The GOT Book Club

[Bilko]

Pat Nevin , the accidental footballer...not overly impressed, didn't have a great deal of good to say about us, which isn't the reason I'm not enamoured.
He writes how he doesn't want the trappings of fame, then proceeds to name drop all the people he met on the music/art scene.
Reading autobiographies isn't really my bag tbh, never have been grabbed by one, so my opinion is probably tainted.

 

[COYBL25]

Pat Nevin , the accidental footballer...not overly impressed, didn't have a great deal of good to say about us, which isn't the reason I'm not enamoured.
He writes how he doesn't want the trappings of fame, then proceeds to name drop all the people he met on the music/art scene.
Reading autobiographies isn't really my bag tbh, never have been grabbed by one, so my opinion is probably tainted.

I’m generally not a fan, but I’ve found there can be a massive difference in quality, which doesn’t normally tie in with the person the book is about.

 

[cronullasharks]

I’m generally not a fan, but I’ve found there can be a massive difference in quality, which doesn’t normally tie in with the person the book is about.

I'm reading Zlatan's at the moment, it's quite interesting. I'm waiting to see how he paints the picture of the dust ups he's had with teammates though as I'm not too far into it yet.

 

[COYBL25]

I'm reading Zlatan's at the moment, it's quite interesting. I'm waiting to see how he paints the picture of the dust ups he's had with teammates though as I'm not too far into it yet.

If you haven`t read it yet, I can`t recommend Rob Burrows -Too Many Reasons To Live.

It`s without doubt one of the best I`ve read and if you`re not crying like a baby at the end of it, you`re not human.

 

[cronullasharks]

If you haven`t read it yet, I can`t recommend Rob Burrows -Too Many Reasons To Live.

It`s without doubt one of the best I`ve read and if you`re not crying like a baby at the end of it, you`re not human.

I don't know if I could bring myself to read that tbh, breaks my heart even thinking about what he and his family are going through.

 

[COYBL25]

I don't know if I could bring myself to read that tbh, breaks my heart even thinking about what he and his family are going through.

It`s truly an inspirational read mate.

At no point does he wade into self pity of say " why me ".

His missus and parents. are as much the star of the book as he is.

I also think Kevin Sinfield has deliberately asked him to tone down his charity raising stuff, so the book remains all about Rob.

 

[LostLegend]

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth

Just finished reading this and...

The synopsis is somewhat misleading as the story it tells there doesn't really kick in until the latter stages of the book.
The book is told from the point of view of one of the editors 'Causabon' from his Student days in 1970's Italy, to him working with the other two editors 'Jacopo Belbo' & 'Diatollevi' at the Garramond publishing house in the late 80's and the strange cast of conspiracy theorists and occultists he meets along the way.

He is a student of Philosophy of History and is writing his final dissertation on the real story of the Knights Templar during the 1st & 2nd crusades and the eventual power struggle between them, King Phillip the Fair of France and Pope Clement III which eventually leads to their arrest & disbandment.
He's then brought in to the publishing company as an expert to check the authenticity of a manuscript based around a conspiracy involving the Knights Templar/Illuminati/Rosicrucian's etc. which leads to them becoming long term friends and collaborators

The book is over 600 pages long but feels way longer as it is incredibly dense with historical facts and exposition. The author, Eco, was a historian and a professor of Semiotics, which is the study of symbols and how they are used and interpreted. So as you can imagine, the attention to detail here is on another level, so much so that the story itself and the pacing takes a FIRM back seat to a huge amount on dialogue between characters about certain historical events, groups, people, places, dates and all that. You have to really have an interest in this kind of stuff to get through the book. Even so, I still found it a bit of a slog at some points.

I did really enjoy this over-all, but with a huge caveat that this feels more like a history textbook than an actual novel for large parts lol

 

[BigMick]

About 300 pages into this one which is the first book in Robert Caro’s planned five-volume biography of LBJ (he’s still writing the fifth volume). It’s been his life’s work over the past forty years. Meticulously researched and really gets into what fueled LBJ and what an odd person he was.
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The most fascinating US president for me.
As well as Caro's work I'd recommend Robert Dallek's two books and an early one from Doris Kearns Goodwin called Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
Joseph Califano, who was on LBJ's staff, also wrote one called The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson which is worth reading too.

 

[LostLegend]

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

I mentioned this one earlier and was unsure as to whether to bother as I'd heard it was a bit on the pretentious side, but the synopsis sounded really intriguing and at 240 pages figured it was worth a punt.

Very much glad I did. I tore through this in a few days and it had me hooked.
It's a very liminal and somewhat ethereal tale about a guy called Piranesi (we are told early on that he knows this is not his real name, but he isn't sure what it is) who lives in this 'house' which is an infinite labyrinth of these huge interconnected grand halls filled with thousands of marble Greco-Roman style statues, no 2 being the same.
He spends his days cataloguing these statues and keeping track of the 'house's' other oddities. The lower floors have an ocean that floods many of them when the tide is in a points throughout the day and the upper floors are covered in clouds and it rains there.
He reports all this back to a mysterious man known as 'The Other' twice a week and The Other brings him gifts in exchange.
Then one day, evidence of a 3rd person appears and everything starts to unravel.

It's deffo a weird one with the ambiguous characters and the whole liminal spaces thing, but I really enjoyed this. If you are looking for something different and not too taxing to read, a big recommend from me.

 

[wm02]

Just finished reading this and...

The synopsis is somewhat misleading as the story it tells there doesn't really kick in until the latter stages of the book.
The book is told from the point of view of one of the editors 'Causabon' from his Student days in 1970's Italy, to him working with the other two editors 'Jacopo Belbo' & 'Diatollevi' at the Garramond publishing house in the late 80's and the strange cast of conspiracy theorists and occultists he meets along the way.

He is a student of Philosophy of History and is writing his final dissertation on the real story of the Knights Templar during the 1st & 2nd crusades and the eventual power struggle between them, King Phillip the Fair of France and Pope Clement III which eventually leads to their arrest & disbandment.
He's then brought in to the publishing company as an expert to check the authenticity of a manuscript based around a conspiracy involving the Knights Templar/Illuminati/Rosicrucian's etc. which leads to them becoming long term friends and collaborators

The book is over 600 pages long but feels way longer as it is incredibly dense with historical facts and exposition. The author, Eco, was a historian and a professor of Semiotics, which is the study of symbols and how they are used and interpreted. So as you can imagine, the attention to detail here is on another level, so much so that the story itself and the pacing takes a FIRM back seat to a huge amount on dialogue between characters about certain historical events, groups, people, places, dates and all that. You have to really have an interest in this kind of stuff to get through the book. Even so, I still found it a bit of a slog at some points.

I did really enjoy this over-all, but with a huge caveat that this feels more like a history textbook than an actual novel for large parts lol

Have this one taunting me from my bookshelf. I’ve never made it past page 50 or so

 

[LostLegend]

Have this one taunting me from my bookshelf. I’ve never made it past page 50 or so

Yeah, it's a dense one. Took me nearly a month to get through it, I definitely spent a fair bit of time screaming at the author to "get on with the story ffs" for large parts lol

 

[Black Belt Jones]

I mentioned this one earlier and was unsure as to whether to bother as I'd heard it was a bit on the pretentious side, but the synopsis sounded really intriguing and at 240 pages figured it was worth a punt.

Very much glad I did. I tore through this in a few days and it had me hooked.
It's a very liminal and somewhat ethereal tale about a guy called Piranesi (we are told early on that he knows this is not his real name, but he isn't sure what it is) who lives in this 'house' which is an infinite labyrinth of these huge interconnected grand halls filled with thousands of marble Greco-Roman style statues, no 2 being the same.
He spends his days cataloguing these statues and keeping track of the 'house's' other oddities. The lower floors have an ocean that floods many of them when the tide is in a points throughout the day and the upper floors are covered in clouds and it rains there.
He reports all this back to a mysterious man known as 'The Other' twice a week and The Other brings him gifts in exchange.
Then one day, evidence of a 3rd person appears and everything starts to unravel.

It's deffo a weird one with the ambiguous characters and the whole liminal spaces thing, but I really enjoyed this. If you are looking for something different and not too taxing to read, a big recommend from me.

Great book - she can really write.
I don't think everything unravels when the 3rd person appears, though, I think it ravels. Was slightly disappointed that it evolved towards a more plotted story as it went on. If it had maintained the mystery and buried the plot for the reader to uncover it would be a masterpiece.

 

[SLAVEN BILIC]

Just about to finish ‘Making it So’ by Patrick Stewart.

Really good to be fair and I usually get bored with autobiographies, but he’s very open and honest about his life and the people he’s worked with.

 

[sdk]

The most fascinating US president for me.
As well as Caro's work I'd recommend Robert Dallek's two books and an early one from Doris Kearns Goodwin called Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.

During one year of grad school I was Robert Dallek’s teaching assistant, so I graded all the student work in his courses. In his course on the American presidency in the 20th century he devoted a lot of time to LBJ and, by wild coincidence, one of LBJ’s granddaughters (or great granddaughters?) was enrolled in the course. I gave her a D.

 

[LostLegend]

I know it seems like I am taking over this thread recently. But I have upped the number of books I want to read this year and have been going through a few shorter ones.

This one, 'Cockroaches' by the fantastically named 'Scholastique Mukasonga' is an absolute gut-punch of a read. One of the most upsetting and harrowing reads I've had in a while. One I'm sure my fellow depressing-read connoisseur @COYBL25 will appreciate.

It's about the Rwandan genocide in the early 90's and follows the author, who is a Rwandan Tutsi, covering her life from childhood in the 60's/70's and what it was like growing up as a member of this oppressed minority, to when she was smuggled out to Burundi at the orders of her parents, the Genocide itself when she was living in France, finally to her return to Rwanda in 2004 searching for what fate befell the 31 family members she lost.

There's this theme she speaks about, the idea of 'closure' and being able to move on from such a traumatic event and what prevented her from doing so.
The lack of any hope for justice, when it was nearly and entire country that was killing its own people to not knowing the final fate of her parents and even where their bodies are to mourn them. There's a powerful passage with her questioning whether some of the un-named bones in the memorial crypt near her childhood home could be them, whether they still lie in an as yet undiscovered mass grave or if scavaging animals got to them.

Later, as she travels back to Rwanda and hears some of the frankly horrific fates that befell some of her other family members and friends (the details of her younger sisters death probably ranks as one of the most awful things I've ever read ), a new question arises - "Is it better to know or not to know"

Despite being pretty short at 160 pages, this is a very tough one to read in terms of the content, but I think an important one given this year marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide.

Something a bit more light hearted next methinks