Like many others it seems, I fell off the thread earlier in the year - thread four in fact! Moving to London, amongst other things, meant that something had to give, and that was mostly internet time! I was still reading and recording on Goodreads however, and have just made my target of fifty books (one day to spare!). Oh, and there was no reading at all in November as the month was given over to writing seventy five thousand words of a novel for NaNoWriMo!
Where work books are listed as “dull, work related”, they weren’t all dull by the way - just too dull for here!
Working backwards from fifty to twenty-five ie. everything not previously mentioned, and the titles from twenty-five to one. Bring on 2017!
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Everything that Remains by Joshua Fields Millburn - excellent treatise on going beyond the “how” of minimalism (decluttering etc) to the “why” (living a more meaningful life once you’ve gotten rid of all the stuff). Recommended. Free PDF download at the moment, link (probably) from www.theminimalists.com
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Walking the Thames River Path by Joyce Mackie - fairly unambitious journal of a fifteen day walk down the Thames. Does what it says on the tin really, not massively inspiring beyond the fact that the author did in fact get from one end of the other. Free Kindle download.
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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. Re-read, following my NaNoWriMo exertions in November and taking on board the advice in this Observer article about reading one writing book a month before next November. Excellent, not a traditional “how to” writing book at all, it contains precisely one writing exercise, but is thought provoking nonetheless. Recommended.
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Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto - Japanese coming of age tale in which our hero leaves her small town life and upbringing for Tokyo, but returns for one last summer.
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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - seasonal re-read! One of the best Christmas-time stories, eminently quotable as well. “You’ll want all day tomorrow I suppose?”
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Kids in the Syndrome Mix by Martin L Kutscher - recommended by many on MS SN groups, reading this (and other things) have been like a light going on, illuminating DD’s behaviour over the last couple of years and likely ASD (now being assessed). That’s a whole other thread though!
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Data Virtualization by Robert Eve - dull, work related.
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Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn - excellent, the best kind of travel writing: thoughtful, erudite, strangely disturbing in many ways, really captures the dislocation of foreign locations (and at this remove, foreign times). Recommended.
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The Wrong Kind of Snow by Anthony Woodward - a daily companion type book, notable weather facts and stories in a “on this day” format. There’s something quite grounding in reading a book (almost) every day for the whole year, so I might look for something similar for 2017 (another subject though).
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About a Boy by Nick Hornby - re-read after many years. Will doesn’t seem quite as endearing as he did to my younger self, as he canons around his North London milieu looking for single mothers to date. The ending is terrific though, like a Mike Leigh film for the nineties. Also noteworthy: this is set in 1993 and was written in 1992, and Hornby makes a joke about Will being appalled that he hears the Christmas song his father wrote for the first time this year on November 19th, as if that’s ludicrously early! How things change…
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End this Depression Now by Paul Krugman - A heartfelt polemic about how governments around the world should adopt Keynesian policies and spend their way out of recession, rather than stick with austerity. Interesting with the benefit of hindsight, as it was written a few years ago (although updated). Somewhat repetitive and the conclusion is hardly a surprise, since the front and back covers pretty much cover everything inside.
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Literary London by Eloise Millar - fairly lightweight look at London locations with a literary bent: places where authors lived and worked, and real and fictional places inhabited (and haunted) by fictional characters.
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Preparing for Life in a Digital Age by Julian Fallon - dull, semi-work related
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The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr - excellent, although somewhat predictable in style. If you know Marr’s TV work, and imagine what a history book by him would be like, I’d bet you’d be pretty close.
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Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure by Scott Guthrie - dull, work related
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Managing Risk and Information Security by Malcolm Harkins - dull, work related
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Introducing Windows Azure by Mitch Tulloch - dull, work related
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Enterprise Cloud Strategy by Barry Briggs - dull, work related
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Narrow Boat by LTC Rolt - re-read (many times actually), it’s a classic (albeit flawed) - Rolt was a visionary in some ways, his grasp of how modern life is probably unsustainable is well known, alas he didn’t really have any answers that weren’t just looking backwards to some kind of golden age. On the simplest level though it’s a wonderfully gentle tale of British canals and stepping out of your life for a while to do something else. Knowing how it all worked out with his first wife does give a somewhat different interpretation.
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Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool by Shawn Levy - Okay, takes on London from the late fifties onwards, has some interesting bits, but I felt I’ve heard a lot of these stories before (some, admittedly, in the previous book, perhaps a gap would have been better).
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London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 by Barry Miles - Miles is well known from the “underground” scene, proprietor of the gallery where John met Yoko etc etc. But this tale starts somewhat earlier than many similar histories, relating how the post war years created a new kind of excess in the city, even in the midst of austerity and rationing. Interesting to me mostly for the first section.
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The Privacy Engineer’s Manifesto by Michelle Finneran Dennedy - dull, work related
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Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens - I’m aiming to read all of Dickens’ novels, and this was next on the list. Great story obviously, has some really dark moments. I guess bygone London is really the main character, it’s a world that no-longer exists, brilliantly evoked. Although as Dickens was writing contemporaneously, I suppose evoked isn’t really the right word. Described? On now to Nicholas Nickleby which I have actually read before.
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50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to Know by Tony Crilly - sort of popular mathematics in fifty short chapters. Diverting enough.
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Greenwich by Charles Jennings - first book read in our new home in Greenwich. This book is an interesting enough history, but Jennings doesn’t come across as particularly disinterested, more, like someone who prefers Blackheath and doesn’t really think much of Greenwich at all. Therefore marked down for that!