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Come on man, free books are free, the failing here is with you. WITH YOU

*thinking "they are" ffs. Cancelled.

My Joyce bookclub has reconvened after our convalescence having completed the Wake and we've become a Virginia Woolf bookclub. I'd only read Mrs Dalloway before so it's mostly all new to me. First up The Voyage Out: posh Brits go on a boat to South America and then hang around a hotel and...

I guess what I enjoy about it is someone taking Tolkien seriously without being a fanboy. I don't mind the harsh criticism if there's thought behind it and an attempt to work out what it all means. (In my memory there was a lot more Joyce in that piece but reading it again, no, he barely features)

To bring the threads together, a good LRB piece from 20 years ago on Joyce and Tolkien https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien

It grew out of an in person Ulysses group i had with some friends, there was only three of us doing FW in the end. With things as they were the entire thing bar the very last chapter ended up being over Zoom so it's probably for the best there wasn't more. It was only supposed to take a year but...

It's really something else. Every page has multiple laugh out loud moments on it and it was great to have a relatively diverse group of us with different interests bringing different things, one lad in the group knew his local Dublin history top to bottom so he was finding endless obscure...

Two years later and we finished it up this week. Almost killed us but we did it! I Read that John Bishop book and a few reading guides along the way. Feeling very proud to have finally finished "literature"

It's not specifically why i read fantasy, no, even still i didn't find it rip-roaring at all, but that's ok, he has sold 20 million or something copies so he's doing fine and my opinion is in the minority. In fairness, they're better written than Mistborn.

Yeah i've a mate who thinks he's the bees knees and now I need to find a way of not insulting him to his face over this.

I've been reading some modern fantasy and my god it's woeful. Read both of those Patrick Rothfuss novels, kind of a cool magic system and lore but terrible characters, terrible plot, terrible writing, top to bottom awful. Will probably read the third if he ever finishes it all the same...

Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson A realistic enough take on how climate change might be stopped over the next 50 years or so, maybe the only optimistic thing i've read on the topic. Even his optimistic, try and keep things the same, take involves mass death and climate refugees by...

I spent a few days working through this monster 20th century history classic from 1993 for a book that doesn't mention the internet (email gets a brief word at one point) he comes to some seriously 21st century conclusions. The problems for the future, according to him in 1993, are as...

Ah I'm kidding, I just find the Golden Bough completely incomprehensible.

Lol best of luck I might get my finnegans wake bookclub to read it next as its basically the next step up.

Finally got around to reading The Thing About December by Donal Ryan, been sitting on my bookshelf for about 5 years now. Jesus it's sad stuff altogether, kind of what I expected I guess but even still... I felt he was kind of struggling to find a story after about the first third but he does...

God yeah, Everything. I gave it to a mate 20 years ago and haven't seen it since but can still pretty much quote it verbatim. I know Price is working on a new edition at the moment, I think he's a great music journalist meself. There's a book of three extended essays on the Holy Bible called...

Read this last night. Some serious OPINIONS in there aren't there? I wouldn't recommend it as an intro to anyone but not bad all the same.

August is a Wicked Month by Edna O'Brien. Funnier than I expected, if still quite intense and sad. A lot of it is "Imagine the cunts from the Great Gatsby if they had to live with the consequences of their actions."

Bought that about a decade ago, still haven't read it. Someone once opined that I had great taste in books on the basis that I owned it. : / Bought that about six months ago, still haven't read it!