Ahoy, fellow book readers!

Today begins a new year where the goold old ink and paper will make you travel through fictions ranging from The Iliad to 50 Shades Of Grey or perhaps non-fictions like the Tao Te Ching or a biography of Andy Warhol, whatever suits your tastes...

So this is the place to be when you reach the last page of that book which got you hooked for hours or days. Put up the title, author and maybe leave some comments so other readers can evaluate if they're going to put your book in their wishlist or not.

Happy reading!

Previous years:
2014
2015
2016

Tales from Watership Down (Richard Adams)

This book is a collection of short stories, published in 1996 (24 years after the novel "Watership Down").

My least favourite part of the original novel were the myth stories, and unfortunately over half of this book are more myths. The remainder of the book tells of events which occur after the main story of the first novel, involving many of the old characters and some new ones. However, I found these stories extremely bland and boring, somehow the charm of the original story is completely missing. Definitely not recommended.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon
Gateway by Frederick Pohl

I'm rereading Discworld. Finished Equal Rites today. It's meh. Nice buildup, but too short for a proper resolution.

* To Get Over With The Middle Ages * by Régine Pernoud
(original title: "Pour en finir avec le Moyen-Âge")

Written in 1977, it's an essay about rehabilitating the period of the Middle-Ages as it had been thrown into mud by historians, ideologists and got nicknamed "The Dark Ages" in the collective consciousness. The author emphasizes that reducing a thousand years of History into one stereotype is scientifically wrong (as she was herself an historian who worked at the French National Archives thus having first-hand access to all historic documents). Her main point is that the fall of the Roman Empire didn't lead to a regression but to a different kind of society. A good example was the differences she made between serfdom and slavery (also noticing how slavery came back in the centuries afterwards). She also dedicates chapters on art, women's rights, the inquisition , etc. The only big aspect missing are the technologies invented (and the early days of industrialization) during this millenium (5th to 15th century) as she points out to another book from Jean Gimpel as a reference.

This book is surely not the definitive reference on the Middle Ages as its purpose is more a wake-up call to the goal of the work of historians in general and how their work can be biased thus leading to inaccuracies. An enjoyable short read.

It feels weird saying I read this book because it's a coffee table art book, but I finished reading The Art of Atari by Tim Lapetino. I've felt for a good while that the best era for video game box art was the late 70s/early 80s, when you needed vivid art to offset the primitive graphics and when it was still common for advertising and cover art to be painted and dynamic, so this book was right up my alley. Lapetino did a really nice job with it, too. It features large reproductions of Atari's best art, profiles of the most prolific artists, a broad overview of the company's history, coverage of canceled hardware and prototypes, etc. Once you start looking at this book, it's hard to resist the urge to go play some Atari games, at least if you're someone who grew up with those games.

My only major complaint is that it covers only Atari's first-party art, nothing from third party software developers, but that's not such a big deal considering that most of that wasn't as good as Atari's anyway (Imagic had some nice stuff, and Activision at least had a distinctive house style, but that's about it).

* Rehab: The art of re-making * by Bénédicte Ramade
(original title: "Rehab: l'art de re-faire")

This book (or rather deluxe booklet due to its low pagination) was made on the occasion of an exhibition about arts using wastes. The two main texts try to cover the use of wastes in contemporary art from a vague historical perspective and from different thematics (re-using/modeling stuff or bringing up ecological awareness). As usual with modern arts, the works of the artists showcased can go from interesting and thought-provoking to eye-rolling in front of some "artier-than-thou" conveyed feeling.

Interestingly and for English speakers, I noticed in the bibliography a book which goes more in-depth into the subject of Eco-art, so that could be a potential good read:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Eco-Pursuit-Sustainable-Planet/dp/0520273621/

Violent Ends - a collaboration of seventeen YA authors about a school shooting, told from different perspectives. It started out promising, but seeing as it was a joint effort, didn't really tell as cohesive a story as I'd have liked. It wasn't even so much a linear story as it was just a bunch of connected short stories that went all over the place. I didn't know it was a collaboration when I started reading it; knowing that going in, I'd have probably lowered the bar for my expectations.

Ian Rankin - Rather Be The Devil

I love the Inspector Rebus series of detective novels. Rankin's style of writing is descriptive enough to build a world in your head without being so descriptive you spend 3 pages describing a door. This is the 21st book in the series and, whilst I am biased, I enjoyed it immensely.

Saying that, despite my biases, I can see that Rankin is writing himself into a corner with the series and will have make some major changes in an upcoming book or two to either tie-up the Rebus universe completely or try spinning characters off into their own series.

* Shamanism from Siberia and Central Asia * by Charles Stépanoff & Thierry Zarcone
(original title: " Le chamanisme de Sibérie et d'Asie centrale")

Written in 2011, it's a book summarizing actual knowledge about Shamans and their practices from this part of the world. It draws an history of this practice/belief and how it survived or adapted itself as several regions were under the control of islam or communism. Then it goes about the connections of the shaman with the "real" world and the other "dimensions" of the world. And from there it goes in lengths into the local practices of shamanic rituals.

I liked the structure and aim of this book as rather than focusing on the "metaphysical" side of Shamanism, it's more about the documented and tangible side of it thus making it a good reference book from an anthropological point of view. Lots of pictures and the documents in the annex are relevant.

I just finished reading "Sword of Destiny" by Andrzej Sapkowski (the book that supposedly inspired the games).

I quite liked it. It wasn't nearly as good as The Last Wish, which I finished prior to that one, but it was still quite good. I got to learn about how Geralt and Ciri met (and a great tale it is), and learned a little bit more about what makes Geralt tick.

If you're a fan of the games, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you read it, though I would probably start with The Last Wish, as while it is also a bunch of short stories, it is done in a more coherent manner, and they are longer, which makes it better as a starting point to the series.

I can't wait to jump into Blood of Elves. I imagine it'll be grand beyond .. well... imagining.

Boy's Life, by Robert McCammon. McCammon was mainly a horror author in the 80s, but this is really more of a modern fantasy/magic realism novel about an 11 year old boy growing up in a small Alabama town in 1964. There's a low simmering plot about the boy and his dad witnessing a murder in the very early morning and dealing with that, but a lot of the book consists of various episodes involving the boy and his friends and family during each season. To an extent you could almost say the book is a series of short stories arranged in chronological order, because of how distinct most of them are - there's the one about how the kid got his new bike, the one about the camping trip, the one with the river monster, etc.

I've liked everything I've read by McCammon and this is the best thing of his I've read so far (it seems to be his most well-regarded book by most others, too). It's consistently inventive and entertaining and McCammon's writing is exceptionally heartfelt, probably because there are autobiographical elements here, with McCammon also being a guy who grew up in a small Alabama town. I'll probably be recommending this one a lot from now on.

* Don't let us disappear : A call in the name of peace * by Gregory III Laham

(original title: Ne nous laissez pas disparaître : un cri au service de la paix)

This is an interview book format (130 pages) of Gregory III Laham who's the Syrian Patriarch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church (Wikipedia) in the Middle East. He mainly talks about his youth, his actions in Palestine, life in Syria and the ongoing war, Europe, living along with Muslims and the meaning of being a Christian in Orient (as opposed to Christianity in Occident). As an agnostic, I've mainly read it as a document of our current times with a different point of view than our occidental one and found it interesting. I guess that for Christian readers it would put their faith in a different perspective.

01/16 Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. What a yawnfest. Nothing new if you weren't in a coma for the last 10 years. National book award longlist my ass.

01/16 Mort by Terry Pratchett. One of his best. The ending is meh.

01/20 Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. Yet another good-book-meh-ending, and a wtf royalist screed in the middle.