What will you be reading during lockdown?

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Dave7

Legendary Member
Location
Cheshire
View attachment 510769
I recommend this if you want to be gobsmacked at how hard as nails and bonkers cyclists were back then
It is a mixture of a dramatised account of the race, an account of the author's tour following the course and bits of the history of the clean up and restoration of the area after WW1.
Currently ploughing my way through a pile of easy to read Ben Elton novels.
Ben Elton does write a good novel. You read them 'knowing/believing' they are sooo true. Cant remember the title but one based on an X Factor type show.....very good.
 

Dave7

Legendary Member
Location
Cheshire
Still no lockdown, but I've started on a Stephen Leather book.
Read a lot of them. IMO his early ones were the better ones.
He wrote a few pshycic ones which were also good.
 

Smudge

Veteran
Location
Somerset
Ben Elton does write a good novel. You read them 'knowing/believing' they are sooo true. Cant remember the title but one based on an X Factor type show.....very good.

That is Chart Throb, i've just finished reading it for the second time.
 

Yellow Fang

Legendary Member
Location
Reading
I studied 1984 and Animal Farm for my English Lit O-level about 50 years ago! We had a very good English teacher so we discussed the meaning of the books, Orwell's political views, his participation in the Spanish civil war, that kind of thing. I went on to read all of his books after that. My stepdaughter had read several Orwell novels but not 1984 so I bought her that for Christmas a couple of years ago. She had read Animal Farm as a young child and thought it was just a fairy story. I explained to her its real meaning and she said that she would like to read that again so I bought her that as well.

It is amazing how technology has overtaken us. The telescreen was just a nightmarish future technological possibility when Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, and still seemed remote to me when I read the novel at school in the early 1970s, but we now have something similar in most homes in the form of smartphones, laptops and the internet. Big Brother Google/Facebook/GCHQ/NSA/etc. is are watching you us! :whistle:

I also had a thing for Huxley at the time and read BNW several times.

I'd quite like to read those books again now too, so I'll borrow them back! I hardly read novels these days. I should make an effort to start again. I read 5 or 6 books while I was in hospital in 2012, but they were fairly trashy crime novels which had been left in the ward by earlier inmates patients, and I have only read 2 or 3 more novels since then.

I have read most of what Orwell wrote, excluding his diaries. I started reading 1984 when I was 15 or 16, but put it down about three-quarters through, because it did not look like Winston Smith was going to win. When I read it again, in my 40s, I thought it was incredible. I would think I'd found a plot hole, just for it to be explained a few pages later. His Homage to Catalonia was something else. I also have a soft spot for A Clergyman's Daughter.
 
Currently reading "one man and his bike" by Mike Carter, and have bought "three weeks and 8 seconds - Lemond/Fignon`s 1989 Tour de France, and "put me back on my bike" about Tom Simpson. When I get time, not going out riding but using the Turbo Trainer I just bought, why is it so boring? fed up after 2 minutes.
I find watching things on iplayer helps to make the turbo trainer more tolerable. A bit of wood balanced on the bars makes anadequate platform to sit the tablet on.
 

Yellow Fang

Legendary Member
Location
Reading
I should have enough to get me through. Apart from the two I'm reading, I have about 22 books on my shelves waiting to be read. Perhaps the most apt is One Hundred Years of Solitude.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
I have read most of what Orwell wrote, excluding his diaries. I started reading 1984 when I was 15 or 16, but put it down about three-quarters through, because it did not look like Winston Smith was going to win. When I read it again, in my 40s, I thought it was incredible. I would think I'd found a plot hole, just for it to be explained a few pages later. His Homage to Catalonia was something else. I also have a soft spot for A Clergyman's Daughter.
I found the attached PDF of Orwell essays online a few weeks ago. (Assumed to be public domain now.) I haven't read them all yet but what I have read so far is interesting.
 

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I find watching things on iplayer helps to make the turbo trainer more tolerable. A bit of wood balanced on the bars makes anadequate platform to sit the tablet on.
And a pair of noise-cancelling headphones makes it easier to hear the soundtrack/dialogue and to ignore the whine of the turbo trainer
 
I'll save them for when/if I get home. Bought three here off Amazon India.

'DMT - The Spirit Molecule' appeals to my curiosity about, amongst other things, my pineal gland.

The second is 'Sapiens' charting mankind's 'progress' over the last 30,000 years.

And the third is simply called 'Death', an alternative look at not the end of life but perhaps the start of another one.

Can't wait to get home!
 

crossfire

Senior Member
Will try the tip about watching iplayer on the laptop, could also use youtube for cycling vids and how to`s thereby increasing my poor cycle maintainance skills - education and exercise at the same time! Trainer is in garage (gives peace and quiet, and the impression of going out of the house to exercise, and to give the wife time on her own) so can mount laptop on table/junk in there.
john
 

derrick

The Glue that binds us together.
Filled up a skip this morning, years of rubbish now gone, will have to start collecting again.:laugh: Most of it came out the loft, we know have room for our spin bikes up there, Just got to sort out the sound system to go up there,:okay:
 
Location
Kent Coast
I have just received "Gravesend during the Great War" as an ebook from the library. Gravesend is my home town, where I lived for my first 55 years, so it will be interesting to learn about a period of its history.
But first, I need to finish a murder mystery book set in Alaska...
 
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