Wednesday, January 05, 2011

A to Z on books

A couple of years ago, I tried one of the challenges that wings it's way around the blogosphere. It was an A to Z on books challenge and a fairly tough one, looking for 52 books to read in a year. Here's how I did.

I got about half way through both the A to Z on authors and A to Z on titles. Figured it would be fun to try again this year, although I'm going to make it easier by just going for 26 books, with the A to Z being titles and authors. One book every fortnight should be doable with the cricket and gaming providing big distractions :-)

I'll keep this post as a running tally, with the labels helping me keep track. I'm through 3 books already :

A - for (Dan) Abnett - First And Only (added Jan)
B - for (Jim) Butcher - Storm Front (added Feb)
C -
D - for (Aaron) Dembski-Bowden - Helsreach (added Feb)
E - for Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova (added May)
F - for Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks (added Jan)
G - for Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett (added May)
H - for (Simon) Hughes - A Lot of Hard Yakka (added Jan)
I - for Inversions by Iain M Banks (added April)
J -
K -
L -
M -
N -
O -
P -
Q -
R - for Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (partial in Jan)
S - for Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (added June)
T - for Titanicus by Dan Abnett (added Jan)
U - for (HMS) Ulysses by Alistair MacLean (added May)
V -
W - for (Chris) Wraight, author of Battle of the Fang (added September)
X -
Y - for (Charles) Yu, author of How To Survive In A Science Fictional Universe (added August)
Z -

The Iain M Banks book was fairly tough to get through, mainly cos I didn't really know when it was going to get good. It meandered badly through the early stages and finished itself off in an awful rush. Not his best. Hopefully Surface Detail will be better, I'll be looking to pick that up when it comes out in paperback later in the year.

First And Only is from an omnibus book called The Founding by Dan Abnett. It's set in the brutal Warhammer 40k universe and tells the story of an Imperial Guard regiment that just escaped when it's world was taken by Chaos. I was impressed enough with this one that after finishing the first book inside, I've ordered a couple more from Amazon after being disappointed with the appallingly low stock at Waterstones.

(The high street retailers will certainly fail if they don't stock what we want to buy)

I've been involved in the cricket world since I was about 13, so reading A Lot Of Hard Yakka by Simon Hughes was a very curious look into the world of professional cricket although the meat of it was from 10 years before I started playing. Fun to see the parallels between the professional world and the amateur world I played in, I have a feeling I played in better facilities than they occasionally did. I could definitely identify with the self doubts and the confidence issues expressed in the book. Every sportsman will suffer confidence crises and there's a certain level of negative feedback implicit in that. Low confidence and doubts make your run up less sure or your reactions slower, which makes it far more difficult to land the ball on the spot or to whack it to the boundary.

It's not a diary of match results, you can get that from Wisden. It's a very interesting look into the mindset and life of professional sportsmen and written far more intelligently than what people lured into getting the average footballer's life story (ages 18 to 23 with the speed they come out nowadays) will get.

Next on the list is Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. I read this one a few years ago but I'm stubbornly reading it again. I'll probably only read the first of the trilogy as this is by far the best. And there's a fair bit of planetary and astronautic engineering in there that always gets me interested.

I'll add in more books as I go (and probably move a few around too!). Hoping to hit 26 this year :-)

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