Book thread: what are you reading?

[Futtocks]

I've been going through the 'Lensman' books by E.E."Doc" Smith. Absolute drivel, especially the dialogue, but lightweight  trashy space-opera fun.

Edited November 30, 2025 by Futtocks

[Moose]

I can usually read the first couple of pages of a book and decide if it’s worth continuing with.

I’ve read the first line from George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and already I’m hooked.

”The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”

[JonM]

On 30/11/2025 at 13:33, Futtocks said:

I've been going through the 'Lensman' books by E.E."Doc" Smith. Absolute drivel, especially the dialogue, but lightweight  trashy space-opera fun.

My dad really likes those for some reason - he also considers them lightweight drivel but fun.

[Futtocks]

4 minutes ago, JonM said:

My dad really likes those for some reason - he also considers them lightweight drivel but fun.

The dialogue is peppered with what someone from the Thirties thought futuristic space slang would sound like. It can be pretty funny!

[EggFace]

Mass Contacts by Steano Breccia.

About human contact with a group of Beings called the W56's file under not fiction.

[JohnM]

Lost Horizon by James Hilton

40% through, and our heroes reach the fictional Tibetan lamasery of Shangri - La.

The novel has a frame story set in Berlin, where a neurologist obtains a manuscript which records the narrative of a British diplomat who had disappeared in China. The main narrative depicted in the manuscript starts in May 1931 within the British Raj. There is a revolution in the country and several people are evacuated. A number of them are transported in a Maharaja's airplane, but that plane is hijacked. After a crash landing, the four surviving passengers are guided to Shangri-La in the Kuen-Lun mountain range.

 

[Futtocks]

An abridged audiobook of Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright. 
This autobiography is, even when cut down to less than two hours for a shortened 2-CD set, full-on! There are mentions of an ancestor booted out of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army for drunkennes (a recurring trope), a grandparent who lost a kidney playing Aussie Rules Football for Queensland and a violent alcoholic father who once performed life-saving surgery on a young Saddam Hussein.
In between, there's the Swinging Sixties, including sex with a discreetly unnamed MP behind the speaker's chair in the House of Parliament, madcap adventures around the world and epic boozing.
Not for her the milquetoast rock/movie star levels of excess - this is half a bottle of vodka before getting out of bed and pints of gin in the evening levels of self-destruction. A rich, attractive, successful young lawyer turned herself into a shambling, twitching blotch-faced wreck.
Then she finally kicked the booze and learned about the Eighties in restrospect, because she'd barely been aware of anything for over a decade. She completely missed the Falklands War and was bemused by the sight of the victory parade. 
Television was part of the salvation. Notoriously, she once invoked *Last Tango in Paris* when instructing viewers how much to butter a baking tray.
I walked past her once as I was entering and she was leaving the venerable Valvola & Crolla shop in Edinburgh. Much shorter than I'd thought, but forearms like a stevedore. 

[Adelaide Tiger]

Finally got around to reading The Cosmos by Carl Sagen.  Only a few pages in but I am interested in reading what his thoughts from 1980 were and how the sciences have moved on in the intervening years.

[The Hallucinating Goose]

Well I did it, with a day to spare I finished all 24 of Simon Scarrow's, 'Eagles of the Empire' series in 6 months. 10,000+ pages of continuous storytelling about the lives of two Roman soldiers called Cato and Macro.

This series is quite simply brilliant. The character development is the real highlight for me. You get so pulled into their lives that you find yourself genuinely caring for them and getting emotional when certain things happen, even getting angry when people mistreat them. I don't think I've ever felt so close to a fictional character before.

The writing style is so flowing and so easy to read, hence why I set myself the goal of reading them so quickly (by my standards anyway). The stories are very action-packed, very exciting with a real mix of different stories and settings as our heroes travel all across the Roman Empire during their long military careers. Stories range from military (of course) to spy thrillers when they are tasked with tracking down traitors in the world of Roman politics, crime dramas when they are fighting the gangs of Londinium in the early days of that dump's development. So, so exciting.

The history is incredibly well researched as well. To give an example, there are a number of novels about the Iceni rebellion led by Boudica and the detail it goes into about the causes of the rebellion, I thought had to be fictional but after doing some further reading into the subject, it appears that these extraordinary events did indeed take place. I wouldn't have believed it had I just read the novel. 

When I first started reading them, I didn't particularly like the use of modern language by the characters, with a lot of modern swear words included. This wasn't because of the words being used as such but more the historical inaccuracy but by the end of the first novel, this wasn't a problem at all and in fact added to the ease of reading. When you think about it, the characters would have been speaking Latin anyway so in changing that to English, it makes sense to write it in a modern style for a modern audience.

The only other minor criticism I would have is that some of the military stories can seem a little samey, with very similar situations and solutions to those situations cropping up. A lot of this feeling could have come with the fact that I read them all so closely together. As I say though, it is a really minor issue that you barely notice.

All in all, these novels have been truly special and really ignited an interest in me to explore Roman history further, an area of history I'd never had much interest in before. I've already visited St Albans to see the site of Roman Britain's third largest settlement and I will very soon be booking a trip to Rome itself to truly immerse myself in that city's rich ancient history. 

10/10.

[Futtocks]

James Lever - Me Cheeta. A fictionalised autobiography of the chimp from the Tarzan movies. What you get is a scurrilous look at the underbelly of Hollywood's golden age. An original and entertaining premise, really well written.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/06/me-cheeta-james-lever

[Futtocks]

This might interest some music fans on here.

Martin Porter & David Goggin - Buzz Me In (Inside the Record Plant studios)

Blurb: "Strap yourself in and take a helter-skelter ride through more than a decade’s worth of high drama, hedonism, high tech and musical genius as told by the insiders at the heart of Record Plant studios, one of the most prolific recording factories of all time, founded in 1968 by charismatic audio engineer Gary Kellgren and ace businessman Chris Stone.

In the 1970s, Record Plant was everywhere there was music. In 1976 alone, the studios produced three No. 1 albums: Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life, The Eagles’ Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Based on the memoirs and archives of Chris Stone, as well as interviews with over 100 studio employees, music producers and recording artists, Buzz Me In tells the incredible story of Record Plant’s evolution and the making of more than a decade’s worth of Gold and Platinum albums, tape by tape.

Illustrated throughout with behind-the-scenes images, archive photos of artists recording and performing live and album cover art, this revelatory and extensively researched book explores and celebrates the way the studios were designed to cater to every rock’n’roller’s fancy. From the living-room-style studio in New York, where Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland was recorded and where John Lennon later encamped, to the VIP clubhouse studio in Los Angeles where Stevie Wonder produced his classic hits, and the destination recording venue in Sausalito where Sly Stone, Bob Marley and Fleetwood Mac holed up, each studio location had its own inherent character – but all showcased the founders’ proven formula of combining state-of-the-art audio, fantasy bedrooms and group Jacuzzis with sex, drugs and celebrity jams.

Was Record Plant ‘the real Hotel California’?"

[JonM]

On 24/12/2025 at 11:00, Adelaide Tiger said:

Finally got around to reading The Cosmos by Carl Sagen.  Only a few pages in but I am interested in reading what his thoughts from 1980 were and how the sciences have moved on in the intervening years.

Still one of the most widely watched television series of all time, and (I think) the second best-selling science book of all time.

 

[N2022]

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix, about magical and semi-magical beings inhabiting our world, and the influence of entities from times past. Not my usual but nicely written and I was rattling through it during my Christmas break. Unfortunately, didn't get to the end and now can't get back into it - bit of a theme in my reading habits, sadly.

[Futtocks]

I have just got the audiobook of Tim Wigmore - Test Cricket: A History. 20-odd hours of solid, detailed history. 

[N2022]

30 minutes ago, Futtocks said:

I have just got the audiobook of Tim Wigmore - Test Cricket: A History. 20-odd hours of solid, detailed history. 

Longer than quite a few England Tests now, then ...?