{"id":131,"date":"2019-01-17T00:03:22","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T00:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/?p=131"},"modified":"2019-01-17T00:03:22","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T00:03:22","slug":"reading-january-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/2019\/01\/17\/reading-january-march\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading: January – March"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went on a reading frenzy last year, chasing up recommendations from Warren Ellis<\/a>\u00a0and various authors I follow on twitter – most of whom I hadn’t read before, and that’s the big joyous thing about booktwitter – and generally burning a serious groove in my library card. This is also the first year I’ve tried keeping a diary, so I have some recommendations I’m going to throw at you in four handy instalments. Part one in a slow series:<\/p>\n

Jan 3rd: An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears. An English Rashomon, says my diary, and it should know, right? Murky goings-on where no-one is what they seem in 1663 England. I don’t usually go for historical fiction, but this was definitely worth making an exception for.<\/p>\n

Jan 28th: Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway. I read his debut, The Gone-away World, last year, and oh can he tell a story. Inventive and fun, with solid, heartfelt characters, it’s an unembarrassed escapade of the very best kind.<\/p>\n

Jan 31st: You, Grossman. An RPG as a game novel. I don’t know if it’s one for the ages, but a good read that does a lot with the party-of-four mechanic.<\/p>\n

Feb 5th: Artemis, Mark Watney. Not as well-received as The Martian, because how the hell would anyone top that, but there’s enough in here that works for it to be a solid read.<\/p>\n

Feb 19th: Zoo City, Lauren Beukes. Great dystopian sci-fi.<\/p>\n

Feb 21st: Traffic, Vanderbilt. One of my particular pleasures is non-fiction that shows you a new way of looking at something mundane – this here takes us through a carefully-researched look at traffic, where it comes from and different ways to manage it, which sounds entirely wrong<\/em>\u00a0as subject matter until Vanderbilt describes the entirely counter-intuitive ways you can speed people up and slow them down.<\/p>\n

March 3rd: Stormy Weather, Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen is what I might have called a guilty pleasure back when I gave a damn – effortless to read, but with a surprising amount going on under the hood. I have a suspicion that Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard are the same person, depending on what mood he wakes up in…<\/p>\n

March 10th: Bad Monkey, Carl Hiaasen. I also suspect that Hiaasen has roughly the same plot in each book. I have a stronger suspicion that when it’s this good I don’t care.<\/em><\/p>\n

March 16th: Tigerman, Nick Harkaway. Back to Harkaway, this time with a superhero and the last dribbled-out days of empire in the mix.<\/p>\n

March 21st: Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer. I read this just before I watched the year’s most beautiful film, I would say the two complement each other very nicely.<\/p>\n

March 24th: Razor Girl, Carl Hiaasen. More Hiaasen – I read it in two days and loved every page.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went on a reading frenzy last year, chasing up recommendations from Warren Ellis\u00a0and various authors I follow on twitter – most of whom I hadn’t read before, and that’s the big joyous thing about booktwitter – and generally burning a serious groove in my library card. This is also the first year I’ve tried … Continue reading Reading: January – March<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-thinks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryansthomason.com\/newsandnoise\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}