Figures... What sort of books do you like? Are you looking for light reads (I got through a David Gemmell book which was a Christmas present in about 3 hours on Christmas Day...but it saved me from Soap Opera HELL), heavier fiction, factual stuff (and if so where are your interests)?

Have you come across C J Sansom at all? Does a decent line in Tudor (Henry VIII) murder mysteries but with a more political view to things. Pretty good books, nicely written, not too heavy but very easily read without being simple. I like them!

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Which Gemmell (may he RIP) was that? :)

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

I honestly cannot remember the name of it, it was fairly well written but did follow the Gemmell code (great odds, authority corrupted, small band of great heroes, etc).

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Ah yes; his books follow a very predictable format; but the characters make it worth it :)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I have read the first Sansom book (Dissolution?); I liked it, but I felt he cheated in the set up for the murders, as I dont' think it's possible for the reader to solve them with teh clues provided.
I may read more - do they get better than the first?

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

I've never really gone for the solving of the murders thing, I like the writing and the cleverness of things rather than anything else (though I recall that two of them are certainly able to be solved by the reader as I did, or at least was sure of the killer before they were revealed, can't recall which ones though!). If you liked the writing then its worth going on more - though I will say that Dissolution was (in my opinion) the weakest of them.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Have you read Hatless Jack?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I've never even heard of it!

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

It's about John F. Kennedy, and hats.

Take a look. It's a surprisingly spellbinding read.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

Ooer that looks quite spiffy!
I shall add it to my pile when I get a spare moment methinks

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I got it in a wishlist haul a couple of birthdays ago, along with Knife Throwing: A Practical Guide. In the intervening 18 months I have worn considerably more hats than I've thrown knives.

[(Anonymous)]

May I heartily recommend "Magus of Stonewylde"

H

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

You may. Doesn't mean I'll be taking you up on it though.

Ah, go on, go on, go on

[(Anonymous)]

You know you want to

H

Re: Ah, go on, go on, go on

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Alas; due to extreme impecunity this month I shan't be able to afford many new books. As such, I may be forced into it by sheer desperation.

Re: Ah, go on, go on, go on

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

You can double, or even triple, the mileage of your book budget by shopping at Green Metropolis. I've bought from there a couple of times with no complaints.

Re: Ah, go on, go on, go on

[(Anonymous)]

"The Phantom" isn't exactly James blimming Joyce, you know

H

Re: Ah, go on, go on, go on

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

They're both equally readable, and the Phantom is a great deal shorter.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Spike Milligans war diarys

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Read 'em, I'm afraid :)
No harm reading them again, though - they are very funny.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

I finally got around to reading them myself, very entertaining - it's a wonder we did as well as we did in the war reading them!

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I strongly recommend both "The Complete Macauslan" and "Quartered safe out here" by George MacDonald Fraser for the same reason.

[danfossydan.livejournal.com]

Do you really want to enslave all of humanity? With point 2 , I guess its moral to slaughter the ones you don't want to enslave. And also I guess you can not feel responsible for your slaves too. But I think that most of humanity will be terrible terrible slaves.

The computer must have hit book sales so hard. I've never listed the books I've read. But I don't read anything like what I used to.

On the other hand, I do write alot more. Shame 99.99% of it is drivel.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I didn't way I wanted to ensave all of humanity. It's just that, well, I know best, you see.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

If you want to read more than one book a week, I may not have anything to recommend that you haven't already read or will reduce your final total...

Last year I didn't read many books at all, partly due to thesiswoe: reading 20-40 scientific research papers a day tends to dull the desire to read for leisure.

The ones I did get through and enjoyed were sadly mainly re-reads:

The Kalevala - in verse format (physically weighty, metaphysically weighty and puerile by turns, good show)

The Mind's I - Dennett and Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter (OK so I didn't get through it, but I had a jolly good crack again, curse my anarithmeticity)

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Yuki Mishima (yet again!)

Trilobite! - Richard Fortey (again)

The Planiverse - AK Dewdney (One of my all-time favorites, now falling to bits, like "1066 and all that" and The Compleet Molesworth)

Other things I love but you've probably already read:

Moby Dick
Most Raymond Chandler
The Moon and Sixpence (W Somerset Maugham)
White Light (Rudy Rucker)
Kinky Friedman's entire output
Querelle of Brest
Cellini's Autobiography (which should be subtitled "I'm sorry I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am")
Maldoror (Lautreamont)
Most Stephen J Gould

I'll leave out the biosci textbooks, I know I'm broken that way!

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

Also, props on getting through Temple of the Golden Pavilion, slow burner that one for sure.

Confessions of a Mask FTW

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Still not read Confessions of a Mask. I think it's pretty much his only one I haven't (except Forbidden Colours, which is unreadable). I rather liked templer of the Golden Pavillion - I actually re-read it due to being remindied of it in random, and unusually comedic circumstances.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I've been intending to read the Kalevala for a while and shall do so this year - there was a programme about it on R4 the other night and I was impressing the she-David by knowing all the characters despite never having read it (but I have read Deities and Demigods).

There's a fair amount on your list I haven't read, though. I shall eye it up with interest.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Everything by Richard Fortey is worth reading-
Life- An Unauthorised Biography,
Trilobite!,
Dry Store Room No. 1,
Earth- An Intimate History.

Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections are very good too.

Have you read Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle"? or Anathem? If not do so.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Baroque cycle, mostly because my previous encounter with Neal Stephenson (reading Cryptonomincon) put me right off him. Are his other books less insufferably smug?

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Probably not. But I didn't think they were smug. There's a lot less "Massive Coinicidence" stuff going on. The re-used character names are important, the Bolstroods, Waterhouses, Shaftoes and others were interacting in all sorts of tangential and not-so-tangential ways 400 years ago.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I'm getting Niall Ferguson's two-volume family history, the House of Rothschild, soonish; I may have to let you know how it is. And you know, I've never read Thucydides, though I really really should.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

For my money, you can stop reading Thucydides after pericles snuffs it. The rest just reads like a bad wargamer telling you about the huuuuge campaign he's just played through; moving his troops to here and there and winning this siege and staging a surprise attack and zzzzzz. It could be more engaging.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I suspect I've plowed through enough of Herodotus's obscure "Okay, I got this story from a one-eyed Egyptian fortune-teller who lives in a tent, and he swears by the graves of all his seven mothers it's totally true" moments to get past anything. If he can stick to his topic, then it's all good.

[(Anonymous)]

Try "The Bloody White Baron" by James Palmer.

It's a biog. of Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, the last Khan of Mongolia, I'm sure you will find him a jolly sound chap.

D

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

He sounds it. Have you read Josiah the Great? It's the true story of the chap who inspired Kiplings Man who would be King.

[(Anonymous)]

Nope. If you got it I'll pinch it, if I may.

D

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's at the folks - grab it next time you're there.

[(Anonymous)]

Stephen King's Dark Tower series - that's 7 to start you off.

The rest of the Japer Fforde stuff - including the Nursery Crime Division ones...

Tom Baker - The Boy Who Kicked Pigs (it'll take you 5 minutes)

Heinlein - Job, Stranger in Strange Land,

FA Hayek - Road to serfdom, Fatal Conceit, etc

Voltaire - Candide

Frederic Bastiat - The Law

The Flashman Diaries

Are you suggesting I haven't read Flashman? :)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I read the first three or four Dark Tower books when they first came out, but then King didn't bother releasing any more for about a decade and I got bored of waiting. Are they worth going back to? The idea of having to re-read the ones I've already gone through to get back up to speed means that the final payoff will really have to be worth it.

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

Try having children, you'll get through two books a day - unfortunately it is usually the same two, day after day after day...

Two books?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook. What's the problem?

Re: Two books?

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

Actually, some children's books are a pleasure to read - The Gruffalo (Julia Donaldson) is a particular favourite. Also a great excuse to re-read Harry Potter.