thebookmagpie hops through her TBR in 2016!

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thebookmagpie hops through her TBR in 2016!

Denna diskussion är för närvarande "vilande"—det sista inlägget är mer än 90 dagar gammalt. Du kan återstarta det genom att svara på inlägget.

1thebookmagpie
Redigerat: jan 8, 2016, 7:44 am

Hi, I've never taken part in this challenge before. (Though I've done similar ones to various degrees of success!) This year I really want to read more non-fiction, as it's something I enjoy when I make an effort to do so - the problem is making the effort in the first place. So for my TBR 12, I've picked twelve of the non-fiction books I've been neglecting (in some cases for years!)

1. The Art of Happiness - Dalai Lama XIV - read 7 January 2016
2. Defending the Guilty - Alex McBride
3. Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
4. Maps and Legends - Michael Chabon
5. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
6. The Six Wives of Henry VIII - Antonia Fraser
7. Smile or Die - Barbara Ehrenreich
8. In Search of Schroedinger's Cat - John Gribbin
9. I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai
10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
11. Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
12. H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald

For my list of alternates, I've picked some fiction which may present a challenge to me (personally - obviously different things challenge different people!)

1. Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick - read 4 January 2016
2. Paradise Lost - John Milton
3. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
4. Naked Lunch - William S Burroughs
5. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
6. Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
7. Iliad - Homer
8. Odyssey - Homer
9. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
10. The Prose Edda - Snorri Sturluson
11. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
12. Greece and Rome - HA Guerber

I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone else's posts and participating in this challenge!

My Club Read thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/210518

2.Monkey.
dec 3, 2015, 5:04 pm

Nice list! I read a different one of John Gribbin's for my 2014 list, and I have a different Dickens going on my list for this year. I want to read Snorri's, one of my ER reads was about his history which made me very curious to read his actual works. Tressell's is on my shelves, as is Dawkins', and a few others are on my neverending hope to read someday list, lol.

3abergsman
dec 3, 2015, 5:49 pm

Great list, and welcome! This will be my 3rd year participating, but I pop in and out as the year progresses.

I have been meaning to read the Dalai Lama, esp. the Art of Happiness, for quite a while. I read The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins not too long ago, I want to read Selfish Gene as well. I gave up on Barbara Ehrenreich, her projects feel too contrived for me. I Am Malala is wonderful, one of my favorites of my reads in 2014. Tristam Shandy, Paradise Lost, As I Lay Dying, all are on my someday list as well!

4LittleTaiko
dec 3, 2015, 9:03 pm

Welcome! Nice list. The Odysssey is on my list for 2016 too!

5thebookmagpie
dec 4, 2015, 6:35 am

>2 .Monkey.: - yeah, I have to admit I started Nicholas Nickleby already but I've barely made any progress with it so I've decided to let myself count it as unread. I've hardly read any science for a few years now (probably since the first couple of years of my degree which would be about five-ish years ago now) so I'm going to at least make a concerted effort this year now that I'm all finished with uni and so on.

>3 abergsman: - I am feeling sort of ambivalent towards the Ehrenreich before I even start, I got it as a gift a few years ago but what I've read about her since then has made me wonder whether it'll be for me. Going to give it a go though, wanted to at least make sure to try a few different authors as I have three or four Dawkins books on my shelves including TSG. I read The God Delusion a few years ago and quite enjoyed it - I'm not sure I agree with him entirely and I find his Twitter presence misguided a lot of the time, but I'm definitely interested in a lot of his ideas.

>4 LittleTaiko: - excellent! I'm not great with poetry generally, and certainly not long-form poetry, so I'm interested to see how I'll react to it.

6majkia
dec 4, 2015, 7:33 am

Good luck with your challenge!

7Cecrow
dec 4, 2015, 8:28 am

That's a pretty obscure Orwell title I've never heard of before, interesting. I've sampled the Bryson, and read plenty of fiction about Henry VIII. Schroedinger's cat is a concept I'm familiar with, that sounds promising. I'd like to read Malala's story. The Hawking title is the only one of your 12 I've read. It was worth it, but for all that he tried I can't agree he brought it down to layman's terms, lol.

You're timely with Man in the High Castle, there's some kind of television production in the works right now. Milton is gonna be tough. Lose My Lunch ... sorry, Naked Lunch is on the list of novels I'll never read, I can't handle that stuff. Tristram Shandy ... what is it with people listing stuff for 2016 that keep *almost* making it onto mine?? It's conspiracy, is what it is! Three of us will be reading Homer's Odyssey. I'm reading some Faulkner right now, The Sound and the Fury in my case.

Lots of good stuff, it'll be great fun to follow along with your reading.

>5 thebookmagpie:, seeing as, y'know, it's not 2016 yet, you've still got time to swap Nicholas Nickleby for something you know you're gonna like. If you still want to try Dickens, Oliver Twist is a lot shorter and The Pickwick Papers is a lot funnier.

8thebookmagpie
dec 7, 2015, 8:37 am

>6 majkia: thanks!
>7 Cecrow: yeah, I've read/watched some fiction about Henry VIII as well as Henry the VIII and His Chopping Block (many years ago!) - for some reason I'm fascinated by that period. And I've not studied any Physics since I finished secondary school seven years ago so that'll be interesting with regard to the Hawking :P

The Man in the High Castle is out, I think on Amazon Prime - I'm going to read it so I can watch the series with my boyfriend eventually. I'm going to give Naked Lunch a go but I feel perfectly okay about abandoning it if I don't like it/can't handle it. Also, great minds must think alike!

Also, wrt Nicholas Nickleby I felt like it was more of a "wrong book at the wrong time" thing than a actually disliking it - I was really stressed out when I was trying to read it. I loved David Copperfield/Tale of Two Cities/Great Expectations so I don't want to abandon it entirely.

9abergsman
dec 7, 2015, 8:56 am

>5 thebookmagpie: I greatly admire and appreciate Dawkins books. He has great ideas, but his take-no-prisoners approach on the religion front is a bit extreme, even for my tastes.

10.Monkey.
dec 7, 2015, 10:32 am

I don't mind Dawkins' "take-no prisoners" approach, I think his sarcasm in the face of idiocy is the only practical approach, really. It doesn't matter if you try to talk to people rationally, when you try to convince someone their ideas are wrong it almost always makes them simply cling more strongly to their ideas, so you may as well try the shame on you for being so ridiculous angle. My problems with him are his generalizations and essentially 1950s-style mentality on women and such, combined with his notion of, well if *I* feel this way everyone else ought to also. Big problems, there! But I respect his intellect and his ballsiness, lol.

11artturnerjr
dec 7, 2015, 5:44 pm

>1 thebookmagpie:

Welcome to the group! I have one of Orwell's nonfiction works on my lists as well (Down and Out in Paris and London for me). The Man in the High Castle is excellent; I have a similarly metafictional World War II alternate history* novel (Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream) on my lists. I actually read a pretty good chunk of Maps and Legends this year - I love Michael Chabon's stuff. The Prose Edda sounds very promising - Norse mythology is perhaps the most entertaining of all European mythologies, imho. Good luck and happy reading! :)

*is that a sub-sub-genre or a sub-sub-sub-genre? :D

12abergsman
Redigerat: dec 8, 2015, 12:37 pm

>10 .Monkey.:

well if *I* feel this way everyone else ought to also That is basically my problem with him. Agree with everything else you said!

13thebookmagpie
dec 15, 2015, 6:28 am

>9 abergsman: >10 .Monkey.: yeah, I can agree with a lot of what you both say. His attitude towards women is often befuddling and he definitely seems to be overly certain in his own approach to others.

>11 artturnerjr: I want to read Down and Out too! It sounds amazing. This was the one I happened to have on my shelves but I'll get to the other eventually. I love Greek Mythology already and am quite familiar with it, but have a passing familiarity with the Norse stuff and am really looking forward to it.

Also maybe we should just start saying sub^3 genre :P

14Petroglyph
dec 15, 2015, 5:26 pm

Welcome to this challenge! I hope you have fun, and that reading through your list does not become a chore.

A couple of years back I set out to educate myself a little more on some of the sciences, and the Dawkins, Hawking and Bryson books on your list were part of my own reading list.
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The selfish gene I found hard to get through in some places (at the time I read it I was unfamiliar with the field and it was hard to see sometimes why certain issues deserved such an extensive discussion). But very rewarding. I went on to read several others by the same author (my fave is Unweaving the rainbow).
A brief history of time is very readable and very interesting. some passages require a couple of rereads, but nothing that any other textbook in advanced subjects would not require of you. I've found it an excellent and comprehensive springboard to other popular-sciency approaches to cosmology (in book form and on youtube).
A short history of nearly everything I enjoyed so much I read it twice over the span of a few years. Entertaining, informative, and it combines a basic introduction to several fields of the life sciences with a history of science. I particularly appreciated the approach: the author's persona is one of an interested but initially-uninformed layperson excitedly telling you about what they've found, and about how scientists made their discoveries (though it tends to focus a little too eagerly on the eccentric ones). Eminently readable.

Iliad and Odyssey are classics I love dearly. The Odyssey is definitely one of my favourite books of all time; the Iliad less so (endless battle descriptions of whose son battles what heroes). But I don't think you'll regret diving into them. Will you be reading a prose translation or a poetry translation?
The man in the high castle I read as a teenager, in one sitting. I can't remember much, except that the plot didn't really make sense to me at the time. Perhaps I ought to give it a reread

15DanieXJ
dec 15, 2015, 6:36 pm

Very cool list. I was astounded that I liked the Odyssey as much as I did when I read it in College. Which translation will you be reading? (Also, I do believe that your touchstone is for The Odyssey by Jack McDevitt :))

Have you ever read Beowulf? It's like the Illiad and the Odyssey, except I liked it even better (IMHO the Seamus Heaney translation is the best.

16Cecrow
dec 16, 2015, 7:57 am

I've been having trouble with my touchstone for The Odyssey too. You look up the options and there's no straightforward "The Odyssey by Homer" choice.

17DanieXJ
dec 16, 2015, 10:44 am

>16 Cecrow: Yeah, Yeesh.... all those Odysseys, and yet nowhere on that list could I find the one with 30,000+ Odyssey Anyway...Odyssey's work number 1526 if anyone wants to force the correct copy.... Iliad is 5057.

18.Monkey.
dec 16, 2015, 1:57 pm

Yeah it's a thing, the super popular books like that have this issue.

19billiejean
dec 21, 2015, 12:48 pm

I like your nonfiction/fiction approach.

20artturnerjr
dec 29, 2015, 3:02 pm

>13 thebookmagpie:

Also maybe we should just start saying sub^3 genre :P

I like it! :)

>14 Petroglyph:

The man in the high castle I read as a teenager, in one sitting. I can't remember much, except that the plot didn't really make sense to me at the time. Perhaps I ought to give it a reread

It's a challenging one. Dick's fiction is usually a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and TMITHC is no exception.

21thebookmagpie
Redigerat: dec 30, 2015, 7:31 am

>14 Petroglyph: Your descriptions about the science books have made me feel much more confident about reading them. I did well in physics, biology, and chemistry at school but that was seven years ago and I've hardly touched them in that time. As for the Iliad and Odyssey, I'm definitely going to read poetry translations, though I may supplement these with prose ones later. Do you have any particular preference/recommendations? I have one of the Odyssey there, but I can't remember who translated it, and I'm going to have to pick up the Iliad at the shop before I read it.

>15 DanieXJ: Oops, I've done that a few times - I'll get used to touchstones eventually! ETA: I think that's it fixed now.

22thebookmagpie
jan 8, 2016, 7:48 am

Done with my first two and what great choices they were for the start of the year!

The Man in the High Castle - I'm so interested to see how they can possibly make a TV show out of this as it doesn't seem like the kind of book that lends itself to the medium. I found this easier to follow than Ubik but it still has the Philip K. Dick weirdness that I rather like. For whatever reason, I didn't realise there would be so much focus on a Japanese occupation of the US as a counterpoint to the German side of things. I really enjoyed it though - it's a pacy enough read and though I had an idea of how things were going to end, it was different enough from what I thought to thoroughly please me!

The Art of Happiness - this was a pretty light introduction to the ideas of the Dalai Lama but I found it useful as the philosophical aspects were mostly discussed separately from the more mystical aspects of Buddhism, which appeal to me less. I found a lot of the sections useful in helping me to understand ideas about my interior self and my interactions with others.

23Cecrow
jan 8, 2016, 9:09 am

You're off to a good start! I too like reading a book before I watch its adaptation, especially if I'd any prior interest in the novel already. And anyone as inspirational as the Dalai Lama can be intriguing to read about and learn from, regardless of differences in faith.

24Petroglyph
jan 8, 2016, 11:53 am

Congratulations on finishing two already!

>21 thebookmagpie:
I'm afraid I do not have any recommendations re: translations, because I never studied any Ancient Greek; I don't check who did the translating, either. The poetry translations I have read, though, have all been satisfactory to my eye, and once I got used to the format, read like a breeze.

25Cecrow
jan 8, 2016, 1:11 pm

Me neither. As I freely confess all over the place, I chickened out and picked up Homer in prose versions.