Weekend Reading Roundup (26 June 2017)

[nanila]

Bon Monday, all. How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

[nanila]

I'm now about halfway through Alys Fowler's Hidden Nature, which is simultaneously a travelogue of paddling around Birmingham's canal network (aka "The Cut") and a memoir of coming out. As a travelogue it's riveting but I'm finding the memoir aspect a little tedious, mostly because it's pretty humourless and overly earnest.

[ayebydan]

I got a few chapters done. I'm finding that Kevin Bridges is actually a really ... I don't know. He thinks far more deeply than I thought. For those who don't know him he is a Scottish comedian. His memoir is hilarious but also filled with scathing social commentary on the state of the nation as well. I'm enjoying only reading a few chapters at a time to allow me to spend longer on it. It has been a while since I've liked something to that extent.

[alexseanchai]

A hundred pages of Salt by Mark Kurlansky and a bunch of craft instruction pages relevant to restoring this here doll.

[fred_mouse]

I started reading 'The Drums Go Bang' which is an autobiography of authors Ruth Park* and D'arcy Niland** in the first few years of their marriage and writing careers. I'm loving the small details about where some of the ideas that became some of their famous works came from.

* Playing Beatie Bow; The Muddle-headed Wombat; The harp in the south
** The Shiralee

[davidgillon]

I worked my way through an alt-history WiP that's mostly focused on Japan. It's interesting in places, Hirohito takes on the militarists rather than being dominated by them, marries FDR's daughter and then only has daughters, leading to a more liberal Japan. Some of the rest of it I'm not so sure of - Stalin as Socialist PM of Imperial Russia? The idea for a Zionist homeland in China actually taking off? I think it was the odd snippets of real-world history that kept me reading, with my favourite being The Great Emu War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

[ironed_orchid]

I'm working through a re-read of the Vorkosigan Saga, and also read some poems by Warsan Shire as well as a chapbook featuring three local poets.

[fox_confessor]

Great community! I'm glad to have stumbled across it. I've spent the weekend reading Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams, which are essays about mountaineering. It definitely helped on my slightly claustrophobic train trip this weekend.

[singloom]

"City of Glass" by Cassandra Clare, "Trigger Warning" by Mike Hume (the latter of which deals with the subject of whether the fear of being offensive is harming freedom of speech or not.)