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Book Club - What are you reading at the moment?


Grasshopper

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  • 1 month later...

I have re-read Excession by Iain M Banks for about the zillionth time last week. His 'Culture' sci fi books make me really wistful for a future I will never live to see. As far as I can tell, there are no two culture books about the same person or place. It's a crying shame he died so young a few years ago so there are no new books to read. Excession is my favourite book of his, followed by Consider Phlebas, Surface Detail and Matter and then the others who's name I can't remember.

I live in fear that someone will make a film or tv series of one of the books and pox it all up.

 

Edit, ship names in Culture books are something else. They choose their own (being AI entities) My favourite was the warships called 'I Said I've Got a Big Stick' , 'Lapsed Pacifist' and another called 'Frank Exchange of Views'. 

 

From wikipedia

The asteroid 5099 Iainbanks was named after him shortly after his death.[58] On 23 January 2015, SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk named two of the firm's autonomous spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, after ships in Banks's novel The Player of Games.[59] Another, A Shortfall of Gravitas, began construction in 2018. This refers to the ship Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, first mentioned in Look to Windward.

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13 minutes ago, yen_powell said:

I have re-read Excession by Iain M Banks for about the zillionth time last week. His 'Culture' sci fi books make me really wistful for a future I will never live to see. As far as I can tell, there are no two culture books about the same person or place. It's a crying shame he died so young a few years ago so there are no new books to read. Excession is my favourite book of his, followed by Consider Phlebas, Surface Detail and Matter and then the others who's name I can't remember.

I live in fear that someone will make a film or tv series of one of the books and pox it all up.

 

Edit, ship names in Culture books are something else. They choose their own (being AI entities) My favourite was the warships called 'I Said I've Got a Big Stick' , 'Lapsed Pacifist' and another called 'Frank Exchange of Views'. 

 

From wikipedia

The asteroid 5099 Iainbanks was named after him shortly after his death.[58] On 23 January 2015, SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk named two of the firm's autonomous spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, after ships in Banks's novel The Player of Games.[59] Another, A Shortfall of Gravitas, began construction in 2018. This refers to the ship Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, first mentioned in Look to Windward.

Here's one you'll be able to get into Yen!

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Finished 'Leathered' John Hopkins biography a couple of days ago. Still unsure what I think of it. I liked it, I must of done to read it in three days with all the other stuff going on and it definitely more than peaked my interest in Moto racing so its definitely a thumbs up. I just can't make up my mind what I thought of him. I felt like someone should message his wife and say RUN RUN A MILE 😆 Anyway worth a read if you're a sucker for biking books.

I've just started Nick Sanders The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man and thats a real surprise, I had assumed he was either like a lot of athletes usually not a lot going on apart from chasing the ball and desiring glory or he was a bit of a fucked up/loony running away type. So far the latter is correct and its all the more interesting for it and blimey o'Reilly he's bright, well read and intelligent. So far its very very good 👍

Ive also started Chris Scotts Morocco Overland which isn't really a read unless you want to do that sort of thing but so far thats very good too.

 

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11 minutes ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

I've just started Nick Sanders The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man and thats a real surprise

Nick is a bit of a Ladies Man you know! :littleguy:

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5 minutes ago, XTreme said:

Maybe he's mellowed as he's got older! :classic_laugh:

 "He's much better since he's been with Caroline" I was told as if would understand so I just shrugged and said "Oh right" like I did 😆

She is a good woman though. Calm, practical, competent, well thats how I found her.

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7 minutes ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

 "He's much better since he's been with Caroline" I was told as if would understand so I just shrugged and said "Oh right" like I did 😆

She is a good woman though. Calm, practical, competent, well thats how I found her.

Oh yeh.....Nick got about a bit when he was with his first wife! Allegedly!

@Tym.......remember NTart telling us back in 2004/5 about him when she was working at that dealership?

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1 minute ago, XTreme said:

Oh yeh.....Nick got about a bit when he was with his first wife! Allegedly!

@Tym.......remember NTart telling us back in 2004/5 about him when she was working at that dealership?

The books painfully honest so I suspect we'll get to that or maybe not if he never admitted to it 😆

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6 minutes ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

The books painfully honest so I suspect we'll get to that or maybe not if he never admitted to it 😆

He wouldn't put his social life in a book!

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just finished " The Yellow admiral" by Patrick O'Brian, the 17th in the Jack Aubry series popularised by the film "Master and Commander" based on the 1st of the series. just 2 more to go "The Hundred Days" and "Blue at the Mizzen". then I'll have finished the whole series for the 3rd or 4th time...

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On 07/01/2022 at 20:40, XTreme said:

Nick is a bit of a Ladies Man you know! :littleguy:

 

Sounds like he’s enjoyed himself…

 

“..there would be no room in my life for relationships other than temporary encounters….. there was a ginger haired girl called Barbara, and a girl I loved who worked for the BBC but went on to marry an older man who wore a wig. There was the feminist with fish oil syndrome who smelt like decaying mackerel, and the one with hairy arms who got a first at Oxford. I loved her too but she thought me inappropriate. There were blind dates with ugly women and women so thick they could hardly string a coherent sentence together. Girls I could not understand and some I didn’t even like. I learnt a lot from ugly girls; they knew their fate and could always get laid. There was the small one from Swansea and the solicitor from Atherstone; the brassy one from Chelmsford and the curly-haired one from Cockermouth. There was a pretty young thing from Ormskirk and someone I met on a beach at Cromer. Curiouser and curiouser, they’d all had a bit of me and I’d had a bit of them, as we casually strolled through this lunatic asylum of love and life. So there I was, standing up to walk out of that examination hall and into the arms of Grace. She was from Singapore, with a degree in Chemical Engineering and the perkiest sticky-uppest kind of body either side of the Andaman Sea.”

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